By Chef Alexis Hernandez
My phone is full of photographs and videos I took because I wanted to remember something. Many of them preserve a meal, a trip, a dinner party or an ordinary day that felt worth keeping.
Social media gives us another place to hold those moments. We post them, look at them for a while and eventually move on as something newer takes their place.
For all that documenting, I do not write nearly as often as I once did.
Writing is far more intensive than shooting a video. I was not entirely new to writing. At Moody Bible Institute, I spent four years writing papers about theology. That work taught me to examine an idea and say clearly what I meant. Writing personal essays required something different because the evidence was my own life. A camera records what is in front of it. When I write, I have to spend time with the memory and consider why it stayed with me. I also have to face what I understand now that I may not have understood while it was happening.
Why I Wanted to Write It
After Conversation Starters, I wanted readers to know more than how I cook. That book includes stories, but the recipes provide its structure. There were other stories I wanted to tell without having to lead anyone toward a list of ingredients or a finished plate.
With this book, I wanted readers to see more of how I make decisions and how I look at the world from the other side of the stove. I wanted to put my perspective on the page. If someone recognized part of their own life in mine, even better.
I knew a collection of personal essays would be a niche kind of book. I was not writing under the illusion that everyone was waiting for it. Leaving a record still mattered to me.
A photograph can prove that I was somewhere, and a video can preserve what the room looked and sounded like. Writing gives me space to record my observations and tell the story as I came to understand it. It also preserves the parts no one thought to photograph.
The essays in What the Pan Remembers are not arranged chronologically because my memories do not return that way. They often begin in a kitchen with something on the stove, then open into the rest of my life. Food became the way into stories about family, work, identity, entertaining and loss without turning this into another cookbook.
What Does the Title What the Pan Remembers Mean?
A friend who read a proof copy recently told me that the title did not make sense to her. Her question surprised me because the meaning had always seemed clear in my own head. Then I remembered that I have spent most of my adult life looking at the world from a kitchen.
The title is not meant to point to one literal sauté pan. The pan is a loose metaphor for any vessel that has held food—a stockpot, a roasting dish, a mixing bowl, a serving platter or the pan that has followed me from one home to another. The object provides a way back into what happened around it.
I have a collection of All-Clad cookware that I have owned for more than fifteen years. I have taken care of it, but none of it has gone unused. One sauté pan in particular has been on the stove for almost every dinner party I have given.
One of those dinners was a November evening at our farm, Camp Creek. I was making chicken with Brussels sprouts. I rendered bacon in the sauté pan, removed the lardons and used the fat to char the sprouts. I added shallots, deglazed the pan with stock and let the Brussels sprouts braise briefly.
After plating the chicken, I spooned some of the black-pepper-speckled stock and fat from the pan over it, then threw some chives over the top.
Later, while cleaning the kitchen, I looked at what remained in the sauté pan. I wasn’t going to waste it. I grabbed a stray piece of bread and used it to scrape the bottom, letting the bread soak up what was left before eating it at the stove.
That was not part of the dinner I planned, and it was never photographed. Yet it is the part I remember.
The sauté pan has been used in more than one home and for different groups of people. After each dinner, I washed it and returned it to the cabinet until I needed it again.
The pan itself remembers nothing. Still, when I hold it now, I can return to Camp Creek in November and see myself standing over the stove with that piece of bread.
That is what I meant by What the Pan Remembers. The pan is not only this sauté pan. It stands for all the vessels that held the food while life was happening around them.
The eBook edition of What the Pan Remembers: Essays from the Other Side of the Stove by Chef Alexis Hernandez is available for preorder now.
Hardcover and paperback editions will go on sale October 7, 2026.
Hardcover and paperback formats will be available through Amazon and The Other Side of the Stove.
