Hockessin chef simplifies gourmet cooking

Steam curls toward the ceiling from a simmering pot of Italian sausage and kale soup, filling Diana Leitch’s warm kitchen with a rich, zesty aroma.

Her 12 students can’t help but glance in the direction of the mouth-watering smell while Leitch explains the proper way to bruise fennel seeds – with a mortar and pestle.

But Leitch would be the first to say that the best way to learn is by doing – she passes the mortar and pestle to a student and moves on.

The Hockessin gourmet has been teaching cooking classes out of her busy kitchen for 22 years, but the lessons are about more than simply learning recipes – she tries to open people’s eyes to the adventures of cooking.

“You can be so spontaneous in the kitchen,” she said. “I just want people to learn the wonderful tastes of food.”

And Leitch learned from the very best – she studied cooking at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris while living in Geneva, Switzerland, with her husband, Bob, and daughter, Melinda.

Those lessons were rigorous, she said, but one thing she took away is that cooking doesn’t need to be as complicated as people make it.

A fancy cooking school like Le Cordon Bleu puts the focus on tradition at the expense of convenience, she said; they don’t even use Cuisinarts.

Another thing the school doesn’t use is recipes, she said, which can make cooking a bit complicated. During class, a chef might write the ingredients on a chalk board without listing any amounts, Leitch said, leaving it up to the student to figure it out.

Those lessons were both nerve-racking and liberating, she said.

“I realized you don’t have to be stuck to a grid,” she said. “Recipes aren’t the end all be all.”

When the family moved back to the U.S. after five years abroad, Leitch brought those lessons with her, but never intended to become a teacher.

She was talked into teaching by a friend who had already lined up 12 people to take an hors d'oeuvres class in Leitch’s kitchen, she said.

Twenty-two years later, she hasn’t looked back.

“I just get thrilled when I see people light up,” she said. “I give the kind of class I wish I could take.”

That’s not to say there weren’t problems in the beginning, she said.

For one weeknight class, she decided to show the students the entire cooking process for a dinner – from opening the package of veal to serving the finished meal.

“I had to wake up one person. It was 2 a.m.,” she said. “I thought, ‘I have to find a way to streamline this.’”

Now, her classes run like a well-oiled machine as she puts students to work preparing ingredients and gives tips on how to embellish or improve upon recipes.

That doesn’t mean everything always goes smoothly, she said, but she sometimes prefers teaching a class where something goes wrong.

“People can see a chef think fast, which is what you’re supposed to do,” she said.

Her students run the gamut from first-time cooks to gourmet caterers, she said, and she’s never entirely sure who is going to show up.

Leitch’s advice to her students is simple – you don’t need to be a classically-trained chef to have fun in the kitchen and you certainly don’t need to follow a recipe to a “T” to create a delicious meal.

“A recipe is someone else’s idea of what tastes good, so adapt it to suit yourself,” she said.

Meanwhile, the sausage and kale soup is finished, so Leitch gives it one last stir and ladles it into bowls for her students, now sitting around the dinner table, sipping wine and talking about their kitchen heroics.

Each lesson ends the same way -- with a hot meal, a few laughs and, Leitch hopes, a fresh supply of culinary confidence.