Paula Wolfert

Paula Wolfert is an American author of nine books on cooking and the winner of numerous cookbook awards including what is arguably the top honor given in the food world: The James Beard Foundation Medal For Lifetime Achievement. A specialist in Mediterranean food, she has written extensively on Moroccan cuisine including two books, one of them ("The Food of Morocco") a 2012 James Beard Award winner. She also wrote "The Cooking of South-West France", and books about the cuisine of the Eastern Mediterranean, slow Mediterranean cooking and Mediterranean clay pot cooking. 
Background.
Paula was born April 7, 1938 in Brooklyn, New York, daughter of Sam and Frieda Harris. She attended Columbia University in New York between 1956 and 1959, earning a degree in English. During that time, she received as a gift from her mother a series of six lessons with Dione Lucas, a renowned English chef who ran a cooking school in New York. "I loved it," Paula later reported. "I loved it better than school. I grew up on cottage cheese and melon, and my mother was on a diet her whole life. She had no interest in food."
Ms. Wolfert has traveled extensively in the Mediterranean, most notably in France, Turkey, and Morocco.
She is the mother of two children, Nicholas Wolfert and Leila Wolfert. She is married to William Bayer and lives in Sonoma, California.
Alzheimer's activist.
In late 2013, Paula announced that she had been diagnosed with MCI (Mild Cognitive Impairment), an early stage of Alzheimer's disease. She told "The Washington Post" that she had stopped teaching and culinary writing in order to devote herself completely to Alzheimer's activism: speaking out about the disease, urging people who suspect that they may have it to get tested, and asserting her belief that "denial is not a viable option."
Also in 2013 she was featured in a segment on the PBS NewsHour in which she spoke about her role as an Alzheimer's activist.
Biography.
A biography, "Unforgettable, The Bold Flavors of Paula Wolfert's Renegade Life" by Emily Kaiser Thelin, was published in early April 2017. This publication received considerable comment in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. 
Critical commentary.
In a review of Wolfert's "Mediterranean Grains and Greens", Nicholas Lemann wrote in "Slate": "The dream of every artist is to be a genius who is also wildly popular, but the way it usually works out is that there is an inexact fit between giftedness and broad appeal. Every one of the arts has a spectrum of esteem with the rich and unrespected at one end, the difficult and audience-less at the other, and most people somewhere in between. This is no less true in cookbook writing than it is in literature or painting or music. In the foodie world, the William Gaddis, the Ad Reinhardt, the John Cage, the inaccessible deity, is Paula Wolfert. A cynic might take Wolfert, and Wolfert fans like me, for reverse snobs, down-homing to mask the fundamental one-upmanship. But this would be vile calumny. Wolfert is merely a perfectionist and a visionary, and such people should be our heroes."
Of her book "The Cooking of Southwest France", Alice Waters wrote: "A true culinary zealot, Paula Wolfert champions forgotten dishes, uncovers regional cooking in surprising places, and reminds us of our resources and roots. In writing about the earthy food of France's Southwest, she teaches us how to cook foods that are traditional, slow and sustainable." Of the same book, French Laundry chef Thomas Keller wrote: "Americans have only recently come to know what the people of Southwest France have known for generations--that the key to great cooking is in its simplicity and depth of flavor. In this book, Paula has taught us to fully enjoy each bite, to share our joy through the food we cook and serve."
Jeffrey Steingarten, food critic for "Vogue", wrote: "Paula is part anthropologist, part amateur scholar. She works in a way that's both sensual and scholarly. She isn't content until she knows not only how your olives were made, but also where you got them, what you did with them, what else you did with them, and whether your friends are doing the same thing. And then she'll call your friends, too."
Russ Parsons, food editor of "The Los Angeles Times" wrote: "Wolfert is the queen of Mediterranean cookery."
Molly O'Neill wrote in "The New York Times": "When Paula Wolfert discovers a place and its palate, America usually follows." Jean Anderson wrote in "Food & Wine": "Wolfert is blessed with a passion for food, an unerring eye and palate and an enviable ability to transport her reader to the ends of the earth."