was surprised to learn that some of
the men in the kitchen did.
“Occasionally an attitude
would come out in some way,”
Shere said, “but I really didn’t
think too much about it.”
She ignored an overheard col-
league’s comment that a pastry
chef isn’t a “real chef ” rather than
try to correct his mistake. “It was
just a microcosm of the time.”
Shere agreed that cooking and
baking were different. “You can’t
adjust things midstream” with
baking,” she said, while “cooks
could work on the fly, change
things as you go along.”
What she didn’t buy was the
prevailing belief that cook-
ing was art, while baking
was a glorified home-ec
project. In fact, she
didn’t see the need to
compare them and
declare a winner at
all.
She was insu-
lated by lucky cir-
cumstance. The
Chez Panisse pas-
try kitchen was lo-
cated at first in a small cottage
behind the restaurant, so she was
largely shielded from what the
cooks were saying. She worked for
a woman, co-founder Alice Waters,
was 10 years older than most of the
staff and had a family, which meant
she missed what she called “a
pretty wild scene” after hours. She
put all her energy into developing a
seasonal dessert calendar that
generations of California bakers
have adopted — a tectonic shift in
an era of year-round French des-
serts.
Shere preferred the pastry
kitchen, with its small, close-knit
staff and lack of competitive hier-
archy.
To this day she has no idea why
most men stay away from baking,
though she was prepared to float a
theory or two. Maybe a “mother
thing” put them off, she said — the
idea that dessert was a treat, ines-
sential, something a mom might
turn out for a family celebration. Or
maybe men were uncomfortable in
akitchen where women ran the
show.
“Partly,” said Shere, with a hint
of a smile, “I’m sure they feel seri-
ously threatened.”
::The dessert landscape in Los
Angeles in 1976 was bleak — a few
French or Jewish bakeries and
restaurants that served “bought
desserts” from outside suppliers,
Silverton recalled. That was fine
with her. After a year at Le Cordon
Bleu in London, the last thing she
wanted was a pastry job.
“I still had PTSD from that,” she
said, “Because you’re learning the
basics and there’s no flexibility.
You’re an executioner. ‘Can I use
less sugar?’ ‘Can’t I cut down the
amount of gelatin?’ Everything
was ‘No!’ ”
But baking was a “foot-in-the-
door job” in the kitchen at Mi-
chael’s in Santa Monica, so she
took it. Three years later she be-
came the first pastry chef at Wolf-
gang Puck’s Spago, where her ap-
proach had nothing to do with po-
lite women making paint-by-num-
ber sweets.
Silverton combined Shere’s use
of local, seasonal ingredients,
along with the techniques she’d
learned, to create signature des-
serts — and she never let up. When
her first child was born in 1982, she
gave herself a long weekend before
showing up at Spago, newborn in
tow, “not full-time or anything,”
she said, “but to check to see how
everything was.”
Like Shere, she enjoyed the au-
tonomy of the pastry kitchen,
where each cook made desserts
from start to finish. “Everything we
did, we did ourselves,” she said.
“No line cook complaining about
the mayonnaise or the size of the
minced chives.”
But making innovative desserts
wasn’t enough of a challenge for a
woman who’d grown up sur-
rounded, she said, by feminist role
models. She wanted her own busi-
ness.
In 1989, Silverton and her then-
husband, chef Mark Peel, opened
Campanile, with La Brea Bakery
next door. If her Spago desserts
bent the rules, La Brea Bakery
pushed them even further. She ele-
vated bread from an opening act to
the main stage, and introduced
pastries such as her rosemary corn
cake, whose sweet-and-savory de-
scendants are now standard fare.
In 10 years La Brea had a whole-
sale business with annual sales of
$200 million, and the couple sold it
three years later. Since leaving
Campanile and opening the Mozza
group of restaurants, starting with
Pizzeria Mozza in 2006, Silverton
has been much more involved in
the savory side.
Although other bakeries fo-
cused on quality bread took off in
California before La Brea — most
notably Steve Sullivan’s Acme
Bread in Berkeley — it was Silver-
ton’s name that quickly becamesynonymous
with great
bread, in part
because having
a woman at the
helm of a bakery
was a novelty at
the time.
“I made the pos-
sibility of great bread a reality,” she
said. “And I’m a girltoo.”::La Brea Bakery put the rest of
the country on notice: California
was a welcoming place for a female
baker.
“ ‘If you have even the smallest
amount of drive,’ ” a friend told
baker Liz Prueitt in the early 1990s,
“ ‘you will get very far ahead in Cali-
fornia.’ ” Prueitt and her bread-
baker husband, Chad Robertson,
left the East Coastand eventually
opened the tiny Bay Village Bakery
in Point Reyes Station, followed by
Tartine Bakery in San Francisco in
2002.
Tartine was a magnet for young
female bakers willing to work crazy
hours— both trained cooks and ea-
ger hopefuls who signed on as un-
paid interns. Prueitt wanted to cre-
ate a kitchen that could keep up
with them, which meant reconsid-
ering some of the gender clichés
that consigned women to pastry in
the first place.
“I’m not naturally an ‘attaboy’
person, which is so not-female of
me,” she said, but she figured there
had to be a middle ground between
cutthroat and warm-and-fuzzy.
She rejected chef coats that con-
veyed status, encouraged a com-
radely atmosphere as long as the
work got done, and strove for a
“two-way street” rather than a dic-
tatorship.
Outsiders, unable
to grasp the new
business model,
asked Prueitt in
the early days if
Tartine was a
collective.
It was a
work in prog-
ress — as
were the
pastries, de-
spite notions
about the constraints of baking.
“People think of a baked good as
astatic snapshot, as something
that must stay the same forever,”
she said. She did not. Her own
gluten intolerance inspired her to
create new versions of old favorites
and to encourage employees to
come to her with recipe ideas,which is why rugelach made with
einkorn flour ended up in her up-
coming cookbook, “Tartine: A
Classic Revisited,” being pub-
lished in October.
“Collaboration is a very strong
aspect of women working to-
gether,” Prueitt said. “There’s such
a lovely thing when you really know
what you’re doing, rolling out crois-
sants, making cookies, and you’re
just talking about your life.”
At 56, success and tired feet
have taken Prueitt out of the
kitchen on a daily basis; her job to-
day is mainly focused on managing
the workplace she created — multi-
ple versions of it, including Los An-
geles’ Manufactory, a new Tartine
at Inner Sunset in San Francisco
and a bakery in Seoul.
It’s hard for her to talk about.
“The reason it chokes me up,” she
said, “is that I miss it so much.”::Zoe Nathan walked by Tartine
on her way home from a line-cook
job in 2003 and stopped to watch
the bakers through the window. “A
bunch of girls,” she said, “and they
had their tattoos, they looked like
me, didn’t look flowery and soft.
They didn’t look ‘nice’ at all, and I
thought, ‘I want to be there. I want
them to be my friends.’ ”
Nathan, now 37, was a veteran of
kitchen harassment before it be-
came a headline, including a stint
on the hot line at Lupa in New York
City, then part of Mario Bataliand
Joe Bastianich’s empire, where a
male cook more than once followed
her into the walk-in refrigerator to
kiss her. She moved to San Fran-
cisco and a new job but still felt out
of place.
The morning after she passed
Tartine, she walked into the bakery
and offered to do anything, for free,
in her off hours. They handed her a
box of apples. “I cut them so fast,”
she said. “I felt as though my social
life depended on it.” She was of-
fered a job as a morning-shift baker
the next day.
Her schedule belied stale no-
tions of the weaker sex: predawn
shifts at Tartine, “living, literally, in
a friend’s closet,” and a midday nap
so she could learn about bread in
the afternoon. Four years later she
became the pastry chef at Rustic
Canyon in Santa Monica.
Nathan eventually married
Rustic Canyon restaurateur Josh
Loeb, and they now co-own eight
restaurants and an ice cream busi-
ness. For more than six years, until
last summer, she stuck to a daunt-
ing workweek: After saying good-
night to the couple’s three small
children, she arrived at work at 1:30
in the morning and then dashed
home as soon as her husband
called to say they were starting to
stir.
At work, she encourages her
staff to take risks, as she did, rather
than stick to tried-and-true reci-
pes. “I’ll still go in and say, ‘Throw
this out, all five things you just
made,’ but you know what? I say it
to myselftoo.”That, she said, is what a female
baker looks like. “You can’t do this
half-assed,” she said. “You go to
bed at 8, you wake up very early,
you don’t go out, you have to
change your whole life. Bakeries
are very fast-paced places. You
have to be on it.”::The new threat is economic, but
it’s an equal-opportunity road-
block: Pastry chefs, male or female,
are “the first ones to go” when a
restaurant needs to cut costs, said
Antico pastry chef Brad Ray. “If
you can’t pick up a knife and work
in the savory kitchen too, you
might be struggling to find a job
soon.”
McCarty no longer employs a
pastry chef, a response to how din-
ers prefer to end their meals these
days.
“It’s the shared-plate thing,” he
said. “What people need at the end
of the meal isn’t a plated dessert,
it’s three bites of sweetness, cook-
iesor some chocolate, something
very simple.”
Women who have devoted their
careers to baking are frustrated
that pastry chefs are considered
expendable: Prueitt dis-
missively refers to
the “chef ’s dessert”
—an easy bread
pudding or crème
brûlée that a line
cook can make as
opposed to the
more technically
demanding
creations made
by pastry chefs
—and Nathan
complains
about the mind-
set that makes
dessert an after-
thought.
But a restau-
rant can’t exist without a savory
menu. Sometimes bakers lose by
default.
So women who bake have been
looking beyond a restaurant’s
walls to create their own alterna-
tives.
Baker Nicole Rucker gained a
following making desserts for
other people’s restaurants, and
less than a year ago opened Fiona,
a bakery and cafe on Fairfax Ave-
nue; her cookbook, “Dappled,” was
just published. Na Young Ma
serves a loyal clientele at Proof, an-
other bakery-cafe hybrid, in At-
water Village, while Karen Yoo sells
bread and pastries at McCall’s
Meat & Fish in Los Feliz, which she
owns with her husband, Nathan
McCall.
Womensay they don’t waste en-
ergy on naysayers, whether they’re
men who cling to old attitudes
about baking or restaurants pre-
pared to do without them.
“Discrimination will always be
there,” Nathan said, “but that’s
why thousands of girls say, ‘Screw
them, I’ll open my own place. I’ll
make money, and you can’t cut me.
I’m the boss of my world.’ ”[Pastry,from F1]
Pizzeria Mozza’s butterscotch budino from Nancy Silverton and pastry chef Dahlia Narvaez.
Mariah TaugerLos Angeles TimesZoe Nathan’s olive oil cake is a hit at Huckleberry Bakery & Cafe.Mariah TaugerLos Angeles TimesA morning bun, left, and croissant from Liz Prueitt’s Tartine.Mel MelconLos Angeles TimesLindsey Shere’s almond torte is on the menu at Chez Panisse.Mel MelconLos Angeles TimesIllustrations by
Jade Cuevas
Los Angeles TimesWomen lead the way
in baking revolution
F6 THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2019 LATIMES.COM/FOOD