Behind Every Chef, A Great Woman

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

Behind every great chef is usually a great woman. It can be no coincidence that when asked their inspiration for cooking, so many great male and female chefs will cite a mother or a grandmother. Stereotypical perhaps, but historically the cooking has been relegated to the mother in the family. So it is no surprise that even great male chefs often had their first experience at the stove thanks to the lady of the house. In my life, the story was no different. That’s why this Mother’s Day, it might be nice to cook a little something in return for the very women who made those cooking skills possible.

As a young child, my great grandmother used to travel down from Idaho to California for a month every year, bringing the snow with her in her suitcase. I slept with her in the guest bedroom, which long after she passed was affectionately referred to as “Grandma’s Room.” When she wasn’t telling me stories or taking my sister and me on walks, I could usually be found on a stool next to her in the kitchen, just peering over the counter, trying my hand at whatever she was making that day.

Stories as tall as the peaks of a meringue were told in that kitchen. As she showed me how to use a rubber spatula to scrape filling for a chocolate cream pie into the crust, she would tell the fable of a princess who was chosen over all other girls in the kingdom to marry the prince because she scraped her bowl the cleanest, leaving no waste. I would recall that story many years later in cooking school when the famous chef Andre Soltner, showing my class how to make an omelet, stressed the importance of using your finger to scrape out the bit of egg white that sticks to the inside of the shell so as not to waste. I could picture at that moment Chef Soltner as a young child standing in a kitchen next to a distinguished, apron-clad French grand-mère weaving him a story of a young prince who won a kingdom by proving he could make the biggest omelet by not wasting even the little bit of egg white.

It was from my great grandmother that I learned many of my first kitchen lessons. At her side I kneaded pie crust, but not too much, so that the crust would always be light and flaky. We made cream pie with whipped cream, lemon pies with meringue, strawberry pies with crumbles, and apple pies with two crusts. She must have been doing something right, and taught me something well in that impressionable time, but it still took years before my mother could finally say that my pecan pie had at last surpassed that sticky, butterscotch wonder that that my great grandmother was famous for.

At the teary-eyed departure of my great grandmother in the Spring, I would return to the side of my mother, who was skilled in the kitchen in her own right. From baking with my great grandmother to preparing for nightly dinners with my mother, after years of watching her I learned the values of menu planning and economical grocery shopping.

Those grocery lists, menu plans, and attempts to find the best deals at the grocery store may have seemed like strange habits to a young child. But as an adult doing the same at home or working in a professional kitchen, those early lessons are invaluable. A proper menu plan means everything from fewer trips to the grocery store in your personal life, to making more money working in a restaurant. Knowing how to stretch your dollar with ingredients means surviving these tough economic times at home and in the restaurant. Leftovers that may have hit the trash at home can be transformed into tomorrow night’s dinner, while scraps of beef tenderloin that might have been yesterday’s waste in the restaurant are tomorrow night’s beef carpaccio special. Those chefs that actually listened to those childhood fables of our grandmothers and paid attention to the habits of our mothers, have a much better chance of surviving the cooking world in times like these.

With Mother’s Day around the corner it is nice to remember the contributions of the women in our life who have made our own kitchen success possible. If I was with my mother this Mother’s Day, I would probably make her breakfast, a small thank you for years of her doing the same for me and giving me a great foundation to make it in the kitchen today. If my great grandmother were still alive today, I would probably make her a pie and tell her the reason I have yet to marry the prince is because clearly I haven’t been scraping my bowls clean enough. But maybe with a few more years of practice I’ll finally get it right.

Serves/Makes: 4

• 1 pound strawberries
• 1/2 pound rhubarb
• 1/2 orange, juiced
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon cornstarch
• 1 loaf (14 ounce size) French bread
• 4 eggs
• 1 1/2 cup whole milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 dash cinnamon
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1 cup granola
• powdered sugar (optional)