Twelve Recipes: An IACP Award-Winning Cookbook for Mastering Essential Techniques and Building Kitchen Confidence

Winner of the 2015 International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Cookbook Award

Forewords by Alice Waters and Michael Pollan

In this dazzling, full color cookbook and kitchen manual filled with lush photographs and beautiful drawings, the chef of Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse offers basic techniques and essential recipes that will transform anyone into a confident home cook.

When his oldest son was leaving for college, Cal Peternell, the chef of San Francisco’s legendary Chez Panisse, realized that, although he regularly made dinners for his family, he’d never taught them the basics of cooking. Based on the life-altering course of instruction he prepared and honed through many phone calls with his son, Twelve Recipes is the ultimate introduction to the kitchen. Peternell focuses on the core foods and dishes that comprise a successful home cook’s arsenal, each building skill upon skill—from toast, eggs, and beans, to vinaigrettes, pasta with tomato, and rice, to vegetables, soup, meats, and cake.

Twelve Recipes will help home cooks develop a core repertoire of skills and increase their culinary confidence. Peternell tells you what basic ingredients and tools you need for a particular recipe, and then adds variations to expand your understanding. Each tip, instruction, and recipe connects with others to weave into a larger story that illuminates the connection between food and life. A deeply personal book, it was written by the chef alone and it glows with warmth and humor as he mulls over such mundane items as toast and rice to offer surprising new insights about foods that only seem exceedingly ordinary. It’s a book you’re as likely to keep by your bedside as your stovetop. With Peternell as your guide, the journey is pure pleasure and the destination is delicious.

Twelve Recipes features gorgeous color photos and inset illustrations by Peternell’s wife and sons (all artists), and forewords by celebrated chef Alice Waters and New York Times columnist and bestselling author Michael Pollan.

Cal Peternell is the author of Almonds, Anchovies, and Pancetta, A Recipe for Cooking, and the New York Times bestseller and IACP Award–winning Twelve Recipes. He grew up on a small farm in New Jersey and earned a BFA in painting from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, then was inspired to pursue a cooking career while living in Italy with his wife, the artist Kathleen Henderson. After working at various acclaimed restaurants in Boston and San Francisco, he began a nearly twenty-two-year stint as the chef at Chez Panisse, first in the café and then the downstairs restaurant. Cal’s culinary-education podcast, Cooking by Ear, launched in 2018. Cal and Kathleen have three sons and live in the Bay Area.