Ask most chefs where they learned to cook and you get a story about culinary school, or a mentor, or some line cook who showed them how to hold a knife. Ask Tiffany Derry, and the answer has always been her mother. On August 23, that answer gets a kitchen of its own.
Every few years, an email that predates most people’s inboxes resurfaces somewhere, usually forwarded by a relative who swears it happened to a friend of a friend. The story goes like this: a woman is shopping at Neiman Marcus in Dallas, stops for lunch, falls in love with a chocolate chip cookie, and asks the waitress for the recipe. The waitress says it’ll cost “two-fifty.” The woman agrees, assuming two dollars and fifty cents. Weeks later her credit card statement arrives showing a charge of two hundred and fifty dollars. Furious and refused a refund, she gets her revenge the only way available to her: she mails the recipe to everyone she knows and tells them to keep passing it along.