"Iconic New York Jewish Food:" June Hersh, Niki Russ Federman, Rozanne Gold

Dear friends:

How wonderful it will be to see you at this upcoming event at the Eldridge Street Museum -- one of the most alluring and historical museums in the city. Seeing Kiki Smith's extraordinary blue stained-glass windows is reason enough to come. But here's another temptation: On May 2nd at 6 pm there will be a free event and panel discussion to celebrate the publication of June Hersh's new book Iconic New York Jewish Food. Another powerhouse, Niki Russ Federman, fourth-generation owner of the beloved Russ & Daughters will join us. Together we will acknowledge the moxie of the ingenious immigrants who helped shape the city's culinary streetscape and rejoice in collective memories. Since the event is right before Mother's Day, a signed copy of June's book -- chock-a-block with fabulous recipes -- would be a wonderful gift. Noshes, book signing, and maybe a poem or two from my new poetry collection, Mother Sauce, will add to the festivities. Hope to see you there.

Happy Spring.

Warmly,
Rozanne

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

Mid-Year Food Trends 2021

Happy Summer!  It is mid-way to the year-end food trends report joyfully undertaken by our company, Baum + Whiteman -- a restaurant consulting group dedicated to the creation of immersive food and restaurant projects all over the world. We are excited about the most recent good news! Restaurant sales last month beat all records, besting their previous high recorded in January 2020, just before the Covid pandemic exploded.

With summer travel expected to soar, restaurant sales will continue their upward trend – particularly as vaccinated Americans feel safe about returning to indoor dining.  This surge in restaurant spending seems to accompany a down-trend in retail sales.  That’s probably because consumers have used all the money that the government’s been sending out to purchase almost everything they’ve wanted.  So they’re now redirecting those dollars toward pleasurable pursuits.

However, it’s not all roses.  Next time you visit your favorite restaurant, you’re likely to encounter some startling price rises, and there are three reasons for this.  First, restaurateurs need to replenish their cash reserves after losing about $280 billion since the pandemic’s onset.  Second, shortages of practically everything – from paper cups to chicken wings – are triggering higher prices for restaurant supplies.  And, most important of all, there’s an extreme shortage of labor.  This also suggests that along with higher menu prices, you’re likely in many places to endure disjointed service. (The flip side to that is those who are working seem especially kind and grateful.)

Low wages, tough working conditions and this year’s focus on “worker equity” all have prompted about one-third of restaurant employees to move to different industries – or to move from big cities to places where living is easier and cheaper.  And this labor shortage is occurring as thousands of restaurants are reopening, adding to demands for labor while putting upward pressure on simple hamburgers, lofty rib steaks, or decadent desserts. Value meals, in fact, are disappearing at fast food locations. 

No matter.  The big news is that it’s great to have our restaurants back!

Here are five trendlets for the summer:

-- Boozed-up seltzer, with or without added flavorings.  Most contain about 5% alcohol but they vary up to about 12%, which is the same jolt you’d get from a glass of wine.  They’re for people who are drinking “lighter.”  Keto-maniacs like them.  And they offer cheap thrills.

-- Tajin.  The perfect summer spice mix from Mexico.  You can make your own simple version.  Or buy jars that contain ground mild chilies, dehydrated lime and sea salt. Dip the rim of your Bloody Mary glass in the mix, or sprinkle the stuff on scrambled eggs, roast chicken or, as they do on New York City streets, dip slices of mango in it.  

-- Calabrian chilis packed in oil.  During Covid, house-bound consumers began cooking again, and searching for “interesting” ingredients.  This one, driven by social media, is pretty hot but with lots of flavor.  They’ve gone from esoteric to mass-market in no time – from gourmet shop shelves to Trader Joe’s and Target.

--Upmarket “new Chinese American” takeout. We’re thrilled about the recent New York Times article (6/21/21), “More than Just Take Out” by Cathy Erway, featuring our friends at the growing fast-casual chain NICE DAY by Junzi.

--Devoted watching of “High on the Hog” – a Netflix docu-series illuminating how African- American cooking transformed America (based on the book by Dr. Jessica Harris).

--The global tofu market is soaring and will continue until 2027.  

Buzzwords and favorite bites:

Sake on tap (and sake bars); pistachio-filled croissants at Carissa (in East Hampton); salmorejo (a silky gazpacho-like puree, the color of lipstick – my version is made only with bread, olive oil, ripe tomatoes, garlic and a splash of sherry vinegar); vegetarian Reuben sandwiches made with roasted beets, truffle-infused hot sauce (by Truff); sunflower butter; tonburi, and Friendly’s Forbidden Chocolate ice cream (not kidding).

Will Write For Food

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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.

My New Podcast: One Woman Kitchen

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I’m very excited to share this news! Tomorrow, MouthMedia Network will launch my new podcast “ONE WOMAN KITCHEN” on iTunes, Spotify, and everywhere else you listen to your favorite podcasts. Honored to have such a stellar line-up of guests, including food writer Priya Krishna, L’Artusi pastry chef Jessica Craig, Sofreh restaurateur, Nasim Alikhani and many more. Listen to the remarkable stories of women from all generations who have carved their way into the culinary landscape as innovators and visionaries. Join us! You can subscribe at https://onewomankitchenshow.com/

 

For immediate release:                                                                               May 1, 2019

 

 MouthMedia Network launches new podcast celebrating rising star women in the culinary world

(New York, NY)  Adding to an impressive portfolio of industry-leading podcasts, , MouthMedia Network is thrilled to announce the launch of ONE WOMAN KITCHEN, dedicated to “giving voice” to rising star women in the culinary world.  This inclusive, intergenerational podcast also features the remarkable women who paved the way for them, at a time when women chefs, food writers, innovators and entrepreneurs were anathema in professional kitchens and the food industry in general.

The host and creator of this podcast, in conjunction with the executive producers of MouthMedia Network, is Rozanne Gold, a “living legend,” “the food expert’s expert,” and recently named “one of the most important modern innovators in the food world,” by Julia Child’s biographer, Bob Spitz.  An early influencer on the culinary scene at the age of 23, she was first chef to New York Mayor Ed Koch, and went on to become consulting chef to the Rainbow Room and Windows on the World, two of the country’s largest-grossing and most magical restaurants. A four-time winner of the James Beard Award, the author of thirteen acclaimed cookbooks, and a respected journalist, she is responsible for some of the country’s most enduring food trends – from “cocktails & little meals,” to three-ingredient recipes (she is known as the “mother of minimalism”), Hudson River cuisine, Med-Rim cuisine, and “The Greatest Bar on Earth.” A philanthropist and social activist, Rozanne created a pop-up kitchen in Brooklyn to prepare 185,000 meals for those in need after Hurricane Sandy, purchased Gourmet Magazine’s Library and donated it to New York University, and firmly maintains her prominent role as mentor to many in the food world. She has won numerous accolades for her broadcasts, as guest host for Martha Stewart on Sirius, Joan Hamburg on WOR, and as a guest on WNYC for which she received her fourth James Beard Award.

Gold’s guests are a diverse group of outstanding women – Priya Krishna (food writer/New York Times and the New Yorker), Nasim Alikhani (restaurant owner and chef of Sofreh), and Jessica Craig (Michelin-star pastry chef at L’Artusi) – representing all sectors of the food world, all ages, backgrounds, and experience. Their stories, revealing grit and glamour, success and failure, are inspirational. As are their answers to Rozanne’s final question, “What does ‘one woman kitchen’ mean to you?” The show’s title is a metaphor for what it means to be a woman in today’s food world – each carving out a place in unique and special ways.

MouthMedia Network’s CEO Rob Sanchez says “Having Rozanne Gold join is a monumental step for MouthMedia Network as we launch the first of several shows focused on the importance of good and the rapidly changing food industry. We are excited to have such a powerful leader and visionary with us as we embark on this new journey.”

The podcast airs weekly, beginning May 1 and can be found on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.

It joins MouthMedia Network other  leading shows including AMERICAN FASHION PODCAST, ENTREPRENISTA, and BEAUTY IS YOUR BUSINESS .

ONE WOMAN KITCHEN with Rozanne Gold plans broad outreach to all women in the industry and to other women’s organizations.  The podcast also features men in the food world who have supported the great accomplishments of their female colleagues.

About MouthMedia Network

MouthMedia Network fosters great conversations about business, innovation, careers, and leading a balanced life through their podcasts and live events. MouthMedia Network develops podcasts that enable business development, connect audiences, inspire actions, and expand brands, They also work directly with major corporations on internal communication tools, developing podcasts that achieve human resource, training and motivational goals.