Kim Carson’s interview withPeter Gethers, author of
My Mother’s Kitchen Today my conversation is with Peter Gethers who is an author, screenwriter, playwright, book editor, and TV/Film producer. Today our conversation is about his book My Mother’s Kitchen: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and the Meaning of Life.
Kim Carson: Thank you so much for talking to me today Peter.
Peter Gethers: Thanks for having me. Just
hearing that description it’s no wonder that I’m tired.
Kim: So this is a memoir about a son’s
discovery that his mom has a genius quality for understanding these really intimate connections between cooking and people and love. So how did that start to unfold and become clear to you?
Peter: It is kind of a memoir in the story of my
mom. It took a lifetime for me to understand it. My mother was a very important person in the food world, which I can get back to, but when she was 85 years old, she had a very severe stroke. And this is when I began to realize just how extraordinary she was, because I was told she was gonna have locked in syndrome and that she’d never be able to speak or move again at age 84. Six weeks later she walked into a Christmas party because she refused to be wheeled in and she was speaking and making jokes and walking and eating of course. And six weeks after that she moved back to her apartment in New York. She was indomitable and food was so important to her that over the last few years of her life I got so interested in how she had become who she had become, which was someone who has a great level of peace with herself. And I thought, this is really interesting to me. I asked her what cooking did for her, I said, did you cook because it gave other people so much pleasure? And she said, no, which really surprised me. She said I cooked for myself. And I said, really,
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what did it give you? She thought about it and she was quite aphasic but finally she came up with the perfect word, she said, it gave me identity. And I realized people who have that sense of identity also have a great sense of comfort. And we’re all looking for comfort. And I said to myself I wanna see how this person became who she became.
Kim: And thus the idea for sharing these stories in your book, My Mother’s Kitchen.
Peter: Yes and I went to her and I said, I
wanna know more about you let’s start with food, because that was really an access point, it was for my mom. I got her to give me her fantasy breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus and I decided I was gonna learn to cook all these things. So over a couple of years, I cooked for her and with her and learned from her. We talked about every possible thing in life from her early days, literally up until the day she died. And we talked about death and all sorts of serious things. It was a remarkably honest relationship and midway through the process I thought, well, I’m not just learning how to cook from my mother. I tell the stories of my learning how to cook which I think are reasonably hilarious because I just bumble my way through them but I get there. I learned about life from her in a powerful and profound way. And I went, this isn’t just a life experience for me. I’m gonna write a book about it. I am a writer after all. So I should share these things. And that’s a long-winded way of how the book came to be
Kim: And your mom, Judy Gethers was a
celebrated cook and cookbook writer. She
was also a mother figure and a mentor to so many different chefs, Wolfgang Puck, Jonathan Waxman and Nancy Silverton. She also ran the cooking school Ma Cuisine teaching right alongside Julia Child. I mean Julia Child with Peter’s her life was mother, Judy Gethers cooking and this all happened later in life.
Peter: She didn’t start until she was 53 years old.
That was her first job. When she took a nonpaying job at Ma Maison to become a good French cook. That was her goal. She worked there three nights a week and they said, we’ll work you to the bone. And a year later she was the mentor to all these chefs and opened up a cooking school and was pals with Julia Child; it was incredible.
Kim: It is incredible. You visited your mom at
least twice a week and I’d like to know what those visits looked like and what did your mom share about food, family, love and how they’re all entwined?
Peter: Everything, because I really wanted
to learn how she achieved this kind of extraordinary serenity when she had so many ups and downs in her life, especially over the
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