Yeah,

well, certainly where I come from in France, the women are very... very well known and very powerful in the kitchen way before what happened in the last few years here so my mother had a restaurant and i think in my family i count seven or eight restaurants all with women my aunt my cousin my and so forth so yes women were very good in the kitchen and certainly to step ahead between 56, 58 when I was chef to the president in France.

I remember going down to Nantua where my aunt had a restaurant there and getting into the kitchen with her, she'd throw me out, she'd say, get out, use too much butter or whatever.

So, you know, they were not really impressed by what I did at that time and so forth.

So this is what started.

And prior to me leaving home, my mother had a restaurant, so we, of course, worked in In the kitchen, at that time, there was no telephone, no television, no radio.

So we helped in the kitchen, whether it's peeling potatoes or doing one thing or another, coming out of school.

Right.

You fit in.

If you work at a job to stay for a couple of year, you may get involved in, into that type of thing.

But when you work for the day, two days, no.

And remember that at the time the cook was really at the bottom of the social scale.

Any good mother would have wanted their child to marry the lawyer, you know, a doctor certainly not a cook.

So, uh, now we are genius.

I don't know what happened.

That's why I wanted to know why he chose to go back to school, earning his bachelor's and master's degrees from Columbia University in his adulthood.

What is it like learning to cook on that kind of stove, the kind of stove where you can't control the heat, where you can't turn a knob?

Well, it's...

Well, the point is that we didn't have a choice.

You know, that's where you started.

And, uh, it's a totally lost art, you know.

I mean, before it was a big part of the, the training, you know.

Um, and we had a stove with about, in apprenticeship, uh, probably 15 foot long by, uh, eight foot wide, a big rectangle with six hole, you know.

And that you feel that is a failure, possibly of the school, and probably of our larger society, that you're always asking yourselves internally, "Why are we not having and graduating more Black students to become chefs?"

My

son-in-law, he told me, you know, I'm bringing you some food for you to cook with.

Canned salmon, canned chicken, canned whatever is that that I've never really used.

He said, that's what they get in their package, you know, so do something with those.

There is nothing wrong with using that, you know, as well as other things.

It's new.

You already learned something.

And sometimes like a creative life is more just about exploring.