Sara’s Weeknight Meals: Season 09

Me with Lucila Jimenez

Lucila Venet Jimenez

I don’t want to claim that I am one one of those glamorous model-like cooks that now seem to recall that their grandmothers taught them all they know. Every one in Cuba was exposed to grandmothers, mothers, aunts and nannies and “tatas”. Nothing unusual about that.

What was different about me is that I had a mother that was a frequent flyer to all the cooking classes that she could find and that somehow she took me along and I happily followed. We were both pleasantly plump, as opposed to skinny cooks. Of course many Cuban girls had chosen the schools of home economics (Escuela del Hogar), an excellent idea, by the way, that was part of the pre-1959 school system. In exile, I traded memories and classes with the teachers and survivors such as Ana Dolores Gomez de Dumois, more about her below, and my old teacher Marta Bosque, who died in her nineties and was still cranky.

And I must have learned something when I was able to save myself from starvation when I lived with Margarita Lacedonia Mitchell in Key West. A wonderful woman and my inspiration in many ways, but I had to teach her to remove the covering from the ham before she put it in the oven. But that is all kiddie stuff.

In 1969, I took cake decorating classes at the Lindsay-Hopkins school. It was located in an old building in or near downtown Miami in the NW section. My husband drove me there and studied in the library while I took the classes. With a cousin of my husband and a relative we had a carpool and they took classes with me, along with a Haitian couple who were planning to open a bakery. Why did I do that? By now you can tell that anything having to do with cooking pulls me as a lightbulb pulls the moths.

My real learning happened when I was the apprentice to Ana Dolores Gomez de Dumois. She was kind of like the Cuban version Julia Child and had a TV show of her own. After she came from Puerto Rico she gave cooking classes, but I went beyond that. I stayed as her sort of apprentice for four years, day in and day out, to the point that I helped her with the weekly dinners that she took to the embryonic “Big Five Club”, an enclave of the nostalgic former members of the most renowned country clubs of the old Havana elite . At the end of those four years I helped her put together much of her work and she and I created the first edition of Ana Dolores Cocina con Usted. My name is on the first edition.

Then sometime 1975-76 I took the Wilton cake decorating courses, first to learn and then to teach. I taught for a year or two at the Sears store in Coral Gables.

I also worked briefly for Lawry’s products applying and demonstrating their products in Hispanic dishes.

And throughout all that time I was attending classes all over the place. Some of them in stores and others in more formal cooking school settings, such as Bobby and Carole’s Cooking School that later became Ariana’s Cooking School. In those settings I had the memorable experience of seeing first hand the arts of people such as Julia Child, James Beard, Ken Hom and Jacques Pepin. In the case of Chef Jacques Pepin I took week-long classes with him for ten years. My children came to dread and my husband to love those week-long gastronomic experiences when I practiced everything I learned in the evening.

I started making cakes out of my house in 1987 when my oldest son graduated from high school. When I started doing this, my efforts gravitated more toward the field of pastries. I started attending classes with well-known masters in the field of cake decorating, including Geraldine Randlesome on a cold January in Toronto. I was also enrolled in a course with Colette Peters.

When I opened the business in 1992, I started going to shows and conventions in several places including Las Vegas, Italy and France. While in France I met Sylvain Leroy who was then the Pastry Chef for Valrhona and more recently was the Captain of the US Team at the Coupe du Monde de la Patisserie in Lyon, France. Of course I could not miss that. Sylvain introduced me to Valrhona chocolates and I took a course in their headquarters in Tain-L’Hermitage in France. I also took pastry classes with the Matinox company then very prominent in France. Both Sylvain Leroy and the Matinox technicians came to Miami to teach at our store. Also in France I attended courses at the Lenotre school (Ecole Lenotre) and an observer course at the Ritz-Carlton.

I have been retired from active business activities but I remain as a friend and consultant to Lucila Cakes, the bakery that I founded and which has continued to make the most excellent rum cake in the area, and my husband would say, in the world.

There are two bakeries now and the correct website for the bakeries is:

www.lucilacakesmiami.com