'Unforgettable' cookbook a biography of culinary explorer Paula Wolfert
“Unforgettable,” the life story of Mediterranean food maven Paula Wolfert of Sonoma, was released this week with a title and a format that are as multidimensional as Wolfert herself. The narrative of Wolfert’s life is punctuated by 50-some recipes and mouth-watering photos, ranging from childhood favorites made from eggplant and peppers by Wolfert’s grandmother to brain-healthy dishes like the Avocado and Sardine Toasts inspired by Catalan chef Ferran Adrià.
Biographer Emily Kaiser Thelin hand-picked the recipes, not as a compendium of “greatest hits,’ ?but as a reflection of Wolfert’s life ?as a maverick with a penchant for bold flavors.
“We wanted to show above all how modern and contemporary and avant-garde and accessible some of her recipes are,” Thelin said in a phone interview from her Berkeley home. “We wanted to showcase the dishes that make you think, ‘Oh my god, I want to make that right now.’”
Still, there was “fresh heartbreak” whenever Thelin had to whittle the choices down to just a handful of recipes that Wolfert wrote in her cookbooks at the height of her career, between 1973 and 2011.
“That was the most stressful part of the process,” said Thelin, 41. “We just picked the recipes that helped tell the story and propel the narrative.”
There’s more heartbreak to the story than just the editing process. Thelin first launched the ambitious project back in 2010, and four years into the project, Wolfert was diagnosed with dementia, perhaps an early form of Alzheimer’s. This week, more trim and youthful looking than ever, Wolfert will turn 79.
Those who know the self-effacing writer and culinary adventurer will not be surprised to learn that she initially tried to talk Thelin out of writing the biography. Famous for taking the path less traveled in the food world, the cookbook author was not interested in retracing the steps of her own life story, despite its often exotic locales and dramatic plot twists.
“The only way I got her to cooperate was to do some oral histories,” said Thelin, who served as Wolfert’s editor at Food & Wine magazine for a few years. “Even then, she had started to think something was wrong with her cognitive abilities. That helped grant me access.”
Once she got her foot in the door of Wolfert’s life, however, Thelin was able to coax the pioneering cookbook writer to open up about her early years as a beatnik living in Tangier, Morocco, and Paris as well as her days as “Indiana Jones” romancing the recipes out of Mediterranean home cooks from Alicante to Athens.
As time went on, however, Wolfert’s stories started to fray at the edges.
“When we started in 2010, her memory was incredible. ... She had a real steel-trap mind,” Thelin said. “But the end, she couldn’t remember as much and could not articulate it as clearly and beautifully. For someone who’s passionate about good writing, that’s the hardest part of the illness for her.”
Wolfert was never one to feel sorry for herself, however. Since her diagnosis, she has been fighting back against her condition, not only as an activist urging others to avoid denial and get their brains tested, but by tweaking her own diet with cutting-edge techniques like moderate fasting and the butter-laden, “bulletproof” coffee that she hopes will stall the progressive brain disorder.
“Since I’ve been on the diet, I feel fantastic,” Wolfert said in a phone interview from her home in Sonoma. “Does it work? There’s no proof, but people feel good. If I can stay like this, and die of something else in 10 or 20 years, great.”
Meanwhile, Thelin ran up against a few challenges of her own while shopping the book idea back in 2013, Publishers told her that Wolfert’s era had passed, and they were not interested.
“I had done proposals and gotten all these rejections,” Thelin said. “In January 2014, I ended up putting off the book. It was too much, too risky.”
But taking a cue from Wolfert’s defiant attitude toward her disease, Thelin ended up assembling a crack team of talented collaborators, including photographer Eric Wolfinger, designer Toni Tajima and cookbook author Andrea Nguyen, who served as the book’s editor.
Then, she launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the 329-page, hardcover book. More than 1,100 people donated, from chefs and long-time fans of Wolfert’s to folks who simply wanted to support Kickstarter.
“It took a lot of planning, and we were terrified to set our goal at $45,000,” Thelin said. “But we met our goal in four days, and we ended up raising over $90,000.”
Thelin, who works as editorial director of recipes for the meal delivery company Sunbasket of San Francisco, said the team assembled the book with three kinds of readers in mind.
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