Colette Rossant, 91, cook and writer who gave French cuisine a global flourish
Colette Rossant, a native of Paris whose childhood in Cairo before and during World War II gave her a global view of cuisine that eventually helped fuel a prominent career in New York as a cookbook author, food critic, and food memoirist, died on Thursday at her home in Normandy, France. She was 91.
The cause was breast cancer, her daughter Juliette Rossant said.
Ms. Rossant, whom writer Calvin Trillin once called “the cook of my dreams,” made her mark in the mid-1970s when she helped broaden the palate of American food connoisseurs, then dominated by traditional haute French cuisine, by fusing Western cuisine with that of Asia and the Middle East.
Although she was an influential voice in food for decades, she was a late bloomer. After moving to New York City in 1955, when she was 23, she spent nearly two decades teaching French at private high schools there, as well as at Hofstra University on Long Island.
Her career in the kitchen — and behind the typewriter — began in 1972, when she was 40 and started an after-school cooking class with Juliette, who was then 12, and some of her classmates at her town house in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. Two years later, she adapted those playful lessons into a public television children’s show called “Zee Cooking School.” In 1975, she spun off these cooking tips into “Cooking With Colette,” her first of seven cookbooks.
Her best-known offering, “A Mostly French Food Processor Cookbook” (1977), written with Jill Harris Herman, capitalized on the Cuisinart craze of the 1970s. That book, which sold more than 100,000 copies, was brimming with easy-to-make recipes, like brisket of beef with cranberries and green peppercorns and steamed persimmon pudding with brandy sauce, that were “adventurous and inspired without being overly sophisticated,” Ann Barry wrote in a review in The New York Times.
Through her travels in East Asia — as well as her strolls through New York’s Chinatown — Ms. Rossant developed an expertise in Asian cooking, which culminated in another of her most popular cookbooks, “Colette’s Japanese Cuisine” (1985).
By that point, she was also becoming a fixture in the food world of New York, mingling with top chefs and critics.
In a 1981 article in the Times with the headline “The Inspirations of a Global Cook,” Craig Claiborne, the newspaper’s august food critic, wrote that he “found it impossible to refuse an invitation to a Rossant meal, which turned out to be a feast,” including a blend of fresh and smoked salmon christened with rillettes of fish as an appetizer, a roast of veal “cooked to a savory state in milk” and other delicacies.
Ms. Rossant also established herself as a food critic. In 1979, she was hired by New York magazine to write the column “The Underground Gourmet,” a survey of affordable yet adventurous restaurants throughout the city. In the 1990s, she wrote a food advice column for The Daily News of New York called “Ask Colette.”
Ms. Rossant’s prose would eventually take a more literary turn. Following in the path of celebrated food essayist and author M.F.K. Fisher, she wrote three richly evocative food memoirs: “Memories of a Lost Egypt” (1999), later republished as “Apricots on the Nile”; “Return to Paris” (2003); and “The World in My Kitchen” (2006).
Colette Sol Palacci was born on Jan. 18, 1932, in Paris, the younger of two children of Iska Palacci, an Egyptian Jew who was the buyer in Europe for his father's department store in Cairo, and Marceline Bemant, the daughter of a wealthy French business owner.
After Colette’s father had a stroke in 1937 that rendered him paralyzed and blind, the family moved to Cairo to live with her paternal grandparents in their plush Mediterraneanstyle villa.
Despite their material comfort, there were problems. In “Apricots on the Nile,” Ms. Rossant depicted her mother as a self-involved woman who frequently abandoned her to travel. In Cairo, her mother, a Jew who converted to Catholicism, sent Colette to convent school, where the mother superior referred to her as the “little pagan.”
Her escape was the kitchen at home, where the house cook, Ahmet, became a friend and cooking mentor.
After the war, her family returned to Paris, where she studied French literature at the Sorbonne.
In 1955, she married James Rossant, a New Yorker with whom she had fallen in love when she was 16 and he was in college, traveling through France. Fittingly, she wrote, “He fell in love with me on the first evening we met, because I served him the best tomato salad he had ever eaten.”
That same year, the newlyweds set out on an ocean liner for New York, where James Rossant began what would be a prominent career in architecture.
In addition to her daughter Juliette, Ms. Rossant is survived by two other daughters, Marianne and Cecile Rossant; a son, Tomas; and eight grandchildren. Her husband died in 2009.