Cooking teacher's glad fat's made a comeback

06/17/2003

By KIM PIERCE / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

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Mary Risley has seen cooking trends swing wildly in the 25 years since she started Tante Marie's Cooking School in San Francisco.

The "fat" years, she says – when people used cheese and butter freely – were fun. But the "lean" years could be exasperating: She'd make a soufflé with one egg yolk and "someone would ask if you could do it with no eggs."

Ms. Risley was in Dallas recently to promote her new book, The Tante Marie's Cooking School Cookbook (Simon & Schuster, $30). The whirlwind visit included an informal stop to reflect on trends with local members of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and Les Dames d'Escoffier.

Before opening her cooking school, Ms. Risley says, she used to give classes in her Chinatown flat, mostly for wealthy San Francisco housewives. "I would read Mastering the Art of French Cooking the night before," she says, staying just a step ahead of her students.

When she opened Tante Marie's in 1979, the majority of her students were people who wanted to work in the restaurant industry.

"Now they're rich kids who have lost their dot-com jobs," she says. "They're coming from a different space." Today's students are not necessarily taking the six-month culinary intensive to learn skills that will land them jobs, she says. "They say, 'Oh, no, it all depends on whether I like what I'm doing.' "

Ms. Risley divides her professional time between her school and Food Runners, an organization she founded in 1987 that distributes perishable food to San Francisco's poor. She was named Humanitarian of the Year for her efforts by the James Beard Foundation and earned Bon Appétit magazine's cooking teacher of the year award in 1998.

One trend she's glad to see: Fat is back.

"In the '70s, a signature dish was camembert dipped in egg and sautéed in butter with sautéed onions on top," she says. "I couldn't cook it for 12 years." People were too worried about fat, cholesterol and salt.

"With the '90s came prosperity and cheese and beef," she says. "We saw fancier and fancier. Small things on big plates."

But the preoccupation with bigger-better-smaller-finer ended when the prosperity bubble burst.

"Today, the lavish spending is gone," she says. "Most of the people in San Francisco are eating at restaurants they can walk to. People are coming to cooking classes because they want to learn comfort food – home-cooking."

She believes young people in particular are searching for something.

She smiles at the thought of these dot-com kids, who "can't wait to show each other how to deep-fry." And although she professes not to understand them, she relishes her role as kitchen mentor.

"I kind of call myself the madame in the whorehouse," she says conspiratorially. "I teach the girls my tricks. Like how to cut a red pepper."

Kim Pierce is a Dallas freelance writer.