About a year and half ago, friends Shelley Gilbert and Sonja Drown came up with a great idea. It’s the Cookbook Dinner Club. We share a meal selected from a cookbook chosen by the host. Simple formula: five dinners, one every other month skipping the busy winter holiday season. The host selects the book, cooks the main course, parceling out assignments for appetizer, two sides, and dessert. No planning or orchestrating. People make what they want to make and come together to share a meal. It all works out. Usually there is custom cocktail and plenty of wine helping.
The above meal was centered on Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food. The main course was, well, simple: baked halibut wrapped in a fig leaf. For some reason the fig leaf gives the delicate white fish a coconut flavor. Unwrapping on the plate is special. Sides were simple too: whole, multi-colored, roasted carrots and potatoes au gratin. Appetizer was a vegetable cauliflower soup shown above. Dessert featured Dry Creek peaches in a cobbler with vanilla ice cream, accompanied by a French chateau sauterne. And, the custom cocktail you ask? A Vesper – hat tip to Matthew Frome for the inspiration. A vesper is James Bond’s martini – shaken not stirred. Dinner was al fresco. It was a stunning Sunday evening dinner once the winds died down and Doug fir branches could be extracted from the soup!
FUN FACTS: Alice Waters had no formal cooking training when she opened Chez Panisse in August 1971. Cost to open, reportedly about $35,000 which included the house purchase at 1517 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. Waters essentially invented farm to table food in America, creatively starting a partnership with farmer Bob Cannard of Sonoma County to grow fresh food for the restaurant. Her vision to serve simple food elegantly seriously upleveled American cuisine. In 2023, at the Northern California Food and Wine Awards at the Luther Burbank Center, Waters was the inaugural Grand Honoree for Leadership and Inspiration.
A “Vesper” is the James Bond martini. He drinks it, he invents it, and he names it after double agent Vesper Lynd in the 1953 novel Casino Royale. It’s a lovely drink: 3 parts gin, 1 part vodka, 0.5 parts Lillet Blanc, a twist and express of lemon peel rimmed around the glass. Serve in a coupe, consider adding a floating flower petal for color.
