Interview with Cookbook Author of the Year

As a foreign-exchange student in 1973, Judy Rodgers had the good fortune of landing in the home of the family that created Les Freres Troisgros, one of France's great three-star restaurants. Under their tutelage, Rodgers received the culinary education of a lifetime.

She quickly immersed herself in the Troisgros family philosophy — pure, unpretentious food with a seasonal and regional character — and 30 years later, that spirit permeates every aspect of the Zuni Cafe, the extraordinary San Francisco restaurant she has guided since 1987.

"After 24 years, Zuni is still the place that best defines San Francisco dining," wrote Michael Bauer, restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Last fall, after nearly four years of work, Rodgers' poetic encapsulation of her life in the kitchen, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook (W.W. Norton & Co., $35), hit bookstores.

Awards have been rolling in. In mid-April, "Zuni" took the top prize in the chefs and restaurants category at the International Association of Culinary Professionals' annual Cookbook Awards. This month in New York City, the book won two honors at the James Beard Awards, the Oscars of the food world: the coveted Cookbook of the Year designation, as well as first place in the professional cooking category. The Zuni Cafe also won for outstanding restaurant of the year, making for a very emotional night for Rodgers.

In a pre-Beard Awards telephone interview, Rodgers talked about breaking rules, the importance of quality ingredients and twists of fate.

Q: The Zuni Cafe Cookbook is a stylistic departure from most cookbooks. In a world that values uniformity, how did you manage to create something so different?
A: In publishing, there really is an abiding belief that the average cookbook buyer doesn't want a big, heavy tome. The perception is that the market is wider if a book is short and chirpy. There are other golden rules: no recipes longer than a page and no ingredients that can't be bought in a Topeka supermarket during off-hours. The more color photos the better, and recipe steps should be numbered. That's all probably born out of statistics, because I heard it a lot.

Q: And you broke those rules, didn't you?
A: Well, many of them. There is a similarly standard bank of cookbook-review criticisms, and it creates a bias before the readers have seen the book and decided for themselves. You can bet publishers respond to that, too.

All along I kept hearing, "Oh, Judy, you'll be criticized for doing this or doing that." But if it becomes OK to have four-page recipes, then we will get greater variety in cookbook writing. Of course, it's legitimate to criticize when that four-page recipe doesn't work or is difficult for the sake of being difficult. But it's not when I couldn't have written it any other way. If I had printed recipes in neat one-page, three-paragraph blurbs — in other words, leaving out the stuff that makes the dish the dish — I would have been slapped with a more serious criticism, that the recipe doesn't work.

Q: Still, even at 548 pages, you probably had to cut a few things. What didn't make it into the book?
A: There was a long chapter on pizzas, but I struggled with how to make them without a brick oven and ultimately couldn't come up with a satisfactory alternative. There were more tarts and frozen granitas, two of my favorite things to make. Actually, there was a little bit more of everything.

What didn't get cut was the prose, the essays, the atypical stuff. A different editor would have said, "We want more recipes, and we want shorter recipes," but with my editor it was, "Don't cut a word of the prose."

She was gambling that that was something people would like. And I think she was right. It's my opinion that a lot of potential cookbook buyers treat cookbooks as a vicarious pleasure. Of the hundreds of letters I've received about the book, more than half talk about how they buy cookbooks to sit on their bedstand and read, that they love to read them even if they don't use the recipes.

I think that's great. I wanted this to be a cooking book, not just a recipe book. I figured that was something I could add to the equation. ... What's fun is the whole process of cooking.

Q: You wrote that readers need not slavishly follow a recipe. Isn't that heresy coming from a cookbook author?
A: I really struggled with the whole proposition of writing a recipe. I doubt if I've ever sat down and followed more than two or three recipes in my whole life; I learned to cook by watching cooking happen.

No one at Troisgros used a recipe. I dutifully wrote while they cooked, taking down ingredients and quantities, so I could go back home and re-create the same dishes. So I'm back in St. Louis in 1974. I go to the supermarket, idiot that I was, to buy the ingredients for a dish of Jean's, a bean salad with creme fraiche. And guess what? The green beans were as thick as the ropes on a cabin cruiser and the cream was hyper-pasteurized. It was horrible. Of course my family said, "Oh, this is wonderful," but I knew it wasn't good; it tasted tough and plastic.

Everything that was wrong was all the things I never thought about. At Troisgros, great ingredients were a given. But returning to America, I discovered that all those numbers that I'd carefully recorded didn't matter. Quantities are the easy part, they're subject to adjustment. What you can't change is the character of the raw ingredients. That absolutely has to come first.

Q: Finding great ingredients in food-obsessed San Francisco isn't much of a problem, is it?
A: In California, we live in this blessed enclave. And over the years, we've refined sourcing enough so that it doesn't make it into the door at Zuni if it's not pretty darned good. Everything I cook is already in good shape, ingredients-wise. And we have decent pans and stoves that work.

What I struggle with at Zuni is teaching cooks, and how they misinterpret. I'll give cooks our basic Caesar salad recipe, but then I warn them: Eggs can vary in size and flavor, and lemons vary in size, juiciness and fragrance. The basic recipe — which really hasn't changed in 15 years — is a road post. But if the day's lemons are fragrant and juicy, you'll need to use less than half a lemon. Or if they're lousy and you can't count on them to carry the flavor load, you'll have to push harder with the Parmesan and garlic.

It's the experience of knowing how the dish will taste today. You're constantly striving to make the dish as good as it can be with the ingredients you have. By shooting for an absolute standard, you'll probably end up with mediocrity. If you train yourself to pay attention as you cook, that process of optimizing flavor is not intimidating or frustrating. It's fun, and it means you are engaged in the cooking process.