One day in 1976, Jeremiah Tower was leafing through some old cookbooks, seeking inspiration for the next in a series of French regional menus at Chez Panisse, a modest restaurant in Berkeley, California, where he was the chef. In a turn-of-the-century collection of recipes by Charles Ranhoffer, the French chef of Delmonico’s in New York, Tower encountered something unexpected. . . .
“I saw the title of a soup, Crème de Mais Verte à la Mendocino—Cream of Green Corn à la Mendocino,” he writes in Jeremiah Tower’s New American Classics, published in 1986. Why, Tower wondered, did a recipe from a French chef in New York refer to a Northern California town? “Like a bolt out of the heavens, it came to me: Why am I scratching around in Corsica when I have it bountifully all around me here in California?” The recipe, Tower discovered, was nothing but American ingredients prepared according to French cooking principles. “I could not contain my exhilaration,” he wrote, “over what I beheld as the enormous doors of habit swung open onto a whole new vista. And I began to compose an American regional dinner—California, not Corsica.” Chez Panisse had been open for five years. No one had yet uttered the term California cuisine. Proprietor Alice Waters and her friends were just cooking the way Americans do at home, using American ingredients to make recipes from classic cookbooks. They took a lot from France, the occasional dish from Italy or elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and a little from mom. But the elements were there, and inspiration met opportunity. Chez Panisse’s previous menus had been written in French, but this one Tower couched in English. Significantly, the wines offered were from California as well. The menu crystallized Waters’s vision of the sort of food Chez Panisse should serve—great local ingredients prepared classically.
—Wine Spectator, 2001