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Good morning!
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(Applause)
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Good morning, everyone!
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(Audience) Good morning!
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Claudine and I are delighted
to be with you this morning
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to be the first one.
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I left home when I was 13
to go to apprenticeship,
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that was in 1949.
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Actually, home was the restaurant
where my mother was the chef,
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I was already in that business.
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In fact, there was 12 restaurants
through the years in my family
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and 12 of them owned by women,
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I'm the first male to enter
that business in my family.
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So I went into apprenticeship from Lyon
where my mother had her little restaurant
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to Bourg-en-Bresse, where I was
[inaudible] a few miles away.
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Prior to that, when we were
about 8-9 years old,
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my mother [inaudible] restaurant so,
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my brother and I before going to school
walk with my mother to the market,
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the St Antoine market
along the Saône river,
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and she would walk the market one way,
about 1/2 a mile, and buy on her way back.
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Buying a case of mushrooms
which was getting dark,
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maybe for a third of the price or less.
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We carried, of course,
we didn't have a car at the time.
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She'd get home and start doing
her vegetables, peeling for the day.
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She did not have
a refrigerator at that time.
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She had an ice box, that is
a block of ice into a little cabinet,
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so she'd have chicken of the day, meat,
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fish, usually, whiting or mackerel
or skate -- inexpensive fish,
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and that she has to use it that day.
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And the day after,
we start all over again.
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Everything was organic,
everything was local.
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The word organic did not exist, really,
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[because] chemical fertilizers
did not exit either,
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or fungicides, insecticides, pesticides,
all that stuff did not exist,
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so everything was, local and organic.
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I went into apprenticeship,
I was 13 years old and, at that time,
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it was very structured,
well, still is to certain extend,
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you got to be there on time,
you got to be clean,
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you have to be willing,
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it's discipline, it's structure,
that's the way a kitchen can work.
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We learn through a type of osmosis.
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The chef never really explained anything,
he'd just say, "Do that".
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And if you say, "Why?", and
he'd say, "Because I just told you".
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That was about the end
of the apprenticeship.
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Probably, just as good
for someone 13-14 years old.
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So, we worked, repeating, and repeating,
and repeating those techniques ad nauseam,
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we were not allowed
to go to the stove for a year.
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So, during that year,
I plucked a lot of chicken,
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eviscerated a lot of chicken,
scaled fish, chopped parsley,
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all of that type of things,
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and then the chef told me,