By Chef Alexis Hernandez
When people hear that I have written another book, they usually assume it is a cookbook. I don’t blame them.
I have spent most of my adult life cooking, and my first book, Conversation Starters: Recipes from the Other Side of the Stove, combined recipes with stories from my life and career.
There are no recipes in What the Pan Remembers. It is a collection of 28 personal essays divided into six parts. Kitchens run through the book, but this time the stories provide the structure.
Calling it a traditional memoir would not be quite accurate either. I did not begin with childhood and work my way toward the present because that would have made my life appear much more orderly than it has been.
Kitchens, Not Chronology
I remember my life through kitchens more easily than I remember it through dates.
I can recall what was on the stove, where someone was sitting or what I was doing with my hands while a conversation took place. Those details often lead me back to the larger story. The essays follow that same movement, beginning with something tangible before going wherever the memory takes them.
One essay begins after we moved to Florida, when a day spent inventorying our storage room for a garage sale ran longer than expected.
I was hot, tired and unwilling to turn dinner into another job, so we stopped at Publix for a rotisserie chicken.
At home, I pulled the meat, chopped romaine the way I had at my restaurant and made dressing. Dinner required one bowl, one cutting board and one knife.
The chicken gave me back the rest of the evening.
What began as a convenient dinner became an essay about accepting help without apologizing for it. The part worth writing was not simply what we ate.
It was what that decision allowed me to keep.
Many of the essays in What the Pan Remembers make a similar turn. Food gives the story an entry point without deciding where it must end.
The personal essay form gave me the freedom to stay with one experience without explaining every event that came before it.
One story might take place years away from the next, but they belong together because each reveals something about how I saw the world at that point in my life.
A friend described the book as a metaphor for life through food and preparation. I had not explained it to her that way, but I understood what she meant. Food has always been one of the ways I understand people. What someone cooks, refuses to eat, saves for later or quietly serves another person can reveal quite a bit.
The kitchen is also where different parts of my own life kept meeting. The work of being a chef existed alongside family, faith, identity, ambition and loss.
Writing these essays allowed me to look at those parts together instead of separating them into a clean timeline.
I did not want every essay to end with a lesson or pretend that writing about something automatically resolved it.
Some experiences look different after enough time has passed. Others remain complicated.
What the Book Asks of the Reader
The book is not intended only for chefs or serious cooks. A reader does not need to know how to break down a chicken, run a restaurant or build a sauce to understand what happens around a table. The main difference between this book and Conversation Starters is what I ask of the reader. My first book invited readers to cook from its pages.
What the Pan Remembers asks them to stay with the stories.
A recipe eventually has to tell the reader what to do. A personal essay can leave enough room for the reader to decide what it means.
Hardcover and Paperback formats of – What the Pan Remembers: Essays from the Other Side of the Stove by Chef Alexis Hernandez will be published October 7, 2026.
They will be available on amazon.com and on The Other Side of the Stove.com
