A storm has taken the power from half the town, along with several tree branches around her lakefront home. And even though she has tried to bribe power company workers with her butterless chocolate chip cookies, Julee Rosso is still without electricity.
The cookies are lost on this crowd. Guess they don`t know who they`re dealing with: Julee Rosso is co-author of the second best-selling cookbook in the history of publishing, after ”The Joy of Cooking.”
”The Silver Palate Cookbook” (Workman, $9.95) has sold almost 2 million copies. There are nearly 5 million copies in print of the three cookbooks written by Rosso and Sheila Lukins.
Now, three years after their last book, Rosso is shifting her focus. She`s worried about how guests at the Wickwood Inn, in Saugatuck, Mich., which she bought last December, will cope without power.
Bill Miller, her husband of three years, is refueling the generator every hour this Thursday afternoon, and he has been up all night as a volunteer with the fire department.
Even with the hubbub of the storm`s aftermath around her, Rosso, 48, is ready to talk about how she ended up in this small resort town on Lake Michigan after 25 years in New York.
She didn`t wake up one morning in her Greenwich Village apartment and say: ”I`m getting out of here.” Instead, she said, it`s mostly serendipity, a case of her life coming full circle.
Rosso grew up in Kalamazoo, Mich., and graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in history, education and French. Two days after graduation in 1966, she headed to New York, where she worked in advertising and marketing for some of the biggest textile companies in the world. She left as a vice president and advertising director of Burlington Domestics in 1977 so she and Lukins could open the Silver Palate on Columbus Avenue in New York, one of the first gourmet takeout shops in the country.
Out of that came two cookbooks. She and Lukins sold the shop in 1988, and together they wrote their last book, ”The New Basics” (Workman, $19.95).
But it was a personal rather than a professional calling that brought her back to Michigan.
Six Christmases ago, Rosso and her mother, June Rosso, were vacationing in Florence, Italy. Her mother fell, headfirst, off a curb. She was paralyzed immediately and needed emergency neurosurgery. Julee Rosso`s father, Frank, owner of Anchor Chemical Co. in Kalamazoo, had died seven years earlier of an aneurysm.
Her mother`s illness and generous spirit caused Rosso to reconsider her life in New York.
”She has a incredible zest of life,” says Rosso of her mother. ”I saw her charm those Italian doctors, whom she couldn`t even communicate with. She just charmed the pants off of them to the point where this whole entourage would come in and sing `New York, New York,` because they knew it was her favorite song.”
Her mother, still a bridge player and active at 77, caused Rosso to stop and think about what life was supposed to be all about. ”She really, really reminded me that in New York, you get so caught up in stuff . . . that people and fun are the most important things in life. And when I came back here, I remet Bill.”
Bill Miller: The guy with the red-and-white checked hunter`s jacket and a pack of Winstons in his breast pocket. The guy from Holland (Mich.) with the up-all-night look on his face who married the woman from New York in pearls.
And if they look different on this afternoon, Rosso says, they`re also opposites when it comes to personality.
It bothers him that she spends so much money. That she does 12 things at once. That she`s so impractical at times. But they are similar in important ways. ”In values and basic temperament and in what we like to do and how we like to live our lives. It just works.”
Miller, 46, was a builder when they married. They met first in the early
`70s when Rosso came home with some of her girlfriends. Her parents had asked Miller, a welder at the local marina, to drive them all to the lake for dinner.
”And we danced. Bill never got to sit down. He was a terrific dancer. He never had dinner the whole night. He just had to keep five women dancing all the time. And then I didn`t see him for 13 years.”
But Miller kept tabs on Rosso through her mother, who has homes in Kalamazoo and Saugatuck. And the weekend after she`d sold the Silver Palate, Rosso was back in Saugatuck staying with her mother.
Miller popped by for a visit. People still do in Saugatuck. Rosso offered him a glass of wine. ”And then I started flirting unmercifully. I was just terrible. I just sort of threw myself at him. Four months later we were married.”
Even then, Rosso thought, she could manage a long-distance marriage. She`d live in New York and Michigan and be married. But after ”The New Basics,” she`d had quite enough of New York but not enough of sunsets over Lake Michigan. She sold her apartment and moved to Saugatuck full time.
”My biggest surprise is that I never say: `Oh! I`ve got to get to New York!` or `I`ve got to get back to Paris.` I`m real happy here. I love looking at that lake.”
But last summer, Rosso realized that she wasn`t the kind of person who could wake up every morning and have nothing better to do than read a book or go shopping.
So last fall, she and Miller approached their neighbors, Sue and Stub Louis, about buying the 11-room Wickwood Inn. The Louises had opened it in 1981, the first bed and breakfast in Saugatuck.
The Rosso-Millers became owners in December, and the inn pretty much runs itself. They have a solid staff of 10 employees.
The Wickwood Inn is more of a small European-style hotel than a bed and breakfast. ”The dog doesn`t go leaping through the living room,” she says. Each room has its own bath, and Rosso is quick to point out that they don`t live in the house as many innkeepers do. But they`re just five minutes away, and an innkeeper is on duty 24 hours a day.
And there is good food. The Wickwood serves breakfast and, in the evening, hors d`oeuvres.
Weekdays, the staff offers a buffet breakfast: mixed fruit bowl, Swiss oatmeal cereal, house-made granola, fruit salad, muffins and juice. On weekends, they do a bigger brunch of waffles, baked French toast and cheese stratas.
Starting at 6 p.m., they serve at hors d`oeuvres from a repertoire of 30. There are always crudites with a low-fat dip, Chinese ribs, a light salmon mousse, bruschetta and spanakopita (spinach turnovers).
And almost all of this is low-fat, but with plenty of flavor. What isn`t low-fat is made in smaller sizes: the muffins call for coconut, for instance, but they`re miniature. Most of the recipes will turn up in her new book due out this spring from Turtle Bay Books, a division of Random House.
So besides the inn, Rosso truly is doing 12 things, as her husband might say. The book has to be done by December, so she has put her newsletter, Cooks` Notes, on hold for the time being. Meanwhile, she and Lukins write a monthly column for Parade magazine. She does cooking workshops for 500 to 1,000 people as fund raisers for Junior Leagues, art institutes and symphonies.
And then there`s their house, a gorgeous low-slung white cottage with a long front porch and a box of pink impatiens that runs its length. With additions, they`ve doubled the living space, quadrupled the kitchen. Everything but the kitchen is carpeted in pure white berber.
Rosso says this isn`t the place she ever would have thought she`d spend time. When she used to think about living in a small town, it was in the South of France, not the west side of Michigan. ”Saugatuck is real easy to live in,” she says. ”We`ve got interesting people who are very sophisticated people and well traveled and interested in the arts and everything else. But they`re not busy impressing one another.”
All the years she was in New York, her mother used to say that Rosso`s life was too hectic. That her daughter worked too hard and didn`t leave enough time for play.
”My mother was right from the very beginning. She used to say I wasn`t going out dancing enough.”
These days, Julee Rosso dances every chance she gets.
(The Wickwood Inn is booked every weekend until September. But there are rooms available during the week. Call 616-857-1465 or 616-857-1097 for information. Or write to 510 Butler St., Box 1019, Saugatuck, Mich. 49453-1019.)
