In Ohio: Sauteing Together

By Michael Demarest

Columbus, the capital of Ohio, calls itself the All-American City. It has indeed produced such All-American institutions as Ohio State and Woody Hayes; James Thurber, who migrated to The New Yorker; John Glenn, of space and the U.S. Senate; George Wesley Bellows, the early 20th century painter-lithographer, who moved east; as well as the Accounting Hall of Fame, which never said "Goodbye, Columbus."

But, though Columbus is Ohio's second largest city--behind Cleveland, ahead of Cincinnati--with a metropolitan population of about 1.1 million, and shows signs of considerable prosperity, it does not have a major symphony orchestra, a notable theater, a ballet troupe, or a big-league art museum. It also does not possess a single tablecloth restaurant of even one-star distinction. If you want a good French dinner, they say, try Maisonette or Pigall's in Cincinnati, a two-hour drive. For topnotch Chinese food, head for Pan-Asia in Cleveland, northeast on the interstate. Some swear that a first-class Northern Italian meal may not be had this side of St. Louis (eight hours away).

It is only natural, therefore, that Columbus people should have taken to gourmet cooking with the gusto of Fellow Ohioan Ulysses S. Grant taking Vicksburg. Ohio State offers for credit classes in French, Italian, German and Chinese cuisine. The International Wine and Food Society has a thriving local chapter, which produces an annual banquet. Cooking classes have lately sprouted in a number of private homes, as well as in a few well-stocked local emporiums such as the French Market and the Cook's Palace.

But the focal point of culinary Columbus is a small, well-lighted school at 1412 Presidential Drive called La Belle Pomme. It is owned and run by Betty Griffin Rosbottom, 37, an energetic Sophie Newcomb graduate from Memphis, whose husband Ronald is a professor of romance languages at Ohio State.

Betty studied cuisine in New Orleans, Philadelphia and at La Varenne in Paris. Her classes range from basic Continental techniques to such entremets as Winner Soups, A Riviera Cookout and Favorites from the French Bakery. She has taken two groups of culinary acolytes on a week-long working pilgrimage to Paris. Last October Jacques Pepin, Charles de Gaulle's onetime chef, author of La Technique and glamour boy of the culinary circuit, came to La Belle Pomme to give an S.R.O. three-day course.

For two days this spring Betty's visiting luminary was Marcella Hazan, the most authoritative exponent of Italian cooking in the U.S. Her two three-hour classes, limited to 25 auditors at $50 each per class, were sold out almost instantly after they were announced. Some applicants had already attended the school that Hazan conducts each year from May to November in Bologna, Italy's gastronomical heartland. Most are Belle Pomme regulars, eager to branch out into the mysteries of pasta, prosciutto, parmigiana, pesce and polio, not to mention savoring Marcella's gelato spazza camino (Scotch-laced vanilla ice cream chimneysweep style, so called because it is topped with finely ground espresso coffee "soot").

There is talk of Cuisinarts and couscous and knives as the group waits for the class to start. Then everybody scribbles away on a clipboard while Hazan ticks off on two big wall maps the different gastronomical and geographical regions of Italy ("We have 6,000 basic recipes"), expounds the secrets of olive oil, flour and cow cheese, goat cheese and sheep cheese. As if photographing each step on their minds, the students crane forward to retain the maestra's skill in boning chicken breasts ("Save the skins!"), her hammering of scallopini, her preparation from scratch of four-egg pasta in just about every form from agnolotti to trofie.

The class visibly cringes as Hazan, puffing on a Vantage, grandly sprays foodstuffs with salt from the box (exclaiming "wirrirriwump!") or dumps ingredients into the pan with a fine disregard for kilos, cups or spoonfuls. "I guess it's like poetry," sighed an English teacher in the class. "First you master the 14-line sonnet, then you go to free verse." Finally, the salivating students get to devour Hazan's three-course meals, washed down with Robert Mondavi's Napa Valley red.

The well-dressed, mostly well-heeled students, including six men, prepare all their own food at home without household help. They range from sophisticated bees fins who have taken expensive courses on the Continent to young marrieds and a couple of high school students, one of whom is considering a career in cooking. Steve and Mary Stover treated each other to a Hazan class as a tenth-wedding-anniversary present. Several students say they regard cooking as a form of therapy. Indeed, one student suffering "a late 20s crisis" was actually referred to the school by her psychiatrist. A young real estate man, Steve Wittmann, became interested in sauces when he was living and studying in Florence and has been an ardent admirer of la buona cucina ever since. One tyro, the sixtyish wife of a retired surgeon, confesses that she had never eaten an artichoke before signing up with Rosbottom.

The feeling in Columbus seems to be: the family that sautes together, stays together. Nancy Doherty, who grew up on a sheep ranch in Oregon and was a nun for eleven years, started dishing chow for shearing crews "as soon as I could reach the top of the stove." Later she served three meals a day for 300 people at a Philadelphia convent. She now caters to three children and a businessman husband, Paul, whose family in Buffalo "never had less than six in help." Attorney Robert Holland, who has 225 cases of wine in the cellar of his house, regards gourmet cooking as a way of shaping "taste in the home." He proudly notes that his son Justin, 6, up and ordered escargots at a recent restaurant meal. Justin is obviously a prime candidate for the school's Kids Are Cooks Too! class.

Inevitably, there is the tense matter of competing and keeping up socially. A few overachievers may irritate the rest of the class by asking questions palpably designed to show off their expertise. (A kind of one-cupmanship?) Most students are sensible enough to check which of their friends have enrolled in which classes, so they do not wind up serving each other the same meals. But one couple who had taken Rosbottom's Summer Buffets course was considerably miffed at being served the exact Belle Pomme menu, from marinated pickled shrimp to frozen lemon souffle, by friends who had not even at tended the class. Says Attorney Jim DeLeone, "These days you have to learn to cook in self-defense."

New friendships often marinate in Betty Rosbottom's aromatic kitchen. So do occasional business deals: one woman sold her condominium through a Pommemate. Mostly, though, as Belle Pomme Teacher Tom Johnson points out, "the school has sharpened tastes and palates in town. They needed to be sharpened." Says Ann Leathery, an amateur sculptor who has been taking courses at La Belle Pomme since it opened in 1976: "Before Betty set up shop, we were getting stagnant in this town, all doing the same things, going to the same parties." Now she routinely prepares specialties like Bourbon pork roast, Haitian lobster and puff pastry for family meals. Joan Stander, a farmer's wife from Urbana, an hour's drive, is no meat-and-taters lady, either. She has attended James Beard's classes as well as Kazan's, and lectures on herbs as a hobby. Diane Cummins, who has taken two cooking courses at Venice's Gritti Palace and signed up with Husband Millard for the Kazan seminar in Bologna this summer, specializes in pasta but also whips up French and Chinese dishes for domestic delectation. "Millard," she confides, "does not eat to exist, he exists to eat." Whenever they visit New York, she comes back "looking like an immigrant, with bags and bags of Atlantic whitefish, Scotch salmon and cheeses from Macy's."

Several couples agree that the process of sharing stove and sink has added a new dimension to marriage. Husbands have even learned to wash up the pots and pans occasionally. On the other hand, one Belle Pomme regular -- and she is probably not alone -- admits that she attends class solely for the exotic meals that come at the end of each lesson. "I'm not a gourmet cook," she explains. "I'm a gourmet eater."

--Michael Demarest

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