Peggy Knickerbocker is the ultimate San Franciscan: born in The City, kept an apartment in Paris until last Christmas, and gave up teaching to pursue her passion: cooking.
Knickerbocker grew up in the same Pacific Heights house where her mother did, which just happened to be a couple of doors from my mother’s San Francisco home. Her father was the enormously respected San Francisco Chronicle drama and film Critic, Paine Knickerbocker, so she comes by her writing skills genetically and seemingly easily.
She briefly migrated to the University of Oregon in Eugene, where it rained all the time, which she hated – all conditions that motivated her to talk and charm her way into a Junior Year Abroad program in her sophomore year.
Knickerbocker headed for Paris, where she studied at what is known there as “Sciences Po,” short for Institut des Sciences Politiques de Paris, and got distracted by good food, which is not hard to succumb to in Paris.
“My parents made me get a teaching credential at San Francisco State because they thought I wouldn’t be inventive enough to figure out what to do, so I got that,” and taught French, “but not very well.
“I started cooking the minute I got back from Paris,” Knickerbocker confessed.
“My best friend from grammar school, Flicka McGurrin, and I started a cooking school, and then a catering business called ‘The Cooking Company,’ and then we ended up with our first restaurant in North Beach at Mooney’s Irish Pub on Grant Avenue between Union and Filbert streets.
“We ran that for about a year and we had NO idea what we were doing except she had been in school in Florence, and I had been at schools in Paris and we thought we knew a lot.
“It was before there were really catering businesses. There were kind of fancy ones where women wore black and white and the men wore butlers’ uniforms. We were very casual and we just started this business and it took off. We also ran the restaurant and we did all kinds of things like Francis Coppola’s fortieth birthday — just hundreds of parties!”
Knickerbocker is still casual, arriving at Ramekins Sonoma Valley Culinary School, where she was giving a class a couple of weeks ago, in her blue-bottomed, white-topped Mini Cooper and wearing a striped blouse, dark pants, a denim jacket, and snazzy comfortable tennis shoes. Her brother, Tony, has Knickerbocker’s Catering in St. Helena in the Napa Valley.
“Eventually we opened Pier 23 down on the Embarcadero, which is still going strong. The food is quite different from the way it was when I was there. And then about fifteen or twenty years ago I left the restaurant business and started to write.”
About her books, Knickerbocker says “The San Francisco Ferry Plaza Cookbook is actually my fifth book. I started off with a book on Champagne for Chronicle Books.
“Then I wrote a cookbook called ‘Olive Oil – From Tree to Table,’ which is still in print and has run to about forty or fifty thousand copies. I had been writing a lot for magazines, and it was time to do a book. I went on a culinary trip to Morocco with a bunch of chefs and food writers and one morning we were going out to see some amazing site and between the hours of about 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. I didn’t see anything but olive trees. I thought there must be something to this!” Not too surprising since the trip was sponsored by the International Council of Olive Oil.
“Now everybody uses it, certainly more than butter, and everything I cook is with olive oil, and I just thought it would be a fascinating thing to do.
“Paula Wolfert, your friend and mine, lived just a couple of blocks away and helped me a lot because she knows so much about the Mediterranean. One of the biggest tips she gave me was ‘Don’t ever put a recipe in a book that you’re not madly in love with. If you have any question about it, don’t put it in.
“In all of my books I go for the really simple uncomplicated recipes. I think a lot of people want to cook but don’t want to be bothered with long, involved recipes. So just about everything I do is easy and short. If I have any hesitation I give a recipe to someone who isn’t a particularly professional cook and see if he or she can do it. And then I take their notes and incorporate them into the recipe, so every recipe really works.
“Then I did the Rose Pistola Cookbook (with owner and chef Reed Hearon). Reed asked me to write with him because I had written a story for the first issue of ‘Saveur’ on ‘The Old Stoves of North Beach,’ which included Rose Pistola herself, who had an old bar that garbage men and poets went to on Washington Square. He asked me to bring her down to Lulu where he was working at the time, thinking she would be a pushover to let him use her name on the new restaurant.
“She was a tough old broad, with her hair done in blue and a little house dress on. He said he wanted to name the restaurant after her, and she said, ‘Well, honey, what’s going to be in it for me?’ She extracted the commitment from him to ‘be able to come anytime I want, drink anything I want, and bring as many people as I want.’ He gulped and said okay, and she did. Every time I was there she was there with a bottle of booze and her friends, and it was great for the restaurant! She used to say ‘put a leaf of basil in your cleavage because men like the smell of a woman who knows how to cook.’
“Next I did ‘Simple Soirées: Seasonal Menus for Sensational Dinner Parties,’ which is a menu-entertaining book, which won the James Beard Award this year, for 2005” in the Entertaining and Special Occasions book division, “the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me. It is the anatomy of a menu to help people who don’t know what to put with a certain meat or fish.
“I worked on both ‘Simple Soirées’ and the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market book at the same time and I was lucky to have the same photographer for both books. I also co-wrote the Ferry Plaza book with Christopher Hirsheimer, who is a woman, and who is one of the co-founders of ‘Saveur’ magazine.
“As a photographer who can cook she was just great. We collaborated on all kinds of ideas and neither of us believe in ‘styling’ food and neither of us believe in anything but natural light, so we got together to do these two books back and forth from Paris.
“I went to a restaurant with friends the other night to talk about my next book and we couldn’t even hear each other. It was so stressful. I just think the house and having people over is the greatest thing we can do for our friends. A place where we can really continue with a sense of community…. There’s something about the sense of the table that is so important.
“As long as you have really great ingredients, which is what the ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market (or any farmers’ market) is about, most of the recipes involve not much more than unpacking the market basket and throwing things together.
Lucky attendees at Knickerbocker’s Ramekins class got to taste her Peaches on Bruschetta with Gorgonzola Cheese, Fennel and Parsley Salad with Meyer Lemon, Salmon with Lavender-Fennel Salt, Roasted Asparagus in Olive Oil, and Blackberry and Nectarine Crisp, all totally doable for less than expert home cooks.
Knickerbocker serves on the boards of Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation, as well as CUESA (Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture), which oversees the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market.
Knickerbocker’s “San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers Market Cookbook” has “washable” (wipeable) pages, including its fabulous photos, and what could be better for those of us who really use the book! I bought three copies: one for each of our California kids, and, gosh, one for me.
Read Kathleen's Epicurious column in this week's Sun>
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