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 on June 28 at her home in East Marion, N.Y. She was 86.
The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, her daughter Sarah Ross said.
Drawing from a swirl of culinary influences from her youth — Chinese, English, Indian, Malaysian — Ms. 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 she 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 veered from classic Chinese cooking by opening the restaurant Scrimshaw there.
Scrimshaw, which closed in 2016, was 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 restaurant also showcased Italian fare, which she first learned to make while living in Milan and honed under the tutelage of her friend Marcella Hazan, the author of “The Classic Italian Cook Book” (1973).
Doling out cooking tips on the Food Network and the Discovery Channel and in the pages of Food & Wine and Saveur magazines, Ms. Ross fashioned a prominent career in food — a highly unlikely prospect 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,” Ms. Ross said in an interview last year with Northforker magazine. One day while living in London, she added, her husband asked her if she could heat a can of soup.
“I said, ‘Of course,’” she recalled, “and went to the kitchen, washed the label off the can, and put the whole can into a pot of water and boiled it.”
Rosa Maria de Carvalho was born on Aug. 30, 1937, in Hong Kong, which was a British territory at the time. She was the second of six children of Marcus de Carvalho, a stockbroker and a member of one of the oldest Portuguese families in nearby Macau, and Edris (d’Aquino) de Carvalho, a secretary.
After graduating from Maryknoll Convent School in 1953, she went to work as a secretary for British Overseas Airways Corporation, the state-owned airline, before eventually moving to London with her husband, who had taken up a career in advertising.
In 1963, two years after their arrival in London, he took a job in Milan. At a dinner party there, Ms. Ross found herself seated next to to the only other person there who spoke English: Ms. Hazan, who would become known as the “godmother” of Italian cooking in America.
At that point, however, Ms. Ross had little to contribute to a conversation on the topic. “I didn’t know very much about food — I don’t even think I was that interested, frankly,” she recalled in an interview this year on a local North Fork podcast. But as their friendship developed, Ms. Hazan began teaching her the basics of cooking, including her buttery red sauce, which would become famous.
After moving to Los Angeles in 1967, Ms. Ross began to get in touch with the cuisine of her youth by exploring the city’s Chinese markets and restaurants. That quest continued after she moved to New York in 1977, and it evolved into a business after friends told her they were taking classes from Grace Zia Chu, a noted Chinese cooking instructor.
“They told me they learned how to make fried rice with eggs and bacon,” Ms. Ross told Northforker. “I went, ‘You paid money to learn that?’ I soon quit my job to work full time on my cooking classes.”
Wok on Wheels thrived for a decade, branching off into a successful catering business. But after Ms. Ross and her husband settled in the small town of Greenport in the 1990s, she realized that the community was not big enough to support the business, so she decided to open Scrimshaw in a prime space overlooking the harbor.
In addition to her daughter Sarah, Ms. Ross is survived by another daughter, Samantha Ross; her sisters, Raquel Remedios and Monica Oliveira; and two grandchildren. Her husband died in 2012.
Given her expertise in Asian cuisine, most people who knew Ms. Ross were surprised that she tilted in a different direction as a restaurateur. For her, it was never much of a question.
“I wanted an American restaurant, I didn’t want an Asian restaurant,” she recalled last year. “I said, ‘No one is going to pay if you can go and get Chinese takeout for $5. Why are you going to pay $35 for Chinese food?’”
