When Daniel Duane became a father, this San Francisco surfer and climber
found himself trapped at home with no clue how to contribute. Inept at
so many domestic tasks, and less than eager to change diapers, he took
on dinner duty. Duane had a few tricks: pasta, stir-fry ... well,
actually, those were his only two tricks. But he had a biographical
anomaly: Chef Alice Waters had been his preschool teacher. So he cracked
one of her Chez Panisse cookbooks and cooked his way through it. And so
it went with all seven of her other cookbooks, then on to those of other
famous chefs-thousands of recipes in all, amounting to an epic
eight-year cooking journey.
Butchering whole lambs at home, teaching himself to make classic veal
stock, even hunting pigs in Maui and fishing for salmon in Alaska, Duane
so thoroughly immersed himself in the modern food world that he met and
cooked with a striking number of his heroes: writing a book with Alice
Waters; learning offal cookery hands-on from the great Fergus Henderson;
even finagling seven straight hours of one-on-one private lessons from
the chef he admires above all others, Thomas Keller.
Duane's inimitable voice carries us through, with humor and panache,
even through a pair of personal tragedies. Here is a writer who can make
chopping an onion sound fun and fascinating. But there is more at stake
in his wonderful memoir: In the end, Duane learns not just how to cook
like a man, but how to be one.
