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.