My earliest memories are of Mother canning fruit, rhubarb and things from our garden. At four, I was in a bathing suit competition at a pool near where we lived in New Jersey. Mother dressed me as The Queen of the Garden in a lettuce leaf skirt and asparagus top, with a wreath of strawberries for my head and a bracelet of peppers. It was very uncomfortable, but I won a prize.
America, weary after the war, was turning to convenient, fast and frozen food. Mother partly resisted but had four daughters and a husband to feed. The sad part is she wasn’t a good cook. She’d listen to health advice on the radio but didn’t know the basics, so when they said ‘Eat as much butter as you want’, she wasn’t thinking. She’d give us vitamin tablets – which I still take, as insurance - but she wasn’t able to understand what was in our food. I always had to stay at the table until I ate up, so I’d be sitting there for a long time. The only food I’d make myself was banana milkshakes.
Desserts were rare. Mother would bake mince, pumpkin and fruit pies but only for Thanksgiving. I’d hide penny candies under my pillow from my sisters. They were different coloured sugar dots you’d rip off a piece of paper. I also sneaked money - which my parents left around, or in their pockets - to buy lime & cherry popsicles. But for my birthday I’d ask for steak with green beans. When father, who was in insurance, grilled outside it was my favourite smell and I think that’s really where my passion for fireplace cooking comes from.
As a teenager, after we moved to the Midwest (Indiana), I worked in a fast food fried chicken restaurant and a hot-dog car-hop called Winsky & Winsky Enterprises, but my only interest was boys.
When I moved to Berkeley and had a room-mate, Sarah [Wiener], I was interested in what she cooked for us, although I didn’t participate. Then we decided to take a year off in France. It was very exotic to be called mademoiselle and have Coca Cola poured with lemon and ice cubes at cafe tables on market streets. Sarah’s since said she was interested in finding French food and me in finding French men. Men took us out to dinner and they introduced us to this gastronomic world.
I worked on the congressional campaign of Robert Scheer who’d written a paper on how we got involved in Vietnam, which was my bible [Scheer ran for office as an anti-war candidate]. I’d read [Elizabeth David’s] French Country Cooking cover to cover and practised the dishes over and over, and found a willing and enthusiastic group to eat them among Robert’s activists.
Chez Panisse was very freewheeling – working all day, then partying into the night. My parents remortgaged their house to help. Staff were paid $5 an hour – more than the cost of a meal – and the restaurant lost $40,000 in the first year, with $30,000 of wine unaccounted for. We never kept records of anything – it was all about the taste.
The film-maker Werner Herzog had a bet with Errol Morris that if Errol finished making his film about a pet cemetery, Werner would eat his shoe, so it was brought to Chez Panisse to be softened up. I cooked it forever and ever in goose fat and garlic and herbs, but it didn’t soften. But Werner cut up pieces of leather and chewed and swallowed them anyway. That’s Werner.
I made school lunch boxes for my daughter Fanny throughout her childhood, with salad dressings on the side and garlic toast, raw peas, grated carrot in different colours and grilled chicken from the night before and a bouquet of herbs. I’d include little love notes. It was my way of communicating with her. She did go to McDonald’s, with her soccer team.
In the 90s I realised we had to go into the public school system and teach the next generation about politics and food. So we created the academic organic edible schoolyard at the Martin Luther King Middle School [in Berkeley]. When photos went around the world of Michelle Obama with children in our edible White House garden, that was incredibly powerful. And I’m hoping so much more will happen, especially if Hillary becomes president.
I look back to Kennedy who felt Americans weren’t physically fit for the new frontier and put PE into every school. I want to get a president to put edible education into the core curriculum so every child will know where food comes from, how to take care of the land, how to feed themselves and what food is good for them.
I’m a very scattered person in the kitchen but I just always believe that we can win people over, that food and hospitality is a way to reach people, through all the senses. I always talk about feeding people ideas. I’m sure we can find a place where they get it.
Alice Waters appears at the Kerrygold Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food and Wine, Ballymaloe Cookery School, Ireland on Sunday 17 May; litfest.ie
