Becoming a Passionate Home Cook

Note to readers: The progress on my new book has been slower than I anticipated basically because I am now working with a new and much better editor. As our goal is to produce a good book, not merely an average one, she is putting me through my paces.  This means there is less time to write a weekly post. However, I thought you might be interested in this chapter which will lead off the cookbook portion of my book. 

Unlike many people who brag about learning how to cook from their mothers and grandmothers, I can honestly claim that this was not my case.  Yes, my mother did give me an index card box filled with family recipes before I left home to get married the first time right after college, but that was about it.

Learning the basics of French cuisine

It was my first boss—and mentor— in New York City, Mary Lyons, who gets the honor of launching my career as a passionate home cook.  It didn’t take her long to notice my cooking skills deficit when I joined her team at Sopexa. As this was a quasi-governmental agency which promoted imported French foods and wines, having a fundamental knowledge of how to cook was essential.  She suggested that I take cooking lessons with Isabelle Marique. While Isabelle was from Belgium, she was the best teacher of classic French cuisine at the time in Manhattan.  

For six months after work, five other students and I met regularly in Isabelle’s spacious Manhattan kitchen. I am still using those dog-eared pages of recipes from her school forty years later. Dishes such as Gougères, Moules à la Marinière and Tarte Tatin remain at the heart of my culinary repertoire.   

A change of culinary allegiance

Over the next few years, I would be in and out of other random French cooking classes.  Then my heart went rogue, and I developed a newfound passion for Italian cuisine. Suddenly I was overcome by the urge to honor my roots. So, one summer my husband Ed and I trotted off to Tuscany to study under Giuliano Bugiali. I use the verb study as Guiliano was considered one of Italy’s foremost cooking teachers and food historians. He also had a cooking show on PBS which made accessing his classes very competitive like getting your child into the right pre-school in Manhattan.   

While Bugialli resided full time in Manhattan, he also offered cooking classes at his family home in Florence.   There, we learned how to make pasta from scratch, how to stuff sausages, and best of all, how to make rabbit lasagna. 

Cooking with Molto Mario

Years later I worked with now bad-boy, then good-boy Mario Batali who helped me launch a winery cooking school for a client in Tuscany, Tenuta di Capezzana. Whereas Bugialli was precise and academic in his approach to Italian cuisine, Batali was relaxed, free-wheeling and fun. 

Wearing his signature cut-off pants and bright orange clogs, Batali taught us the way Italy’s home cooks prepared meals for their loved ones: using only fresh, seasonal ingredients, combined sensibly, and cooked properly.  Pony-tailed Batali cooked like my Italian grandmother, Maria Spagga. She, too, used no recipes, just solid culinary instinct, and a razor sharp recollection of dishes past down from her family in Alto Adige.

Putting on a Cordon Bleu apron

Then one day, Ed and I won at auction a cooking series on Regional French Cuisine at the Cordon Bleu.  Back in Paris, my passion for all things French was rekindled. Ed and I jumped on le Métro early every morning for two weeks and returned home late at night, often carrying the fruits of our labor.  The hitch here was that the course offered only in French. While I could follow the lessons perfectly being fluent in French, my husband could not.

But that didn’t deter Ed who was a natural cook with exceptional knife skills. Before long he was whipping out intricate fish dishes with delicate sauces as well as a perfectly executed Gâteau Forêt Noire. My chocolate cake was lop-sided and my fish sauces insipid in comparison to his! Incidentally, I still wonder why the Cordon Bleu taught us a recipe for a German cake even decades before the EU!

During our long marriage Ed and I vacillated between our love for France with that for Italy. No matter what side of the border we were on, we tried to learn as much as we could about each country’s authentic home cooking. Our dinner guests back home reaped the benefits of this collective culinary knowledge.    

A wine importer’s way to entertain

Given both Ed and I were in the wine business, hosting regular dinner parties was an integrate part of our business and social lifestyle.  We entertained the likes of Baron Phillipe de Rothschild (he favored Chinese food), Jean-Eugène Borie of Château Ducru-Beaucaillou, and Lebanon’s pioneer winemaker Serge Hochar. For good measure, we also welcomed some of New York’s restaurateurs extraordinaire including Danny Meyer as well as the Four Season’s Alex von Bitter land Julien Nicolini to dine at our home.  Our classic menus were French, Italian, Belgian or American, usually with a Midwestern twist, an homage to my West Virginia-born mother.

At home, I was the chef and Ed was the sous-chef and sommelier.  He took great pains to record every menu, including wine, along with the names of each guest in attendance. His goal was to avoid serving people the same dish or wine twice. That, according to his exacting standards, would have been the sign of a bad host.

Simple, well-prepared, educational, and fun

With years of entertaining experience under our aprons, we caught the attention of Bon Appetit Magazine who featured one of our Belgian dinner parties in their “Great Cook” series.  In the article we discussed our four basic rules for successful entertaining which remain true to this day:  the menu must be simple and well-prepared in addition to being fun and educational. Naturally, making an interesting wine choice to accompany the menu was de rigueur.

That ethos remains consistent today as you will discover in the recipes which follow in this memoire/cookbook.  Each dish is easy to prepare but also has a surprise component.  Either it is an unusual ethnic ingredient, a special preparation, or a decorative flourish any or all of which are guaranteed to produce a “wow” factor. One of my favorite tricks is to garnish a dish with branches of fresh English ivy or nasturtiums from my garden. My favorite decorative piece is a cluster of gilded holly leaves which magically showed up in a kitchen drawer many years ago. No doubt, it was meant for the Christmas tree, but I use it year in year out to great effect.

Cooking as theatre

Cooking and entertaining is akin to a theatrical performance. The menu is the script and the scenery the props you select for setting your tablescape. Your choice of interesting ingredients and recipes represent the costumes. The lead actors are the hosts who do the cooking and the audience, their guests.

Adding a little drama to your cooking doesn’t need to be complicated though.  It just takes a pinch of creativity, a little research to find something tantalizing to serve, and a willingness to have fun in the process. Your guests will certainly enjoy themselves at your table so why shouldn’t you as well?