GraceAnn Walden with Patricia Rose’s Tres Leches cake — covered with strawberries, which are optional
I met muralist Patricia Rose at a party at Bay Area food writer GraceAnn Walden’s house some years ago. She brought a tres leches, or “three milks,” cake with her, and it was a hit. When she gave me her recipe I knew I wanted to write about it, but the post has been sitting in my drafts folder for years.
The cake is tied to an event that is tied to a friendship with GraceAnn that I needed to move away from. Revisiting the cake recipe means revisiting that.
While I could write around the issue and focus on the cake, I’ve chosen to use this post to work through it and send some positive mojo GraceAnn’s way.
I met her in 2005 when I interned at the San Francisco Chronicle’s Food and Wine Department. GraceAnn had her own column, Inside Scoop, a Bay Area culinary insider’s commentary that ran weekly and reflected her sharp and irreverent wit.
She was a pioneer when it came to gossipy writing about the up- and underside of the local restaurant and bar scene. It’s a popular form now, but she went out on a limb with her confident, unapologetic, sometimes-biting, style when starting the column back in the late 1980s at a publication called BayFood.
In 1991 GraceAnn moved Inside Scoop to the San Francisco Chronicle.
I was only an intern there, but she treated me like a colleague. She noticed little things I did in the test kitchen — as I found out when she talked about them publicly at my culinary school’s 2005 fundraiser.
“Renate Valencia,” she said to the audience, “does what needs to be done without complaining, even if it means staying late to polish the stainless steel appliances.”
It’s true. I gave the stainless some extra attention.
Michael Bauer, the Food Editor, liked the stainless steel to gleam. Or so I was told my first day. Well, he was always lovely to me, so why not give a little back?
After leaving the paper in 2006, GraceAnn started a walking tour business. She took groups around North Beach, the Mission District and other areas of interest. She also published an on-line food zine, The Yummy Report, which I understand morphed from The Yummy Letter, a slightly earlier collaborative effort connected to Northside San Francisco Magazine.
By the time we reconnected in 2010, GraceAnn was working on The Yummy Report and looking for contributors. I was happy to oblige, given that I needed the experience and wanted to repay her earlier kindness. I was writing local restaurant reviews, so she began inviting me to venues she was planning to review, suggesting that I write about them for both my own food site and The Yummy Report.
When you share a couple of long meals with a person you start to get to know them, and so we became friends. GraceAnn was down to earth, very open and lots of fun. It was easy to have a good time with her.
She made it her business to get to know as many culinary folk as possible, from machers like Jeremiah Tower and Wolfgang Puck, to line cooks, servers and other staff. Knowing what was going on where — or not going on, often — had been her livelihood, and she got her information from a broad range of insiders.
GraceAnn had heart and was generous to a fault. A good person, though often confrontational. And loud. She liked attention, and had no problem getting it with her big, brassy personality. I’m sorry to say it wore on me. I found it exhausting. And, if I am to be honest, I didn’t want to be associated with her MO on a professional level, given that I was trying to find my own footing as a food writer.
So, about a year in, I distanced myself, little by little. I never told her why.
GraceAnn passed away suddenly in 2015. Although I still believe it was the right decision to remain silent, I feel guilty nevertheless. I say it was the right decision because it was a matter of who she was and who I am. To have been honest would have been cruel and to no good end. Better that she thought I was mercurial.
I will always appreciate what she did for me. Schlepping me along to events and introducing me to well-known chefs — who were incredibly fond of her! That was easy to see.
And I will miss her fun-loving nature. There’s a saying in German about people with whom you can make mischief that translates to, “you can steal horses with them.” That was GraceAnn, neither a snob nor a sycophant in a competitive field that has perhaps more than its share of both.
Finally, here is Patricia Rose’s recipe for Tres Leches cake. It’s wonderful!
If you want to take one of Patricia’s Mission mural tours, check out Precita Eyes Art Center.
- 6 large eggs, separated
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 teaspoon almond extract
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 can (14 ounces) sweetened condensed milk
- 1 can evaporated milk
- 1 cup whole milk
- 1½ cups heavy cream, whipped
- Preheat oven to 325 F.
- Butter a 9X13 baking dish.
- Beat egg yolks and sugar until light.
- Stir almond extract into yolk mixture.
- Beat egg whites to soft peaks.
- Fold whites into yolk mixture until just combined.
- Fold in flour -- do not over mix!
- Place evenly in pan and bake 20-25 minutes.
- Cool 20 minutes.
- Scrape skin off the top of the cake.
- Combine all the milks.
- Pour milk mixture evenly over the cake.
- Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate.
- Can keep overnight or up to one day.
- Serve with whipped cream.