You can almost hear Alice Waters say, “Here is how I cook,” in the opening line of her long-awaited memoir. It’s simple, precise and to the point, much like her cooking. Waters, who has been at the forefront of American cuisine, has long been recognised for her influential restaurant in California, Chez Panisse.

Now after almost 47 years since first opening doors to the Berkley institution, Waters’ tell-all memoir, Coming to My Senses, retraces the incredible stories, and at times tumultuous events, that led her to open her first restaurant at 27 years old. “People want to know how I came to open a restaurant at twenty-seven years old. I never went to culinary school. I never cooked professionally,” she says.

The New Jersey native, who would later study at Berkeley, recounts a raw and intimate insight into her childhood, growing up with a perfectionist father figure and a mother who was brought up in a fundamentalist Baptist family. Chapter after chapter Waters intricately navigates the impacting social and economic changes in a post-war America obsessed with TV dinners and abiding by the idea that “cooking was drudgery.” Later she reveals: “I think we forget sometimes that food is alive and that we have to follow that intuition and treat food as a living thing.”

From her formative years in California and to those later spent in France, Waters reveals a never-ending transformation woven from stories, photos and recipes that litter the pages of her memoir. There are times where it’s impossible to put down, from moments of humour and joy to chilling scenes of an attempted rape.

It’s clear from the outset that Waters is a tour de force. Whether it’s the political activist, humanitarian, food authority or mother that grasps your attention, this is much more than the story of a restaurant in California – this is the story of a woman who changed the way the world thinks about food.

Coming to My Senses, Hardie Grant Books, is available from 5th September 2017, $39.99.