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.
Though I am not a foodie, I like watching chefs on TV. They are the
new "rock stars" and their antics are often equal amounts amusing,
terrible and inspirational (in the kitchen, that is). It's hard to
imagine a city's food lovers more connected to a chef than Los Angeles
is to Ludo Lefebvre. Trying to get a reservation to his tri-annual,
6-week pop-up restaurant is harder than getting VIP passes backstage to
U2. (I'm guessing, but I don't think I'm far off.) When out dining in LA, the conversation, if you're with passionate
diners, inevitably turns to the hottest local chefs and eventually to LudoBites - how many you've been to (3),
which incarnations (3.0, 4.0 and 6.0) and how much time/how many
computers you had running trying to get one of the elusive reservations
on OpenTable…before it crashed for those trying to get into 5.0 and 6.0.
This last time for 007 (back downtown at Gram & Papas), it went off without a hitch – that is if you
got into the system in the first 2 minutes, which by the grace of God my
Man did.
