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A Cuisine Of Attitude

'West Coast Cooking' honors a sense of play and love of place

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BARRY WONG / THE SEATTLE TIMES In the spirit of West Coast cooking, Greg Atkinson's Grilled Rare Albacore with Ocean Salad and Wonton Crisps is both down home and cutting edge. GREG ATKINSON / WEST COAST COOKING

WHEN HELEN BROWN wrote "The West Coast Cookbook" in 1952, I think most people — including Brown — thought of "West Coast" as more or less synonymous with California. It's not much different today; California looms so large it's easy to forget Oregon and Washington. But even when you include the Great Pacific Northwest, the West Coast is greater still. To the north is British Columbia, and stretching down its coastal side is the region of Alaska that its denizens refer to as "Southeast." When you look at North America on a globe, the center of the continental West Coast is somewhere near Seattle.

So when I set out to write "West Coast Cooking," a West Coast cookbook for the 21st century, it seemed perfectly natural to orient the book around the Pacific Northwest extending north to Alaska and south to Baja California. It's roughly 2,400 miles from Seattle to Anchorage and 2,060 miles from Seattle to Tijuana. I figured my desk on Bainbridge Island was somewhere close to the middle.

But "West Coast Cooking" is not a geography book, nor is it strictly a "regional" cookbook. I discovered pretty early on in assembling this collection of recipes that West Coast cooking is shaped as much by philosophy and culture as it is by climate and topography. As much as it is a regional cuisine, ours is a cuisine of attitude. The choices we make about what to bring to the table are shaped by politics, economics and social dynamics that extend far beyond the kitchen.

To shed light on how we got this way, each chapter opens with an essay on one of the luminaries who helped define "West Coast Cooking." Many of them were radical iconoclasts who eventually became icons in their own right. From James Beard on hors d'oeuvres to Alice Waters on salad, Marion Cunningham on cookies and M.F.K. Fisher on preserving, these people rejected the factory-farmed and processed foods that dominated the culture of their time and helped us focus on seasonal foods enjoyed close to the source. Much of what we think of as the "New American Cooking" is really West Coast cooking carried to other regions.

The impulse was to present great-tasting, familiar foods that reflect our sense of play, echo our respect for the environment and honor our heritage. Ours is a cuisine both down home and cutting edge. So I updated family favorites, codified formulas for dishes I've cooked and eaten at high-end restaurants, and devised recipes for homemade and natural alternatives to fast-food staples. Ultimately, the process became one of discovery. In trying to define West Coast cooking, I realized that "West Coast Cooking" had defined me as a cook.

Greg Atkinson can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong can be reached at studio@barrywongphoto.com.