Alice Waters: I wasn’t sure that I had a gift for cooking, but I knew that I had a gift for finding the ingredients, finding the dishes the people liked to eat, and that I was still intimidated by the cooking process. So that’s why I relied on recipes from other people. I wasn’t at all ready to improvise. Luckily, someone gave me the cookbooks of Elizabeth David. And her recipes were very bare bones. So I had to interpret what she meant, and sometimes I was less successful, and sometimes I was more. But she gave me a real aesthetic about food — the simplicity of it, the kind of purity of it she instills through her beautiful writing.