clove of green garlic, and two minced anchovies. The toasted bread
is spread with the sheep’s-milk ricotta and topped with the sugar
snap mixture. She cuts it into four pieces and asks me and her
assistant, Jaimee, what we think.
We think it’s great.
Clark isn’t satisfied. She continues trying different
combinations—one with English peas, one with just the ricotta—
all while scurrying around the kitchen prepping other dishes
(pesto, pasta, duck) and cooing over her toddler, Dahlia. Her
strategy seems to be MOMENTUM, in all caps.
In a quiet moment, I ask Clark about her process: “How do you
come up with these recipes? How do you know they’re good and
ready to print?”
“I’ve always created my own recipes,” she tells me. “I just
don’t think about it.”
She’s been doing this since she was a child. “When I was
eleven, I remember I wanted a purple cake. So I tried to make one
without looking at a recipe. I mixed together the flour, the sugar,
the butter, and the eggs and added lots of red and blue food
coloring.”
The cake, when it came out of the oven, was “a flat marble
brick.”
But that failure didn’t discourage her; in fact, failure is simply a
part of the routine of a top-tier recipe creator.
For example, once Clark tested an eggplant recipe only to find