About Ruth

When my mother agreed to help me with this blog, she said, “please, no photos of me!”  But, I can’t resist, so here is one of her with me and my father taken a few years ago during a river cruise on the Elbe from Prague to Berlin.  My parents are cute, right?

Ruth is also very modest about her skills in the kitchen.  Yet she is much more than a Cookie Queen and has been preparing full gourmet meals for decades now.  I have distinct memories in the late 1960s of watching Julia Child on our small black and white television on the kitchen counter; I can still hear the show’s theme song bouncing around in my head.  For a long time, my mother kept her large stash of Gourmet magazines, organized chronologically, stored on shelves in the basement.

Starting in the 1970s, my parents and a group of their friends met almost once a month to prepare, assemble and eat meals inspired by recent Gourmet magazine menus – before organizing gourmet dinner groups was trendy.  In the 1980s my mother took cooking classes with Jacques Pepin, “before he was a celebrity chef,” she says.  In the 1990s and early 2000s, Ruth and a few of her friends commuted fairly regularly on the train into New York to Macy’s to take cooking classes from the likes of celebrity chefs Bobby Flay, Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.

Ruth’s Christmas cookies are just one weapon in her vast and varied arsenal of culinary talents.  Next?