The Savory Life of Sheila Lukins

To the post-Julia Child generation, Sheila Lukins’ Silver Palate Cookbook was an everyday gourmet bible. Sara Nelson remembers their smorgasbord of friendship and fine food.

The first time I met Sheila Lukins, she sent me out to get parsley.

I came back with chives.

She forgave me–and we were instantly friends.

I honestly didn’t appreciate the moment, because, not being much of a foodie (obviously) I didn’t really know who Sheila Lukins was at the time. I supposed I’d heard of The Silver Palate Cookbook, but I certainly didn’t know that Sheila, along with her then partner, Julee Rosso, had “awakened taste buds,” as the New York Times put it in its obituary of Lukins, who died of brain cancer last Sunday at 66. The Silver Palate was an era-defining Upper West Side food store in the late 1970s, a catering business that grew into a groundbreaking cookbook. This was the post-Julia Child era, and most working women weren’t so interested in cooking Cordon Bleu. Sheila and Rosso “experimented by serving Greek mezes, Moroccan chicken pies, and gazpacho at a time when only French-style standards like duck à l’orange were considered elegant enough for entertaining,” said the Times.

“Darling,” she’d say to me in her slightly drawly falsetto. “Let’s go to Per Se. I can get us a table in the kitchen.”
Never mind that I didn’t know what Per Se was.

Over the years we were friends, Sheila talked to me about food–and even cooked for me once, soft-shell crabs–but comestibles were not our currency. Thinking about her today, I realize that that parsley incident was not our first introduction, that we had, in fact, connected over cuisine years before in the Dakota apartment in which she began her catering business. It was the 1990s, and Sheila was hosting a party for a mutual friend of ours, Richard Klein, who’d written a marvelous book called Eat Fat. Greeting guests at the door was a, tiny, fiftyish woman with boing-y hair–if this had been the Plaza, you’d have thought her a grown-up Eloise. I swear she was wearing a beret and striped tights, but I might be imagining that. But about this, I am positive: she was passing around a plate of fois-gras-stuffed figs, and I remember that because I’d never before or since thought of much less enjoyed such a delicacy. Eat fat, indeed.

So the East Hampton garnish incident was officially my second Sheila sighting, but we both always thought of it as our first time.After that, we slipped effortlessly into a pattern of regular emails, less frequent but still regular dinners (always at the coolest new restaurants), dinner parties in her Central Park West apartment (she’d since moved up the block from the Dakota) “Darling,” she’d say to me in her slightly drawly falsetto. “Let’s go to Per Se. I can get us a table in the kitchen.”

Never mind that I didn’t know what Per Se was.

When you went out to dinner with Sheila, you could count on getting the star treatment. Chefs, owners, waitstaff–everybody knew the sprite with the springy hair.One after another, a guy in white would slip into a booth or squat down by our table, and pay homage to Sheila.And while she didn’t lack for self-regard about her knowledge of food, she wasn’t a snob. On the Sunday afternoon of that East Hampton weekend, when my then-9-year-old son and I gave Sheila a lift back to the city, she insisted we stop by her favorite haunt in Greenwich Village. Turn left here, right here, she’d say–until we ended up at the Gray’s Papaya on Sixth Avenue and 9th street. And though I’d been there many, many times in the past, it was Sheila whom the counterman greeted happily; we bought two dogs apiece and two for my son, and savored them all the way uptown.