Rossant, Colette 1932–

PERSONAL:

Born 1932, in France; married James Rossant (an architect), c. 1954; children: Marianne, Juliette, Cecile, Tomas. Education: Attended a convent boarding school in Cairo, Egypt; additional study in Paris. Religion: Secular Jewish.

ADDRESSES:

E-mail—colette@coletterossant.com.

CAREER:

Writer, food journalist, columnist, editor, entrepreneur, and educator. St. Anne's Episcopal School, New York, NY, chair of language department; Hofstra University, instructor in French; host of Zee Cooking School, a PBS-TV children's cooking series. Partner in two restaurants, Buddha Green and Dim Sum Go Go.

AWARDS, HONORS:

James Beard Award nomination, 1997; IACP Cookbook Award nomination, 2000, for Memories of a Lost Egypt; Thomas Cook Travel Book Award nomination, 2002, for Apricots on the Nile; James Beard Award, for an article on Egyptian cuisine published in Saveur.

WRITINGS:

Cooking with Colette, Scribner (New York, NY), 1975.

A Mostly French Food Processor Cookbook, New American Library (New York, NY), 1977.

Colette Rossant's After-Five Gourmet, Random House (New York, NY), 1981.

Colette's Slim Cuisine, Morrow (New York, NY), 1983.

Colette's Japanese Cuisine, Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1985.

New Kosher Cooking, Arbor House (New York, NY), 1986.

Vegetables: The Art of Growing, Cooking, and Keeping the New American Harvest, Viking Studio Books (New York, NY), 1991.

Memories of a Lost Egypt: A Memoir with Recipes, Clarkson Potter (New York, NY), 1999, published as Apricots on the Nile: A Memoir with Recipes, Bloomsbury (London, England), 2001.

Return to Paris (memoir), Atria Books (New York, NY), 2003.

The World in My Kitchen: The Adventures of a (Mostly) French Woman in New York, Atria Books (New York, NY), 2006.

Author of column, "Underground Gourmet," New York magazine, 1979, and "Ask Colette!," for New York Daily News, 1993. Food and design editor, McCall's, 1982.

SIDELIGHTS:

Food writer Colette Rossant has written several books and numerous articles on cooking. Born in France in 1932 to a secular Jewish father and a French, Roman Catholic mother, Rossant grew up in Cairo with her Egyptian Sephardic paternal grandparents. Educated in Cairo and Paris, Rossant has been a teacher, chair of the language department at St. Anne's Episcopal School in the Brooklyn Heights section of New York City, and a hostess of a PBS-TV children's cooking series. She is a columnist for the New York Daily News and editor at McCall's.

Rossant wrote her first cookbook, Cooking with Colette, to introduce children to the basics of French food. "If they can look into a pot on the stove," Rossant writes, "they're ready to cook." She aims to make cooking fun and to create confident cooks. The book begins with desserts, and includes recipes for appetizers, fish, poultry, salads, soups and vegetables. Carolyn Jenks wrote in School Library Journal, "Rossant's recipes are excellent; her tone is chatty and encouraging, often urging users to vary recipes creatively. But, she promises too much: it won't be as easy as she says for those who don't already know the basic, simple facts about cooking."

In another cookbook, Rossant targets busy working parents. She wrote Colette Rossant's After-Five Gourmet "to help you prepare exciting meals without spending your life in the kitchen," in her words. She lists the creative recipes by category and preparation time. The dishes include snail stew with walnuts, almond rillettes, pumpkin mousse, and tomato jam. A Library Journal reviewer commented: "Many of the recipes are fresh and practical, but many others are extremely expensive and seem contrived to surprise as much as to delight."

Rossant says of Colette's Slim Cuisine, "The recipes in this book by themselves, will not make anyone lose weight." Rather, she provides a low-cholesterol, low-fat approach which, she says, other healthy choices such as physical exercise should supplement. Rossant emphasizes fresh fruits and vegetables, fish, veal, tofu, and poultry in place of beef, butter, and cream. Chinese and Japanese cuisine influence many of the dishes, as well as French and a little Middle Eastern. The recipes include calorie counts. Sybil S. Steinberg, writing in Publishers Weekly, stated: "Despite the magic word in the title, this is not a ‘diet’ book in any boring, invidious sense." Ruth Diebold, reviewing in Library Journal, stated, "this imaginative book, Rossant's best, will inspire every thinking cook to look at food with a fresh eye." Another Rossant cookbook emphasizes kosher alternatives. New Kosher Cooking features more than one hundred innovative gourmet recipes from many different cultures. Diebold described the book in Library Journal as "a collection of kosher recipes about as different from what anybody's grandma used to cook as it is possible to imagine…. A surprise and delight."

Memories of a Lost Egypt: A Memoir with Recipes began as a James Beard Award-winning Saveur magazine article. The memoir, she explains, also arose from her children's curiosity: "For years, my children had endless questions about my childhood in Cairo. To quiet them, I told them stories about growing up in a big house surrounded by a large, tumultuous family. The stories seemed exotic and unreal to them. They also wondered about my love-hate relationship with my mother, my passion for food, and my true identity. Was I French? Egyptian? Catholic? Jewish?" Rossant begins her memoir with her early childhood in Paris and continues with her years in Cairo with her father's family and in a Catholic convent boarding school before her mother sent her back to Paris. The future food writer was initially discouraged from culinary exploration. When her Parisian grandmother found her in the kitchen, she scolded her: "Une jeune fille de bonne famille ne frequente pas la cuisine!" ["A young girl of good breeding does not go into the kitchen!"]. After two years in Egypt, when Rossant was only seven, her father died. Her mother left the family to travel, and Colette remained under the care of her grandparents and the French-trained Sudanese family chef Ahmet. Paul Levy wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "Nostalgia for the Egypt of Rossant's childhood pervades this lightly edited but charming book."

Rossant takes up the story of her life in Paris with Return to Paris, her second memoir of her eventful and sometimes turbulent life. She tells of how she ended up in Paris under the care of her grandmother, a strict and difficult woman, while her mother remained largely absent. Compared to her home in Cairo, Paris was drab and lifeless. She struggled with conflicts with her Jewish identity, and to avoid upsetting her grandmother, she had to conceal the fact that she had been educated in a Cairo convent. Rossant soon found great comfort in the kitchen of her new Parisian home, aided by the advice and instruction of the family cook, Georgette. French food and cooking became the stabilizing force in her life, helping her through difficult family relations, uncertain liaisons with her boyfriends, and the multiple problems of adolescence. To accompany her story, Rossant also includes relevant recipes and provides the stories behind them. "Never was the kitchen a more welcome port in the storm, or more nurturing, than for the buffeted Rossant, who is a sympathetic character, and all the more so for her measure of pride," observed a contributor to Kirkus Reviews. Despite some repetitions and contradictions in the text, "those interested in food will still enjoy Rossant's careful explanations of meals and markets," noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Library Journal critic Wilda Williams commented favorably on Rossant's writing, noting that "her prose is sensuously alive."

The World in My Kitchen: The Adventures of a (Mostly) French Woman in New York, is the final book of Rossant's three-volume memoirs. In 1954, she married American architect James Rossant and the couple departed France for New York. With the sights, sounds, and customs of a new country came new tastes as well, as she applied her epicurean skills to discovering the joys, and drawbacks, of American food. From simple pleasures such as an ice cream sundae, to the hearty stature of baked potatoes and bagels, to vegetables that at first were too bland, Rossant became acquainted with her new home through flavor and texture. Rossant describes the various jobs she held down in America, including teaching French at Hofstra University. There, she met Alice Trillin, wife of noted writer Calvin Trillin. She also describes how she helped oversee a cooking class arranged by her fifth-grade daughter Juliette, and how that experience evolved into a series of cooking classes, into a television program, and from there into several contracts for successful cookbooks. "Rossant's breathless yet humble descriptions of her cooking and her vocational success are great fun to read," commented a Kirkus Reviews writer. Library Journal critic Elizabeth Rogers called Rossant's memoir "entertaining and warmly recounted," noting that the stories of her background offer readers "insight into the character of a French woman and budding chef." Rossant's "writing is vivid and opinionated," observed a Publishers Weekly contributor, "which makes her good company." The Kirkus Reviews contributor called the memoir a "mouth-watering reminiscence of marriage and [Rossant's] stellar epicurean career."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Rossant, Colette, Memories of a Lost Egypt: A Memoir with Recipes, Clarkson Potter (New York, NY), 1999.

Rossant, Colette, Return to Paris (memoir), Atria Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Rossant, Colette, The World in My Kitchen: The Adventures of a (Mostly) French Woman in New York, Atria Books (New York, NY), 2006.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 1, 1992, review of Vegetables: The Art of Growing, Cooking, and Keeping the New American Harvest, p. 999; February 15, 2003, Mark Knoblauch, review of Return to Paris, p. 1032; October 15, 2006, Mark Knoblauch, review of The World in My Kitchen: The Adventures of a (Mostly) French Woman in New York, p. 14.

Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2003, review of Return to Paris, p. 46; June 15, 2006, review of The World in My Kitchen: The Adventures of a (Mostly) French Woman in New York, p. 625.

Library Journal, October 15, 1981, Ruth Diebold, review of Colette Rossant's After-Five Gourmet, p. 2028; May 15, 1983, Ruth Diebold, review of Colette's Slim Cuisine, p. 1002; August, 1986, Ruth Diebold, review of New Kosher Cooking, p. 149; March 15, 2003, Wilda Williams, review of Return to Paris, p. 109; September 15, 2006, Elizabeth Rogers, review of The World in My Kitchen, p. 84.

Nation's Restaurant News, December 23, 1991, review of Vegetables, p. 78.

New York Times, December 2, 1991, review of Vegetables, p. 15.

New York Times Book Review, May 30, 1999, Paul Levy, "But Is It Kosher?," p. 9; June 1, 2003, review of Return to Paris, p. 23.

Publishers Weekly, April 22, 1983, Sybil S. Steinberg, review of Colette's Slim Cuisine, p. 97; February 10, 2003, review of Return to Paris, p. 172; June 26, 2006, review of The World in My Kitchen, p. 42.

School Library Journal, April, 1976, Carolyn Jenks, review of Cooking with Colette, p. 92.

Times Literary Supplement, June 27, 2003, review of Return to Paris, p. 32.

ONLINE

Ask Colette!,http://www.askcolette.com (August 10, 2007).

BookLoons,http://www.bookloons.com/ (August 10, 2007), Mary Ann Smyth, review of Return to Paris.

Colette Rossant Home Page,http://www.coletterossant.com (August 10, 2007).