What is Cooking amongst the Pots?

Sourcing and preparing food, making it eatable and desirable is one of the oldest and most common gestures in the world. It responds to the need to nourish oneself and others. Cooking can answer to simply an obligation, a daily gesture, a custom..., but it is always a sign of civilisation. Not only a useful gesture. It can be done alongside tiredness, contrariness, unwillingness, a role. And even then it always happens in relationship and is lit up by it. It is enough just to think about what the family would have been, and socialisation too, without the table. Even though it may not be accompanied by a free desire to cook, it cannot be done and lived with indifference because, at the very least, it is dictated to by the spontaneity of nourishing and it takes the path that leads to the other. It is the generosity of the gift. It is historically the female work of civilisation. In my professional experience too, as I have been able to see it personally in restaurant kitchens, the preparation of caterings, in private kitchens, and at home, with women friends, the kitchen is very often, almost always, accompanied by passion. Passion is what separates it completely from the feeling of obligation and service and turns it into special work. Nutrition, taking care, continue to be present, but passion supersedes them. Leaving behind the objective of merely nourshing endows the kitchen with one more meaning, a free and relational value that above all brings energy. It is the link between nutrition and passion that leads the game. A game into which the great cooks, those decorated with awards, be they women or men, also enter. I prefer to say cook rather than chef, because before there were professional or home cooks, none of them were chefs. My mother was a cook and she transmitted to me a living experience, a knowledge not learned at school. The awards were given by me. The plus that the noble and generous action of nourishing needs, passion takes care to add it.