Woman in the Kitchen, 1987

Spectacular vintage menus. A strange and wonderful recipe... and a very good gift.

When Lydia Shire took over the kitchens at The Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles it was a very big deal. It was 1987 and Lydia was the first woman in the country to helm a major hotel kitchen. The hotel had three restaurants, 280 rooms and served more than 2,000 meals a day. My rather ecstatic review of Gardens includes this passage:

On the tape that I made as I drove home that night, I sound ridiculously rhapsodic. “Those oysters,” I hear myself saying dreamily, as a car honks behind me, “were an amazing idea. There they were, sitting on a plate half covered with ice and half covered with rock salt. Each oyster had been treated in a unique fashion: a tiny icy Olympia came topped with caviar, a Pigeon Point was hot, crisply wrapped in a tempura of vegetable strips. One came in a vinaigrette, another like a little beggar’s purse wrapped in filo pastry. And each,” my voice gets dreamy again, “was absolutely fabulous.”

There I am, driving through the night, talking about the escarole and fava bean soup: “A clear broth so the flavor of the vegetables came shining through. There were croutons with it, buttery and fine. I absolutely loved it.” I was equally taken with scallops with blood orange butter and fried vermicelli. “Dishes that sound this exotic rarely live up to their promise,” I hear myself saying. “But these all did.”

Three huge charred lamb chops were meaty and lean. They came with a fried artichoke with capers, a sort of American carciofi alla giudia. “A wonderful dish!” I cried. But my greatest praise was for the lobster. “It was perfectly grilled,” I told the tape recorder, “topped with the tomalley that had been sauteed with garlic, and served with a sort of ginger butter. I could have gone on eating it forever.”

I went on so long about the wonder of this food that I was almost home before I even got to dessert. “It was a dream!” says my voice. “Rhubarb crisp, not very sweet, with perfectly flaky crust and vanilla ice cream. Something called ’24 karat gold chocolate plate’ contained a spectacular frozen chocolate mousse with Calvados poured over it; it was cold, soft, velvety all at the same time. White chocolate mousse with raspberries came wrapped in cat’s tongues. A flourless chocolate cake was dense and slightly bitter. There was also an intense chocolate terrine. At $6, this plate was a bargain.”

Even before Shire’s arrival in LA I was so excited that I wrote Women Who Can Take the Heat about newly empowered female chefs. “Next month,” I noted, “when the two most eagerly awaited new restaurants in Los Angeles and New York open their doors, each a multimillion-dollar venture with an enormous staff, women will be running the show.

It began with this note from Anne Rosenzweig. “Did you read that newspaper article? There was one comment I really loved that said hiring Rosenzweig to redo 21 was like hiring the designer of a small Madison Avenue boutique to redo a wing at the Met. I’ve gotten that sort of stuff from the beginning, and I’ve come to expect it. I just want to go out and show ‘em, you know, I can do it.”

Here’s what Lydia Shire had to say: “My job has always come first; my children have always understood that. It would simply never have occurred to me to ask for Saturday night off. If you want to get ahead, you have to do what it takes.”

Lydia did indeed work hard and make a lot of sacrifices. But the real cause of her success was her unique take on food. Look at these menus! They’re astonishing for that moment in time: even today I want to eat every dish.

I should add that, like Thomas Keller who arrived in Los Angeles a couple years later, she was too far ahead of her time for the monied Los Angeles audience she hoped to feed. A year later she was gone, and as I was reviewing the new chef at Gardens I wrote “Was anybody really surprised when Shire and the Four Seasons parted ways? I doubt it. The food and the room were not dancing to the same tune. Shire was doing a terrific tango while the dining room wanted to waltz.”

Speaking of Lydia…. this is from something I wrote in 2009 and I believe she took this picture of Colman Andrews, Alice Waters, Jonathan Waxman and me in Barcelona in the late 80s.

Going through old photographs is dusty, sentimental and satisfying work. I've spent the day traveling through the past, poring over old albums and pawing through boxes. I've promised to come up with new material for the reissue of Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me With Apples, and I thought old pictures might make people happy. But what a journey it's been!

Here's the picture of our fourth grade class at PS 41; I'm a little stunned to discover that I can name every person, even Glynn Turman, who was only in our class for one year. (He left for a role in Raisin in the Sun, and later I heard that he'd married Aretha Franklin.) Here's my sweet Aunt Lili, squinting into the Hollywood sun, holding one of the miniature Schnauzers that she bred. Aunt Birdie, eclipsed by the gaudy splendor of my rainbow wedding dress, stands between me and Doug ; she is so tiny that she barely comes to his waist. In the next picture Alice Waters, Marion Cunningham and Cecilia Chiang hover like three fairy godmothers as they cut the cake at my wedding to Michael. (Nancy Silverton, who made the cake, stands in the background, holding an infant and frowning as if she doesn't quite trust that they'll do it right. )

The pictures are in no particular order, and they tumble from the box in a dizzying spill of years. One minute I'm looking at my father's father, who died in 1913, posing in front of some Alp wearing lederhosen, and the next I'm looking at myself in front of the lake in Taishan in 1980, a long-gone China which no longer exists. I found a whole box of slides from that trip to Barcelona that Colman arranged in the late 80s for Alice Waters, Lydia Shire, Mark Miller, Brad Ogden and Jonathan Waxman. We are buying food in the Boqueria, we are in restaurants, we are in bakeries. Mostly we look like we are pretty drunk (we were), and like we're having way too much fun.

My hands are covered in dust, there are piles of photographs all over the floor and stacked on top of the table. But what I keep wondering is how all these random memories ended up, together, in an apartment in New York in 2009?

Here’s the recipe for Lydia’s wonderful calves brains from that trip to Barcelona. I wrote about it in Comfort Me with Apples.

And while we’re on women chefs….

Francine’s Outrageous sauces are pretty much what you’d make at home; they contain no egregious ingredients (dyes, palm oil, stabilizers and the like), and they are sweet and delicious. My favorite is the toffee…. Anyone in need of a last-minute dessert would be thrilled to have these in the pantry; spooned over ice cream they create an instant party.