In 2014, Laura McLively turned the iconic East Bay grocery store Berkeley Bowl and its legendary produce section into a personal challenge, pushing herself to develop recipes for the store’s oddest ingredients: Think African horned melons and vegetables with such short seasons as to be utterly unrecognizable. To share her experience and recipes, the dietician, writer, and avid home cook launched her popular blog, My Berkeley Bowl. Now, embraced by Berkeley Bowl’s owners Glenn and Diane Yasuda, McLively’s recipes are being published as a book bearing the store’s official approval: The Berkeley Bowl Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by the Extraordinary Produce of California’s Most Iconic Market, out April 17 from Parallax Press.
Cooking her way through the sizable store (the original location, though she likes the new one, too), McLively concocted recipes for wiry haired rambutan, crunchy sea bean spindles, and mysterious tubers of all shapes and sizes. The most challenging ingredient she encountered was Indian bitter melon: “It’s a whole new level of bitterness, it’s practically medicinal,” she says.
The fruit might be popular in Southeast Asian cuisine, but for her, it was something short of palatable. A strong curry preparation to mask the flavor “just tasted like aspirin soup.”
“Then it occurred to me to just go with it, and exploit [the medicinal aspect].” Ultimately, McLively devised a citrusy, grapefruit infused tonic with the melon providing the right bitterness.
More than just a cookbook, McLively’s compendium of recipes, complete with glossy photographs from Erin Scott, doubles as a well-deserved ode to Berkeley Bowl itself. “Whole Foods has a book, Market Hall has a book,” McLively says. Such books celebrate a market’s centrality and promote its offerings. But Berkeley Bowl is a little humble for that, and had no plans for a book of its own.
“What I learned from interviewing Glen and Diane,” who founded the store in a former bowling alley (hence the name) in 1977, “is they don’t think of themselves as this big symbol of the food movement in California. It would never occur to them that way.”
McLively contends they’re just that — iconic and influential — and likely to remain that way. “You’d think a couple in their ‘80s would be set in their ways, but they’re the exact opposite,” she says. “They’re constantly willing to evolve, and even be ahead of the times.” To keep up with the freshest produce, Glen Yasuda still does a daily circuit of produce wholesale markets at 2:30 a.m., McLively learned — a serious feat at any age.
Thinking of Berkeley Bowl’s place in the changing landscape of grocery consumption — as, for instance, Amazon begins delivering Whole Foods produce in no time flat — McLively still can’t imagine anything more rewarding than a trip to Berkeley Bowl.
“If you know exactly what you’re looking for, you can shop online, but if you’re looking to be inspired, walking through a farmers market, or walking through Berkeley Bowl is a chance to get outside of your comfort zone.”
By challenging yourself to cook with ingredients you don’t recognize, “you’re slowly demystifying them... One of them might be your favorite food and you don’t even know it yet.”