Cookbook author Paula Wolfert at the Swiss Hotel restaurant, 18 West Spain Street, Sonoma.
Tonight, an impressive group of Bay Area chefs is gathering at Camino in Oakland to honor Sonoma-based author Paula Wolfert. Wolfert has been diagnosed with a variant of Alzheimer’s disease, and the meal is a fundraiser for the Alzheimer’s Association.
We asked a few of the chefs about Wolfert’s influence on them.
“I love her books,” says David Kinch of Manresa. “I’m a huge Francophile, so her Cooking of Southwest France book was a great education.”
“Paula is a cook’s cook,” says Amaryll Schwertner of Boulettes Larder and Bouli Bar. “[For her cookbooks] she got the right kind of info and put it in the right context so it wasn’t about a set of steps that you had to follow. She contextualized the food and talked about the technique. That’s so important.”
“She really did a huge service to everybody who cooks–not just people who are interested in Moroccan cooking–by preserving these recipes,” says Aziza’s Mourad Lahlou, who first met the author of 1973’s Couscous and Other Good Food From Morocco and The Food of Morocco when she wandered back into his kitchen of his restaurant, then located in San Rafael.
“In Morocco, we don’t write recipes. We do it by feel. People are very secretive. They only pass them down within their families, and even then only to a favorite daughter,” he explains. ” She was able to get recipes from people who hadn’t shared them with anyone else.”
Incidentally, a few places at tonight’s dinner remain.
