Dementia, and fighting back with food.
SONOMA, Calif. — The first thing Paula Wolfert wants to make a guest is coffee blended with butter from grass-fed cows and something called brain octane oil. She waves a greasy plastic bottle of the oil around her jumble of a kitchen like a preacher who has taken up a serpent.
Never mind that this is the woman who introduced tagines, Aleppo pepper and cassoulet to U.S. kitchens, wrote nine cookbooks and once possessed a palate that food writer Ruth Reichl declared the best she’d ever encountered. Wolfert, 78, has dementia. She can’t cook much, even if she wanted to. Which, by the way, she doesn’t. She learned she probably had Alzheimer’s disease in 2013, but she suspected something wasn’t right long before. Words on a page sometimes made no sense. Complex questions started to baffle her. Since she has always been an audacious and kinetic conversationalist with a touch of hypochondria, friends didn’t notice anything was wrong. Doctors spoke of “senior moments.”
But she knew. One day, Wolfert went to make an omelet for her husband, crime novelist William Bayer. She had to ask him how.
The woman who once marched up to French chef Jean-Louis Palladin and told him a dish didn’t have enough salt can no longer taste the difference between a walnut and a pecan, or smell whether the mushrooms are burning. The list of eight languages she once understood has been reduced to English. Maybe 40 percent of the words she knew have evaporated.
“What am I going to do, cry about it?” Wolfert said in an interview at her home this month, the slap of her Brooklyn accent still sharp. After all, she points out, her first husband left her in Morocco with two small children and $2,000: “I cried for 20 minutes and I thought, ‘This isn’t going to do any good.’”
Still, her insatiable drive — which took her to live with the Beat Generation’s most notable characters in Tangier in 1959 and then propelled her like a pushy anthropologist into countless kitchens around the world — seems to be working just fine. Wolfert has been collaborating with a writer on a biography to be published in April. Instead of seeking out recipes, she is eating to save her mind.
Thus, the bulletproof coffee she makes every morning and the squares of dark chocolate she eats after lunch, in the belief they will bolster her brainpower. In between, she eats a carbohydrate-free diet built on salmon, berries and greens, along with extracts of turmeric, cinnamon and eggplant.
The diet draws on an amalgam of theories she has culled from deep internet research, her doctors, the other dementia patients she meets with every week and long conversations with friends and experts on FaceTime, her favorite place to chat.
“You can talk for an hour and a half, and it doesn’t cost you a dime!” she said. (Southern food writer James Villas, her good friend, lovingly calls her La Bouche — the Mouth.)
She has happily lost 20 pounds. Friends say she looks remarkably good, younger even. “Turning back the clock, turning back the clock,” she chants cheerfully.
Wolfert hasn’t even eaten bread, a true love, in more than a year. “I don’t remember it, but I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t want to be a zombie.”
It would be hard to overstate the importance of Wolfert’s work, which introduced couscous and other classic Mediterranean dishes to generations of cooks. New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne called her “one of the leading lights in contemporary gastronomy.” She made Alice Waters fall in love with chicken cooked with preserved lemons and olives in a tagine, and primed America for the Middle Eastern flavors of Yotam Ottolenghi, who remains a fan. British chef Fergus Henderson chose her cassoulet as his favorite recipe of all time.
A whole murderers’ row of great U.S. chefs — Thomas Keller, David Kinch, Judy Rodgers — said how much her work mattered. “I have always treasured and loved the vigor of her passionate and intellectual approach to authenticity,” Mario Batali said.
She started cooking as a young bride, taking classes from French instructor Dione Lucas, who was famous for her omelets. Wolfert became Lucas’ assistant, then picked up some cooking jobs arranged for her by James Beard.
Discovering she was a complete failure as a line cook, she agreed to move to Morocco with her first husband. There, surrounded by expat writers and musicians stuck in their web of drug-taking and drama, she found refuge in the souks of Tangier and planted the seeds for what would eventually become “Couscous and Other Good Food From Morocco,” which she published in 1973.
She branched out to southwestern
France, Spain and other parts of the Mediterranean, writing books at a time when America was waking up to the culinary treasures beyond its borders. The concept of culinary Columbusing had yet to surface, and the quest for authentic city in food hadn’t become sport.
Next month, a book about Wolfert will debut with an origin story as unconventional as she is. “Unforgettable: The Bold Flavors of Paula Wolfert’s Renegade Life” is a biography interwoven with about 50 recipes.
The author is Emily Kaiser Thelin, Wolfert’s former editor at Food and Wine, who has become as much a daughter as a biographer.
In 2006, Thelin inherited the magazine’s Master Cook column, which included contributions from Jacques Pépin and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. “I always dealt with their assistants,” Thelin said.
But Wolfert called her and said, “‘OK, you’re my editor and you need to know I can’t write my way out of a paper bag.’”
In 2008, Thelin traveled to Morocco to write about Wolfert for the magazine. Young and intimidated, Thelin watched her in action. She likens the adventure to “a trip to Kitty Hawk with the Wright Brothers.”
Thelin left the magazine in 2010 and moved from New York to Northern California. The two women’s friendship deepened, laced with long conversations about food, reality TV and politics.
Thelin was toying with the idea of a biography. Then came the diagnosis. The biography seemed more important than ever.
The proposal was praised but rejected by nearly a dozen editors, including Dan Halpern, who as a young man slept free on Wolfert’s couch and later published her book “The Food of Morocco” in 2009.
Wolfert, it seemed, was yesterday’s news.
Eric Wolfinger, who is essentially the Annie Leibovitz of food photography, suggested a Kickstarter campaign and offered to shoot the pictures. It quickly raised more than $91,000, including $100 from Halpern. Andrea Nguyen, the noted Vietnamese cookbook author, signed on to edit. Toni Tajima agreed to design it. On April 4, it goes on sale for $35 on Amazon and through a website, Unforgettable Paula.
The book begins in a Jewish neighborhood in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where Wolfert grew up with vision problems and a dieting mother who fed her cottage cheese, melon and lettuce, and didn’t like her very much. It ends with tips for using food to connect with someone suffering from dementia, like cooking recipes together that have a deeper, personal meaning or understanding that the hands of many older cooks may remember what to do when their minds cannot.
The loving profile sometimes glosses over comments from critics (which Wolfert still has quite a sharp memory for). More than a few editors and cooks have found her demand for specific ingredients impossible, the way she delivers extensive knowledge of certain cuisines insufferable and her recipes so complex as to be unworkable.
But Thelin, like many, is a true believer. “I feel like every Paula recipe seems to pull the rug out from under you,” she said. “You think it’s not going to work, but if you keep calm and follow the recipe it does.”