Mother Sauce: Now Available on Amazon

MOTHER SAUCE by Rozanne Gold
Four-time James Beard award-winning chef turns from food to poetry 

“This book was created by a singular poet - death doula, legendary chef, geographer of women’s souls - who writes with a memorable voice. Deft, wise, and delicate, the poems of Mother Sauce are powerful recipes for wisdom and compassion.”

—Annie Finch, author of Spells and A Poet’s Craft 

Brooklyn, New York (Dec. 27, 2022)   After more than four decades in the food world, award-winning chef, celebrated author, food writer, and international restaurant consultant Rozanne Gold turns her formidable creativity to poetry with her first poetry collection Mother Sauce published by Dancing Girl Press.   

Mother Sauce refers to the five classic sauces created by chef Auguste Escoffier, and the subsequent “daughter sauces” that form the basis of all French cuisine. This metaphor weaves itself through Gold’s “spare and deceptively simple” poems which, like her minimalist style of cooking, resound with unexpected complexity that “tease the senses and excavate bliss.”    

This poetic memoir, a bildungsroman, takes the writer from an unhappy childhood in Fresh Meadows, Queens, finding nourishment through men, to becoming a chef and food writer in order to nourish herself, and an end-of-life doula to deal with her grief after her mother’s death.

It’s about the heartache of "motherlessness" -- caught between not being one and not having one; a story of endometriosis; a powerful connection to Nefertiti, and what it means to become a poet in her 60s. It’s about trading the language of food for the language of words and images; it’s about the search for spiritual nourishment and what it means to become a mother at age 53; and what it means to care for dying people. It’s about a psychological dimension that gives rise to a city of women, of women carrying women home, and ultimately about God as a woman… the ultimate source of nourishment.  

Buoyed by her singular career, both glamorous and gritty, Gold delves deep into her own experiences of feeling unworthy, unseen, and taken for granted; taken from, not celebrated, known and yet not known. It is a quiet reclamation of the divine and the feminine in her later years.  And while Gold’s story is uniquely her own, women, men, humanity at large can relate in their own way to the book’s many steps, both in its path and pathos.

 “Mother Sauce is nourishment for the heart and soul. Exploring loss and joy in motherhood and motherlessness, these poems entice the reader into a feast of contemplation and experience. We are served a savory and well-balanced meal ranging from “how to grieve” to “how to peel a carrot.” From the Imaginative leap of the first poem – God as cook creating Mother Sauces – the culinary serves spiritual Inquiry, seasoned with everything from razzmatazz to gravitas.”  --Krista Leahy, Nothing but Light 

“With a chef’s touch Rozanne Gold’s debut chapbook exquisitely gathers memory, loss, and boundless love into a redolent bouquet garni. With a keen eye for lush detail and epic sweep through the sensorial necessity of food, Gold offers process, where a recipe holds the future, where we grow memories older
than water. Step into this kitchen. There is nourishment here.” –Robert Balun, Acid Western and Traces

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rozanne Gold is an award-winning chef, food writer, journalist, and end-of-life doula. At age 23 she was first chef for New York Mayor Ed Koch and later the consulting chef for the Rainbow Room and Windows on the World. Considered “one of the most important innovators in the modern food world,” by Bob Spitz, (Julia Child’s biographer), she is the author of 13 acclaimed cookbooks, and winner of four James Beard Awards. Rozanne has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Gourmet and Bon Appetit, where she was entertaining columnist for five years. When Gourmet closed its doors, Gold bought their expansive library and donated it to New York University. After Hurricane Sandy, she ran a pop-up kitchen in Park Slope for 1-1/2 years, preparing 185,000 meals for those in need. A finalist of the 2020 Sappho Poetry Prize, she is a board member of Brooklyn Poets and co-founder of the Death & Living Project. 

DETAILS                      

Title: Mother Sauce
Author: Rozanne Gold
Publisher: Dancing Girl Press
ISBN #: 979-8-218-06304-7     
Price: $8.00
No. of pages/51  
AVAILABLE ON AMAZON    

 

One Year Later: 100,000 Meals

Photo Credit: Laura Landau Come volunteer with us!  Everyone is welcome.  CBE Feeds (at Congregation Beth Elohim, Garfield and 8th Avenue) in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Monday thru Friday, every week, 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. For more info: rozannegold@mindspring.com

Like most chefs, I'm used to feeding people in good times.

But one year ago, I began a pop-up emergency operation in the second floor kitchen of a synagogue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and as of today, along with hundreds of volunteers, have prepared and delivered our 100,000th meal to victims of Hurricane Sandy.

At midnight after the storm, Andy Bachman, a social-activist Rabbi, fired off an email to his congregation: He was looking for a way to feed several hundred people at a nearby Armory for a few days. These poor souls had been uprooted from the city's nursing homes. Some were old, some were sick, and others in desperate need of a warm meal. I woke my husband and said...we need to do something. Credit card in hand, we raided our local Key Food and bought everything we could carry.

When we arrived at the shul, a platoon of volunteers was waiting. Within several hours, together we made 600 sandwiches. The next day, 1,000.

Everyone wanted to do something. We had few pots, pans or utensils but we managed. I asked everyone I knew for a dozen hard-boiled eggs and a loaf of bread. This simple request demonstrated the amazing power of community. Within 24 hours we were peeling thousands of eggs for sandwiches. Without everyone's involvement, we would not have been able to reach our goals those first few days.

Cooking was one thing, but how to get the food to those in need? Many people had little fuel in their cars and gas stations were shuttered. More volunteers became the beneficent commanders who located drivers and dispatched them to the most vulnerable areas. They ensured that our promise was delivered from that day forward.

The next day Rabbi Bachman made another request. In addition to 2500 sandwiches, he told us he wanted to prepare 500 hot meals. My husband ran home to get his cleaver and we bought and hacked up 150 chickens from Costco. We made mashed potatoes, steamed vegetables and sent out cookies (and fruit when we could find it.) The next day, we did it again....and again...and again. We made sandwiches and cooked up whatever raw ingredients were donated to us. The chapel was filled with potatoes, onions and fresh green beans and canned vegetables. The upstairs ballroom, where meals were assembled, resembled an outsized army mess test. We cooked for 3000 hungry people that first Sunday after the storm.

We operated this way for months -- feeding people without homes, without kitchens, without power, people who lived near markets that had no food.

That's when it struck me: I realized that I never knew anyone who was truly, chronically, hungry. After all, at the age of 23, as first chef to New York Mayor Ed Koch, I knew more about catering political parties than hunger on the streets. Later, as consulting chef to the Rainbow Room and Windows on the World, I fed happier people in happier times, that is, until another tragedy took hold. But Sandy brought to my door the reality that people very close to my community grapple with hunger every day. Our kitchen, affectionately known as CBE Feeds, was able to lift some of that worry. Yes, with food and sandwiches -- but also with spiritual nourishment -- we showed up day after day, provided hope and connection, and proved that we cared.

The kitchen has become its own sacred space. Volunteers arrive from everywhere -- from Staten Island, Riverdale, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and from all over Manhattan, church groups from Ohio, students from Harvard Divinity School. During the Christmas holidays there were people from California and Washington State, from Israel and France.

In the beginning, Anne Hathaway heard about our efforts and came to lend support. And so did Natan Sharansky who'd heard how we'd helped the Russian communities in Brighton and Manhattan Beach.

Today we feed those-in-need in the Gravesend housing projects, hungry students at the Red Hook Initiative, abused women and their children at the Sea and Salt Mission, volunteer construction workers rebuilding homes in Coney Island, and displaced folks at Chips.

My main job is not to make sandwiches, but to honor everyone who walks through the kitchen door. We ask their names and are eager to hear their stories. One woman who touched my heart had lost her Far Rockaway home yet came every day to cook for those who were less fortunate. She felt lucky; she had a friend in Park Slope to spend time with. We didn't see her for awhile, her name was Alice, but then she came to the kitchen several more times. "We missed you," we all said. Do you have a home, now? No, she replied, but I still want to help. That was months ago. Miraculously, Alice appeared at the kitchen today. One year later, still no home, but still eager to make a chicken salad sandwich.

For those of you who pitched in after the Storm, you know that this work is its own reward. Some 2,800 volunteers have walked through our kitchen doors, and with amazing grace put on a hair net and gloves and, one year later, continue to prepare food for others, with little more than a thank you and a cup of coffee. The need is still great, so join us -- you might meet Alice.

Joe Baum's Nasturtiums: A Tribute

It was the mention of nasturtiums on a trendy menu recently that reminded me of Joe Baum. Considered by many to be the greatest restaurateur of the last century, it is hard to imagine that he died thirteen years ago, in 1998, October fifth to be exact, during summer’s last gasp.

This razzle-dazzle man who created no fewer than fifty restaurants, including the world’s largest-grossing and most legendary, who launched a thousand trends and inspired four decades of chefs, is slowly forgotten by a younger generation who, in blissful ignorance, still eat and drink his dreams.

Sitting wistfully at my desk, I marvel at a menu Joe created more than 50 years ago for New York’s Four Seasons restaurant in midtown New York. On it is a curious salad of nasturtium leaves, presaging by three decades America’s fling with edible flora. Also in its startling repertoire are foraged wild mushrooms, a beefsteak tomato carved tableside, fiddlehead ferns, acid-tinged calamondin oranges (today called calamansi), and those now ubiquitous but then obscure cherry tomatoes and snow peas.

Even with foraging, Joe was ahead of his time, sourcing wild mushrooms picked by John Cage, noted avant-garde composer and celebrated mycologist. If it wasn’t just right, or fascinating somehow, it wasn’t for Joe.

The menu was peppered with Joe’s sensibility:  “Our field greens are selected each morning and will vary daily". Unloved and humble vegetables were heralded with: “Seasonal gatherings may be viewed in their baskets” -- offering 16 side dishes including Farmer’s Sprouts with Bacon, Beets with Rosemary, a dish of Braised Lettuce with Marrow and Almonds.(Twenty years later, he would install a “vegetable sommelier” in the three-star Market Bar & Dining Rooms at the World Trade Center and turn a steakhouse into the country’s first market-driven restaurant.)

More important than any individual ingredient, however, was The Four Seasons’ culinary conceit:  A freewheeling amalgam of great dishes from around the globe that foretold the emergence of a “world cuisine” that, in this new century, defines who we are and how we eat.

With The Four Seasons, and the nearby La Fonda del Sol, which was the country’s first pan-Latino restaurant, Joe began a trend that ultimately broke the strangle-hold that French restaurants held on gastronomy. At the outset both lost serious money and were misunderstood. Notorious for nouns and verbs that tumbled into incoherent sentences, Joe remarked years later:  “I was too previous”.

Joe developed icons you could ingest. His restaurants embodied discovery, pleasure, and sensate experiences, and he brought to every level of dining a theatricality that obliterated stodgy orthodoxies.  He wrote menus in English (instead of stodgy French) – and insisted that people feel comfortable – rather than intimidated – in their surroundings.

Almost 30 years ago, at the Hors d’Oeuvrerie on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, Joe broke all the rules by merging small plates of sushi, quesadillas, bunderfleisch and Thai spring rolls on a single menu that foretold the ultra-relaxed “grazing” craze.

And he introduced New York to two new types of restaurants that he called by their forms:  Trattoria and Brasserie, the latter still alive on East 53rd Street.

Joe created the world’s first fast food court – The Big Kitchen –  and changed the way developers built shopping centers. And he made rooftop dining respectable – the Tower Suite, Rainbow Room, and Windows on the World shone in the sky like romantic spaceships, with interior lives rich enough to outperform a foggy galaxy.

Twenty-seven years ago, I celebrated Joe’s birthday on the first day of my job. He had hired me, a tall, slightly neurotic Jewess with notably sensitive food radar and commendable connections, to be his culinary sidekick.  I had already worked for several brilliant, blustery men – as chef to Mayor Wagner at his law firm, as first chef at Gracie Mansion for Mayor Ed Koch, and personal chef to Joe Brooks, Chairman of the Board of Lord & Taylor, while in charge of 38 restaurants nationwide. I even cooked for a President and Prime Minister.

But nothing could have prepared me for the “University of Baum,” as one Disney executive put it after attending one of Joe’s “master classes” – an endless colloquy of screaming, drinking, discovery and creation, that would influence, once boldly and now posthumously, the spirit of dining and the spectre of hospitality forever.

But that morning, I selected two dozen ripe figs, caressing each as if to ascertain its inner perfection, and brought a celebratory cake I’d baked from a distant memory.

It was an intimate affair, just the four of us, Joe, me, and his partners, Michael Whiteman and Dennis Sweeney, in an office overlooking Madison Square Park. Biting into every fig to find the most succulent, Joe growled “What’s in the cake, Gold?”, miffed that his exquisite taste buds had faltered.

“Olive oil, red wine, lemon zest and a bit of rosemary,” I answered with an apprehension that must have been obvious.  “Something I tasted once in Venice.” He looked at me and said, “Smile.” It was his shorthand for affection.

On that lovely August morning we chatted about Joe’s current projects. I’d been hired to help an upscale supermarket chain rethink how food would be sold in the years ahead. The answer? To cook restaurant-quality food in open kitchens and hire real chefs in starched whites to interact, nose to nose, with customers. We made supermarket food respectable, too.  

At the same time, there was restaurant Aurora in midtown Manhattan, named for the goddess of dawn, which Joe created for himself, rather than for clients.  No project could have been more excruciating for a man who was terrified of criticism. His defense was to brand himself a perfectionist, endlessly tinkering, redesigning, piling up costs and refusing to declare a project finished. One detractor quipped that “Joe could exceed an unlimited budget” -- which occurred at Aurora, a three-star dining temple that eventually sank under its profligate excesses.

And what of his $26 million re-do of the Rainbow Room in 1987? One Rockefeller executive grumbled, “America bought Alaska for one-third of that.” But Joe rescued an American icon from obscurity and had his revenge by resurrecting Baked Alaska on the menu. In short order he turned the place into the country’s largest-grossing, and most magical, eatery.

Earlier, Joe created the outlandish Forum of the XII Caesars where potatoes came baked in hot ashes, pheasant was served forth on a soldier’s shield, and where oversized silverware and wine buckets fashioned from upturned warriors’ helmets reflected the obsessively designed lighting. This time the menu had a short preamble: Cenabis Bene…Apud Me.  “You will dine well at my table”. It was the essence of Joe.

By today’s standards it was high-class kitsch complete with food on flaming swords, but restaurants and hotels around the country noticed that Joe had stopped “doing the continental” and imitated his every move.

He detested being dubbed the “father of theme restaurants” although had created a German sausage emporium, a Latino showpiece, an Irish saloon, an English pub, a Hawaiian restaurant with hula dancers, and quintessential “New York” dining spots.

Working beside him for 14 years, Joe showed me how – given enough design strength, merchandising razzle-dazzle, sizzling menu language and great marketing – it was possible to replace the personality of an owner with the personality of a concept.  Which is why no one looks any more for a Danny or a Mario or Emeril at the door; the idea of eating in one of their places suffices.

Eventually Joe trusted me to create concepts for his company: “Hudson River Cuisine” for the three-star Hudson River Club; Café Greco, the city’s first “Med-Rim” restaurant; Little Meals at the Rainbow Room (with a James Beard award-winning book dedicated to him); the food program that helped win back Windows on the World in 1996, and The Greatest Bar on Earth. I was consumed with his teachings.

Joe was an epicure: a hedonist with a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other and, usually a forgotten cigar smoldering nearby. He perfected a language of food that could make guests swoon, yet his own unruly syntax produced such howlers as “don’t push a dead horse,”  “someone threw a monkey into the works,” and “there’s a flaw in the ointment.”

A few years before he died, the man who rocked the world of fine dining and pleasure got tangle-tongued one last time.  Accidentally conflating two separate thoughts, he uttered the words “sustainable cuisine”, leaving all of us scratching our heads. If Joe said it, it presumably meant something.

A new idealism was born – a concern that today links how chefs and restaurants can support small farmers and regional agriculture so that future generations will dine well at the table.

“Smile,” I heard Joe say, as I bit the nasturtium flower and its peppery leaf. Joe, you are missed.