Joy, tears at Sonoma Valley’s post-fire cookbook giveaway [Santa Rosa Press Democrat]

You wouldn’t think a cookbook giveaway would be all that emotional. But much percolated to the surface Sunday as Sonoma Valley chef Sondra Bernstein and a slew of volunteers beckoned people whose homes burned exactly six months earlier to help themselves to what was possibly history’s greatest selection of donated cookbooks. “A lot of tears,” said Bernstein of The Girl & the Fig restaurant. “A lot of tears.” Among the perhaps 10,000 volumes that filled a MacArthur Street warehouse, a woman found a replacement copy of a cookbook she’d received as a wedding gift. Other fire survivors pressed to their hearts the kitchen fundamentals they’d used forever and lost along with everything else they owned: more

by CHRIS SMITH, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, 2018-04-12