Six California Kitchens: A Collection of Recipes, Stories, and Cooking Lessons from a Pioneer of California Cuisine
by Sally Schmitt with Bruce Smith.
Winner of the 2023 Golden Poppy Award for best cookbook and the IACP Award in the American Category! Purchase at Indiebound / Bookshop.org / Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Indigo(Canada) / International
Six California Kitchens is the quintessential California cookbook, with farm-to-table recipes and stories from Sally Schmitt, the pioneering female chef and original founder of the French Laundry.
Sally Schmitt opened The French Laundry in Yountville in 1978 and designed her menus around local, seasonal ingredients—a novel concept at the time.
In this soon-to-be-classic cookbook, Sally Schmitt takes us through the six kitchens where she learned to cook, honed her skills, and spent her working life. Six California Kitchens weaves her remarkable story with 115 recipes that distill the ethos of Northern California cooking into simple, delicious dishes, plus evocative imagery, historic ephemera, and cooking wisdom.
With gorgeous food and sense-of-place photography, this is a masterful, story-rich cookbook for home and aspiring chefs who cook locally and seasonally, food historians, fans of wine country, and anyone who wants to bring the spirit of Northern California home with them.
Six California Kitchens will have you eager, in equal parts, to curl up in an armchair and read this inspiring memoir cover to cover, and/or to tie on your apron and pull out your soup pot.
Starred Review. “Schmitt, the founder of California’s famed French Laundry restaurant, reflects on the food that defined her life, in this sumptuous collection of recipes and tales from the kitchens that inspired them {…} Fans of Alice Waters won’t want to miss this delectable page-turner.”
– Publishers Weekly, Read Full Review
“The rare cookbook in which the personal history, recipes, margin notes and photographs are all equally compelling {…} As for the food: Six California Kitchens scores high on what I call a cookbook’s IQ—Irresistibility Quotient {...} Packed with wisdom accrued over decades, Six California Kitchens stands out as a paean to the considerable satisfactions of doing what you love, both for and alongside those you love.”
– The Wall Street Journal, Read Full Review
Starred Review. “The late Schmitt (1932–2022) cofounded famed Napa County restaurant the French Laundry, whose farm-to-table ethos is credited with transforming food culture. This cookbook is a love letter to California cuisine and six of the kitchens Schmitt worked in (starting with her mother’s), paired with 115 total recipes–sure to inspire home cooks as well as buffs of American culinary history.”
– Library Journal, Read Full Review, Best Cookbooks of 2022
“The book, illustrated with photographs and memorabilia, is filled with often inventive but always ingredient-driven dishes [...] Some are written with step-by-step directions — two pages for a turkey sandwich! — that convey a sense that Ms. Schmitt is at your side offering handy tips. Her French Laundry recipes are pulled from daily five-course menus: warm salad of sweetbreads and mushrooms; roasted rib-eye of veal; and rhubarb mousse, nothing precious.”
– The New York Times, Read Full Review
“From the first page, I was touched by the authenticity and clarity of this memoir of a life intertwined with a life in food. Ninety years of California history and a vision of life in a different time, when moms had the energy to make pies and dads came home from their day jobs then tended the vegetable garden. It’s the story of a happy marriage, and family, and the nascence of one of the most important food movements in the U.S. Just an all-around beautiful and important book.”
– NetGalley Member, Read More Early Reviews
“This cookbook is like having a grandmother teach you how to cook. But this isn’t about grandma’s green beans and pot roast — Schmitt had an expansive palate, a sesame seed toaster and a suribachi (grinding bowl) from Japan and adored salmon with sorrel sauce. […] It’s the kind of cookbook you will want to sit and read through, taking in maybe a couple kitchens a day and marking the recipes as you go along […] It becomes quite apparent why she had legions of fans of her cooking. You’re about to become one more of the them.”
– San Francisco Examiner, Read Full Review
“Six California Kitchens proves you can write a powerful memoir one recipe at a time. Whether the book will become enough of a legacy to vault her into the position she deserves, praised alongside “inventors” of California cuisine—farm-to-table, local, seasonal—like Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Nancy Silverton, and Mark Peel, only time will tell.”
– California Review of Books, Read Full Review
Starred Review. “A cookbook-memoir that’s humble, proud, and filled with family {...} Along with her recipes (more than 100), Schmitt shares knowledge of ingredients and culinary wisdom that forswears fancy equipment and techniques to zero in on flavor and taste. Personal photographs grace her lessons {...} Dishes themselves, reflective of Schmitt’s personality, are approachable, unintimidating, and respectful of flavors {...} An inspiration up to her closing lines.”
– Booklist, Read Full Review
Sally is the subject of Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot's short documentary, "The Best Chef in The World," released by the New York Times in late 2022. Watch the entire film at the above link.
Winner of the 2023 Golden Poppy Award for best cookbook and the IACP Award in the American Category! Purchase at Indiebound / Bookshop.org / Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Indigo(Canada) / International