Recipes for Success

OK. OK. Here’s how you make the scones.

Mabel Chase, former owner of Ventura’s City Bakery, didn’t say it in so many words, but that was the inspiration for her newly published “City Bakery & Cafe Cookbook.”

“So many people had asked me for my scone recipe,” Chase said. “People had courted me for years, asking me for it. That and my salad dressing.”

Interested cooks will get more than just the two trademark City Bakery creations in Chase’s 140-page compilation of breads, sandwiches, desserts, salads and other dishes she prepared during her eight years as owner of the eatery.

Several copies were sold in a trial run last week at City Bakery, with other books scheduled to go on sale Aug. 22 at Toby’s Kitchen store and the Ventura Bookstore, and at Local Hero and Table of Contents bookstores in Ojai.

Chase will return to her old City Bakery digs for a book-signing at 3 p.m. Sunday.

“It’s pretty much everything that we made there,” said Chase, who sold the establishment to her former chef, Rose Burtchby, in 1996. “It probably represents a thousand things that didn’t work, and our best recipes. We had a great opportunity to cook a lifetime of recipes.”

It’s a good bet the first printing of the book (retailing at $18.95 at City Bakery) will sell out quickly. For one thing, there are only a dozen copies.

And for another, current and former customers are likely to consider the cookbook a symbol of Ventura’s cultural history.

“We had the poetry readings and the theater there, it was sort of the first of its kind,” Chase said. “Everybody was so excited in the beginning. Everything else was in Santa Barbara. Now, it’s no big deal that we made everything from scratch, but then, I don’t think there was even a cappuccino machine in Ventura.”

Not only will City Bakery regulars find familiar recipes in the cookbook, they’ll probably also find familiar people and events. Many of the recipes are accompanied by vignettes from the bakery’s past.

“There were so many interesting people who worked there and came in,” Chase said.

“People would come in with recipes,” she said. “The pumpkin-chocolate chip muffin was somebody’s aunt’s recipe. One recipe--the Columbian pinto bean soup--came from my mother.”

In addition to the cookbook, Chase will share her culinary talents with the masses through a cooking class at Ventura High School in September.

The City Bakery book-signing will be at 3 p.m. The bakery is at 2358 E. Main St., at Arcade Drive. For more information, call the bakery at 643-0861. To order a copy of the cookbook, call 646-3401.

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A fallen tree pictured on the label of the upcoming release from Cottonwood Canyon Vineyard & Winery says it all. And if it doesn’t say it all, the name of the wine fills in the blanks.

The Santa Barbara County vineyard’s Pinot El Nino, a blend of pinot noir and chardonnay, will be released Sept. 8. Grapes for the wine, as the name and picture would suggest, were harvested during the earliest of the El Nino storms of 1997.