Little Book of Banchan
Little Book of Banchan began the way many beautiful things do: with an unexpected visitor. One quiet morning, an exotic little cat appeared on Rossmore’s doorstep, elegant, mysterious, entirely self-possessed. She moved with the same instinctive resolve Rossmore feels when she is in her kitchen or standing before a blank canvas. Something in her presence cracked open a new world: small, beautiful dishes painted like tiny poems, arranged like a gallery.
The hardbound book-to-be grew from that moment.
A whisper: What if cooking could feel like art?
Another: What if art could feel like cooking, warm, nourishing, intimate?
The encounter pulled her back to her university days in Los Angeles, browsing the Melrose Trading Post and collecting vintage books. She remembered a curious little recipe book from the ’60s that felt as much like art as instruction. That same curiousness resurfaced, like the cat gently reminding her who she really is and what she truly loves, what speaks directly to her soul.
Rossmore has always lived where the sensory and the symbolic meet. Banchan, the small Korean accompanying dishes that turn a meal into a landscape, felt like the perfect medium. Each dish became a vignette, a color study, a mood; each painting, a recipe in its own quiet language. This allowed her to dive deeper into an uncharted realm that somehow felt familiar once encountered. She became enthralled with riffing on banchan recipes to her own culinary instincts.
As the project evolved, even the words began to shift under her brush. Through the Rossmore lens, Little Book of Banchan became, at times, Little Book of Bon Chance, or even Little Book of Bon Chat—a French echo of “good luck,” a playful nod to the cat who started it all. The title drifted, danced, rearranged itself. Until publication, no one could quite know which direction the work would ultimately choose. The lens kept moving. The world kept unfolding.
Little Book of Banchan—or Bon Chance, or Bon Chat—became, in essence, a love letter to life as art: meaningful recipes, soft watercolor palettes, daily style dishes, edible still lifes. It blended Rossmore’s fine art practice with her private cooking rituals, creating a universe where flavors and brushstrokes live side by side, and where one elegant empress cat became the muse for it all.
