Volume 28 · Number 2 · Winter 2011
Savoring the Coho
Coffee House cookbook provides alum with a recipe for blending her worlds at home and abroad.
My teenage daughter recently went on a school field trip to UC Davis. The night before going, she asked me, “What should I look for? What’s special there?” I started reminiscing about some of my classes, professors and friends, and then in a flash of belated insight, told her, “You must go to the Coffee House. Everything they make is good. It’s cheap. And it’s the best place to scope out the other students. That place is UC Davis.” She looked at me rather strangely, probably wondering why I wasn’t recommending a trip to Shields Library or some of the different buildings where I had studied. Here, her mother was instead recommending that she have lunch with her friends, hang out and look cool. What alien had kidnapped her all-too-serious mother?
Before she left the room, I grabbed my dog-eared copy of the Coffee House Cookbook off the kitchen shelf and showed it to her. “Look at these recipes. Look at the great illustrations. Look at the humor here! They published this in 1986, and I’ve used it ever since. Remember that rice salad? That recipe came from this book.” At this point she yawned, rolled her eyes and excused herself to go instant message her friend. I, still being in a nostalgic mood, sat down at the kitchen table and thought about the cookbook and my UC Davis experience.
I spent many hours in the Coffee House, visiting at least five times a week during my years in Davis. I often met friends and professors there. I enjoyed the warmth and sustenance of the hot coffee during the damp Davis winters. In the middle of summer, I cooled off in the air conditioning and drank something refreshing, all the while delaying my exit back into the hallucinatory heat.
The time came to accept a job far away from Davis, so I went to the bookstore and bought a copy of the Coffee House Cookbook. This tome went into my suitcase, and on a hot June day in 1986, I took off from the airport in Sacramento for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I didn’t cook very often in Malaysia (the local food was too good). But on the rare occasion when something American was requested for a party, I would dig out the recipe for “Dynamite Chocolate Brownies” and people would be wowed.
From the jungles of Malaysia, the book was once again packed into an increasingly wonky suitcase, and shipped one country south, to Singapore. For six years this was my go-to “American” cookbook. To this day, there are Singaporeans who make and enjoy “The Original Coffee House Chocolate Chip Cookies” and “Sharon’s Bran Muffins,” never knowing what the Coffee House was nor who this Sharon person is (longtime CoHo Manager Sharon Coulson).
My increasingly food-splattered copy was eventually packed up and shipped to my next port of call, Hong Kong. Substituting gailan (Chinese kale) for broccoli in the cream of broccoli soup truly mixed both my life in Asia with my student years in America. Again, the cookbook would be brought out and used whenever western food was called for.
Flash forward to the present. The Coffee House Cookbook sits on my kitchen bookshelf in Santa Rosa. It has been shipped three times to Asia, and three times back to America. Its spine is faded, its covers shelf-worn, but the binding is tight. The recipes — splatters and all — are still intact, as are the memories.
Here’s hoping that another edition will appear in the future. Let’s see how many frequent-flyer miles I might rack up with a new edition!