From “Ode: “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
by William Wordsworth

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
             The earth, and every common sight
                       To me did seem
             Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore;—
                       Turn wheresoe’er I may,
                       By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more!
             The rainbow comes and goes,
             And lovely is the rose;
             The moon doth with delight
         Look round her when the heavens are bare;
             Waters on a starry night
             Are beautiful and fair;
         The sunshine is a glorious birth;
         But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.


From “Ode: “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” by William Wordsworth. Public domain.  (buy now)

It was on this day in 1971 that Alice Waters opened her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. It's now considered to be the birthplace of California cuisine, a fusion style where locally grown foods are used to prepare dishes from different traditions around the world, and the resulting dinner is arranged very artistically on the plate.

Waters went to college at Berkeley in the mid-'60s. She majored in French studies. During one summer she traveled to France and had a meal in Brittany, which she says was a huge inspiration for the rest of her life:

"I've remembered this dinner a thousand times. The chef, a woman, announced the menu: cured ham and melon, trout with almonds, and raspberry tart. The trout had just come from the stream and the raspberries from the garden. It was this immediacy that made those dishes so special."

She returned to Berkeley, did a lot of French cooking for her friends, and decided to start a restaurant with a friend also interested in French cuisine, Paul Aratow, a Berkeley professor of comparative literature. And on this day in 1971, Chez Panisse opened its doors. It had a set menu: pâtés en croûte, salad, duck with olives — and for dessert, an almond tart. It all cost $3.95. There wasn't much hype around this neighborhood bistro in North Berkeley at first. But then four years later Gourmet magazine featured a gushing article about it. Soon foodies from all over the country began making pilgrimages to the birthplace of California Cuisine.

Chez Panisse began listing on the menu the way it prepared its dishes, and the places where ingredients came from — so these days a Chez Panisse menu lists stuff like "Marin Sun Farms beef tenderloin grilled over vine cuttings" or "king salmon baked in rock salt with wild fennel gratin, new potatoes, and wilted amaranth greens" or "Santa Rosa plum ice cream profiteroles with plum caramel." It's still at the same location in Berkeley, but the $3.95 set dinner price tag is a thing of the distant past. The set weekend night dinner menu is on the order of a hundred dollars a head now.

Alice Waters has helped to revolutionize ideas about food in the United States, popularizing the practices of eating locally, organically, and sustainably. She's written about a dozen food-related books, including Slow Food: The Case for Taste (2004) and In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart (2010) and  We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto (2021).

Today is the birthday of the father of German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (books by this author), born in Frankfurt (1749), the author of the epic drama Faust. He moved to Italy in 1786 and when he returned to Germany in 1788 he fell in love with a woman from Weimar, Christiane Vulpius, a 23-year-old who was 16 years his junior. That year he wrote her an epithalamium, a specific type of poem written for a bride on the way to the marital chamber. But he didn't actually marry her; instead, the couple lived together for 18 years unwed.

They were still living together in 1806, unmarried and with children, when some of Napoleon's French soldiers — who were drunk — broke into their home in Weimer one evening. Goethe was terrified, but Christiane started shouting at the soldiers, fending them off in hand-to-hand combat, and protecting the bewildered man of the house. After a prolonged skirmish she pushed them out of the house and barricaded the kitchen and the cellar so the soldiers couldn't try to steal any more of their food. Grateful to the brave and steadfast woman who'd saved his life and home Goethe went down to a church the very next day and married her, his live-in girlfriend of 18 years.

In 1806, the same year of the home invasion and marriage, Goethe published a preliminary version of Part I of his great work, Faust, the story of a brilliant scholar named Heinrich Faust who makes a deal with the devil. The great epic has it all: seduction, murder, sleeping potions, an illegitimate love child, a stray poodle that transforms into the devil, contracts signed with blood, imprisonment in dungeons, heavenly voices, and redemption. It's often called "Das Drama der Deutschen," or "The Drama of the Germans." It's also referred to as a "closet drama" because it's intended to be read, not performed. Goethe spent 50 years working on this two-volume masterpiece, finishing Part Two in 1832, the year of his death.

Goethe wrote, "A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days," and "Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one," and "That is the true season of love, when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way after us."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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