It’s possible that if you bought a ceramic rooster at Sur La Table on the Upper East Side in 2011, you were rung up by a young cashier named Claire Saffitz. It’s also possible that if you came back to return an immersion blender someone gave you for Christmas, Saffitz kept it for herself.
That store policy stocked the twentysomething’s kitchen with all the essentials. At the time, Saffitz had just graduated from Harvard with a humanities degree, and all she really wanted to do was cook. So the next year, she shipped off to culinary school in France, where tuition was cheaper than in the U.S. Today, Saffitz is a YouTube star, a best-selling cookbook author, and the owner of a fluffy, black chicken named Tina. She still has that immersion blender.
