Airborne Recipes

Radio, once it grew up a little, scampered out of the kitchen as fast as it could. Television, being at the beginner's level, still spends a lot of its time in the kitchen. Most TV recipe shows are as flat as stale beer, but one stands out from the rest like a glistening grape in a flavorless aspic.

To the Queen's Taste (Mon. 8:05 p.m., CBS) is the confection of Mrs. Dione Lucas, a cook who knows her sauteed onions. Last week, from Brooklyn to Baltimore, she had husbands drooling and wives making determined tries at filet de sole Walewska or crepes Suzette. Mrs. Lucas assumes, as most of her rivals hesitate to, that her watchers already know how to boil an egg, and are ready for something fancier.

Mrs. Lucas, who runs Manhattan's Cordon Bleu Restaurant and cooking school, is something of a television sensation. Recently, she had to hire a secretary to handle the mail (900 letters a week after an average program, as many as 1,500 after a particularly tasty-looking dish).

Tricks & Timing. The program is carefully rehearsed, to the last dab of whipped cream, and Mrs. Lucas usually cooks a sample of everything beforehand, so the audience can see how the dishes ought to look, without waiting for them to cook or jell. On the air, Mrs. Lucas does it all over again, explaining her tricks in a no-monkey-business British accent. Her principal television bugbear is common to every kitchen: how to get everything ready at the right moment. Sometimes she has to gloss over the end of her TV bill of fare in a hurry; again, she may have to ad-lib with her eggbeater, in order to fill out the half-hour. "Food is alive," she says. "You never know how it will act."

In seven months on TV, Mrs. Lucas has never burned a cookie or fluffed a line, although she was "frightfully nervous when we did apple pie." CBS has imposed just two restrictions: no emphasis on brandy, rum or cooking wine, and no live food. Mrs. Lucas regards both taboos as utter nonsense: "Why, when we had lobster thermidor, I had to kill the lobsters before the program, and that's most unhealthy, you know." Next week, in the new last-word television studios CBS is opening in Manhattan, Mrs. Lucas will move into a last-word, specially built kitchen.

The Stove-Struck. Mrs. Lucas, who once ran a restaurant in London, arrived in the U.S. in 1942, with two trunks of pots & pans and no money. With borrowed funds and a $40 stove which she "found in a junk heap,"she started the Cordon Bleu. Several thousand students (including such stove-struck celebrities as Harold Lloyd, Joan Fontaine and Nicholas Roosevelt, and many a society girl about to marry) have gone to school in her kitchen. Mrs. Lucas does all the marketing, cooking, teaching and telecasting herself, and writes cookbooks in her spare time (last week she was working on five new ones).

Once a week she takes a night off, often tries out a new Manhattan restaurant, and orders her favorite meal: hamburgers and tossed salad.

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