Comme d'autrefois

Berkeley, January 11, 2011—

LEADING UP TO ITS fortieth birthday, this August, Chez Panisse has undertaken forty weeks of menus inspired by forty of its — well, inspirers. The week between Christmas and New Year's was dedicated to Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock, for example: we weren't lucky enough to have eaten at the restaurant that week, but Scott was in town to preside over a private party, perhaps through no coincidence, and I reported on that a few days ago.

This week's devoted to Waverley Root, a favorite of mine. His books on the cuisines of France and Italy are brilliant, memorable, and useful. His memoir is amusing and telling. And his influence on Chez Panisse, while perhaps not as pervasive as that of, for example, Robert Courtine, is still present. Today's lunch menu in the café was attributed to his inspiration, and from it I ordered

Liberty Farm goose and pork terrine with pistachios, pickled vegetables, and mustard
Choux farci: grilled sausage wrapped in cabbage leaves with chanterelle mushrooms, thyme, and fried shoestring potatoes

and I could have sworn I was in a Paris bistro in the 1960s, except that never before have I had french-fries cut like tagliarini and re-fried. Brilliant.

I had already pretty well decided I wanted to stuff a Savoy cabbage one of these days soon: it's just cabbage, deconstructed, steamed, then reassembled with a farci of ground veal and such. When I get around to it I'll tell you more; and this time I'll look it up in Waverley Root before turning automatically to the Julia Child recipe I usually use.

Zinfandel: Green and Red (Napa county), 2008

• Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley; tel. 510.548.5525

Since lunch was so substantial, dinner back home on Eastside Road was simply toast, rubbed with raw garlic, drizzled with oil, and sprinkled with salt, with some raw carrot.

Côtes du Rhône, Caves des Papes, 2009