Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 18, 1995 TAG: 9510180023
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Not 104. And not 102.
That should tell you something about the Roanoke Times restaurant reviewer and newly published cookbook author.
She watches what she eats with an eagle - some say, evil - eye.
She has been known, when dining out, to sample a bite of pie and, finding it a tad too sweet or the crust not properly flaked, leave the remaining portion on her plate . . . completely untouched.
She has been known to instill fear in the most seasoned of cooks, one of whom complained in a letter to the editor that she should ``Get a life!''
She has been known to carefully conceal her identity as a restaurant reviewer - even going so far as to arrange for an expense-tab credit card . . . under a fake name.
If you were to write a screenplay starring a restaurant critic, you would want to take Dolores Kostelni out to lunch - and take careful notes.
The archetype critic, she is nothing but precise.
So leave it to Dolores not to publish just any old cookbook on the most ordinary of home-cooked cuisine: the cookie.
Full of exacting recipes and cookie lore from far and wide, ``Cookies by the Dozen'' (Warner Bros., $11) is Dolores' guide for the discriminating cookie-eater - the person who has only the time, inclination (or waistline) to bake just 12 cookies.
Not 24. Not 48. Not even 14.
It started three years ago with Dolores' motherly ``Dial-a-Recipe'' service. Her son, Jeffrey, called her for a recipe for cookies to serve as a dinner party dessert.
He didn't have the time for a standard cookie recipe, which produces an avalanche of cookies. Nor did he have the inclination to put up with the temptation of three dozen leftover cookies.
``This was my finickiest eater, the kid who would hide broccoli and fish under the table, and it would sit there for weeks petrifying before I caught on,'' Dolores recalled recently over breakfast at downtown Roanoke's Angler's Cafe, where she ate two-thirds of her cinnamon-glazed pancake (a positive review).
``He called me and asked if I had a recipe for just a dozen cookies. And I told him, `No, but I can devise something for you.' ''
She went to work that afternoon in her fabulous, restaurant-quality kitchen and came up with the measurements for two cookie standards: the chocolate-chip and the sugar. Yield: 12 cookies.
Several Dial-a-Recipe episodes later, it occurred to her there might be a market for a scaled-down recipe cookbook. A publisher agreed.
Throughout the writing process, Dolores kept copious notes using her voice-activated recorder so as to keep her hands - and her creativity - free.
``Chefs don't write things down,'' she says. ```They create.''
She also kept a meticulous notebook during her frequent travels abroad with her husband, James Kostelni, the president of Bontex in Buena Vista.
An oatmeal Anzac came from a friend in Australia. Her Viennese crescents were inspired by the real Austrian thing.
And Dolores made monthly pilgrimages from her Rockbridge County home to her favorite Jewish bakery in New Jersey - in search of the secret of the almond gazelle (she pronounces almond ``aa-mond,'' with a nasal, Jersey-style A).
``Every bakery I've ever found these in, I've asked the baker how to make these cookies, and all they'd tell me was, `Lotsa almonds.' '' she says. ``I went through a case of almond paste before I finally got the recipe right.''
Dolores comes from a long line of finicky eaters with a flair for fine foods. She remembers the bakery-made fruit pies her family served as a child, and the debates they inspired in her gourmand Italian parents: Was the fruit thickened with cornstarch, flour or tapioca?
And was the restaurant's au jus thickened or reduced?
``My mother made lofty cakes, pies and cheesecakes. And at dinnertime we always talked about these things,'' Dolores, 58, recalled. ``No one else's parents did that.''
According to Dolores's research, cookies have been around forever. ``Probably since the Ice Age, when women figured out they could make something good over the pit fire with honey and grain. Maybe cookies quelled a woman's PMS, I don't know.''
``Now, you can go to any city in the world, particularly Vienna, and cookies have been elevated to a gourmet food.''
While she's enjoys the success of her book - which nabbed the sales perk of being named a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate - Dolores considers her role as a restaurant reviewer the highest honor.
``I absolutely love it,'' she says. ``I'm writing a consumer report. I take it seriously.''
The hardest part, she says, is dealing with the armchair critics who critique her work - fans of skewered restaurateurs, for instance. ``I do have thin skin. It takes me a while to get over'' the angry letters to the editor. ``But I write the facts, I have to tell the truth.''
And, yes, people sometimes think twice before inviting Dolores over for a friendly meal. (We had to ask.)
But never fear. As a guest in someone's house, she always cleans her plate. ``You have to be a good guest,'' she says. Even if she is constantly watching her weight.
To help maintain her girlish figure, Dolores likes to recite, word for word, the saying she once read in Seventeen magazine. She was 11 years old at the time, a boarding-school student, and she weighed 160 pounds. The phrase helped inspired her to shed 50-some pounds, using a diet plan she discovered on the back of a Rye-Krisp crackers box.
``Boys have no propensity toward girls of such immensity,'' the saying went.
``I still eat Rye-Krisps,'' Dolores says, chuckling. ``I mean, they're a good cracker.''
Dolores Kostelni will sign copies of ``Cookies by the Dozen'' at Ram's Head Books, Towers Mall, Roanoke, from noon to 2 p.m. Saturday , and again Oct. 28 at the Washington & Lee University Bookstore in Lexington from 12:30 to 2 p.m.
Roanoke's Books Strings & Things will feature the author Nov. 25 from 1 to 3 p.m. And Roanoke's Books-A-Million will host a signing Dec. 9 from noon to 2 p.m.
Recipes for:
VIENNESE CRESCENTS
TEAROOM BARS
by CNB