In a life of many changes and challenges, the one constant for Renée Senne—former owner of the renowned, eponymous Renée’s Restaurant, in Ithaca, New York—has been her passion for cooking.
Addicted from high school to cooking in any place she could cook, even stairwells and other borrowed spaces, she thinks cooking should be a free service. Someone paying her for her passion is as shocking as a price on breathing.
Yet Renée hates household chores. When she was 5, she was assigned household chores. Boys worked outdoors with father and grandfather. Girls were deemed to be right for household chores, to help in the kitchen and to do laundry and vacuuming. It was a division of labor.
Her mother was a genteel schoolteacher, and her father rode motorcycles.
Renée’s early years were spent in Norwich, N.Y., a peaceful, quiet suburb. She remembers the “objective correlatives” of her first nine years: the giant honey locust tree over the house, the neat folds of crisp bed sheets she loved to touch, the aroma of food being prepared at home.
And she remembers two reality checks from those years. She accidentally set fire to a dinner napkin while laying the table. In her determination to avoid prepared mixes and store-bought starters, she used a “Joy of Cooking” recipe to make chocolate cake. It came out dry, and her mother said, “Too much flour.”
She later prepared chocolate mousse from Julia Child’s French cooking. She even tried cooking fresh liver—there was blood all over the kitchen floor and linen.
Renée loved cooking from her ninth year, when the family moved from Norwich to Colorado. It was a big move for her. In Colorado, the grass was not greener, but drier and crisper.
As a child, our chef craved for apple tart, tarts small and large, apple crisps, mushroom soup, mushroom ragout, dry-aged beef, sweet breads, poached fish, croissants, almond paste, coffee, homemade jam, chocolate cake, apricots, fresh glazed. ...
Although she majored in music, the music she heard in the house was drowned by chatter from her two older brothers, one younger brother, and a younger sister. After graduating in music, she taught for a year. After that, music lost and cooking won.
One of Renée’s specialties is wedding cake. The cakes require weeks of concentrated artistic work.
Bea Vo (of Bea’s of Bloomsbury), Renée’s former assistant cook at Renée’s Restaurant, acknowledges in her book the great debt to all that she learned at Renée Senne’s restaurant in Ithaca.
Now Renée has a new turn in her career. Seeing the current epidemic of obesity starting with children, Renée has created an eight-week course on eating for health, which she teaches at Wegman’s supermarket and at her home to small gatherings of dedicated learners. Her classes combine classic high-end gourmet cooking with cooking for health.
She sees that what has resurfaced mysteriously from the palimpsest of memory is a kitchen that is a near relation in appearance to one from a Burgundy Chateau in her Paris years. It has the same floor, the same long table, and is both familial and professional for her classes—an evolving project for her designers.
Renée Senne has come a long way from cooking in borrowed spaces.
