For Renee Erickson, Learning to Paint Turned Her Into a Chef

In the winter of 2001, I was staying with my dad, in Woodbridge, Connecticut – a suburb of New Haven, where I’d spent the majority of my childhood. My parents were recently divorced and my dad had bought a little jewelry box of a house, where I stayed in the guest bedroom along with – what seemed to me – every cookbook he’d ever purchased or been gifted.

These books and I got to be friends, as I started doing some freelance work for my dad (how’s that for foreshadowing?). I pored through book after book – Elizabeth David, Julie Sahni, Marcella Hazan, Patricia Wells – researching recipes and quantities and ingredients, fantasizing and looking for inspiration for our future cookbooks. Surprisingly, though – probably because I hadn’t really started cooking yet – I didn’t get a good sense of what kinds of cookbooks I liked personally.