The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation By David Kamp Published by Broadway Books; September 2006;$26.00US/$35.00CAN; 0-7679-1579-8

The Silver Palate's genesis lay in a mid-seventies catering company called The Other Woman, a single-person operation run by Sheila Lukins, a young mother of two who cooked out of her apartment on Central Park West. As her company's name and slogan ("So discreet, so delicious, and I deliver") suggested, Lukins's clientele was mostly male: professional men who wanted their dinner parties catered but not in an inordinately fussy, Edith Whartonian fashion.

Lukins was a self-taught cook, more or less -- she had taken a course at the London Cordon Bleu while she and her husband lived there, but "it was the dilettante course," she says. Her greatest inspiration was not Child and company's Mastering the Art of French Cooking but the more practical, less labor-intensive recipes of Craig Claiborne's New York Times cookbooks and his Sunday pieces for the Times Magazine. Lukins's cooking was eclectic but somehow all of a piece -- aspirational comfort food: moussaka, lasagna, ratatouille, stuffed grape leaves, and the quintessential Lukins dish, Chicken Marbella, the quartered bird baked after a long soak in a Mediterranean-style marinade of oil, vinegar, garlic, prunes, olives, and capers.

While running The Other Woman Catering Company, Lukins became acquainted with Julee Rosso, a young professional who worked in the advertising division of Burlington Mills, the textile company. Rosso had attended many events catered by Lukins, and was so impressed that one day, she hit up Lukins with a proposal. "She said, 'So many women are working late now. What if we opened up a shop for them?'" Lukins remembers. The two went into business as the Silver Palate in the summer of 1977, with Lukins as the cook -- carting food over from her apartment several times a day to the then kitchenless store -- and Rosso as the marketer and front-woman.

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