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Chef Alice Waters’ memoir tells tales of her youth and loves

Related Topics: Alice Waters, Chez Panisse

She grew up eating frozen peas, frozen fish sticks and canned fruit salad for dinner. To complete this incongruous picture, Waters adds, “I grew up with iceberg lettuce and Wishbone dressing.”

Waters and her restaurant Chez Panisse are credited with pioneering the farm-to-table movement and introducing mesclun to the masses. But she didn’t start out as a revolutionary and wants people to know that. Her journey from a childhood of 1950s convenience cooking to the heights of American gastronomy is the subject of her new memoir, released this week.

In “Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook,” Waters tells richly detailed, occasionally spicy tales of her early years, the travels, transformative meals, friendships and love affairs — there were many — that changed the course of her life and led her to open Chez Panisse in 1971, without any formal culinary training.