![]() As the woman behind the counter rang up a box of Oregon sea salt for me, I told her that I used to work at Williams Sonoma. I passed by the shiny copper cookware, picked up a frying pan, and flipped it around in my hand like a professional chef. The smell of maple bacon wafted through the air. Inside, I saw a class of school-aged kids learning how to make breakfast. And before I made the long drive back home to Brooklyn, I needed a little bit of comfort, a reminder of that perfect world Chuck Williams created for all of us back in Sonoma all those years ago. For the past week, I'd been at a nearby hospital visiting a sick friend who wasn't going to get better. I ducked into a Williams Sonoma just last month because it seemed like a good antidote to how I was feeling that day. "Say, a sauté pan, braiser, omelet pan, quiche pan, tart pan, and so on." "I wanted to introduce American cooks to the idea of having the right pan for a particular task," he told his friend Laura Martin Bacon. He decided to share what he'd learned by opening a small cooking store in Sonoma Valley, where he lived. There were herbs and spices he'd never heard of (herbes de Provence was his favorite), olive oils from Italy and Spain, and salt that tasted nothing like the Morton he used at home. On that trip, he realized there was more to cooking than he'd ever imagined-much more. He'd grown up cooking simple dishes beside his grandmother, who once owned a restaurant in Lima, Ohio, with her husband. Williams felt the same inspiration while traveling through France in the early 1950s. Of course, it was Williams Sonoma founder Chuck Williams' goal not only to appeal to the professional chefs who frequented his store, but also to entice fledgling or wannabe home cooks who might be inspired to up their game with a fancy French pan the same way an aspiring runner might take his routine more seriously with a $200 pair of running shoes.
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