Rosa Ross, a Hong Kong-born chef "who, despite lacking even basic kitchen knowledge into her 20s, became a noted cookbook author, Chinese cooking instructor and restaurateur on the North Fork of Long Island," died June 28, the New York Times reported. She was 86. Drawing from the culinary influences of her youth--Chinese, English, Indian, Malaysian--Ross began her rise in the food world in the early 1980s by traveling to homes around New York City to provide Chinese cooking lessons with a business called Wok on Wheels.
She published the first of her four cookbooks, 365 Ways to Cook Chinese, in 1994. Ten years later, after moving to Greenport, N.Y., she launched the restaurant Scrimshaw, "an early farm-to-table American restaurant that blended in elements of the Asian cuisine of her youth, including heritage-pork dumplings and duck-confit spring rolls that became the stuff of local legend," the Times noted. The restaurant, which closed in 2016, also showcased Italian fare, which she first learned to make while living in Milan and honed under the tutelage of her friend Marcella Hazan, author of The Classic Italian Cook Book.
Ross fashioned a prominent, if unlikely, career in food after she eloped to London with Ronald Ross, a radio disc jockey from Australia, in 1961. "I was in my 20s when I left Hong Kong and I didn't know how to cook," she said in an interview last year with Northforker magazine.
In 1963, two years after their arrival in London, her husband took a job in Milan. At a dinner party, Ross was seated next to Hazan, the only other person there who spoke English. As their friendship developed, Hazan began teaching her the basics of cooking, including her buttery red sauce, which would become famous.
After moving to Los Angeles in 1967, Ross began to get in touch with the cuisine of her youth by exploring the city's Chinese markets and restaurants. The quest continued when she moved to New York in 1977, and evolved into a business when friends told her they were taking classes from Grace Zia Chu, a noted Chinese cooking instructor. Wok on Wheels thrived for a decade, branching off into a successful catering business.
Ross's other cookbooks include New Wok Cooking: Easy, Healthy, One-Pot Meals; Beyond Bok Choy: A Cook's Guide to Asian Vegetables; and Chinese Healing Foods (with Suzanne LeVert). She also wrote for major food publications, including Food & Wine and Saveur, as well as ghostwrote and tested books for well-known personalities.