Before Julia there was Dione – Dione Lucas. Well, actually for me, Dione came after my early marriage attempts at Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I signed up for Lucas’ Le Cordon Bleu class that was being held in the back of a gourmet houseware’s store in New York. It may have been the last class she taught, as we all knew she was quite ill. She was distracted, grumpy, utterly impatient and divine. She was also usually tipsy on Calvados, and I was her pet student.
I was excited by the opportunity to study under her and I joyfully strived to be perfect at each stage and I guess she noticed, though it was not that difficult to achieve ‘Pet” status, as the other ladies basically sucked at their half-hearted efforts. My favorite sucky moment was when an Upper East Side Idle Grand Dame (I was living in a five flight walk-up painter’s loft near SoHo) brought in a half pound of saffron that her servants located at a pharmacy. We had to provide our own ingredients for our recipes; Hers called for saffron. (A pinch already!) When we finished cooking, we were permitted to take the results home. She, however, could not, as “cook would be vexed.” One must never, NEVER vex a cook!
Dionne’s favorite ingredients were Red Currant Jelly and the aforementioned Calvados, which she used on everything. By the way, both work wonderfully.
Suzanne Goin, the uber-talented celebrity chef of Lucques and A.O.C.
Wine Bar fame, was rumored to be the front runner for the
2005 James Beard Chef-of-the-Year award, and as far as I was concerned,
she could just skip the swim suit competition and pick up her gold
toque and tongs. Because praise the lord and pass the friggin’ salt
cod, if food could cure cancer, it would be this food. May The God of
Good Eatin’ please keep Suzanne Goin’s hands hale, hearty, and forever
heating up the small plates. 
Having earlier experienced both the exquisite pleasure and excruciating
pain that comes from washing down four or five pounds of Chicken Liver
pate with fifteen dollar glasses of 2001 Chateauneuf du Pape, I was
careful to prepare my sensitive digestive tract by fasting for
practically an entire half-day on Fiji Natural Artisan water, plus a
supplemental half-inch rind of smoked salami that I discovered under a
plastic tankard of Barefoot Contessa Moussaka that I accidentally made
five weeks ago in a bizarre attack of culinary industry. As a note, I
have a firm policy of never throwing away any left-over that originally
took more than sixty minutes to prepare, unless it starts to stink
worse than my daughter’s feet did after two weeks at Catalina Camp,
where filth is a fashion statement.
In the summer of 1966 I worked as a dishwasher in a summer camp near Hunter Mountain in upstate New York. This was in the pre-automatic dishwasher days meaning dirty dishes were dumped in a super hot sink of soapy water and washed and dried by hand. I used to come in around 6 a.m. to clean the breakfast pots and pans. Henry, a very tall, rail thin man who had been a cook in World War II in Europe, had gotten there at least an hour before me; I usually found him smoking a filterless cigarette and slowly beating powdered eggs and water in a huge stainless steel bowl or ladling out pancakes on the football field-size griddle.
A: It's been 21 years since we opened Kate Mantilini's, which I
named after my Uncle Rob's mistress. My mother wouldn't let me speak to
her, nobody would allow us to mention her name, but she was a very
strong woman and I wanted to name my restaurant after her. My husband
was under contract with Warner Brothers, and he did 50 films in the
1940s before we went into the restaurant business.