Sally Schmitt, who, with her husband Don, opened a French Laundry, now a famous restaurant in California’s Napa Valley, in 1978 and in doing so helped establish the valley as a place to buy food and wine and started the culinary movement. made with seasonal, local ingredients, died Saturday at her home in Philo, Calif. She was 90 years old.
Her family announced her death, which occurred just weeks before the publication of her memoir and cookbook, Six California Cuisines: A Collection of Recipes, Stories, and Cooking Lessons from a California Cuisine Pioneer.
Today, the French Laundry in Yountville, California is known as chef and restaurateur Thomas Keller’s flagship establishment and regularly features on lists of the best restaurants in the country and the world. But, as Mr. Keller, who bought the restaurant from the Schmitts in 1994, is always quick to point out, it all started with the Schmitts, and especially with the cooking of Sally Schmitt.
“Kind and generous, straightforward and unpretentious,” he wrote in the preface to her forthcoming book. “A culinary pioneer, but also a throwback, cooking dishes that are reminiscent of the most delicious versions of your childhood favorites. This is the Sally we all know.
The Schmitts arrived in Yountville, about 60 miles north of San Francisco, in 1967 to run the mall, and Sally soon took over as a hamburger and sandwich shop. Four years later, she opened the more ambitious Chutney Kitchen, which served lunch and, once a month, by reservation only, dinner. Soon dinners were twice a month and she added themed dinners and more.
The couple spotted a local stone building that was once a French laundry (as well as a bar and boarding house), and when it came up for sale, they bought it.
“The building was so crude, so obviously modest,” Ms. Schmitt told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. There was not—no—not a single straight line in the whole building.
The restaurant they opened there in February 1978 also had its own personality. With Mr. Schmitt overseeing an extensive wine menu, Ms. Schmitt planned and prepared meals, one menu each evening, based on what was in the local season and available. The guests had their own table for the evening; they could stay three or four hours if they wanted to.
The area was already known for its wine, but a French laundry and a few other restaurants have also helped make it a gourmet destination. By 1980, Ms. Schmitt noticed a change.
“Now we bring people from San Francisco here for dinner,” she told The Napa Valley Register that same year, “where the opposite is usually true.”
Miss Schmitt was no culinary school diva; she often said that she was influenced by her mother, aunt, and the home economics teacher she had in high school.
“Some things can’t be improved because they’re so simple and so real,” she told The Chronicle. “I resist fashionable things. Sometimes, even if I like something, I won’t do it until it cools down a bit.”
With an emphasis on local ingredients, Ms. Schmitt is considered a pioneer in what would eventually become known as California cuisine, but she didn’t think of herself in those terms. “French country cuisine is what I’m leaning towards,” she said in a 1993 interview, “stews, simple meals, lots of vegetables, homemade desserts, not pastry desserts.”
Her kitchens gravitated toward low technology.
“I have always tried to be simple,” she wrote in a new book, “so I never felt the need to use a food processor or microwave. Instead, I had good sharp knives, pots and pans, a large chopping block, a wooden spoon, and a whisk. I have always loved working with my hands. That’s what cooking is.”
Her cuisine, she says, was not about taking a philosophical stance.
“I didn’t have a mission,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2020. “I wasn’t trying to prove anything to the world about simple, fresh local food. It was exactly the way I prepared it. I didn’t really have a statement to make. I just put food on the table.”
Sarah Elizabeth Kelso (always known as Sally) was born February 28, 1932 in Roseville, California, near Sacramento. Her father Henry worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad and her mother Helen was a housewife and school teacher.
She grew up in the Sacramento Valley, where her family had enough land to grow vegetables and keep a cow; as a child, she churned butter and learned how to preserve. And kitchen tricks.
“As soon as I was ready, my mother put a paring knife in my hand and I peeled the potatoes,” she wrote. “And when she thought I was ready for a big knife, I was cutting vegetables next to her.”
She studied home economics at the University of California, Davis, although she transferred to the Berkeley campus in her senior year, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1952.
She married Donald Schmitt in 1953. According to her, her first cooking was for their family, which eventually grew to five children.
“Despite the fact that I loved to cook, I never thought about taking up cooking,” she wrote of that time. “There were no female chefs at that time. Besides, cooks were looked down upon in those days; there was no such thing as a celebrity chef.”
After the Schmitts sold the French laundry, they joined their daughter Karen Bates and her husband Tim at an apple farm in Philona where Sally Schmitt taught cooking classes.
Ms Schmitt’s husband died in 2017. She was survived by two sons, Johnny and Eric; three daughters, Katie Hoffman, Miss Bates and Terry Schmitt; 10 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
Some of these descendants worked in a French laundry and some went on to culinary careers, including her grandson Perry Hoffman, who is now a chef at the Boonville Hotel and Restaurant in Northern California. In a telephone interview, he recalled how, from a young age, he did various things in his grandmother’s kitchen – roasted peppers, peeled onions and much more.
“We didn’t really know how special it was until much later,” he said. “She was so good at everything she did. It was so easy, yet so difficult.”