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A Vision of Simplicity
"I've got so much energy I don't know what to do with it," she says, while instructing a makeup consultant how to touch up her hair. One of those ongoing projects is her image, less overtly glamorous than girl-next-door. And yet her appearance dazzles. Ray is short, with plenty of soft curves and a wide, toothy smile. Meanwhile, nothing seems to ruffle her.When confronted with the description that she is always cool-headed, she shakes her head in protest. "No, no, I'm an impatient girl -- and not at all like Martha Stewart," she says, wiping a knife blade on her jeans and dumping some garlic into the sauce. "I can't bake, and I can't make a pot of coffee. Besides, I make a huge mess in the kitchen. That's why I have a big dog! But I have a knack for putting things together."
That whopper, delivered with a straight face, makes her the queen of the understatement. Ray not only puts things together, she does so with more panache than a French couturier. Still, she's careful to rub the gloss off it, which may be an unconscious nod to her working-class upbringing.
Between preparations, she pulls a tray of meat out of the refrigerator and begins hurling it into a pot. "This is for my grandpa's Christmas pasta, which I'm going to adapt for the magazine. Everything went into his gravy: pork, spareribs, sausages, veal, grouse, anything he caught the day before."
Rachael Ray was raised in Lake George, New York, under the shadow of the Adirondacks and the watchful eye of her Sicilian grandfather, a father of ten who once worked as a liquor runner to pay for shoes for his kids, and is remembered as "the great cook of the family." Her parents divorced when she was 12, although each contributed individual components to her passion and palate.
"My father, who is from Louisiana, is a great slow-cook," she says. "His gumbo takes three days." But it is her mother, Elsa, whom she credits most for the boundless Rachael Ray persona that looms in the public eye. "I wanted to be just like my mother. She was loud and fierce, a great piece of work. She was four-foot-eleven in stiletto heels, which she always wore, and she did the work of any twelve men."
Ray adopted that Darwinian ethic, then took it on the road, working behind food counters, on kitchen production lines, and as a bus girl and barmaid, always watching, watching, watching. And waiting -- waiting for the right opportunity, no doubt, to stake her own claim.
Predictably, she landed in New York City in the early 1990s, "but I got mugged twice within two weeks, so I moved back upstate," where it seemed less threatening to nurse her ambition.
Her patience and persistence paid off. A cooking course she devised to boost sales at an Albany gourmet market proved so popular that a local TV station convinced her to turn it into a weekly segment for the evening news, which quickly blossomed into a series, followed by cookbooks, appearances, a devoted fan base, the works. An empire was born.
Ray maintains her life has been "a total accident," but that is so much blather. There is a savvy, methodical approach to her success, which is personified by her signature cooking. It looks "thrown together" or "simple," as she puts it, on the surface "a total accident," but that's merely a trick to disguise the fact that there is more on the plate than meets the eye. Everything she touches, especially her image, is a vision of simplicity that packs a wallop.
She smiles guilefully as she ladles a mound of Montepulciano chicken on a dish. "Whaddya think?" she asks, with a twinkle in her eye. But she already knows the answer. Its flavors are deep, satisfying and ridiculously complex. "Now I'm gonna simplify it for you," she says, and goes right back to work.
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