The World in My Kitchen (13 page)

A
year after Thomas was born,
I was hired by Hofstra University to teach French literature to future French teachers. Three times a week, I drove to the Hofstra campus in Long Island early in the morning and came home around four o’clock just as my daughters were returning from school. One morning in January, I woke up to six inches of snow. My car was an old jalopy, and I didn’t trust it on the snow and ice. For the first time, I took the train to school. I arrived at the Hempstead station, looking in vain for a taxicab to take me to Hofstra. Next to me stood a young woman wrapped in a fur coat. I asked her if she knew how I could get to the university from the station. I said I was late for my class and quite worried because I was a new teacher and still on trial. The young woman said, “I also teach at Hofstra, in the English department. Let’s call for a taxi and share it. Don’t worry; everyone will be late today, including the students. By the way, I am Alice Trillin. I also live in Manhattan.”

Alice was a beautiful young woman with light wavy blonde hair and large eyes. She talked rapidly and had an easy laugh. I liked her immediately, and very soon, I invited her and her husband to dinner. Calvin, “Bud” to those close to him, was a writer for
The New Yorker
. He was charming, always joking and teasing us. He loved good food, and I loved having a guest who looked forward to my new way of cooking and my experiments.

When we met, Jimmy and I had just moved into our Sullivan Street house, and the Trillins were not far away on Grove Street; a pleasant walk through the village was all that separated us. I loved to have them over for dinner; every time I found some interesting ingredient or a new Chinese restaurant, I would invite them over. Now feeling more secure and bold, I explored many small streets and back alleys in Chinatown. Chinatown was growing very fast, and I was never far behind. I discovered new restaurants and new markets, was not afraid to ask questions, buy ingredients that were strange to me, and try them at home. Sometimes the experiments were great achievements, sometimes even greater disasters. I would call Suzanne and tell her about my disasters, and we both would laugh, then she would explain how the Chinese cooked with whatever ingredients I had been too original with.

A few weeks before Alice and Calvin’s first daughter, Abigail, was born, I called Alice: “Alice, I just found a new vegetable in Chinatown. They call it water spinach; it is yummy. Come for dinner tomorrow night.”

Come they did, and after we had eaten the appetizer, a cauliflower soup with blue cheese, Alice announced in an excited voice, “I have to go home; I think the baby is coming. Bud, take me home.”

Calvin got up and said in a hurt tone, “But I don’t know what Colette is serving for the main course!”

We all laughed, and I went to the kitchen and made the dinner “to go.” I placed the roasted quails that I was going to serve with the water spinach in a container along with some sautéed water chestnuts and said, as I handed him the package, “Don’t worry; first babies take a long time. Here is what I would have served you. Good luck.”

Abigail took another week to come, but the story of my care package ended up as a small story in one of Calvin’s books. In
Alice Let’s Eat,
he wrote, “One of my favorite New York cooks is a friend of ours named Colette Rossant…She defies Americanization, and she is so far above frozen food, that I always suspected that she may not keep ice cubes.” The book was reviewed everywhere, and
The Wall Street Journal
used this quote to praise Trillin’s book. All of a sudden the telephone started to ring, and requests poured in for articles about food. The first call was from
Vogue,
asking me to contribute to a series of articles by well-known cooks about dinners that had not gone as planned. I said yes right away. I certainly had the right material. Only a few weeks before, my husband had asked me to invite one of his clients, a rich developer with whom he was involved in a very large project. Jimmy had talked about me as a wonderful cook, and the man wanted to be invited to dinner.

“You have to go all out,” Jimmy said. “It’s very important for me.”

I planned the menu very carefully. I decided to make a cheese soufflé as a starter (serving a soufflé in 1968 was still exotic, but this is no longer true today), half a young goat as the main course served with Chinese vegetables, and a puree spiced with black olives. For dessert I would make a beet pie. I had never made one, but I thought it should be quite easy. I went shopping on Ninth Avenue in Asian stores, which I had recently discovered, and bought a baby goat. I cooked all day. The pie was beautiful, the color of ruby; the goat was ready to be put in the oven and the table set. At 7:00
P.M
. I put my baby goat, smeared with spices and French mustard, in the oven. The developer, his wife, and two of his associates arrived promptly, and at 8:00
P.M
. we all sat down with what I thought would be a memorable evening.

The first course went well. The golden soufflé had not collapsed, and I thought that our guests were quite impressed. Once the plates were cleared, I took the baby goat out of the oven and tried to carve it. Impossible! I called Jimmy, who sharpened our knife and tried also. Still impossible. I had underestimated the cooking time. The goat was underdone and disaster threatened.

“Quickly go and pour more wine and give them fresh bread. Tell them that what I am making has to be done at the last minute and may take some time.”

I raised the oven temperature to 450 degrees and waited ten more minutes. Still tough. This was not a baby goat I had bought; this was his grandmother! And so while they all drank more wine, I tore pieces of meat from the goat, cut it into tiny cubes. I wondered what I could make and decided on an omelet. I stuffed it with the goat cubes, lots of herbs, and garlic. I wasn’t very sure what it would taste like but hoped that the herbs would enhance the dish. I also hoped that no one would think that the omelet was a very unusual and bizarre dish. To this day, I don’t know what Jimmy thought of the dinner. All I know is that, as they left, the guests praised the dinner, raving about my food and the very unusual omelet. Had they been too drunk to notice the taste of goat? The article about the goat was a success, more offers for articles came my way, and thus my career as a food writer was born.

One day when Juliette, our second daughter, was in the fifth grade, she announced that many of her friends had formed secret clubs. She wanted to form a secret club herself but had no ideas. What could she do? I suggested a cooking club. The idea came from the fact that when I came home from work, my children would be all around me clamoring for my attention. I began to give them jobs to do in the kitchen. I taught them how to peel vegetables, stir the sauces, etc. I told Juliette to select a few friends and invite them to our house one Saturday a month to learn how to cook one dish that they would eat for lunch and another they would take home. Juliette would charge a quarter. She was enthusiastic and came back the next day triumphant, saying that she had four new friends who would join us at the end of the week for the first meeting of the secret cooking club.

That first Saturday, I had in my kitchen five little girls eagerly waiting to be taught how to cook. I was scared. It is one thing to show your child how to separate an egg, but now I had children I did not really know who looked at me eagerly and were probably expecting a miracle: In one day, they would know how to cook!

I had decided that each child would make a quiche for lunch and a small apple pie to take home. And so I gave each child a bowl, a wooden spoon, a knife, flour, etc. I went from child to child teaching each how to measure, wiping the spills, and praying that the dough would work. We made the dough that I call “The never-miss dough,” the one that my own grandmother had taught me as a little girl in Egypt. I taught the girls how to break eggs and separate the yolks from the whites, allowing the whites to slide in their hands into the bowl. “Disgusting” said one little girl, laughing as the yolk also fell in the bowl, and I picked it up with my hands. We beat the yolks with cream, grated Swiss cheese, rolled the dough, and lined the pie plates with the dough. We beat the whites and folded the beaten whites into the yolks. Soon the quiches were assembled, and the five little girls, trembling with excitement, each placed their quiche in the oven. While they baked, we made a French open apple pie with the remaining dough. The children were going to take the uncooked apple pies home to bake.

When the quiches were ready, we all sat around the table and ate. For most of the children, this was their first taste of a quiche. “I love it!” cried one the girls. This was followed by grunts of approval from the other children. The day had been a great success. Juliette was happy, and as they left the house, she handed them the recipes of what they had made.

I was exhausted but pleased to see the smile of contentment on my little girl’s face. On Monday, when Juliette returned from school, she announced that other girls in the class, having learned how much fun the five friends had had, wanted to join the club. “Can I invite other friends to come?” Juliette asked.

I did not think that I could afford to have so many children. At a quarter per child, I would quickly go broke. Also, more than five would be too much to handle. I said to Juliette, “We will see next month. Maybe the ones who wanted to join now will have forgotten about your secret club. You can invite the same children to come back.” But time did nothing to dull their enthusiasm. By the end of April, I had about twenty mothers call me to ask if their children could join the club. “I hear that you really teach them how to cook and that they loved it. I never learned anything from my mother. She never taught me! I am such a bad cook…. I really wish you would reconsider and take my daughter.”

One night our friend, Alan Buschbaum, came by. Alan was an architect, a graphic designer, and above all, my best friend. What we had in common was cooking as he was one of the best cooks I knew in New York. He and I often cooked together. I told him of my predicament. “What should I do?” I asked.

“I know. Let’s make it a
real
cooking school. You will charge for teaching. You can teach every Saturday morning. I will design a flyer, and you can send it to all the private schools. Parents have no idea of what to do with their children on Saturday. You will be a godsend to the mothers.”

And true to his word, Allan made a flyer announcing
COLETTE’S COOKING SCHOOL
. We calculated how much the food and the utensils would cost and decided what to charge the parents. We mailed the flyer to all the private schools. The school would start the first Saturday in June, when private schools began their summer vacation. Alan secretly sent the flyer to Corky Pollen,
New York
Magazine’s “Best Bet” editor. She mentioned the cooking school in her column, and we received hundreds of calls. This time it was not only girls who wanted to come but also boys. I decided that we would have three sessions a week. Each session would have eight kids: four boys and four girls. I also had to make some rules. The children had to be at least eight, tall enough to look in a saucepan without going on tiptoe. A few days before the first class, I had a call from
The New York Times.
They had heard about the school and wanted to send a reporter. I tried to dissuade them as they wanted to come on the first day of school. Couldn’t they wait? No was the answer. As the parents dropped their children at our house, a reporter roamed among them, asking questions.

We were all in the dinning room. Each child had a wooden chopping board, a small knife, wooden spoons, bowls, etc. For the first session, as I knew I had a reporter looking on, I decided to stick with the same dishes we had made at Juliette’s first cooking club meeting. We made eight quiches and eight apple pies. To my relief, the quiche came out of the oven golden brown. The kids loved them, even the little girl who kept on saying, “I hate eggs,” relished the quiche.

In one of my Saturday classes was the daughter of a television producer. He came to see my class and suggested that we make a pilot and present it to PBS. PBS loved the idea but refused to put up the money, so he turned to Warren Steibel, a well-known television producer who was also the producer of William Buckley’s
Firing Line,
a political talk show filmed in South Carolina.

Warren Steibel decided to present the idea to South Carolina public television, which accepted the sponsorship of the show. As the school year had started by this time and I was back to teaching at Hofstra, we decided that I would start filming the show in July. He flew me to Columbia to start filming. The plan was to do twelve episodes. Four boys and four girls would join me for each episode, and each show would be geared to a different age group, ending with a Christmas dinner aimed at older children.

To get children to join the show, Warren put me on South Carolina public radio, asking children to come to the studio to interview for a cooking show. The response was overwhelming. Hundreds of children swarmed into the radio station. Warren refused to let me see any of the children, saying that the element of surprise as I met them on the set would make for a better television show. We decided together that the first show would be about dough, pies, cracking eggs, etc. The first taping went well; however, Warren had failed to factor in that the children were Southerners with heavy southern drawls, and I had a French accent. The dialogue between the children and I was as funny as an Abbot & Costello sketch. I dimly understood what they were saying, and they barely understood me, but we managed.