Famous chef talks about her 2 cookbook collections
By Paula Forbes, Eater
Beard Award winning chef Traci Des Jardins has four restaurants — Jardinière, Mijita Cocina Mexicana, and Public House in San Francisco, and Manzanita at the Ritz-Carlton at Northstar — and two cookbook collections: one antique, one modern. (She is also working on a cookbook of her own to be released in fall 2013.)
Below, Des Jardins talks about what draws her to both old and new books, the need for encyclopedic cookbooks, and the one book she thinks is worth “all of the accolades that it got.”
So tell me about your cookbooks.
I have a whole range. I do a lot of the modern books, the books that are just being published. And then I have a collection of antique books. Celia Sacks, the owner of San Francisco’s Omnivore Bookstore, is an old friend of mine, and she was an antiquarian book cataloguer in her former life. So she started collecting books for me a long time ago, and looking at these different collections of books across the board, culinary books. So she would call me and say, “Hey, I got this really cool book! Do you want to come see it?” So that’s how I started collecting antique books. I have two collections: I have a modern collection, and then I have a pretty significant library of antique books.
My brother was a chef/cook and the first cookbook he gave me as a Christmas Gift was “The Great Scandanavian Cookbook”. He learned to cook at Michele’s Restaurant (on the beach at Waikiki) in the 60’s. He collected cookbooks, and I have them all now (he passed), and I’ve collected my own collection — even all the old “Gourmet” Magazines. When raising my daughter, I always grew my own veggies and bought what I did not grow from the farms in Half Moon Bay/Coastside. I WAS a good cook, but rarely cook anymore. But I sure love my cookbooks! Your article inspired me to (in the future) create a catalog of my cookbooks! To me – they are works of art. Thanks for the great article – and I hope Traci opens a restaurant in SOUTH Lake Tahoe! Maybe at Heavenly Village? Or, lease the Park’s Historical house on the huge property where the Borges run their horse-drawn sleds (like they do in Sun Valley) so folks can take a sleigh-ride to the restaurant… FUN. Judi
My new motto: “If you can’t nuke it – don’t cook it”