Learning to Cook : First Courses : Better Late Than Never

Some of us learned to cook from our mothers. Some of us learned to cook in spite of our mothers. Actually, our mothers didn’t have all that much to do with the process--as the following stories prove.

Although we all came to cooking via different paths, all of us vividly remember the first foods that we cooked. And while they’re not generally dishes that we find ourselves cooking up every day, when we recently tested these recipes, we found, somewhat to our surprise, that they are all delicious.

I had gone through life until I was 18 knowing nothing about cooking or cleaning. It was my mother’s wish; a sort of Victorian hysteria, a silent scream manifest in a devotion to culture at all cost and beyond all practicality.

We lived in a first-generation Albanian circle in the Lower East Side of New York where most girls our age spent Saturdays waxing the floor and cleaning the baseboards. My mother, though, preferred to see my sister and me labor over homework, practice the piano, play the cello, sketch, dance and sing in a chorus. Our Saturday afternoons were spent at Carnegie Hall. Forget dusting, sweeping or stirring a pot. It was my mother who did all that.

My mother usually was on her knees waxing the kitchen floor, washing windows or scrubbing clothes when the alarm went off in my father’s head. He’d look up from his paper, one eye going bright red. “Aren’t you going to teach these spoiled daughters of yours anything about keeping house?” he’d would ask at least once a month.

“Don’t worry,” my mother would assure him. “They’ll learn when they need to.”

“And when is that, when they’re already married?” That was the question repeated over and over and over again for years. The echo still rings: Years later I can still hear the words: “When they’re already married?”

Well, yes, as it turned out. When I married I barely knew how to handle a kettle of water without damaging something. I also remember the daily visits to the neighborhood delicatessen where I would buy roast beef, pastrami, potato salad and coleslaw for dinner.

The Air Force probably saved us from early heart disease. While my husband taught math at the Air Force base at Ithaca, N.Y., I held a job at nearby Cornell University, making sketches for home economic recipe booklets. I’d follow the plain, economy-minded American recipes verbatim when I got home. I began my repertoire with meat loaf, hamburgers, pork chops and watery spaghetti from the home economics cooking pages. And I’ll never forget the ice cream with Jell-O dessert, an accident that became my star dessert for years. (The recipe has long since evaporated from memory.)

It wasn’t until my husband was discharged from the Air Force and continued his studies at Columbia University that my cooking world took shape. I landed a job with Dione Lucas, a master chef of the French Cordon Bleu school, who taught cooking classes in her apartment at 1 West 72nd St. My job description varied from day to day. Mostly, however, I ran the cooking school and helped when the help failed Dione, which, because of her hot temper and strict demands, was quite often.

It did, however, give me a chance to work with the master cutting pretty praline cutouts for trompe l’oeil dessert centerpieces (I was better at construction than she), and formed precise quenelles de brochettes with two spoons when a catering event was at hand. I whipped creme Chantilly into soft curls, stirred the roux for souffles, carved turnips with seven sides and fluted white mushrooms into perfect corrugated domes. I also handled production matters for her cooking show, one of the first of its kind on television, and acted as makeup girl for celebrities who participated on her show, thanks to my theater arts experience in college.

Lucas’ school was probably the forerunner of the today’s “gourmet” cooking schools, but on a much more exclusive social scale. Her clients were the city’s social elite--the rich and famous, who dropped $100 for a lesson on poulet a la Vallee d’Auge, supreme de voilaille Auvernaise, mousse de pommes Calvados, Charlotte Malakoff or dents de lion, mostly to show off to friends invited for an intimate supper.

To be sure, Lucas, a no-nonsense type with an intimidating air of Captain Cook, often snatched the dish out of the inept hands of her charges and finished it off with a proper professional flourish. No dish would leave her premise without a final Dione Lucas stamp. “With the wrist,” she would yell at a woman attempting to fold egg whites into a batter with the tips of her freshly manicured fingers.

Needless to say, the job became my source of inspiration to tackle dishes at home that no normal home cook would dream of attempting. I remember taking to a friend’s shower a galantine de volaille, which looked so much like a decorated purse no one dared eat it. I once turned a humble bean soup into high-class cassoulet when an Albanian prince dropped in for an impromptu visit with my father-in-law.

One of the most memorable and popular of Dione Lucas’s dishes was Chicken Kiev, a chicken roll filled with butter and herbs, which she taught to countless socialites and prepared by the dozens for catered parties. It was a dish I could assemble ahead and refrigerate until it was ready to be cooked.

The idea of a butter- filled fried chicken roll is completely out of sync with today’s health-mania, but what the heck. It’s one of the great dishes of the Western world, with a story to boot. According to Lucas, when secret messages from the battlefield were sent to the Russian czar, they arrived via Malakoff, the kitchen chef, who embedded the note in one of his plump chicken rolls.

Now, looking back, my mother was correct. “They’ll learn when they need to.”

DIONE LUCAS’ CHICKEN KIEV

8 boneless chicken breast halves

1/2 cup butter (use 1 cube)

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 teaspoon chopped chives

1/2 teaspoon chopped Italian parsley

1/2 teaspoon chopped tarragon

Salt, pepper

Flour

1 egg, beaten

1/2 cup bread crumbs

Oil

1 bunch watercress

Place chicken breast halves, skin side down, on wax paper. Cover with another piece of wax paper and pound with wooden mallet until breasts are flat. Remove top sheet wax paper. Cut butter cube in half lengthwise. Cut into 8 lengthwise fingers.

In center of each chicken breast place finger of butter. Combine garlic, chives, parsley and tarragon. Sprinkle over each chicken breast. Season to taste with with salt and pepper. Roll up jellyroll-fashion, tucking in each end. Roll in flour, brush with beaten egg, then roll lightly in bread crumbs. Chill.

Heat 1-inch oil in pan to 350 degrees. Add rolls and fry until golden on all sides, turning to brown evenly, about 6 to 8 minutes. Drain on paper towels. Arrange on serving platter and garnish with watercress sprigs. Makes 4 to 8 servings.