This 11-year-old is a truly gifted cook

CONCORD -- Chloe Rosen has been cooking for about eight years. She has cooked her way through many books, has taken classes, has watched hour upon hour of cooking shows on TV, and has restaurant kitchen experience. Despite all this passion, however, Chloe isn't certain she'll have a career in food. But she has plenty of time to figure that out. She's 11.

Chloe can't remember exactly when she started cooking, but, she says, "There's a picture of me making a chocolate cake when I was 3."

Today, in her family's airy, bright kitchen, she's putting the finishing touches on French onion soup, which has a crusty top of bread and cheese. A casserole of noodles, bechamel sauce, and Gruyere is in the oven. Freshly baked profiteroles, the cream puffs, will be topped later with chocolate sauce. And a chocolate souffle is in the works. This is all for lunch.

She's tweaked these recipes, adding touches such as red onions to the soup to sweeten it and honey to the chocolate sauce. The recipes come from all kinds of books, TV shows, and magazines. As for how often she tries new dishes, Chloe responds, "Like every day."

Family and friends are all enthusiastic about the girl's accomplishments. "Look at this," says mom Addie Rosen, with a bit of exasperation. She opens a drawer brimming with gadgets, including a cherry pitter and a lemon zester. "All of these are things people gave Chloe as presents."

Chloe pulls out another gift, a hand-me-down KitchenAid mixer from one of her mother's friends, and expertly inserts the beaters before starting the souffle.

When Rosen and her husband, Joel, realized that their daughter had real talent in the kitchen, they made a decision to let it evolve but not become stage parents. "We've never pushed her," says her mother, with a combination of pride and bemusement as her pixie-like pig-tailed younger daughter moves around the kitchen in a whirlwind of activity. "She has just always been interested in cooking."

Addie Rosen, who also likes to cook, used to lift Chloe up on the kitchen counter when she was very young so the girl could watch her mom put recipes together. "Maybe that's how it all started," Rosen says. (I knew Addie Rosen in college, but had not seen her in more than 20 years before writing this story .)

Rosen taught Chloe some basic skills several years ago, but now mom acts more as a chauffeur and an assistant, driving Chloe to various cooking-related activities or reaching for things in the kitchen that 4-foot-7 Chloe is too short to get to . The dynamic is apparent: Chloe gives directions with assurance as she puts the finishing touches on the onion soup. "Mom, make sure the oven is on 375," Chloe directs. Then: "Could you take the profiterole dough out of the refrigerator?"

When she's not cooking, Chloe is at Meadowbrook School. After school, the sixth-grader plays soccer, lacrosse, and basketball. She often bakes and cooks for school functions, for her friends, and for her sister, Aliza, who is 15.

Except when she's talking about cooking, Chloe is a bit quiet and shy. But she becomes animated and precise as she describes how she made the bechamel sauce for the noodle casserole. "First I put butter in a pan and melted it and then put flour in and made a roux," she says. Other sophisticated cooking words -- like piccata and gratineed -- pepper her speech.

Chloe likes author and TV cook Ina Garten, known as the Barefoot Contessa, from whom she learned such tips as leaving egg whites at room temperature before beating, and adding cream of tartar to the bowl. Other favorites include Giada De Laurentiis and Alton Brown. And though she's soft-spoken, she has strong opinions. When her mother reminds her that she also likes to watch Rachael Ray, Chloe responds, "But I don't like her recipes."

While other girls her age might be reading teen magazines, Chloe is devouring the latest issues of Gourmet and Bon Appétit. She has subscriptions to both, and also looks over the Baker's Catalogue from King Arthur.

And instead of going to soccer camp over the summer, Chloe went to cooking camp for one week at Create-a-Cook in Newton. "I learned how to chop and peel," says Chloe. Then she corrects herself. "Well, it wasn't really learning, but perfecting."

Because Chloe is always looking for new opportunities to cook, her father asked the owner of a favorite restaurant near her grandparents' home in New Jersey if she could spend some time in the kitchen there.

When she walked into the kitchen at Bay Ave. Trattoria in Highlands, N.J., this summer, "She showed no fear," says chef and owner Joe Romanowski. Romanowski, who also teaches at a local cooking school, says, "For how old she is, she's very much into [cooking ]. You can see the desire."

In October, Chloe's mother asked an acquaintance who tests recipes for Cook's Country magazine if Chloe could visit her at work in the publication's Brookline-based kitchens, the same ones used for the public television show "America's Test Kitchen." The magazine is an offshoot of Cook's Illustrated.

When she met Chloe, Diane Unger, an editor and recipe tester, was a bit taken aback, she says. "I was expecting someone older. " But Chloe helped with a biscuit recipe and "she did everything perfectly," says Unger. "We have interns who don't do as well."

When Unger asked the girl to do the mise en place (measure all the ingredients), Chloe knew exactly what to do. "She wasn't intimidated at all," says the editor.

Chloe might not be sure she's going to have a career in cooking, but she probably has a job waiting for her if she wants it. After watching her in his kitchen, restaurateur Romanowski says, "If she were older, I'd hire her in a minute."