“We cooks have the highest intelligence, and we have opinions about everything. Why? Because the qualities we have come to know as ‘taste’ and ‘a deft hand in the kitchen’ are essentially courage, and that is the prerequisite to alchemy: a set of nerves so steely and seasoned, which always know how much garlic, how many chilis, how much salt and pepper to put into each dish, at any second, in any situation, in any city, for every mouth, for every type of hunger.” Your grandmother was also a scientist. She would say, “Cooking is not simply a skill. A cook also needs basic knowledge of physics.”
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