December 2011

“I go to Ma Gastronomie for spiritual guidance reflecting the ideas of the great mid- century chef in south-eastern France who operated  La Pyramide. If you look back at a Michelin guide list of restaurants in the provinces that had 3 stars in the late ‘70s, you would find that more than half of the chefs (Paul Bocuse, Jean and Pierre Troisgros, Alain Chapel) had done their apprenticeships with Fernand Point. I got my copy in 1970 or ‘71, and it was a revelation. I go back to it for a renewal of the guiding principles of my work.

“Others I think of as field guides, as my cooking is nature based. One is Bigelow and Schroeder’s Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, an extremely valuable book to help us at Fore Street in identifying correct names for fish, as marketing names can be misleading.

“Fish & Shellfish and Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making by James Peterson–an all around cook and writer–are valuable resources.

“Paul Bertolli’s Cooking by Hand has essential information on making pastas, gnocchi, and different sausages. This book is useful on technique and manual skills, putting judgment back into cooking, like proportions of fat to lean, lactic acid starter, how fine to grind–these basic guiding principles.

“Nancy Harmon Jenkins’s The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook is a keeper, and Alice Waters’s books. I gave my kids her most recent, The Art of Simple Cooking, which is really a hands-on, great book.”

–Sam Hayward, Fore Street, Portland