Lisa Donovan
Lisa Donovan
Feature Magazine Article
LAUNCHPADS - An Award-Winning Pastry Chef Traces the Arc of her Career Through her Kitchen Notebooks
Food & Wine Magazine
February 2020
“At last count, there were 72 notebooks stacked in my attic and storage space, or close at hand in my Nashville kitchen. Scrawled on their pages is the story of how I became a chef. The first time I wrote in one, I was a 20-year-old sophomore in college, six months pregnant with my first child. I lived alone with a cat and had no idea what I was doing, in life or in the kitchen. I got out the notebook, one I’d previously used for sketches and moody poetry, because I needed to remember that I changed Bernard Clayton Jr.’s formula for hot-water pastry. I had decided his was too stodgy, that it needed a little more finesse. Little did I know that dull heft was the entire point of a hot-water pastry dough—I had essentially rewritten it into a basic pâte brisée without even knowing it. It would take me a few more years, and several more notebooks about my strange kitchen and eating habits, to realize that this self-education was the stirring of a career as a pastry chef I did not yet know I was going to have…” Read more.
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Lisa Donovan
Food & Wine
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