Chez Panisse Desserts: the secret to delicious sweets is in the detail, and the ingredients
- Californian chef Lindsey Remolif Shere took advantage of fresh produce from friends’ gardens
- But most of the recipes in her cookbook, Chez Panisse Desserts, are still achievable by competent home cooks anywhere
The recipes in pastry chef Lindsey Remolif Shere’s book Chez Panisse Desserts (1985) look deceptively simple and straightforward. But like the food at Chez Panisse – the Berkeley, California, restaurant where Shere was pastry chef from its inception, in 1971, until her retirement, in 1998 – the outcome depends on details, and on ingredients.
Shere, 85, isn’t one of those chefs who reveals a lot about herself; there are no amusing anecdotes where she reminisces about her first taste of Dessert X on a lazy summer’s day in Tuscany as she gazed upon the green rolling hills and how it inspired her own version, or how the world seemed to stop as she revelled in the deliciousness of Dessert Y, which she enjoyed while walking along La Seine on a beautiful afternoon in Paris. She doesn’t even write the introduction to the book, instead leaving that to her better-known colleague, Alice Waters, the founder of Chez Panisse.
“I think this is a very special cookbook,” Waters writes in the preface. “It is a collection of recipes created over the last thirteen years by Lindsey Shere, the pastry chef at Chez Panisse. The recipes reflect a unique aesthetic, shaped by the fusion of Lindsey’s personal inspiration with that of the restaurant.
“Guided and stimulated by the philosophy and resources of Chez Panisse, Lindsey expresses her almost ethereal sense for balancing flavours and combining tastes. Her desserts are restrained – yet exotic and wild. They leave you charmed, surprised, and satisfied.”
Chez Panisse restaurant (as opposed to the more casual Chez Panisse cafe, upstairs) offers only a nightly tasting menu – nothing à la carte – and the dessert each night must integrate with the courses that came before.