On the Pepper Trail

CONNECTICUT AND THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN 1988 to 1994

“This is nouvelle Paula.… It requires, first of all, a very hands-on type of cooking I find extremely pleasing, and it brings together a variety of diverse ingredients—the tastes sour and sweet, the textures crunchy and soft—into a finely tuned and delicious equilibrium.”

—Paula Wolfert on The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean in a profile by Molly O’Neill in the New York Times Magazine, 1994

A STRONG CASE CAN BE MADE that Paula’s fifth book, The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, changed American food culture in more ways than any of her other works. Yet Eastern Mediterranean has never received nearly the recognition that her best-known titles, Couscous and Southwest France, have garnered.

Many of the Middle Eastern culinary practices commonplace in the United States today owe their prominence in no small part to Eastern Mediterranean. This is true not only of the popularity of mezes (small plates) but also of the elevation of vegetables to a main dish (and the relegation of meat to a condiment) and the regular use of such pantry staples as sumac, pomegranate molasses, and Aleppo, Marash, and Urfa peppers.

But when the book appeared in 1994, such notions were so radical that even Paula’s most ardent fans knew the book was too far ahead. In the Chicago Tribune, William Rice, her former editor at Food & Wine, wrote, “On the inside covers and facing pages of Paula Wolfert’s arresting new book… is a map that alerts the prospective reader/cook to just how far outside the American culinary mainstream Wolfert has stepped.”

In restaurant terms, if Couscous was a late bloomer and South-West France was an instant hit, Eastern Mediterranean was that hole-in-the-wall that only industry insiders know about—but they’re all regulars. The book influenced three food pioneers in particular: Alice Waters, Ana Sortun, and Ari Weinzweig, each of whom shepherded a different one of the book’s ideas into American culinary consciousness.

In Berkeley, Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters had been giving vegetables equal ground with meat in her advocacy for farmers’ markets and school gardens when Eastern Mediterranean helped her articulate a key notion. “To make vegetables the main dish, that was just utterly impressive,” Waters said. Paula didn’t just describe the eastern Mediterranean practice in the book’s introduction: she adopted it as an organizing principle for the entire book, whose structure is arguably even more unorthodox than Mediterranean Cooking. (While Eastern Mediterranean includes conventional chapters on fish, poultry, and meat, of its first nine chapters, a whopping six are dedicated to vegetables. One is titled “Vegetables”; the other five have such quirkily specific titles as “Small Cooked Vegetable Dishes” and “Small Uncooked Salads.”) These recipes informed Waters’s burgeoning political activism. She founded her first Edible Schoolyard, or school garden and kitchen, at a public school in Berkeley in 1994, the same year Eastern Mediterranean appeared. Today, there are Edible Schoolyards across the country, and their vegetable-centric menus draw in part from Paula’s book.

Ana Sortun, who heads up Oleana restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is considered among the first chefs in the United States to serve upscale, modern takes on Turkish mezes. As this chapter details, she discovered the country’s cuisine through Paula.

Ari Weinzweig, founder of specialty foods emporium Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, became the first major importer of Turkish Marash and Urfa peppers to the United States thanks to Paula, who described the vibrant Middle Eastern red pepper flakes in the book. A 2002 story in Los Angeles magazine also credited Paula with first introducing Aleppo pepper to American chefs. And at the specialty foods store Sahadi’s in New York, Charlie Sahadi told me, “we’ve imported Aleppo pepper since at least the 1960s, maybe since we opened in the 1940s. But very few people not from the Middle East asked us for it before Paula wrote her book.”

Today, Aleppo pepper on avocado toast has become a foodie cliché (though war in Syria has moved much of the pepper production to Turkey), vegetable-centric diets are on the rise, and Middle Eastern flavors appear on high-end restaurant menus across the country. Many restaurants now describe themselves as “eastern Mediterranean.” Yet Paula’s foundational role in these trends is little known. She was so far ahead of her time, her achievements have become obscured, even forgotten.

Today, chefs and more recent cookbook authors (particularly Yotam Ottolenghi) are most often credited with the surge of interest in eastern Mediterranean cooking in America—and deservedly so. In a 2015 article in Saveur magazine, Michael Solomonov of the groundbreaking Philadelphia Israeli restaurant Zahav wrote, “It’s great to see the food of the Middle East finally get its due here in the States.… Let’s give some props to some early adopters: Before it was even cool, Mourad Lahlou in San Francisco was making couscous by hand, and Ana Sortun of Oleana in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had been expertly using Turkish flavors for years.”

When I spoke with Solomonov, he cited Paula as an influence, just as his peers have. Mourad Lahlou acknowledges her in the Morocco chapter (here). Read on to learn how Paula helped lead Ana Sortun—and the rest of America—to Turkey and beyond.

When Paula started Eastern Mediterranean in 1988, she was fifty years old and didn’t need to break fresh ground. Although World of Food had gone out of print, it did nothing to tarnish her icon status in the food world. On the contrary, she had been recast as an expert not just for Morocco and Southwest France but for the entire Mediterranean. She could have revisited any of her earlier regions to publish spinoffs, as successful cookbook authors often do. Instead, in her pursuit of new flavors, she undertook the most adventurous work of her career, traveling to regions that weren’t just remote but downright risky, such as Dagestan and Syria.

Paula was looking for fresh territory, which was when she often cast the widest net. By the late 1980s, her place in the food world had shifted. Her recipes from distant locales drew less interest as Americans began to explore good foods closer to home, like artisanal bread, craft-brewed beer, and better coffee from so-called first wave roasters like Starbucks. Increasingly, new chef stars like Thomas Keller, Charlie Trotter, and Bobby Flay overshadowed food writers. Cookware stores could no longer afford to fly in teachers, and Paula taught fewer cooking classes. Her attentions shifted to newly established conferences on food, where she now lectured. But she wanted to keep learning, to keep pushing the envelope.

She also remained ever vigilant about not competing with other English-language cookbook authors, tiptoeing around regional authorities she admired, such as Claudia Roden, to collaborate with emerging Mediterranean food journalists who published in their own languages and saw Paula as a mentor rather than a competitor. With their help, Paula gerrymandered a map of the eastern Mediterranean subregions that captivated her—ones that, to her mind, remained underreported: Slavic Macedonia, northern Greece, southeastern Turkey, Syria, and the barely Mediterranean Soviet Georgia. In the book she described her snaking route as “following the pepper trail.”

As with much of Paula’s life, her pepper trail quest started from unlikely circumstances. She didn’t wake up one morning and decide to write about the eastern Mediterranean, despite her past visits to the region. Instead, she chose it on a 1988 junket to the decidedly non-Mediterranean Soviet Union. The last year before the Berlin Wall fell, Paula, almost on a lark, joined three dozen food stars on a three-week tour of the USSR.

Organized by the Soviet Union, the USSR tour included some old East Coast writer pals such as Arthur Schwartz, plus West Coasters whom she got to know on the trip, such as Alice Waters. The group traveled to Kiev, Moscow, Leningrad, and the Baltic republics, where they sampled unremarkable, sometimes awful food (a layer of unidentifiable fat often floated atop the borscht served at Moscow restaurants) and drank a great deal of vodka.

Then they got to Georgia. “I took one bite of this eggplant dish and I went wild! We were finally in a place where people really knew how to cook. I spent the rest of the trip figuring out how I was going to get back to Georgia to learn the rest,” Paula said of the recipe here. Georgia stood at the intersection of Indian, Persian, and Armenian culinary traditions. Paula loved its pungent flavors, its unusual combinations of fresh herbs and rarer spices like sumac and red pepper pastes. The country reminded her of Morocco, especially in its warm hospitality. “In Georgia, guests are treated like a gift from God,” she said.

But Food & Wine balked at a story, explaining that no one knew or cared about Georgian food. She persuaded them by fibbing that their rival Gourmet was interested in a few recipes. She hired a New York University student to teach her basic Georgian (not an easy feat, given that its Kartvelian script and structure bear no relation to the Cyrillic alphabet of Russia—or to the Arabic, French, Spanish, Catalan, Sicilian, or Serbian languages that Paula had already studied), and perused Georgian cookbooks written in Georgian. Finally, in the winter of 1988, she found a small, new American-Soviet culinary exchange program called Peace Table. It was run by a Washington State baker named Jerilyn Brusseau, who arranged a three-week stay for her and Paula in the Tbilisi home of a woman named Tsino Natsvlishvili, whose friend Tamara translated. By luck, the women turned out to be excellent cooks themselves, with Paula-level dedication to tradition.

A snapshot Paula took of the elderly women bread bakers of Khunzakh.

“Our first day,” Brusseau recalled, “Tsino and Tamara were clustered in this little kitchen, wringing walnuts with their bare hands to make walnut oil.”

Paula’s Georgia adventures show just how far she was now willing to travel for good recipes. Paula and Brusseau crisscrossed the country, exploring villages along the Armenian border in the south and along the Black Sea coast to the west. Paula even talked their way into Chechnya and to the edge of the Caspian Sea in the east, persuading an official from bordering Dagestan to fly them to the capital city of Makhachkala. But at the Tbilisi airport, their flight to Makhachkala left early, stranding them, so the official hired a taxi to take them that night. They spent eleven hours in the back seat of the tiny car, climbing steep roads with turns so tight that the driver often had to stop and back up. They passed through the Chechen capital of Grozny by moonlight. They pulled into their hotel in Makhachkala at two o’clock in the morning, then rose before dawn to drive up into the mountains another eight thousand feet above sea level to the village of Khunzakh, where they watched an ancient bread-baking ritual at sunrise. Paula wrote, “seven elderly local women, in black dresses and black shawls, appeared… from the icy air and began to kiss us. They had come, they explained, to teach us to make corn bread. I can still feel the parchment-like texture of their deeply weathered cheeks.”

Yet all this buildup and romance could not soften Paula’s standards. The food was not good, so she omitted their recipes from the book. However, before departing Makhachkala, their hosts gave her a delicious recipe for pork skewers marinated in dill (recipe, here).

Back in the States, Paula did her utmost to spark interest in Georgian food, but the only interest came in the form of an interview with the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. She couldn’t write a whole book on Georgian food—not least after she learned that her publisher, HarperCollins, had signed Russian studies expert Darra Goldstein to do a seminal Georgia book, which released in 1993. But her time there sparked her curiosity about the seasonings of Georgia and its neighboring countries in the eastern Mediterranean. She saw an opportunity to honor Georgian food in a book about the condiments of the Middle East. “No one had written about the region the way I wanted to, by exploring its ingredients, its pantry,” she told me. She came up with a way to justify her inclusion of Georgia by applying the transitive quality of equality: Georgia is considered the birthplace of wine, wine is essential to the Mediterranean, ergo, Georgia could be considered part of the eastern Mediterranean. She sold the idea as the first of a two-book deal to HarperCollins.

From Georgia, Paula wanted to venture to truer centers of eastern Mediterranean cooking, such as Iran, Lebanon, and Armenia (Armenia is no more Mediterranean than Georgia, but she knew from her travels that “Armenians lived all over the Mediterranean,” she said, and had influenced its cooking in myriad ways). But conflicts in all three regions prevented her from getting in. She decided to leave Persian cooking out of the book but doggedly called Armenian churches around the United States to build a collection of community cookbooks that she could later reference.

As she shared her new book idea with food insider friends in New York, she was told repeatedly that she needed to get to Syria and Turkey because they had some of the best food in the eastern Mediterranean.

Paula’s invitation to Syria from Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass

Few Americans, let alone any American food writers she knew, had been to Soviet-allied Syria. She contacted the State Department and charmed a Syrian desk officer there into connecting her to an attaché at the Syrian embassy in Washington, DC. The attaché turned out to know a surprising amount about the culinary ambitions of his country’s ruling elite. He wrote a letter on Paula’s behalf to Syria’s minister of defense, Lieutenant General Mustafa Tlass, whose wife had recently published an Aleppo cookbook. Maybe they would invite her to Syria to study the cuisine?

Soon, a gold-embossed letter on heavy cream stock from Tlass arrived in the mail. The Syrian government offered to fly Paula and Bill from Jordan to Damascus, to cover their hotel stay, and to provide a car and driver.

On the flight in, Bill read up on Tlass and learned that he was a notorious anti-Semite—author of The Matzah of Zion, a book that promoted the patently false myth of the Jewish blood libel, the ancient fiction that Jews in Damascus slaughtered non-Jewish children to bake their blood into matzoh. And, in his role as a henchman for President Hafez al-Assad, he presided over the horrific Hama massacre of 1982.

This time Bill was the nervous one. When Paula woke up from a nap, he suggested they not go. She talked him into going forward, promising that she would not reveal they were Jewish—a tall order for someone so voluble.

In their hotel room, their driver, a young uniformed soldier named Ayman Ramadan, placed his finger to his lips, turned on the faucet, and pointed to the ceiling. “You’re probably being bugged,” he told them. (For that, he was not only included in the book’s acknowledgments, but more important, Paula and Bill wrote letters in support of his visa application to the United States just a few months later.)

A snapshot by Bill Bayer of their visit to Palmyra

They stayed three weeks. The general gave them one of his staff cars, with a general’s star affixed to it, which gave them exceptional access, even driving through the car-free medina of Damascus. They toured sites that have since been destroyed by war, from the modern cities of Homs and Aleppo to the glorious arches of the ancient city of Palmyra. Paula fell in love with Aleppo pepper at a restaurant so centered around the spice that all of its foods were red.

They had to suffer through only two meetings with the general. The first was at a party for several hundred at his villa. When the general shook hands with Paula in farewell, she succeeded in keeping a straight face as she felt him lightly wiggle his index finger against the inside of her palm, a gesture she knew to be a crass come-on. Once they left and were safely in their car back to their hotel, she shared what had happened and laughed when their driver noted wryly, “His excellency fancies himself quite a ladies’ man.”

Toward the end of their trip, the general invited them to a more intimate lunch. On a tour of his library, he unlocked a steel door to his inner sanctum. It was crammed with gold-plated daggers and guns, Persian carpets, and creepy acrylic-on-velvet seminude paintings of Hollywood actresses like Brooke Shields. Of the few books, the general drew their attention to a set titled The Jewish Encyclopedia, then pointed to his forehead. “Know your enemy,” he chuckled. Paula kept her mouth shut. They were able to leave the country without incident.

Ever since visiting the Ionian islands and southern Greece in the 1960s, Paula had wanted to explore the northern part of the country—and she knew that few English-speaking food writers had covered it. In New York, a Greek importer offered to introduce her to Aglaia Kremezi, an Athens journalist. E-mail for the masses wouldn’t arrive for years, so Paula faxed Kremezi, who quickly faxed back.

Fluent in English, Kremezi was a successful magazine editor and photographer at work on her first cookbook when she came upon World of Food. Kremezi had been reading American cooking magazines and knew Paula’s reputation. She was particularly impressed by the high quality of Paula’s Greek wedding cookies (recipe, here). As a journalist, she greatly appreciated the book’s reportorial approach.

“It was one of the most engaging and intelligent collection of recipes I had seen,” she said. “I thought the voice behind that book belonged to somebody I would like to meet.”

It turned out that neither of them had explored much of northern Greece. Through fax communications, the women plotted a three-week trip to explore Macedonia, Epirus, and Thrace. Kremezi worked her many contacts and volunteered to drive. Paula bought a Pimsleur method kit to teach herself basic Greek. “At least enough that I could read the map!” she said. They each purchased separate copies of encyclopedic regional Greek cookbooks (written in Greek) and created their own lists of recipes they hoped to find.

Paula had never before collaborated this closely with a fellow food writer. Kremezi would become among the first of few food writers to witness Paula’s methods so closely. They met for the first time in May 1991 at the airport in Thessaloniki, and within hours felt like lifelong friends. In the book, Paula described the road trip as their “nonviolent version of Thelma & Louise.” It’s a fitting comparison: Kremezi the younger, more reserved Geena Davis, Paula the older, more ribald Susan Sarandon. “We shared the same hotel room every night. How could she not become one of my best friends?” Paula asked.

At first Kremezi was struck by Paula’s anxieties about even minor travel inconveniences, like finding a legal parking spot in Thessaloniki. (Paula didn’t realize that parking “illegally” was commonplace in Greece.) “Her anxieties seemed strange for someone so traveled,” Kremezi said. “But then she relaxed. And we clicked.”

In the field, Kremezi realized that Paula’s fears underlined the seriousness of her work. “She took everything very, very seriously,” she said. “Really—she wasn’t taking things lightly at all. Ever.” Kremezi also admired Paula’s horse sense—and relentlessness—about finding the best cooks. In many villages, using Kremezi’s contacts, they gathered women together and quizzed them about their cooking repertoires to find out who might have the best recipe for the dishes on their lists. Because these were just conversations in a room, they could not taste these dishes, nor watch the women cook, so they had to gauge whom to trust based on instinct and observation. “In Greece,” Kremezi said, “when you ask somebody what they cook, everybody will tell you the most obvious things, like roasted lamb with potatoes. Paula has this intuition in choosing which cooks to ask, what to ask, and how to get things. And she doesn’t take no for an answer. She’d point to one woman and tell me, ‘Ask her! No, she hasn’t spoken, ask this one!’ And they would turn out to be the ones who knew.”

Paula used intuition and charm to coax recipes from guarded women such as these Macedonians.

“I follow their eyes,” Paula said. “I must have learned it in Morocco. If you ask who makes the best version, all the other women will look to one or two women. They know!”

For her part, Paula was so taken with Kremezi, she felt comfortable enough to work with her in a way that she had never done with any American food writer. Their collaborations did not end with finding good recipes; on the contrary, back home in their respective kitchens, still comparing notes by fax, they began the hard work of finessing—each giving their own versions a different spin. They began a decades-long practice of publishing divergent takes on similar recipes in their respective books. For example, in Eastern Mediterranean, Paula published an unusual northern Greek pie of wild greens, its crust made from a mere sprinkling of cornmeal (recipe, here). Kremezi later published a similar pie under its Greek name, hortopsomo.

When Kremezi expressed concern to Paula about competitors stealing their recipes, Paula told her not to worry about it. As much as Paula avoided competition herself, she knew the value of generosity in winning over rivals.

“Paula said, ‘if you help people, it will come back to you,’” Kremezi recalled. “Now a lot of people write to me, and I go out of my way to help everybody. And it really has paid back.”

Paula also advised Kremezi on which recipes to include in her debut cookbook. “Paula gave me some of the best advice I ever got, which I think every food writer should have: she said only choose recipes that you love to cook and love to eat, that you want to make again and again. It helped me from then on with all of my books.”

From her research, Paula knew that some of the best eastern Mediterranean cooking would be found in Turkey. In her travels she had experienced the culinary influence of the Ottoman Empire. In the book she wrote, “If one thinks of the eastern Mediterranean as an arc, Turkey is the keystone, a country that not only synthesized the cooking styles of the many nations it conquered but also reinterpreted and then exported these ideas to the farthest reaches of the greater Mediterranean.”

In the early 1990s, Paula sat on a panel at a food conference in San Francisco with Turkish Sufi cooking expert Nevin Halici and seized the moment, confessing she had never been to Turkey but was dying to go. Halici not only invited her to stay for a week with her in her town of Konya but also gave her a list of the twenty-five best chefs in the country. In a departure from her language-first approach, Paula wrote all the chefs in English to ask if she could visit and learn their food. In closing, she added a last-ditch suggestion (in English): “I know you don’t speak English, but can you hand this letter to someone who does, who might be willing to help me?”

Three chefs managed to write back. In Gaziantep, Burhan Çağdaş, said to be the best baklava chef in the country, took the letter to Ayfer Tuzcu Ünsal, a popular local English-speaking reporter.

“So I read this letter,” Ünsal said. “I didn’t know who Paula Wolfert was, I was not in the food world that much at the time, it was not that popular, you know? But she had left a fax number, and we had a fax. So I faxed her a few short lines, something like, ‘You are looking for me!’”

In another lifetime, Ünsal and Paula could have been sisters. Born fourteen years apart, both women had rich alto voices, infectious laughter, and strong opinions. Ünsal, the younger, is almost more energetic and stubborn than Paula. When they met, Ünsal was working as a social worker and political journalist active in Armenian–Turkish relations. Her father founded the biggest newspaper in Gaziantep, where she was on staff. He had three goals for his daughter: to learn to cook, to marry well, and to speak English. She achieved all three and then some. To polish her English, as a high school student in 1970, Ünsal spent a year as an exchange student with an American family in Topeka, Kansas. Back home, already an accomplished Turkish cook, she special ordered buns and taught herself how to grind meat to prepare American hamburgers. After college, she studied English to work for the United Nations. She had always wanted to make Gaziantep an internationally renowned city, not least for its food: too few people recognized it as Turkey’s gastronomic capital. She saw Paula’s fax as an opportunity. But she had no idea that what came next would change the course of both their lives.

“The following morning, she got crazy!” Ünsal recalled. “She sent me a fax back that went on for at least eight pages!” In these early days of thermal fax printers, Paula’s eight pages spooled out in a single roll onto the floor. The scroll-like missive explained who she was, followed by detailed descriptions of the specific ingredients and foods she was after.

Ünsal invited Paula to stay with her and her family for two weeks. Within no time, Ünsal became the second international journalist after Kremezi whom Paula helped recruit into food writing. For the next fourteen years, Paula returned to Turkey at least once a year to explore its foods with Ünsal.

Ayfer Ünsal, right, and Filiz Hösükoğlu, bottom left, at dinner with Paula in Turkey in the early 1990s.

For all of her time there, Paula never learned Turkish. “By the time I really started to go to Turkey, I could no longer learn languages,” she told me. “Your mind does go down a bit when you get older.” Paula was then in her sixties; it’s possible Alzheimer’s had begun to set in.

Ünsal found another Gaziantep woman to serve as Paula’s translator, Filiz Hösükoğlu, whom Paula also won over to food.

“I have a degree in mechanical engineering and never thought about the importance of the culinary culture on our lives till I met Paula,” Hösükoğlu wrote me in an e-mail. Above all, she was struck by the humanity of Paula’s methods.

“Paula has a beautiful way of approaching people,” Hösükoğlu said. “Although there is great competition in this world, she never made us feel it. Her common denominator is food, and we are all searchers.” Hösükoğlu also admired how Paula tailored her questions to her interviewees: “It was fascinating how she grasped their social status and experience, even though she does not speak Turkish.” Inspired by her time with Paula, Hösükoğlu began a second career offering her services as a culinary-culture consultant to writers and filmmakers traveling to the area.

In Turkey, Paula’s key ideas for Eastern Mediterranean coalesced. With her dynamic duo of Ünsal and Hösükoğlu, Paula explored virtually every nook and cranny of the country but especially the southeast. Ünsal took Paula to such romantic settings as the banks of the Euphrates, the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent “where it all began!” Paula exclaimed (meaning agriculture, as well as civilization). In their travels to cities with exotic names like Nizip, Paula met dozens of women home cooks who, like Madame Jaidi, embraced her like family and shared their most cherished recipes.

To bolster her eclectic choice of regions for her book, Paula noted the many similarities found in the cooking of southeastern Turkey, northern Greece, and Syria. They shared boundaries and had occasionally swapped population segments, after all. She loved the emphasis on vegetables and the relegation of meat to a condiment. With Ünsal’s help, she made a pilgrimage to the mountaintop café of the maker of the finest manti (Turkish dumplings) in the country. Ünsal also introduced her to two key Turkish red peppers: the bright, citrusy Marash and the earthy Urfa. For years, Ünsal arranged through an importer friend for Paula to receive annual three-pound shipments of canisters of Marash pepper flakes. Paula embraced the role of spice ambassador, handing out the canisters to leaders of the American food scene, and talking up their Aleppo and Urfa cousins.

Thanks to Ünsal, Paula also developed a profound obsession with kibbe, kebabs covered with a bulgur-and-meat shell, of which Paula published a list of fifty recipes in Eastern Mediterranean. (She couldn’t fit all the recipes into the book and invited readers to mail her if they wanted the unpublished ones. Only one person took her up on it.)

In 1995, a year after the publication of Eastern Mediterranean, Cambridge chef Ana Sortun discovered the mezes and flavors of Turkey with the help Paula and Ünsal. Through a mutual friend, Ünsal invited Sortun to retrace Paula’s steps in Turkey. Back home, Sortun used Eastern Mediterranean as a textbook on Turkish flavors to develop the menu for Oleana, her first restaurant, which she opened in 2001. While she also consults Middle Eastern cookbooks by Paula’s peers, such as Claudia Roden, Eastern Mediterranean, Sortun says wryly, “opened the can of worms.”

Sortun became one of many chefs and food writers in the 1990s who got to know Paula in person through Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust, a food advocacy organization whose initial work focused on the Mediterranean. Founded in 1990 and based in Boston, Oldways worked in parallel to do much of what Paula did with her cookbooks, though on a grander scale, organizing conferences around the Mediterranean largely funded by olive-growing Mediterranean countries and the United Nations–chartered International Olive Oil Council (today the International Olive Council). Attended by chefs, food writers, nutritionists, anthropologists, and food importers from all over the globe, the events promoted the healthful and hedonic benefits of tradition-based Mediterranean foods. Between 1991 and 1993, the organization partnered with Harvard and the World Health Organization to design the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid, which emphasized fruits and vegetables over meat and olive oil over butter and cream—and would help Paula promote her book. Paula objected only that the pyramid lacked a section for herbs and spices—that it lacked flavor—but she liked the philosophy of Oldways and greatly benefitted from the organization’s activities. (Once again she was ahead of her time; after consulting with scientists, Oldways added herbs and spices to the pyramid in 2008.)

As the reigning queen of the Mediterranean, Paula was one of the first authorities Oldways approached to participate in its conferences as a speaker and a resource to help them tap local authorities, such as Ayfer Ünsal in Istanbul.

“There are so many amazing food writers and cookbook authors, Paula was special because she talked in stories, which made these Mediterranean traditions come alive,” said Oldways president Sara Baer-Sinnott. “She was also incredibly generous with her expertise in a way that not everybody is or was. She wants you to experience her discoveries like she does. She gets so excited she can barely stand it,” she said fondly. “I know food retailers said it helped them come back [from conferences] and sell food in the United States in a more meaningful way. Paula helped them explain whatever the food was because she talked in stories.”

Behind the scenes, Paula often drove everyone crazy with her nerves. The presentations before so many esteemed colleagues were very high stakes for her. Despite years of practice teaching, she often panicked in the hours leading up to them. But by many accounts, her presentations were revelatory. “Her going on those [Oldways] trips was a sort of edible education for many people I know,” said Alice Waters.

The conferences proved vital to Paula not only for her on work on Eastern Mediterranean but also for every book that followed. The gatherings gave her new reach, allowing her to share finds with culinary leaders who could act on them immediately. It was on a bus to visit a food producer that she raved to Ari Weinzweig about Aleppo pepper from Syria and Marash and Urfa peppers from Turkey.

“Because I loved her work so much, and trusted her taste, I didn’t hesitate to act on it when she told me something was that good,” Weinzweig said. Paula introduced him to Ünsal. With their help, his company, Zingerman’s, quickly became the first major US importer of Urfa and Marash peppers into the United States.

Thanks to Oldways, Paula got to compare her research style against that of rival American food writers in the field. It tickled her to see how some of her closest competitors needed to take such thorough notes. In those days, though she had lost the ability to learn new languages, her food memory remained so efficient that she could scribble two lines, go home, and re-create the entire dish. Observing her at a 1993 conference, Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten wrote, “Paula seems to breathe in recipes the way I breathe in air.”

Paula always had wanderlust, but through Oldways, she hit peak travel. In addition to eastern Mediterranean recipe hunting, she may have had a new reason for getting away: to escape the suburbs. In 1989, after Bill had sold several books to Hollywood, the couple moved to Newtown, Connecticut. Bill had originally wanted to move to San Francisco, but Paula resisted living so far from her children, who were both grown and living on the East Coast. She also worried she would have trouble finding close friends out West. He proposed Santa Barbara, but she couldn’t bear to live in a small and unfamiliar town where she might have to play second fiddle to the biggest food star in the country, Santa Barbara resident Julia Child. They compromised with the move to Connecticut.

They both eventually regretted the move. “Bill calls them the lost years,” she said. “We lived there for five years, and neither of us can remember practically anything we did there; it’s like we wasted time.”

Paula had resisted a suburban life since she was a teenager in the 1950s and her parents moved to Westchester. To a certain extent, she found Connecticut undeniably exotic. After Bill sold the movie rights to one of his novels for a small fortune, he splashed out on a twelve-room Georgian colonial farmhouse with a millpond large enough to accommodate its own small island. The house had a literary heritage of sorts, as it was once owned by Rea Irvin, the founding art director of The New Yorker. Paula and Bill employed a maid, a gardener, and two part-time drivers to chauffeur Paula the hour and fifteen minutes back to Manhattan whenever she wanted.

In certain ways, the Connecticut years proved to be surprisingly fruitful. Life in the country sharpened two skills that would inform her next book, Mediterranean Grains and Greens. In Newtown, for the first time since Tangier, she could garden—on acres, not just square feet. In the surrounding fields and forests she also studied how to forage—for wild grape leaves, purslane, nettles.

“I made a deal with a neighbor that I’d weed his garden if I could keep his purslane,” she said. To the chagrin of her gardener, she also let nettles run wild on her three-acre lawn. Through a nearby Greek Orthodox church, she found a Middle Eastern market that carried all the ingredients she needed for testing. If she had questions on her recipes, she faxed Kremezi or Ünsal.

Striking a pose on the porch of her Connecticut home

But she also felt isolated and lonely. In the summers, Bill went to their vacation house on Martha’s Vineyard to write. Paula insisted on staying behind to watch the property. She filled the time by hosting friends on overnight stays. She started an annual tradition, an exclusive summer feast for three dozen of her closest friends. “I would do twenty dishes. Ayfer would come, Molly O’Neill, Jimmy Villas, Suzanne Hamlin. We would cook for days. I was always doing something that I knew people had never had before. Show-off meals,” she said.

But the house spooked her. “It was a bad-luck house,” she said. This time her superstitions appear to have been tragically well-founded: in 1990, their maid asked her husband, their gardener, for a divorce, and the gardener stabbed her to death and then killed himself. “It took us a long time to get over that,” Bill said.

In January 1994, a blizzard struck. While on the roof clearing snow, Bill stepped through the skylight above his office. In his fall to the floor below, he punctured his lung and broke three ribs. On the gurney into surgery, he firmly announced, “We’re moving to San Francisco.”