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In 1977, two friends opened a chic gourmet takeout shop in New York, and called it The Silver Palate. Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso served up the food that they loved to cook: Classic European dishes with a distinctly American twist, from cassoulet and ratatouille to their famous chicken Marbella. Five years later, they gathered their favorite recipes into The Silver Palate Cookbook, which became an instant classic and went on to have over 2.2 million copies in print. Lukins passed away in 2009; Rosso operates the Wickwood Inn in Saugatuck, Michigan. Here, Rosso shares her memories of working with Lukins on the book.
I liked flavors that knock your socks off. I used to love when we’d be serving blueberry chutney in Saks Fifth Avenue and people would go, "Wow, that’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten." If you were just trying to explain blueberry chutney, they wouldn’t know what in the world you were talking about—but one taste and they would.
So these exaggerated, magnified flavors. When we wrote The Silver Palate Cookbook, our copyeditor was a woman who lived on a farm in New Jersey. She was a traditional cookbook copyeditor. And when she looked at our ratatouille, she said—I remember the note that came back—"No, girls, no. Ratatouille does not have this much garlic in it." We of course were totally intimidated. I mean, we were just cooking like we cooked! And back we went to the drawing board and decided, Oh, we like it the way we like it. I’m sorry if it’s not a classic ratatouille.
It all started when we were having lunch with Barbara Plumb, who wrote this page for Vogue. She was always searching out the latest and greatest. She said, Girls, have you ever thought about writing a cookbook? And I said, Oh yes—we’re working on one! Which was a complete lie. Sheila’s kicking me under the table. Because we weren’t! And we didn’t know how to write a cookbook. And so she said, I work part time at Workman Publishing, and I’d be very interested in looking at an outline. Well, those were all words we didn’t know. I didn’t know how to do an outline for a cookbook, I didn’t know how to write a cookbook, I didn’t know who Workman Publishing was. I thought, Oh, she’ll forget about it. But she didn’t. Three weeks later she called again and said, I’d really like to see an outline for a cookbook.
Well, Sheila and I didn’t know what to do, so we took a bottle of scotch to her apartment and we brainstormed what we’d like a cookbook to be. It was, in essence, the cookbook that we wanted. People thought, What is this? Here’s a vegetable chapter, but then you’ve got an asparagus chapter, but then you’ve got a—people didn’t understand. But we understood. It made perfect sense to us, because asparagus you want to cook when you want asparagus, not just a plain old vegetable.
In the early days, I'd stand behind the counter and explain what in the world bistilla was or torta rustica was. It was so much fun for us to teach people things about food, and expose them to flavors that they’d never had. But overriding was: Let us not take this food too seriously. It’s just food. It's not nuclear physics. It's not medical research. It’s eating, and it should be fun, and it's all about having a good time with people you care about. And the tone wasn't terribly serious, which was intentional. Some people in the food world thought we weren’t serious people. But we were. We took it all seriously enough, you know. We were also just fun-loving girls.
