Crawford cooking class starts off with dessert
April 25, 2024 at 1:49 a.m.
When Cara Tannenbaum looked around the Crawford Mansion Community Center kitchen, she saw a group of people from various backgrounds.
A married couple, their houseguest, a mother-daughter pair, a retired educator and this Westmore News reporter stood before her as the first cohort of her free culinary classes at the facility.
Tannenbaum is a professional chef, with 38 years of experience in the kitchen. She taught at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City and has privately catered for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
When she entered a rental agreement with the Town of Rye on Feb. 15 to use the Mansion’s kitchen, part of her deal was to host several cooking classes for the community—at no cost to residents.
She’s expected to do three more classes this year, though the dates and dishes have not yet been determined. On Wednesday, Apr. 17, the seven in attendance huddled around the stainless steel kitchen tables to partake in the first session.
The goal: to bake three different Passover-safe desserts.
Tannenbaum said she’d like to keep the classes relevant to the times they occur. “I want to do these around the seasonal holidays,” she said.
At the start of the lesson, she distributed short, simple instruction packets to her students. Each listed the ingredients and steps required to bake the Passover almond cookies, coconut macaroons and chunky chocolate treats. None of the three were longer than half a page or more than six steps.
The chef described them as “simple enough.”
Blind Brook High School senior Kiera Curran (left) and her mom Jen look to Cara Tannenbaum as she prepares to start the baking lesson.By David Tapia
While two of the recipes were of her own design, Tannenbaum was quick to ascribe the one for coconut macaroons to the chef she borrowed it from.
“Credit is very important when it comes to cooking,” she said at the start of the class. “I have to thank Martha (Stewart) for this one.”
When it came to actually teaching, Tannenbaum gave her students the freedom to put structure into the class.
“We can do this together at the same time or you can watch me and then do it yourselves,” she said.
The seven attendees, split into three groups, decided on the latter.
As expected, the seasoned baking veteran made it all look easy, effortlessly separating egg whites and whisking them to a frothy consistency. However, as this reporter quickly learned, an inexperienced cook could be left with a sore arm from the continuous, resistive movement.
Others, like Glen Avenue resident Ruth Anne Cosgrove and Bola Ahmed, who accompanied Longledge Drive residents Lynn and Alan Lebowitz, were able to show off their skills throughout the lesson.
During a break between dishes, Cosgrove explained she joined the class to build on her culinary knowledge.
“I’m more interested in just talking with (Tannenbaum),” Cosgrove said.
Throughout the lesson, the retired King Street School teacher picked up tips from Tannenbaum, such as freezing egg whites for later use when a recipe only calls for the yolk or keeping hands damp to avoid them getting sticky while pressing almonds into the cookies.
Though Tannenbaum was the center of attention, conversations peppered the room as class participants became more comfortable around each other—a side effect of waiting for equipment and ingredients to be passed around.
Jen Curran and her daughter Keira, of Mohegan Lane, joked that Tannenbaum wouldn’t need a timer when it came to baking and Cosgrove explained how Anne became a family name in honor of her mother.
Everyone in the class quickly learned of Lynn Lebowitz’s love for sweets, keeping an eye out for her wandering hands as she looked to snatch up a snack.
With each step, Tannenbaum drew confidence from her students. Eggs were cracked and separated faster, cookies were doled out onto baking trays more uniformly and this reporter even managed to reduce the mess made when whisking.
As the cookies were cooling, the amateur chefs reflected on their experiences.
Kiera Curran, a senior at Blind Brook High School, said she felt good about her baked goods as her mother nodded in agreement. They had read about the free lesson in this newspaper and decided to try it as a fun way to spend their Wednesday evening together.
When asked how she felt about the class, Ahmed began to respond “good” before Alan Lebowitz jumped in to joke, “No one got hurt,” drawing out a big laugh from the woman. They had received a flyer in the mail, his wife recounted. “Lynn said she wanted to bake, and I said let’s bake,” he recalled.
In the end, each person took home a box of baked goods, completely unaware of which batch they had worked on, as they were all nearly identical—with one exception.
Carmen Konigsbach, who served as Tannenbaum’s sous chef for the class, offered a piece of advice that evening.
“When you’re in a class like this, you should mark your food in some way,” she explained. “You can write on the side with a pen, or have something different from the others.” With that in mind, this reporter was able to bring back his batch of cookies to the Westmore News office, as one cookie was much smaller than the others, identifying it as his work.
Though details for the summer session have not yet been determined, anyone interested in watching a recording of the Apr. 17 class can do so by visiting fb.watch/rFr3yJ9OJH/
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