Alice Waters:
We wanted it to feel like a little French restaurant, neighborhood French restaurant, and we invited all of our friends. Some of them didn't get to eat that night, but...
Kerry Diamond:
Hey, Bombesquad. You're listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, the show that's all about women and food. I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Newsstand Studios in Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City. Today's guests are the mother-daughter duo, Alice Waters and Fanny Singer.
Alice is the force behind the legendary California restaurant Chez Panisse, which turns 50 years old this year. And, she's the founder of Edible Schoolyard, the organization that advocates for free healthy lunches for schoolchildren. It's a goal that shouldn't be so radical, but it is.
Fanny is the author of Always Home, a wonderful memoir I enjoyed immensely. She just curated an exclusive collection of limited edition prints for the home kitchen with Absolut Art. We'll be right back with both women after this word from our sponsor, AIX Rosé.
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Now for my chat with Alice Waters, who joins us from her home in Berkeley, California. Alice's latest book is We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto. I am always thrilled to talk to this food world legend.
Alice Waters, welcome back to Radio Cherry Bombe. This is such a thrill.
Alice Waters:
Thank you so much.
Kerry Diamond:
You look wonderful. It's great to see your face.
Alice Waters:
Likewise.
Kerry Diamond:
Even if it's over computer, thousands of miles away. Alice, I want to go right into it. This year, which blows my mind, marks the 50th anniversary of Chez Panisse. Take us back and tell us about the opening of the restaurant.
Alice Waters:
When I think back now, I just see myself madly tacking in the rug up the stairs as people are waiting at the front door. It felt like a big improvisation because we didn't know what we were doing. We really didn't know how to cook for a lot of people. We wanted it to feel like a little French restaurant, neighborhood French restaurant, and we invited all of our friends. Some of them didn't get to eat that night, but...
Kerry Diamond:
That's so funny. What was on the menu?
Alice Waters:
We had a pâté en croûte and we had duck roasted with an olive sauce, and we had plum tart.
Kerry Diamond:
That sounds so good. Is there one dish that has made frequent appearances over the five decades?
Alice Waters:
I guess I would say salad, mesclun salad, because that has never left. I didn't mention, but I think we had a choice of salad or cheese after the main dish. Maybe that didn't happen the first night, but that happened the first week and it's always been there. Even if it's a little pile that might be on the side of an entrée dish, it is omnipresent in the restaurant, upstairs and down.
Kerry Diamond:
What is the Chez Panisse vinaigrette? Is there a special vinaigrette that has lasted all these years?
Alice Waters:
Great olive oil. Great olive oil is always the secret. Really good red wine vinegar. I always put garlic in the base, pound it with a mortar and pestle.
Kerry Diamond:
I was going to say, as soon as you said garlic, I saw you with your famous mortar and pestle.
Alice Waters:
Salt in there. But that's the basis, and every year we have an olive oil tasting, blind tasting, and make a decision about the olive oils we're going to use that year. In the last couple of years, the California olive oils have been right there with the ones we've always loved from Italy. It's hard to believe and wonderful.
Kerry Diamond:
That is wonderful, because I know how much you love local things.
Alice Waters:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Alice, what is the situation at Chez Panisse today? Are you open? Are you closed? Are you partially open?
Alice Waters:
We are a very small place, and we can't open the restaurant until we don't have the protocols. We will probably not open for quite a while. Maybe after the 50th birthday, around October 1, is a projection.
But we have been open for food-to-go five days a week, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. On Sunday, we can take advantage of the parking lot behind the post office and we do a farmers market. But the whole goal is to keep the main cooks employed and to be able to support all of our suppliers. We're able to do that, and we feel like we can probably do that until Christmas.
Kerry Diamond:
I know your suppliers are like your family, so I know how important that is to you.
Alice Waters:
Completely dependent upon them. I just know that there are a lot of people that come to the restaurant who want those ingredients, who depend on us to provide them.
Kerry Diamond:
Now, just to clarify because Alice, we have listeners from around the world. They might be wondering why is the restaurant still closed. They might not realize that California had much stricter regulations than other states. Because a lot of states are open and operating again.
Alice Waters:
We want to be very careful because Chez Panisse is so small, that in order to make it work financially, we have to really have it full. I think also that we're really uncomfortable with working in the kitchen with masks on. We're a group of collaborators who like to taste and share ideas. It makes it very, very difficult under these circumstances.
But we know we want to welcome people back. We're going to really make this work. People can always come, buy food and make a picnic, take it home. Getting food to go and doing all my tasting and giving food back and... I feel connected, even though I'm quite at a distance.
Kerry Diamond:
Give us a little virtual taste. What is Chez Panisse to-go? What are some of the wonderful things you're making?
Alice Waters:
Well, wonderful salads. I mean, we've been shaving all of the vegetables and making salads with different kinds of lettuce as we move through the seasons. That's the great thing about what we're doing, is that we are in a seasonal place and when it's over. That allows us to be in the next place.
Right now, we've left asparagus behind. We're grilling quail on the fire. We're doing potato pancakes and, of course, really great desserts with strawberries.
Kerry Diamond:
It's strawberry season out there. I've been seeing all the photos. What are you making with those strawberries?
Alice Waters:
They've been making a strawberry compote that goes on top of a panna cotta. They're putting it in a little glass jar and sending that out with food to go. But the most wonderful tart for me is the apricot galette that we make. I always look forward to that at this moment in time. It's just begun, and so we will have that probably for another month.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm swooning over here in Manhattan, thinking of the Chez Panisse apricot galette. I love galettes. I know you do, too.
Alice Waters:
I do.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay, so Alice, I was super surprised, I think it was just last week, to read that you are opening a restaurant, or something restaurant-like, in Los Angeles this fall. Can you tell us about this project?
Alice Waters:
First of all, this is not a Chez Panisse project in Los Angeles.
Kerry Diamond:
Got it.
Alice Waters:
Excuse me. This is a project that I am wanting to do at the Hammer Museum. It is a restaurant that they were looking for someone to run. I thought If I could find somebody who wanted to cook that I knew and somebody who could run it, I'd love to collaborate. I found David Tanis and Jesse McBride, and I have to say that probably my daughter moving to Los Angeles had something to do with it.
But really, what had most to do with it is the fact that the Hammer Museum is connected to the University of California, and I'm very engaged with the university around the ideas of regenerative food, organic regenerative food. They have a climate initiative for 2025. I'm hoping that food can be part of that.
The fact that this is a beautiful situation in a museum that brings together art and food, and students could be in the kitchen and at the restaurant is irresistible to me. That is why I am enthusiastic about it. I have to say it is why I would support any project that really carried the values of regenerative agriculture, of beauty, of community, of diversity, of local. It just fits.
There are so many friends on Los Angeles who have worked at Chez and want to help us. It feels like, again, the extended family of Chez Panisse in a way, but it's way more than that. It's about really finding a way to communicate these values globally, and the University of California has the potential of doing that.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, lucky Los Angeles. I mean, you have resisted opening another location for so long. I mean, your life has been Chez Panisse and Edible Schoolyard. Why have you resisted all these years, and now is the time?
Alice Waters:
I have had, needless to say, my hands full. But here we are, at 50 years of Chez Panisse and 25 years of the Edible Schoolyard Project. Both have extraordinary people to move them forward. I want to be involved in any project, and I mean whether it's slow food in Italy, whether it's the Refettorio of Massimo Bottura in San Francisco, whether it is a school in the Bronx or a university that wants to hold these values, wants to go forth and teach the next generation, I am there. I will be present. That's not like I'm opening up Chez myself. It's being a supporter in all ways I can to express these values as I did in my manifesto.
Kerry Diamond:
I was just going to say that's a great segue because all those values you talk about, you have put into a brand new book. It's called We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto. Tell us about this beautiful book.
Alice Waters:
Well, I wanted to understand myself, how we happened to lose our human values in this last 60 years. I've always thought about that Brillat-Savarin philosophical sentence that says, "The destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves." How have we been nourishing ourselves? We have been eating fast food and when we're eating that food, we're eating the values that go along with the food.
So we've been digesting the ideas of fast, cheap, and easy. We believe that we should be able to get anything we want 24/7. We believe that everything should be uniform. We believe that it's okay to eat in our cars. We believe that food should be cheap, that it should be cheap when it's always been precious. We believe that it's okay to waste, there's always more where that came from, and that cooking is treasure, that farming is treasure, and that diversity is not desirable, that we want the same thing we've always had over and over again.
I do believe this is what has taken us down the wrong paths. We've destroyed our environment, our health, and we're endangering, really, the future for our children. I'm just saying that we need to understand slow food values and... I mean, they've always guided my life, always, since I went to France that first time and experienced the beauty of a culture.
Kerry Diamond:
Now, Alice, the people who know and love you agree with you and have tried to live these values alongside you. Who did you write this book for?
Alice Waters:
I guess I wrote this book for the politicians in Washington, for the Department of Education, for the people who make the decision about school lunch. How could we feed our children fast food when we could feed them slow food for the same price? That's my next book, is how we can do that, how we can teach about cultures of the world through a school lunch education, how we can change the world if we bought food like Chez has always done, directly from the people who take care of the land and their farm workers. What could be better?
Kerry Diamond:
Alice, how can we help? How can our listeners help?
Alice Waters:
How can they help? Let me say there's so many ways, but I think, really, communicating to the powers that be is very... It's a very crucial time right now. People are thinking about hunger of children and health of children during the pandemic.
But we don't just want fast food for our kids. We want real food. We want to support those people, and to make that definition of school lunch clear that we want to support local economies. We don't want to buy food from around the world that's second rate and not organically grown. We don't want that food, and we can grow the food in this country.
And eating seasonally is something that needs to be championed because it really is something that makes you really connected to nature, always. In order to make the right decisions about our future, we have to fall in love with nature. We have to treasure, and seasonality is the way to really engage, to ask where everything comes from and to eat.
People can have greenhouses. They can store food for the winter. There are nuts and berries and squashes and spices and all the new grains that have been discovered in the last five or 10 years. It's amazing.
Kerry Diamond:
Alice, you have planted so many seeds over the years. I've seen so many of the green shoots and plants that have resulted from your work. Do you feel hopeful?
Alice Waters:
I've never lost my hope from the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the '60s. I knew that if we all got together, we can change the world. We feel like we really helped with civil rights. We felt like we stopped the war in Vietnam. I felt the power of that, and I've never, ever lost my hope. I feel that right now.
So many people have awakened during the pandemic and seen the failure of the industrial food system and seen all the hungry children and the broken school system as well. Why can't we be outside educating our children? Why can't we take them down to the beach? This is where my hope is, in public education, our last truly democratic institution. Every child goes to school, or should, as Gloria Steinem said. I count on that, that we can really volunteer, that we can be engaged, because the decisions that are made right now are going to be so, so important.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, Alice, we are totally behind you. You have been such an inspiration to me, personally, and I know to everyone in the Bombesquad. I can't thank you enough for everything you've done and for putting all this into this book. I mean, everyone really should pick up a copy of We Are What We Eat. I think you will all feel very inspired by Alice's words. It gives us a path forward. Thank you again, Alice, for that and for everything you've done.
Alice Waters:
It is my pleasure.
Kerry Diamond:
Thank you so much to Alice for joining us. Now, let's check in with Fanny Singer, who joins us from Los Angeles. Fanny Singer, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Fanny Singer:
Thank you so much for having me, Kerry. It's a pleasure to be with you.
Kerry Diamond:
It is so nice to see you. It's been a while. The last I saw you and your mom it was April of last year. You two, I think, had just become roommates.
Fanny Singer:
God, I mean that feels like yesterday and it also feels like a million years ago. It's been a strange year time-wise. But yeah, I had just moved from San Francisco into my childhood home with my mom in Berkeley. That coincided with the launch of my book, Always Home, so I was always home with my mom from... Well, actually really from the end of March. I was there with her in Berkeley for 10 months.
Kerry Diamond:
Your book is in my bookshelf, of course. Every time I see the title, I am just struck by how prescient that title was.
Fanny Singer:
Honestly, even still.
Kerry Diamond:
Right.
Fanny Singer:
Just no one could've foreseen the longevity and relevance that it would have because we are still... I mean, even just now, much of the world is still under that form of quarantine. It was a weird bit of propheticism on my part. I wish it hadn't been.
Kerry Diamond:
I think it says a lot of about a book and a title, also, that it can evolve with the times because when you titled the book Always Home, it didn't mean what it means today. What did you mean when you gave it that title originally?
Fanny Singer:
That title was meant to reflect this idea that you could feel yourself to be at home anywhere, depending on how you organized different aspects of your life, and that you could recall a feeling of the coziness and homeliness and things that we associate with our childhood homes often or being with our family virtually anywhere if you just oriented yourself with a few, in my mind, tricks or recipes, tricks in the sense that my mom's classic burning of rosemary to make any room smell beautiful or just arranging some foraged flowers or any little thing like that. It was really meant to convey this idea by making recipes, by gathering friends, by surrounding yourself with beauty, that you could feel a sense of real groundedness.
Of course, it came to me in that here's a recipe book to use while you're trapped at home, suddenly having to cook. How do you feel comfortable? How do you eat good food? How do you take care of your family in times of duress? It did take on a new mean in the course of that year.
Kerry Diamond:
The book is such a delightful read and it's funnier than I expected it to be. I remember reading it last year. People will have heard your mom before this interview, and your mom can be serious sometimes, very serious, so I just love that there was so much humor in the book. But also, you're young to have written a memoir. Why did you decide it was time to do that book?
Fanny Singer:
I mean, I had been asked to write early on when I was 18. Publishers got in touch with me to write a book. There was so much interest and there always has been, and there perennially will be interest in my mom and for good reason, I think. She's doing really important, compelling work. But there's was always the appetite, I think, to understand or see the narrative from the other side or what does Fanny, Alice Waters' daughter, eat? I basically moved away from California and from the United States entirely to get out a little bit from under that, what was at times, oppressive scrutiny.
I lived in England for 11 years. I was doing a PhD in art history over there and then I stayed. People knew who my mom was, but not in that way where it felt like that was the epithet, Alice Waters' daughter, Fanny Singer, and that that was how it was always seen. That was an important chapter in my life, to really create something that felt autonomous.
Of course, the book is about, in a way, realizing that I was never far from home spiritually and that however, getting to do that work meant coming back to California with a different feeling and footing. It suddenly felt like a nice time to reassess that relationship. I wasn't living at home then. I moved to San Francisco, but I was back with my family.
I'd started writing when I was still England, but I was anticipating the return to California. I wanted to write the book when our relationship was still very much in the present tense because it isn't just a memoir. It is a story of that mother-daughter relationship. I liked the idea of not treating it as something that I was looking back at totally retroactively, but something that we were still working out and living through.
Also, I mean sort of selfishly, asking Brigitte Lacombe to make photographs meant memorializing our relationship in that present moment when both of us still had a quality of relationship that felt more like it did when I was young than how it might in another 10 or 15 years. It was almost like taking a snapshot in that middle moment of both of our arcs as mother and daughter.
Kerry Diamond:
Those Brigitte are so beautiful. Do you feel the need, or are folks asking, for a new final chapter?
Fanny Singer:
There's definitely been some chatter. People are like, "Come on, give us the dirt," because this is not an expository book or one where I'm trying to reveal any sort of dirty truths.
Kerry Diamond:
Like I said, the book is delightful and funny. You will find yourself laughing out loud sometimes.
Fanny Singer:
Because I'm also an art critic and I write about art routinely and culture, do culture writing as well, my tone is quite serious generally. I think it was really nice for me to actually explore the reality of my sense of humor and just... This is the lens through which I have lived this life with my mom. My mom, I think many people perceive her as their doctrinaire and very kind and lovely but also possibly humorless. But the reality is she loves to crack up, too. For her to read these stories and these accounts through that lens of humor was, I think, really a pleasure for her.
Kerry Diamond:
So tell us, how was it being Alice Waters' roommate for all those months?
Fanny Singer:
I mean, it was an amazing thing. It's an amazing thing to be an adult and move back in with your parent if you love that parent, I think. I mean, plenty of people have strained relationships with their parents. I have the aforementioned difficulty of navigating her celebrity, but I don't have a difficult time through a personal or emotional level. We just really love being together.
It was really wonderful. I mean, it was crazy at the beginning because they were doing, I mean, just dozens of virtual events. She was supposed to be on book tour to a few different locations with me for Always Home, and I was supposed to be in three different countries for the book tour. Suddenly, everything was virtual. And then even other things were booked that could never have been physical events because suddenly, there was that perceived opportunity. We were just in a constant state of frenetic activity, so the first few months just almost evaporated that... It was the first time I was really home since I was 18 for any prolonged period of time.
Kerry Diamond:
Fanny, one of the things I want to talk to you about is, and this is one of the things I've always admired about you, is the creative life that you've led. Creativity seems to be this thread that has run through your life, of everything you do. Even when I was thinking back, I've seen all those adorable photos of you at Halloween and your homemade Halloween costumes. Was the idea of a creative life something that was nurtured in you, or is it something that just happened organically?
Fanny Singer:
Well, I think a little bit of both. I think I probably had an innate, in a way, aptitude for art. I mean, I had started making art just compulsively when I was kid, and then I went on to study art and art history at college. I think I thought I was going to be an art major and maybe be an artist, and it was in the process of doing that, that I was like, "I don't know if I have the skill or actually the discipline with this one thing." Now that I know so many artists through the work that I do, I really respect that singular drive to make and create that I'm never sure I had just in that. There was always a number of things that I was interested in doing.
But I come from a family of artists. My father is a painter. He also is a winemaker, but he makes incredible paintings, was painting when I was a little kid and had done a BFA at SFAI in San Francisco and had a studio in our backyard. I was always out there tootling around with him while he was painting. He would take me to museums. He really nurtured a more traditional engagement with art and with institutional art, so going to museums, seeing shows that mattered to him, which is why I have a Sol LeWitt tattoo. It's fully my dad's influence.
Kerry Diamond:
I missed that. Where is the tattoo and what is it of?
Fanny Singer:
That is right here.
Kerry Diamond:
I didn't know that. Beautiful.
Fanny Singer:
He does not approve of tattoos, so didn't exactly feel honored by that choice. But my engagement with that world does very much come from my father's nurturing. But my mom is an artist, too. I mean, everything she touches, I mean she's always rearranging and making things look a certain way or adhere to a certain color palette. I talk about that a lot in my book because there is a sort of almost a program around aesthetics. I grew up in a house where everything was always very beautiful. There was really zero tolerance for things that were unattractive or utilitarian. No plastic anywhere in the house, very little even stainless steel or metal. It was warmer hues of copper and wood, and the reality that those tools that we have eschewed because there's something more convenient or we can plug an implement into the wall and whiz something faster.
It's like it's not that they're better. It's like you can actually luxuriate in the time that it takes to make something more slowly if it's something more beautiful in a way that might actually be more gratifying. I think that's my mom's overwhelming message, is, and especially in this new book, too, is that slowness is actually a value and that in doing something more slowly, you engage with the beauty of the process, whether that's the smell of the spices that you can really smell and absorb if you're pounding something versus putting it in a closed blender and whizzing it. That did govern the aesthetic program of the house, and I do think that really rubbed off on me.
I mean, I do have some modern conveniences in my kitchen, but the two influences of my parents were dovetailed, I think, in the way that I wanted to then approach my career. I mean, I run a design brand called Permanent Collection, which is very much about a pretty strict, pared down, minimalist but beautiful aesthetic around kitchen and homeware, predominantly, but some jewelry and garments and things. That's a project that I started with a design historian also from California named Mariah Nielson.
And then I also write. I write about art and then do these occasional curatorial projects like the Absolut project.
Kerry Diamond:
Which we're going to talk about right now. When I heard about the Absolut Art project that you were doing, I just thought, Oh, this is so perfect. It just combines so many things that I know Fanny loves and just does so beautifully.
Two questions. Tell us what Absolut Art is because I know when people hear the name Absolut, they mostly associate that with vodka. I know for me, I did. And then tell us about the project, because it just launched.
Fanny Singer:
Yes. Absolut Art is an organization that is within the umbrella of the vodka brand, but it is a semi, I guess, autonomous, limited edition print platform. It's an online gallery where you can buy accessibly-priced, limited edition prints by artists. They started this, I think, really because they had cultivated so many strong artist relationships back in the '70s and '80s.
Kerry Diamond:
Right. Some people might remember the amazing ad campaigns.
Fanny Singer:
Incredible. They were all designed by artists. You had Warhol. You had, I mean, these really big names like... And Louise Bourgeois, who were associated with the brand really early on, which was interesting to me because I think that... I mean, obviously I had Absolut art ads plastered all around my room-
Kerry Diamond:
We all did.
Fanny Singer:
... was always this sort of resonance with the design, aesthetic and just the actual innovation.
Kerry Diamond:
I think I read they collaborated with more than 500 artists on those-
Fanny Singer:
Yes. It's incredible.
Kerry Diamond:
... campaigns over the years, which is incredible, yeah.
Fanny Singer:
Obviously, these are not Absolut bottle prints. What they do now is they work with artists to make a unique... Well, unique to the limited edition artwork and then that gets printed in usually pretty small runs, like 25, 50 prints per run. They're signed prints. You can buy them through their platform.
When Absolut reached out to me, I had been sort of aware of what they were doing because actually, Brigitte has a relationship with them and makes works and prints for them, really beautiful photographic works. Their proposal was to come up with a collection for the kitchen. I was like, "Well, I really understand why you thought of me." I can't think of someone more engaged with the art world and cooking and culinary world than me. So I was like, "That's maybe the most appropriate Venn diagram overlapping situation that I've ever come across," because most of what I do feels sort of... That there is some sort of genetic continuity between it, but I often feel like I'm wearing different hats. I'm the art critic over here. Now, I'm on Instagram writing a recipe for followers. There is a diversity of things that I do, and this really melded them.
Anyways, this project is works that I... I mean, what I really thought about actually in asking artists, I wanted artists who I thought would might make work that would reflect how people cook. Jeremy Deller is a conceptual artist. His print just says, "Marmite on toast." It's like many of his works which are just text-based. That's how he cooks. I mean, it's just this kind of well, that's the extent of what he engages with in the kitchen. It's more concept than it is execution.
Heather Chontos did two beautiful prints. She's an abstract painter based in Bordeaux. She has a huge beautiful garden. She used to work for years at Gourmet and then at World of Interiors. She has this incredible depth of experience as a cook. She cooks, I think, in a way that's quite impulsive in the way that she... Similar to how she arranges light and shapes and forms in her work. I was interested in okay, you got the abstract painters, the abstract cooks who never follow recipes, the ones who are very programmatic and have everything laid out first, their recipe. The works reflect that. There's also works by Rachel Kaye who's an abstract painter in San Francisco, Peter McDonald who does these wonderful... Between abstraction and figurative works. He has this very unique vernacular.
And then my mom. The folks at Absolut were like, "Do you think your mom would want to make a print?" There had been this photograph that had actually been pre-approved of hers by Brigitte for another initiative that ended up falling through that was meant to be a benefit print for restaurant workers during, I mean, the crazy crisis. It was wonderfully able to be used as a benefit print for the Edible Schoolyard.
And then the last is Sol Calero, who is an artist I adore who is a Venezuelan artist based in Berlin. I mean, she just has an incredible social practice alongside her art work. Her print benefits a small organization in Venezuela called Feed Venezuelan Children.
It was very cool that Absolut was game to do these charity prints, too. They have a history of doing that with various artists. They've worked with Kehinde Wiley to do a charity print. They're a real mix of things, and hopefully something for everyone, I guess, is the idea.
Kerry Diamond:
It's accessible art, this company that has a long history of supporting artists, which is so important and continues to be important, and the website's great. When you go on there to look at Fanny's collection, give yourself some time because you will fall down an art rabbit hole because there's a lot of beautiful art on that website.
Fanny Singer:
It's true. It's true.
Kerry Diamond:
All right, we're going to do a quick speed round. Okay Fanny, coffee or tea?
Fanny Singer:
Tea.
Kerry Diamond:
How do you take it?
Fanny Singer:
I'm a tea drinker, so I just have a beautiful cup of very, very green... You have to brew green tea lukewarm, so it's always barely hot.
Kerry Diamond:
I probably make mine too hot.
Fanny Singer:
I think that's what really changed it for me. I have to say, actually, is I didn't love the taste of green tea. And then when you brew it the right temperature, you don't scald the leaves and so it has a completely different super green flavor as opposed to little bit more of an oxidized flavor.
Kerry Diamond:
What did you eat for breakfast today?
Fanny Singer:
I did not have anything, although I'm eyeing some banana bread that I made yesterday in a chaotic, post-print launch press breakfast. I, in fact, posted a video to Instagram because I looked at the kitchen afterwards and it was a like tornado had ripped through. Whenever I bake, it's total chaos.
Kerry Diamond:
What is your most-used kitchen implement? We know it's not a microwave or something like that.
Fanny Singer:
It's really the mortar and pestle that we made for Permanent Collection. I just use it twice a day because I eat a lot of salad and I always pestle my garlic in there to make a salad dressing. It's a little collaboration with... My mom made a little kitchen collection in collaboration with us at Permanent Collection. This is a Japanese style mortar and pestle. It's just such a useful tool, so I do use it a lot.
Kerry Diamond:
Salad is a big thing in your family, isn't it?
Fanny Singer:
It's a big thing. I buy enough lettuce for one female. Every time I go to the farmers market, this one farm is like, "Do you have a family of 10?" I'm like, "These 15 heads of lettuce will barely get me through the week."
Kerry Diamond:
That came through loud and clear in your mom's interview. What was your last pantry purchase?
Fanny Singer:
I got some millet, actually, because I was interested in banana bread, which is a big hit.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you listen to music in the kitchen?
Fanny Singer:
I do, but it's kind of... I live in a studio, so it's all one room. But I do, and it really varies. Last night, I was listening to Arthur Russell's World of Echo, which is one of my favorite records, while I was cooking.
Kerry Diamond:
What is your kitchen footwear of choice?
Fanny Singer:
To be honest, it's usually those little, I don't know, are they plastic Birkenstocks? Which I'm sure would not be pass muster. You know those ones that are just made of the foamy material, not even the leather ones? But I wear them. It's generally my footwear. When I'm being more responsible, I wear a clog because you aren't supposed to have your toes out in the kitchen.
Kerry Diamond:
I know you just moved, but what is the oldest thing in your fridge?
Fanny Singer:
Oh, it's some miso that traveled to many homes. And amazingly, it's still good. But it's some miso that a friend made. I actually think it's lived in three or four different places. I brought it to LA.
Kerry Diamond:
I love that for people who move a lot with the vinegars you take with you, the mustards, the misos, all of that. All right, Fanny, last question. If you were stuck on a desert island with one food celebrity, can't be your mom, who would it be and why?
Fanny Singer:
When I was thinking about that, I was like, "Probably Francis Mallmann so that..." Because I feel like he'd be really good person to be on an island with. You have the fire cooking. I feel like he probably fishes. I've actually never met Francis. I just adore him from afar. I know he's dear friends with my mom's, but that's... I was like, "I think that would be a safe bet."
Kerry Diamond:
You'll handle the salad, he's got the fire.
Fanny Singer:
I'll take care of the salad. I'll forage the greens from the forest.
Kerry Diamond:
Exactly. All right, well Fanny, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. I love you and your mom so much. It's just so nice to see you both. Thank you for putting these wonderful projects into the world.
Fanny Singer:
Thank you so much, Kerry. The admiration is mutual. It's really nice to catch up.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Thank you so much to Fanny Singer for joining us. Fanny's memoir is Always Home. You can check out her curated art collection on abolutart.com. And thank you again to her mom, Alice Waters, for joining us as well. Alice's latest book, We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto, is out now.
Thank you to our sponsor, AIX Rosé, for supporting this episode. Cheers to them.
Radio Cherry Bombe is a production of Cherry Bombe Magazine. Special thanks to Cherry Bombe's Jenna Sadhu and to Joseph Hazan, chief engineer of Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center.
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Harry from When Harry Met Sally:
I'll have what she's having.