So many people played such a vital role in the creation of this book that I must ask forgiveness from anybody I leave out here. I would first like to thank you, Ann Bramson, editor and the publisher of Artisan, who has now been with me for many years, for your work, not just on this book but on projects past, including Vegetables and Fish & Shellfish, and for your confidence in allowing me to undertake this (at times daunting) project. And thank you, Peter Workman, for your confidence and for signing the checks that made this possible. I must also express my appreciation to those people at Artisan who spent months poring over manuscript, galleys, and pages, doing their best to make this book sound and look its best. Thanks to Deborah Weiss Geline, Judith Sutton, and Dania Davey for your careful attention to detail and your, what to me seems magical, ability to imagine text and photographs in various combinations and to come out with something so beautiful. To Jim Wageman, thank you for your talents as a designer and for the restraint and good taste that seems to me now evident throughout the book. And to Vicki Semproni, Pam Smith, and Lisa Sloane, who produced the layouts. To Tricia Boczkowski, thanks for your patience with my endless phone calls, including that last-minute request for a table at the French Laundry.
And limitless gratitude to Stephanie Lyness. Without your extensive help with reorganization and hard work putting the manuscript into its final form, this book would not be as logical and approachable as it is.
Very special thanks must go to Debré DeMers, not only for your hands, which are in practically every photograph, and for your lips, which are in one, but for your friendship, enthusiasm, critical photographic eye, and for sharing with me all that food after we photographed it. And thank you for using your infallible good taste for selecting the props for the photographs. Thank you, Geraldine Cresci, for your help in styling the chapter opening photographs and for so many other things.
And I must always acknowledge my agents, Arnold and Elise Goodman, who stand behind me, rock-solid determined, and who, after so many years, I’ve grown to love and respect in ways that still take me by surprise.
Finally, thanks to the man with whom I share my life, Zelik Mintz, who sometimes seems to care more about the rewards and pitfalls of my life as a cookbook writer than even I do.