Hot off the press
The new Paula Wolfert cookbook pays homage to the story of a culinary legend.
“It never happens that you meet your idol and they’re even cooler in person than they are in your dreams,” says writer Emily Kaiser Thelin.
In 2005, Thelin not only met her culinary idol, legendary cookbook author Paula Wolfert, she planted the seeds of a working relationship that, over the course of the following decade, would grow into so much more. Thelin’s biography-meets-cookbook, “Unforgettable: The Bold Flavors of Paula Wolfert’s Renegade Life” (Mortar & Pestle; 336 pages; $35), is the result of that relationship.
“She’s such an amazing and rich combination of relentless and exhausting high standards,” says Thelin, who spent hundreds of hours interviewing and cooking with Wolfert, now 78.
Decades before Yotam Ottolenghi and Michael Solomonov made their names celebrating the flavors of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, Wolfert traveled and wrote about the region, publishing eight seminal cookbooks, including her 1973 landmark debut, “Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco.”
In addition to her prolific public cooking persona, it turns out Wolfert — whom Thelin says possesses “a humility that (doesn’t) match the scale of her accomplishments” — has had one hell of an adventurous personal life.
Wolfert’s rise as a culinarian is chronicled in tender, yet warts-andall, detail. The book details her early efforts to escape her Flatbush upbringing in New York, where, thanks to her mother’s propensity to diet, she grew up on melon, iceberg lettuce and cottage cheese. Visits to rural New Jersey to stay with her paternal grandparents introduced her to flavorful Balkan dishes like ajvar.
Despite the lackluster early years, food-wise, Wolfert found her way to the kitchen and began to thrive. The section on her time working under James Beard is a hoot, as is the anecdote about an exchange with Jack Kerouac at a cocktail party.
Wolfert never became as big a household name as, say, Julia Child, who once wrote that she considered Wolfert “one of the few food writers whose recipes I trust.” Praised in savvy and professional culinary circles, Wolfert’s highly detailed recipes were often considered too challenging by mainstream cooks. And although hosting a television show, like Child, might have seemed a natural next step, Wolfert didn’t really want mass fame or to make the concessions necessary to do so.
In recent years, Wolfert — who has lived in Sonoma with her husband, author William Bayer, for nearly 20 years — has been tackling a challenge far more daunting than cooking. In 2013, she was diagnosed with dementia, a devastating blow that has affected her memory and her sense of taste.
However, Wolfert has refused to feel sorry for herself. She’s approached the diagnosis much the same way she did her cookbooks: through performing detailed research, keeping a photo archive and diving head-first into a new culinary regimen — all in an effort to stall the inevitable progression of the illness.
Thelin, who lives in Berkeley, began working with Wolfert in 2006 as an editor at Food & Wine magazine, and in 2008, she traveled to Morocco with her for a profile. It was in 2010, prior to Wolfert’s diagnosis, that Thelin floated the idea of a biography past the author.
“She thought it was ridiculous. ‘Who’d want to read about me?’ ” Thelin recalls Wolfert saying.
Following the diagnosis, it became all the more pressing for Thelin to bring the author’s personal story to life — but Wolfert’s skepticism proved correct.
For a cook whom many in the food industry revere on the same scale as Marcella Hazan, Diana Kennedy and Madhur Jaffrey, you’d think enticing a publishing house to sign off on a biography would be a cinch. But nearly a dozen publishers passed on the project, implying that although Wolfert’s story was interesting, her time had passed.
After Thelin told food photographer Eric Wolfinger about publishers passing on the book proposal, she and Wolfinger decided to take it into their own hands. “Eric was like, ‘Forget about them. We’ll do it ourselves,’ ” Thelin says.
In addition to Wolfinger, Thelin assembled a crack team of cookbook pros, including Andrea Nguyen (“The Pho Cookbook”), who served as the book’s editor, and art director Toni Tajima (“Manresa”).
In 2015, Thelin and her crew launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. “Our only desire was to raise the money to do a really beautiful book,” Thelin says.
The campaign did more than that, hitting its goal of $45,000 in just four days. The project raised a total of $91,465 from 1,112 backers, including local chefs such as Joyce Goldstein, Amaryll Schwertner and Charles Phan. Dozens of other industry luminaries, including Pim Techamuanvivit, April Bloomfield and Mario Batali, donated dinners and other special
items as rewards to campaign donors.
“Our jaws were on the floor. The outpou- ring of support was unbelievays able,” says Thelin. “All these food heroes of mine, who regard Paula as their food hero — everyone saw merit to it. It was so gratifying and excitany ing.”
In many ways, Thelin and her team’s rigorous and market-bed damned approach to getting the book published was much like the subject
herself.
Wolfert “published a cookbook on Moroccan cooking when there were not tajines in America,” Thelin says. “She wouldn’t let anything stop her. I like that we adopted her renegade spirit.”