A Life of Culinary Exploration

Florence Fabricant, food writer for The New York Times and author of 11 (soon to be 12) cookbooks, remembers having lunch with her father when she was 8 years old at Le Cafe Chambord at La Cote Basque, one of the most elegant restaurants in Manhattan until it closed in 1964.

“It was a storefront,” she recalled, “and in the window were champagne bottles of all the different sizes — there were 12, not including half bottles — and the ritual was that I had to name each of those sized bottles before I could go into the restaurant.”

Ms. Fabricant, who said that her parents were foodies “at a time when the term didn’t exist,” has many such food-related memories from her childhood. “When I was little, when we went to a Chinese restaurant, I was very careful about how much soy sauce I put in the egg drop soup because it had to have just the right amount of saltiness and color.”

As a teenager, watching Dione Lucas make a strudel on television, she took copious notes and within a week was stretching her own strudel dough. She went to France for her junior year of college and still recalls the monkfish with lobster sauce she ate on the Liberté during its crossing.

With such a background, it comes as a surprise to learn that it wasn’t until 1972, after graduating from college, working in advertising, getting married, and having two children, that she wrote her first food column — for The East Hampton Star.

“I was living in Wainscott that summer. I had a bunch of friends with kids the same ages as mine. I was the one they asked how to cook a piece of bluefish, or who had the best potato salad, or where to find good tomatoes. And I kind of had the answers. So I pitched the idea of a food column to Everett Rattray at The Star, and he said, ‘Well, do a sample, 400 words.’ It probably took me three weeks. Today I could do that in the shower. I began writing the column and within six months started to get assignments from The Times.”

In addition to her weekly Times columns Front Burner and Off the Menu, she joins Eric Asimov for his Wines of the Times features. She not only tastes each week’s wines but also devises recipes appropriate to them. Their book, “Wine With Food: Pairing Notes and Recipes From The New York Times,” was published in 2014.

Ms. Fabricant has been coming to the East End since she was 12, when she stayed in Southampton with a close friend’s family. “People complain about the traffic,” she said. “I remember when it took four hours, when there was no Long Island Expressway.”

Her parents took a place in Westhampton when she was in high school, and she and her husband, Richard, a lawyer, began renting there soon after they were married. “When we visited friends in Water Mill and East Hampton, we really liked those areas more. So we started renting in Wainscott for a couple of years, then we built a little house, and after selling that we built the house in East Hampton where we live now.”

Ms. Fabricant remembers when the culinary options were limited on the East End. “When we first started coming out here, if I wanted interesting produce, I could get strawberries from a truck on the road, tomatoes from a card table in somebody’s front yard, and corn on North Main Street at another card table. But if you really wanted fresh produce, you went to the Green Thumb. And to go from East Hampton to Water Mill on a Saturday morning took 10 minutes. You didn’t think twice about it. You don’t do that any more.”

While she applauds the farm-to-table movement and the profusion of farm stands and farmers markets, she wishes organic food was more prevalent. “I use almost no processed food,” she said. “I’ve been doing organic since the late 1970s when I read something about salmonella in chickens and eggs. I refused to stop making mayonnaise, so I began to buy organic eggs and moved on from there. It wasn’t that easy then. You had to go to health food stores, and they were really kind of grungy, Birkenstock-type places.”

For the past four summers, Ms. Fabricant has hosted “Stirring the Pot: Conversations With Culinary Celebrities,” a Sunday morning series at Guild Hall, where she is a trustee. Her guests have included Lidia Bastianich, Thomas Keller, Anthony Bourdain, Gregory Zacharian, and Tom Colicchio, among others.

“At the end of the day, the celebrity chefs are doing something good, because more people are aware of food. A lot of them are going to promote their own roducts, but at the same time they’re not promoting Doritos. They’re promoting cooking, and I think it’s a good thing.” She also cited the director Francis Ford Coppola and Fess Parker, who famously played Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone on television, as “very serious winery owners, extremely serious,” despite their celebrity.

While she has never worked in a restaurant, she has been in countless restaurant kitchens, working alongside chefs, interviewing them as they cooked, taking their recipes home “and wrestling them to the ground,” because chef’s recipes can be complicated. She cited one that called for crushing together five types of peppercorns. “If I use that recipe, I’ll reduce it to two.”

Her next book, “City Harvest: 100 Recipes From New York’s Best Restaurants,” will be published in October. A fund-raiser for City Harvest, it will contain recipes from the restaurants that support the food rescue organization, which has been dedicated since 1982 to helping feed more than 1.4 million New Yorkers facing hunger every year. Among the chefs contributing recipes are Daniel Humm, Marcus Samuelson, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and David Chang.

Ms. Fabricant has also written “Park Avenue Potluck” and “Park Avenue Potluck Celebrations,” both of which were projects for the benefit of the Society of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

She spends a lot of time with her husband on the South Fork. “Besides cooking we like to play tennis, go to the beach off-season, and we take a lot of long walks. The network of hiking trails out here is amazing, and so few people realize they exist. We keep cross-country skis and snowshoes here, and we go to Cedar Point and tromp around in the snow.”

Her daughter is a book designer who has designed five of her books. Her son and daughter-in-law are not in the culinary field, but they love to cook. “It’s fun to work with them on food, particularly out here.”

While she knows so many chefs both in New York City and on the East End, she doesn’t socialize with them too often. “I get invited to a lot of stuff, but if you want to hang with chefs you have to do it at 11 at night or later and go out drinking someplace in Brooklyn or downtown. I’m afraid that’s not my style.” She refuses to divulge the names of her favorite restaurants.

“Cooking is often a discovery,” she said. “What keeps me going is that I’m always learning something.”