The gourmet governor

MILTON -- A shiny black sedan hurtled down the driveway and stopped short in front of the darkened house. Dinner guests gathered in the gloom watched their host root around in the back seat for the wine.

"I'm late!" Deval Patrick shouted cheerfully, darting into the house. Two friendly Labrador retrievers scooted out the door, tails wagging. Lights came on, and people took off their coats. "Diane is coming with the rest of the groceries," he said.

It is a scenario that would terrify many a host: arriving late for your own dinner party for 12 guests . But the governor-elect seemed utterly unfazed. He loves nothing more than rolling up his sleeves, firing up the stove, and whipping up a feast. In the kitchen, he is a confident man.

Patrick has always worn the apron in the family. He is the one who dashed to the supermarket when his daughter, on her way home from college one night, revealed a craving for corn chowder. He is the one who sauteed, grilled, smoked, and baked for the family's annual Christmas open house until the guest list passed 150 , and caterers were finally summoned. His favorite presents are kitchen implements, and he can rattle off recipes as fast as Emeril can.

"I cook because it is relaxing, it's creative," said Patrick, as he began to sear off a massive quantity of scallops for a risotto Thursday night. "It's also the most social thing I think people do."

But he is just as likely to brandish his saute pan when cooking alone, said his wife, Diane. When they first began dating, she called him one night to see if he wanted to get together. He said he was in the middle of making dinner for himself and invited her over. She arrived to discover the main course was chicken marsala.

"I'm not sure I'd ever had chicken marsala at that point," she said with a laugh. "I was immediately impressed. This is a bachelor living by himself, and that's what he threw together for his dinner."

Which brings us to the reason Patrick learned to cook in the first place.

"I love to eat," he said. "I'm not kidding. That's the main thing."

Finding something good to eat was not always easy when Patrick was a boy; his mother, he said, was a "dreadful" cook. "I don't think I knew that peas were green instead of gray until I was well on," he said. "She had other gifts."

When he was very young, he would help his grandmother make fried chicken and other Southern specialties. Later, at Milton Academy, he found a home away from home -- and culinary inspiration -- with a couple on the faculty: his English teacher, A.O. Smith , and Smith's wife, Aubrey , who was Patrick's Spanish teacher.

The Smiths, who adored cooking, hosted a student gourmet club, which Patrick helped found. Its purpose was not only to offer a break from cafeteria food, but also to provide a place for the students to talk over tumultuous current events, Aubrey Smith wrote in an e-mail last week.

Patrick had his turn being "a shopper, a washer-cutter-upper, a table setter, a chef and a cleaner-upper," she wrote, and the students would talk as Joan Baez or Beethoven's Fifth played in the background.

By his senior year, Patrick was a budding gourmet. His schoolmate, William Speers , recalled their trek to Speers's family's cabin in New Hampshire one Presidents' Day weekend. With a mile hike on snowshoes from the road to the cabin and frozen Squam Lake as their only water source, Speers figured they would bring dried soup and oatmeal. He was mistaken.

"Deval said, 'Let's go shopping,' " Speers recalled. "He bought steak, vegetables. Everything was fresh; nothing was packaged or boxed. It was the first time I ever had Grey Poupon. We ate like kings for the three nights that we were up there."

More than 30 years later, Patrick no longer has to rough it. His kitchen is the home cook's dream, boasting a massive Wolf stove with two ovens, six gas burners, and a large griddle (though he has been known, on occasion, to cook dinner in the fireplace to capture the flavor of wood smoke). The cupboards hold Calphalon skillets and Le Creuset Dutch ovens, and a set of J.A. Henckels knives roosts on the countertop. A built-in bookshelf holds cookbooks of every sort, including M.F.K. Fisher's impressionistic "The Art of Eating."

Normally this time of year, Patrick would be getting ready for a Christmas tradition, directing his family through the day-and-a-half odyssey required to make lobster bisque. But this year, after a 22-month campaign, the family may have other plans.

The long hours on the campaign trail over the last two years took Patrick away from his beloved kitchen -- though he still found time here and there to fix pasta or grilled cheese or omelets for campaign staffers. But shortly after the election he was back at it. Earlier this month, he and his wife invited Lieutenant Governor-elect Timothy P. Murray , Senate President Robert E. Travaglini, and House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi and their wives for a dinner of asparagus soup and osso buco.

DiMasi said he was impressed, but skeptical, when he arrived to learn that Patrick was cooking dinner, so he ventured into the kitchen to verify for himself that the governor-elect was at the stove. DiMasi, a North End resident whose Italian-American family cherishes old-country cuisine, had this to say about the main course:

"It was delicious."

And that was the consensus of the Thursday night dinner guests, who, a little more than an hour after they arrived, were sampling a fresh Caesar salad and digging into the scallop risotta. The chef was pleased, though he conceded, "It needs salt."

Lisa Wangsness can be reached at lwangsness@globe.com.