“There is nobody like him,” said Ruth Reichl, former editor in chief of Gourmet magazine. She called Rowley, who died on Wednesday at the age of 74, a pioneer along the lines of Alice Waters. “He really understood that quality is everything in food, and he thought it was important, and he thought we could do it in this country.”
An Alaska-based commercial fisherman turned Seattle-based marketer, Rowley embraced his true role as a tastemaker. He corresponded with Julia Child for decades — her name for him was “the fish missionary” — and they traded research on “fascinating” topics like piscine rigor mortis. When “The Silver Palate Cookbook” co-author Sheila Lukins visited Seattle, Rowley took her on a strawberry-picking trip with his daughter Megan’s fifth-grade class. The shortcake he made the group with his favorite fragile Shuksan berries went into her “U.S.A.” cookbook as the best one ever, a fairly standard reaction to the foods Rowley champions.