Fanny Slater grew up in a family that loves food so much that they begin talking about what to make for dinner while still eating breakfast. Her parents owned the wildly successful Rachael’s Brownies in the 1980s — a venture that led to a luncheon with President Ronald Reagan and an appearance on “The Phil Donahue Show.” “I’m sort of part of a brownie legacy,” Slater says. But cooking never figured into her childhood ambitions. Instead, she wanted to be an actress; to live in Los Angeles, under the Hollywood sign. After college, Slater fulfilled her goal, moving from her family in Raleigh to the West Coast where she knew no one. “The thing that’s really getting me by is that I’m out here by myself, cooking,” Slater recalled. “It kind of clicked for me there: This is what I think I want to do.” Two years ago, Slater left LA and moved to Wilmington with dreams of launching her own catering business. She worked desk jobs while laying the groundwork for what would become Fanfare, a one-woman catering outfit spe-cializing in gourmet sandwiches. Fanfare’s client base grew steadily and Slater created more and more of her own recipes. Then she mused to her boyfriend that she’d like to start planning for an eventual cookbook. About one month later, a text message from Slater’s grandmother tipped her off to a contest on “The Rachael Ray Show.” The prize? A cookbook deal with Rachael Ray Books, an imprint of Atria. Slater entered with a video pitch featuring vintage home movies of her as a little girl. It begins with a clip of her dad asking her to name three things she would buy at the grocery store. At age 4 or 5, little Fanny replies, “Well, um, grapes and peas and champagne.” A book of recipes tied to childhood memories, several months and a few televi-sion appearances later — Slater learned her concept won the book deal. She’s now hard at work on the cookbook, which is due out next year, and tempo-rarily shelved her catering business to devote herself to the project full time. An instinctual cook, Slater says the most difficult aspect of the book has been the precision required to write recipes for others to follow. “The idea of cooking and having to measure every little thing has been the hard-est,” she says. She has already tested about 100 recipes and is now working on writing the per-sonal stories to go along with them. “It’s supposed to be very witty,” Slater says, “I like to think of it as kind of Tina Fey meets Rachael Ray.” Slater appeared on another episode of “The Rachael Ray Show” in September and won a zany cooking competition against four other celebrity chefs. She’ll be back on air next year to promote the book, which she says will definitely not be her last. She already has ideas for other cookbooks, such as one centered on sandwiches. “I adore sandwiches,” she says. “You can take a gourmet meal and put it between bread and it becomes this handheld, casual food but it’s still sophisticated.” She’s also mulling over an idea to write a cookbook for fans of her favorite televi-sion show, “Friends.” “Somehow, I know that I would be able to relate ‘Friends’ back to food,” she says. Fanny Slater 84 WBM november 2014
2014-11
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