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    

Tricycle Magazine | 10,000 Dharmas in a Bowl

Click here to read the complete article in Tricycle Magazine.

Fourteen years ago, when Jonathan and Diana Rose created the magnificent Garrison Institute, a repurposed monastery on the banks of the Hudson River, they asked if I’d cook a meal for the Dalai Lama, who was coming to visit. I declined. Maybe insecurity got in the way, but it felt more like fear. Although I was well known as a chef with a Zen-like approach to cooking, I believed that the honor should go to a practitioner of Buddhism or at least someone who would be more fully awake to the experience than I would have been. Ever since, I’ve had a recurring thought whenever I shop, cook, or daydream. “What would I have made?” Sometimes the question makes me smile; other times it triggers great anxiety. But in the end, I realized that the food itself was not at all what mattered.

Brooklyn Magazine | The Life and Rhymes of Rozanne Gold

Oh, my God. Rozanne Gold — the four-time James Beard Award-winning chef known as “one of the most important innovators in the modern food world” per Julia Child’s biographer, Bob Spitz — has come for lunch.

I’m not sure why or how it seemed like a good idea at the time to offer to cook a meal for the author of 13 cookbooks, but here we are.

Lauded as a food influencer before everyone was some kind of influencer, she seems to have done it all: At age 23 she was living at Gracie Mansion as the private chef for Mayor Ed Koch, and by the time she was 40, she had cooked for a president, prime minister and brigadier general; created the original menus for both the Rainbow Room and Windows on the World; helped usher in the small-plate craze; and written her first book, “Little Meals: A Great New Way to Eat and Cook.”

Click here to read the complete article in Brooklyn Magazine

Will Write For Food

Will Write for Food. Was there ever a better book title to pique your curiosity?

Dianne Jacob, journalist, author, and writing coach, said during our recent chat (she in her beautiful home in Oakland Hills, California, and me sitting in a big comfy chair in my Brooklyn dining room), that the original title of her book was “How to Write about Food.” But “Will Write for Food” engages all the senses, going way beyond didactics, almost begging the reader to explore hidden desires and latent hungers – because, after all, who doesn’t want to scribble about edibles?

Lesson #1.  A provocative title is a good start. But it is the subtitle to Jacob’s fourth edition: “Pursue Your Passion and Bring Home the Dough Writing Recipes, Cookbooks, Blogs, and more,” that says it all. 

I wish this book existed in the mid-1970s when I got started in this business – first, as a chef, and then as a food writer.  I’d have had all the tools I needed and the confidence a new writer longs for. Yet, even now (13 cookbooks and 600 articles later), Dianne’s fourth update still reveals professional secrets to me and I can’t recommend it highly enough.  Each edition is a sociological map of the culinary landscape harkening back to 2005 when the first “Will Write for Food” was published -- well before the riotous world of blogging began. The second edition published in 2010 was early to food writing’s more entrepreneurial vibe, while the 3rd edition, published in 2015, inched away from gastronomy’s Eurocentric point of view.  Now Jacob’s newest edition embraces roiling diversity and the artful virtue of “voice.” Not necessarily “storytelling,” according to Dianne, but the development of personality on the page. 

What’s most different today, she observes, is that “to be a food writer also means to be a business person.”  So while Jacob stirs in ample amounts of editorial prowess about how to structure a story, do an interview, or invent a good lede, she serves up multitudinous interviews and real-life experiences shared by the food writers who are joyfully, and successfully, singing for their supper. “I love unearthing this information and talking to really smart people about it. I love the learning.  The people who want to write want to learn,” she said.

In this newest edition, Dianne demystifies the process to make it possible for anyone (imagine!) to write about food.  “And,” she says with great earnest, “there is now money in it. A website with ads and high traffic can bring in a six-figure income.”  

“Is anything being lost?” I innocently asked, “in this bulging-influencer-foodie-zeitgeist?” “The writing is suffering,” she replied. “Those who are interested in business are not necessarily focused on the writing.”

Dianne, for whom writing is paramount, comes armed with two degrees in journalism and decades of positions as an editor-in-chief and senior editor at a handful of publications, in addition to being the restaurant reviewer for the San Francisco Weekly (where she misheard   be “edgy” as be “bitchy,” and so a riveting style ensued.)

More riveting still may be Dianne’s childhood table: laden with Bombay-Baghdadi food, Japanese food, Iraqi Jewish food, and Chinese food. Curious? Her parents, Orthodox Iraqi Jews who lived in China, were obsessed with food, and cooking became a metaphor for identity. Her book is dedicated to them: “For my parents who cooked to remember who they were.” I especially loved hearing about a beloved family dish that was prepared for the Sabbath: Hamin, a multi-layered complex recipe of rice-stuffed chicken with more rice and spices and boiled eggs, gets baked overnight, and then served with radishes and green onion.  But that’s another story for another time.

For now, you may enjoy as a special treat, one of Dianne’s personal favorites – about comfort food and memory

https://www.diannej.com/MediaFiles/MumsComfortFood.pdf

or you can simply devour Will Write for Food, 4th edition, 2021.