From Lady Ralston's Kitchen

Lady Carolyne Lederer-Ralston is a creative cook by nature. She rarely uses cookbooks, preferring to develop her own original, no-waste recipes inspired by diverse sources and cultures, particularly European foodstuffs. Documenting her process with meticulous handwritten notes, some dating back decades, she recreates dishes later in her ‘spirit-filled kitchen’. She keeps copious handwritten notes while she cooks so she can return to the notes promptly to recreate the recipe in proper printed form. Some of her original recipes go back to the 1970s, long before “Gourmet” became the buzzword it is today.

A natural multi-tasker, she balanced a demanding full-time career with preparing full homemade meals daily. Planning and organization (mise en place) are vital to her approach, as is a well-stocked pantry. She includes practical hints within her recipes, and readers often say they feel she’s right there with them in the kitchen – a compliment Lady Ralston cherishes.

Lady Carolyne Lederer-Ralston, her honorary title coming from her architect husband’s philanthropic knighthood, began writing a weekly newspaper gourmet cooking column in the mid-1970s. The Board of Education saw the gourmet columns and asked her to teach an adult night-school course for a new school. Their kitchen wasn’t ready, so Carolyne agreed to teach the classes in her private home. Carolyne, as a hobby, is a food writer and an original recipe developer; while she has two contiguous careers, one for fifteen years as a textbook copy-editor, indexer and dictionary developer, working with international linguists and lexicographers. Since 1980 as an extremely successful realtor, she opened her own boutique real estate company, working alone since 1991, and having a 24% market share in her trading area, all the while she continued to write newspaper gourmet cooking columns.