The only other times you get disagreement is when people were weaned, they were brought up on a particular food product, like, for example, Mrs. Butterworth's maple syrup. Which is actually corn syrup, mostly. And sometimes you'll see people pick that over maple syrup, the real thing, because they grew up on it. So food preferences are identified at an early age, as every marketing company knows. Kids' Happy Meals -- the whole concept is to get people to associate a brand of food with a happy memory. So those things do last, sometimes, a lifetime. Or let's say that you have a full tasting, a blind tasting, and then they disappear, but that's when you get disagreements with people. If they ate Campbell's tomato soup every day for ten years, then they might actually like it, although it doesn't taste anything like tomatoes. Q: You're in Boston right now. And that's where the Test Kitchen is. Do you have, mostly, in the Test Kitchen, people who were born and raised and brought up in New England? A: No. We have, actually, most people are probably not indigenous to Boston, no. Q: A lot of the time, in, say, your personal writing, your writing is informed by the fact that you are of that area. A: Oh, yeah. There's no question. I am completely molded by my experience growing up in the summers on a poor mountain farm in Vermont, yes. That's actually true. I'm a born and bred Yankee, yes. Q: Is it that same farm that you still live on, partly, today? A: Same town, different farm. Q: So you live sometimes in Boston and sometimes on the farm. A: We spend, I would say, four months out of the year up in there, and eight months of the year down here, something like that. Q: And what do you get from that contrast? A: Well, I suppose it's like the old Victorian England thing, you know? I mean, people spent six months in the city and six months in the country. I think it's a great combination. In the country, the social structure's very different. The social structure in Vermont is, are you a good neighbor? And that's it. There's no number two. So, how you fit in to the community is all a function of whether you bring somebody food when they're sick, and help them chop their firewood, and etc., etc. In the city, of course, it's a totally different mindset. So, I like both, though. I think they're both stimulating.
Boston does offer a lot of range of stuff. We live in the south end, I can walk to Fenway, I can walk to the theater, I can walk to the restaurants, we can walk to the symphony, so you get all that, and I enjoy that. I belong to a very old-fashioned club in Boston where everyone wears bowties. Q: Everyone wears bowties? A: Well, a high percentage. Still a high percentage of bowtie wearers and everyone sits around and drinks and tells stories and they're actually pretty interesting. You sort of have that very old Boston tradition. I love tradition. It has that too. There are no eating clubs in Vermont that I know of. So it's completely different. And I think that makes for an interesting life. Q: It's good for you, it's good for your kids, to see that sort of difference? A: Well, you know, my wife and I would say that it's good that the kids have manure on their boots for a good part of the season. And then they can come to Boston and go out to see "The Sound of Music," like we did last weekend. So it's a nice contrast. Q: In Vermont, you say, "Are you a good neighbor, do you chop firewood, do you bring people food when they're sick." Are people loathe to bring you food because they worry that you'll -- A: No, actually, what's great about Vermont is people -- they have no interest in your life beyond what they experience. It doesn't matter who you are at all. Donald Trump could move to Vermont and no one would care. So, therefore, what I do for a living is not interesting, nor do they know much about it, particularly. The only place we get invited to dinner is Vermont. Q: In Boston, people are afraid? A: No one invites me to dinner in Boston. Q: Well, they think you'll say, "your knives are dull." A: Well, I would say that. I should say, there's one couple, a French couple, actually, who does invite us over for dinner frequently, and he's actually quite a good cook, but if I didn't like his food he wouldn't care anyway, because's French. It would be my problem, not his. But I've eaten squirrel spaghetti sauce, I've eaten woodchuck stew, I've eaten bear, a lot of venison, and whatever they're serving is what we eat. I've eaten wild turkey pasta dishes. It's good food. Q: As a Vermonter, how do you feel about Howard Dean? A: Well, first of all, I'm not a Vermonter. I wasn't born in the state. And I don't live there full time. So nobody in Vermont would ever confuse me for a Vermonter. So I don't qualify. I've heard him on the radio a lot over the years, in Vermont. I think he's a bright guy, and I like the fact that he actually, most of the time, says what he believes. So he's, in that way, a typical Vermonter. He doesn't parse his words. At least, he didn't use to. So I like him. I don't agree with him all the time, but I like the guy. Q: Do you have political beliefs that you would care to share? A: Yeah, I hate the Democrats and I hate the Republicans. Which is probably typical for most people who live in Vermont. The thing I find curious is, the Republicans are supposed to be the capitalists but the Democrats try to solve every problem with money, which I think is kind of curious. And the Republicans have equal issues. So we should all go out and vote for Arnold or something, you know? It's a joke, anyway, so we might as well make it our big joke. I think it's at the point where it isn't going to get fixed. So you might as well just eat the squirrel on Saturday night and not worry about it. Q: As a person who's intensely interested in food, do you have opinions on agriculture subsidies? A: Well, you know, that was actually interesting, because it was the idiot politicians who stood up - oh, Ventura. Didn't he stand up a couple of weeks ago and say, he made some comment about how we should lift the price caps with agricultural supports! He didn't realize that actually they were supports, they were minimums. I think the problem is that Vermont -- I grew up on a dairy farm, and the dairy farm, obviously, is not there anymore. The next town, there were forty dairy farms, in the forties and fifties, and now there are two. And the problem is that the food industry figured out, a hundred years ago, that you can't make money selling commodity products. That is, you can't make money selling milk. And that's why the food industry turned into the processed food industry. Because you make money on cornflakes, not on corn. Everyone knows that. The problem with most farmers is, they're producing commodity products. If you buy a pint of strawberries, five percent of the cost of the strawberries is the strawberries. Ninety-five percent is the marketing, the slotting allowances in the supermarkets... Q: And the transportation... A: The transportation, and the CFO and the COO with huge stock options and everything else. So I don't think the issue's so much agricultural price supports. I think it's figuring out how to make agriculture the higher-margin business in a capitalist economy. The only way that happens is if people are willing to pay more money for a better product. And Americans today are just starting to do that. I mean, like, organic foods, for example, there is some indication people will pay more for organic foods. Q: When you're in the city, you go to farmer's markets, you try to stick with organic foods? A: Well, we grow on our farm, we actually grow a lot of stuff. We have a root cellar, we have five hundred pounds of pork in the freezer, a thousand pounds of beef, and our own honey, maple syrup, and potatoes and beets and apples, so we grow a lot of that. But otherwise, yeah, I use local people for other stuff. And yes, we do that here or we go to Whole Foods Market and buy organic if we can.
But I think that the way to solve that problem, and I've worked with some farmers in Vermont, is for them to produce a product that people understand is better and will pay more for. There's a company almost in Canada called Butterworks Farm, started by a couple, ex-hippies in the seventies, and they produce the world's best yogurt and cream. It's fabulous. But they have very limited distribution, and are Americans willing to pay for good cream? They don't know the difference between ultra-pasteurized stuff that has no taste and this creamy yellow stuff that these folks produce. Q: They might even be scared of it. A: Yeah, because, you know, "My God, it's not ultra-pasteurized." Q: You did your cooking class at Sur La Table in Berkeley, which I attended. As a person who doesn't know much about cooking, I know about food safety what the mass media have told me, I think, "raw egg equals danger." And then you put egg into a dish that was warm, but not antibacterial-hot, and I said, "aren't you a little worried about eating the raw egg?" And you basically laughed and said, look, risks, tradeoffs. If the thing you think of when you're eating is, "will this kill me," then you're not going to enjoy it. A: Yeah. Statistically, being a pedestrian is a much higher opportunity for dying. So I don't buy that argument. But I think that's how agriculture is going to solve its problems, is by people viewing food as like the new clothes or cars. You pay more for a nice suit than for a lousy suit. But people won't pay more for a better apple. Q: Well, some people can't. A: Yeah, I suppose so. But actually, that's not a true argument, because most people go out and buy processed food. If you want to spend a lot of money on food, buy processed food. Because it's more expensive. So, if you buy raw ingredients that are good, better raw ingredients, you'll save a ton of money over buying processed foods. Q: It's a time tradeoff for most people. They say, "well, it will take more time to make real food, and this processed food takes one minute to heat up..." A: Well, yeah, but it also takes time to raise a family. That's a ludicrous argument. I mean, the fact of the matter is, okay, you don't have four hours a night to make dinner anymore, because both parents are probably working, at least part-time, sure. But you can make a great dinner in half an hour. So I don't buy that. Besides which, you can just go out and get some cheese and some fruit, and a loaf of bread, and have a nice dinner that way. You don't have to have three sides of meat. I think, actually, that is a notion that's been sold to us by the food companies. And the notion is, slaving over a hot stove -- that's pure marketing baloney. Q: It's a straw man? A: It is! Because they're selling you on the notion of spending two or three times what you should spend on processed food. And that's, as I said, since 1917, the food companies have figured this stuff out, so that's what they're trying to do. They're saying "Food is inconvenient. Cooking is inconvenient. You don't want to do anything inconvenient in your life. Do this. Spend more money." So, you could spend a lot less money, and you could do a stir-fry, whatever. You can do lots of things. You don't have to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. But obviously I'm losing this argument, because the trends would always show you that convenience foods certainly aren't going down in sales anytime soon. Q: Do you have an opinion on bovine growth hormone? A: Yeah. I wouldn't eat meat with it, or milk. I don't like it? Q: Does it taste different? A: I don't know the answer. I've never done a blind tasting. But but I would always vote for the natural -- first of all, I sort of object to the concept philosophically. And two, I wish people would spend more time and effort trying to produce things that taste better than to produce things that are lower cost per unit. I mean, the problem is, you do that (BGH), and then you end up with even lower costs for milk. Q: It doesn't solve the problem. A: No, it doesn't solve the problem. It's absurd. It's like these people trying to get the Arctic flounder trout chain into the tomato to create a tomato that actually ships better and has more flavor. Well, the fact of the matter is that it's a transportation problem. You're growing tomatoes in California and shipping them to New York. Well, if you had a more local source of produce, and people actually didn't eat foods that were not indigenous to their part of the country all the time, like raspberries in February, you wouldn't have that problem. It's the wrong problem to solve. The problem isn't how you produce milk more cheaply. The problem is, how do you get people to actually make a decent living producing milk and milk products that actually taste good? I mean, in Europe, people actually care about that. At least, they used to. In this country, nobody ever thinks about flavor anymore. Q: You say no one cares about flavor, but look at the Food Network, look at cooking shows -- A: The Food Network has nothing to do with flavor. That's entertainment. I mean, if you go into any supermarket in America and pick up a tomato, and eat it, that proves my point. Because you cannot find a tomato in any supermarket in America that is worth eating, with occasional exception of maybe a very small tomato, like a grape tomato or something like that. But 98% of the tomatoes in the supermarkets are tasteless. Q: I believe Alton Brown showed a very nice-looking red tomato, and then put it through a vise, and there was no juice coming out. A: Right. So if you go into the markets and taste the food they're selling, you'd have to say that Americans don't care. It's like the old - there are red, green, and yellow apples. Those are the three varieties we have. It's the same thing. People don't know the difference between a good apple and a bad apple. Julia [Child] said that for years.
The job is to educate people to the point where they actually can form their own opinion about whether something tastes -- if you haven't grown up tasting good cream, then you have no point of reference, because you get this white stuff and it says "Cream" on the box. Q: And so this would be a good reason for people to spend more time on farms? The way that you did? A: Yes, but I think that's not possible for most people. I think it would be a good idea for people to use their own head and form their own conclusions. For people to actually have enough personality to form their own opinions about things they buy in the market.
If you're in Italy or France or other places, and you get boeuf that looks ill or something -- for example, a couple of years ago, I went over to Paris with my wife and we spent some time with a family, friends of ours from Boston, with his mother, just south of Paris. He bought some calves' liver, which she made for dinner, which was excellent. But he was disappointed with the cut. He didn't like it. So the next day he marched into the butcher's shop, he gave the guy about ten minutes, you know, an earful about why this was just a crappy piece of calves' liver. And he came out with a big smile on his face. I said, "what did you do?" He said, "Well, I'm, just keeping him honest." That's what they do in France. They complain if the food's not good, if the cheese isn't good or the meat isn't good. Q: Whereas we trust these alleged experts? "Well, if that's the way it is, then that's the way it should be." A: Yeah. There's not a tradition here of people saying, "you know, I just bought that chicken and it wasn't very good." There's no tradition of that because there's no taste memory of saying, "I grew up with a certain food and I know what it's supposed to taste like." This guy's father - they used to come home for lunch. He came home for lunch and his wife had cooked a cut of meat that the butcher had recommended. He took one taste, stood up with a napkin in his shirt, walked four blocks down to the butcher's, put it on the counter, and told the butcher to eat it, because he wasn't going to. But that's very French, is having an opinion. It's sticking to it, and knowing what it's supposed to taste like.
There's no tradition of that in this country, and somehow that has to happen. Because otherwise people will just accept this crap that's being sold. They don't know the difference. If Cook's Magazine tells you what brand to buy, I guess that's helpful, but ultimately, people are going to have to develop their own sense of what's good and what's bad. Q: It was this passion that led you to start Cook's Magazine, which turned into Cook's Illustrated. A: Yeah. Q: Why the name change? A: It's a long story, but it meant, in 1990 -- I had left in '89, Sy Newhouse (?) had purchased the magazine from the Bania (?) group in Sweden. And he had purchased the subscriber list, I believe. And the Bania group had retained the trademark, which expired two years later. So I got the trademark back. But I changed the name for two reasons. One, it was illustrated. That was actually part of the editorial concept. And the other is, I wanted to signal that this was related to the original one, but actually quite different. Because the format was different. There was no advertising. We were going back to the kitchen without doing any of the lifestyle stuff we had done.
I had taken advertising, in the eighties. And I found that not to be, economically or editorially, very satisfying. We weren't able to just stick to recipes. We had to make a stab at doing other things in order to satisfy the needs of advertisers. Q: One reason that I'm so interested in the Test Kitchen is that it is actual science, in a sense. It's food science. Do you have any science background, in the theoretical sciences? A: No. Q: Did you like chemistry in high school? A: No, I hated chemistry. I loved physics, but chemistry was beyond me. Because when I discovered that chemists describe chemistry in a way that's actually not true -- it's not an actual description of what's actually going on, and they give you this model that helps you to understand it, but is actually made up -- when I understood that those molecule diagrams actually bore no resemblance to reality, that's not a very Zenlike approach.
It's not about food science as much as it is about -- food science is very complicated and it's rare that you can actually come to some sort of accurate, definitive statement about what's going on, because there are so many things going on at one time. So there is food science, but it's more a practical demonstration of what works and what doesn't. Then you go and try to figure out why. But it's most important to understand, actually, what happens. That is, if you do x, you get y. So the food science is there, but the more I know about food science, the less I'm comfortable that there are any easy answers. It's very complicated. Q: But you're using the scientific method. A: Yes, that's right. Q: But in a sense, maybe the only part of the scientific method that you're using is -- it's not that you're using it and applying it to science. You're using it and applying it to tastes. You're sort of cutting out the relativism with statistics. A: That's correct. We're using a scientific, blind tasting, progressive method to get from A to B, that's right. Instead of me saying, "this is my favorite meatloaf recipe," we test it forever, using the scientific method, to do trials, like a drug company would. To get to the point where you actually can have a consensus on what recipe is the best. Q: You say in your new book, "The Kitchen Detective," basically, anyone who gets curious about what's going on in a kitchen, anyone who asks why, is a kitchen detective. Do you remember some revelatory moment when you started asking why? A: There were two. The first one: I was about seven years old and I made a chocolate cake out of Fanny Farmer, the seven-minute boiled icing. And the icing didn't work. And, of course, I immediately blamed the cookbook, like any good cook. And I started getting suspicious about recipes. I sort of wondered, "well, maybe it wasn't just me." Then, many years later, I started taking cooking courses, and it's the scalding milk example. I discovered, actually, you don't have to scald milk for making bechamel or veloute. It turns out that, actually, you don't have to scald milk. Q: Now, what is the reason that people who do it give? A: The reason that I spouted for years, that I was told, was, there's an enzyme in the milk that has to be killed by heating, because otherwise it won't thicken properly. I'll list a few reasons why that's absolute nonsense. First of all, milk's pasteurized. So it's already been heated. Q: But what about actual raw milk? A: Well, I did that. I actually went across the road in Vermont, I got raw milk from my neighbor, I brought it over, and it thickened just fine. Cold, raw milk thickens. If you think about a roux, butter and flour, it will thicken water. I mean, chicken stock's basically water, right? That's a veloute. Well, if it'll thicken water, it'll thicken anything. So, that's complete and utter nonsense. The other issue, which I think is actually the more relevant one, is probably, the reason they would scald the milk is, they were pasteurizing it. In other words, the raw milk had bacteria, they were killing the bacteria just for safety reasons. My guess is, that's where it probably comes from, but I don't know for sure. But, whatever it is, you don't have to do it. Q: Are there shows or foods that you simply won't or can't do [on America's Test Kitchen]? A: Well, we like to do foods that people are familiar with, because if you're familiar with pies, and you have a problem with them, you're more likely to be interested in our discussion of how to get from a bad one to a good one. If you're doing a dish no one's made before, then you don't have a problem with it. Therefore, your interest level's probably lower going in.
I will not do fancy chef recipes at home that require too much time and too many steps. We will do practical home cooking. That would be the definition of what we do and what we won't do. Q: The sort of main foods that I tend to see in Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen are, sort of, from American, Italian, and Mexican cuisines, because these are the things that people make at home. A: Yeah. And German and English. Q: Yeah, I was sort of subsuming those -- A: Yeah, you're talking about Northern European plus Italy, plus Mexican occasionally. But Mexican's, though, hard, because Mexican cooking's actually not easy to do at home because you have too many pieces going into most of those recipes. Q: It might seem easy because there are little packets of spice powder, that you can supposedly just sprinkle on the ingredients to get you "Mexican Flavor." A: Or, if you cook a lot of Mexican food, you have a bunch of stuff in your pantry, already made, like Rick Bayless (?) does. So then you're all set. But for most of us -- there is a reason to go out to eat at a Mexican restaurant, or lots of other restaurants, because actually, the food is something you're not going to make at home. Q: Have you ever gotten food poisoning? A: Not that I know of. The Center for Disease Control would probably say, millions of Americans get some faint, mild form of food poisoning every year. They just don't know it. It's probably true that I have. I didn't get poisoned to the point that I was in bed. Q: The thing is, "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." So, I imagine that somebody that finds himself doubled over in pain for a weekend is going to spend more time making sure to wash all the places that raw poultry has touched. A: Yeah, but you know, if you look at the statistics, I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of those cases come from restaurants. You don't see that many cases from home cooks. So the big problem is restaurants. Because restaurants have quality control issues. They have issues with delivering hot food twelve hours a day, or twenty-four hours a day, depending. And they're dealing with large volumes. So that's why hamburger places, or chicken, other things, you tend to run into that. The fact of the matter is, at home, there isn't too much of a problem with that. You don't tend to see that in statistics from the CDC. It tends to be restaurants, are really where you get most of the problems. That doesn't mean you shouldn't worry about it.
When it comes to poultry in particular, I've read statistics that twenty-five percent of all Thanksgiving turkeys have e. coli contamination. So I think you really should be very careful with that. But outside of poultry, I don't think there's a huge health issue here. Q: Are vegetarians safer off? A: Well, they're probably in a bad mood all the time, because they don't -- they're not getting good to eat. But, well, I know a woman, actually, whose daughter ended up aborting her child because she ate organic -- she's a vegetarian -- and the lettuce was grown -- Q: Without pesticides? A: -- in manure that was not composted properly. And she got very sick and she lost the baby. So I don't know. You can find trouble wherever you look for it, I suppose. Q: What, if I may ask, are you reading and watching and listening to? A: I just finished "The Ladies' No. 1 Detective Agency." Q: I just started reading that! A: I love that book! I thought it was one of the best books I've read in years. Q: She's a detective, just like you. A: Well, I've actually spent some time in Africa, and found his description of Africa to be extremely poignant and also accurate. And, also, he has a very spare writing style that I find, which goes with Africa. It was a great character and extremely well-written, and it was full of, like, O. Henry stories. Each of the little cases has a twist in it, which you'll see. I just loved it. I thought it was the best thing that's been written in a long time. It wasn't overwritten. That's sort of like the Tom Clancy phenomenon. A three-hundred-page book turns into a thousand-page book. He, like a good musician, knows what notes not to play. Q: I see that the New Englander values his minimalism. A: Well, the great writers, in my opinion, are minimalists. It's harder to take stuff out than it is to put it in, I think. Q: Is this true of cooking? A: Yeah. Q: At the end of every episode of America's Test Kitchen, you're like, "And it's good. It's simple. Only n ingredients." A: Yeah. I think simplicity is to be honored above all, in most things. So that's my favorite book I've read lately. Q: And how about watching and listening to? A: I do not watch TV, other than the occasional Red Sox-Yankees game. I do watch movies, though. A lot. I do rent a lot. I belong to NetFlix, so I get a lot of old movies. I rented the original Cape Fear, which I'd never seen, with Robert Mitchum, which was a fabulous movie. Gregory Peck. And also, just rented The Best Years of Our Lives. I don't know if you ever saw that. Fabulous. Q: I'm a young whippersnapper, so... A: Well, it's about soldiers coming back from World War II, and discovering that, in fact, nobody likes them very much. It was a very bitter, dark movie. It's a great movie.
And I'm listening to -- I'm a Deadhead, so. Q: You're a Deadhead?! A: Yeah, a major Deadhead. I used to go to every Fillmorese (?) concert, from 1969 to 1973. I followed them around the country. Q: Does your wife know about this? A: Oh yeah. She's a Deadhead too, actually. Q: Is that how you met? A: No, but I think, just because you've had to put up with listening to thousands of hours of Grateful Dead over the years, she probably actually really likes it now. I took my two oldest daughters to see the Dead in Saratoga, New York this year, in June, which was a wonderful experience. Q: You don't watch any TV. So you don't watch other cooking shows, you don't care about the other cooking shows. A: No. I never watch TV. Q: Do you think you make a good show? A: Well, I'm not sure how to answer that. I think we make a show that deals with the issues that people at home really do have with cooking. So it's very practical. I think you learn. There's more information in our show, I think, than any other show, in terms of useful information. I think that's good. And I think the Consumer Reports part of it, with the tastings and testings, is unique and useful to people. So I think, if you want to learn how to cook, we show bad food. Q: Oh, that's great. A: Yeah. Bad food's good. So, I think, from that perspective, it's a very good show, because it's honest. It's useful, and we don't try to bullshit you. We're not saying, "this guy at this restaurant can make it in ten minutes." So, I think, on that level, it's a good show. I don't think we're Emeril. We're not entertaining in that regard. But I think people -- well, it's sort of like a lot of those building/garden shows, where you don't really have to be an entertainer. You just have to sort of know what you're doing. On that level it's a good show. But it doesn't have Julia. Julia, for example, just has this remarkable presence, which is very much larger than life. And I think that's a different thing. I mean, Julia has something that we don't have, which is that remarkable personality. We don't have that, but we do have information. Q: You and the other hosts have quite a bit of rapport. You've been hanging out together and working together for quite a long time. A: Well, that's the strength of the show, other than the information. It's that these are actually the people who work here five days a week, and work in the test kitchen. So I think you get the sense, this is not a bunch of professional actors who came in as talking heads. These are people who know each other and work together, and I think that's the strength of the show, is that it's real. It's not ersatz, we're not trying to entertain you. And I think that comes across in the show, that we know each other and work well together. But it's not -- it's heartening to think that the show, which is doing really well now, is the antithesis of Fear Factor, or Blind Date, or whatever these shows are. It's real people doing something real in a real place. It's a real reality show. That's good. That means there's an appetite for information somewhere, which is good. Q: What's the best compliment you could get from somebody who's experienced your work? A: "The recipe worked." We just had someone write a long email this morning about a recipe that worked. She was very funny. It changed her life!
The best emails or notes are when people say, "I could never cook, and I've always been a failure at cooking, and I started reading Cook's or I watch your show, and now, I actually cook and I like to cook, and the stuff's coming out." And you can see people who are... to change a life is a little bit strong, but, it does give them something, confidence that they can actually do this, and they start doing more of it. That's my goal, of course. I'm insidiously trying to get everybody to go back in the kitchen. At the end of the day, that's what I'd like to have people do. Q: Has anyone ever fallen in love in the Test Kitchen? A: Julia [Collins] actually got married last June to someone who was hired to help prep for the TV show the year before, yes. She met her man on the TV show. Maybe she should have gotten married on Letterman or something. Q: The chocolate shows are full of double entendres. A: Yeah, well, a lot of them get cut, actually. There's a whole lot of stuff that doesn't show up, which is not even thinly veiled. It's fairly R-rated. But our director is kind enough to save us from ourselves, yes. Q: If I could ask you to share an anecdote or two about a prank... A: Well, the one last year, was -- sometimes, as a throw, after a cooking segment, to another segment, we say, "we'll be back in a few minutes," and then take it out of the oven. And I had some surgical gloves and put them on. I think Bridget [Lancaster] was cooking with me. I said, "We'll be back in a few minutes, just enough time to perform a cruel scientific experiment on Bridget." She recovered about an hour later.
And then, I think it was the lemon cheesecake or something, it was the last episode, they replaced all the sugar with salt. They were waiting for me to take a nice big bite, and tell everybody how good it was, which I did. And then, Bridget thought they had actually substituted the good one for the bad one. So she took a big bite. Got a mouthful of salt. There's a lot of stuff that goes on, probably not repeatable. Q: Is there anything else you would like to say? A: Yeah. Turn off your television and go in the kitchen.
It's gonna be interesting to see the next few years, because it seems to me the culture's got people set to twenty years ago. The culture has gotten to the point where it seems like we've run the gamut of the stuff that, now, there has to be a turning to something else, and I hope that cooking embodies some of those things that people will turn to. I'm not sure that's true. But Real Simple Magazine, for example, is doing very well. There seems to be some indications that there will be a shift. But maybe I'm just being an incorrigible optimist. Q: You're incorrigible, at any rate. A: I'm incorrigible. Hopefully incorruptible. But I think you're starting to see people come back to cooking. When I go around the country, I start to see a real enthusiasm for it. And I think it goes beyond sort of a love affair with chefs and flashy lifestyle. I think there's something else going on out there. Hopefully it's the beginning of something new, but people have been saying that for fifty years, probably. Q: I was wondering if you would tell me something that makes you proud of your kids. I like hearing about people being proud of their kids. A: The problem with kids is, of course, before you have them, you have visions of what it's going to be like, and it never turns out anything like that at all. Then you get into intense chaos for a long period of time, hoping that you'll survive at the end of the day. And then, at some point, later on, you notice that one of your kids has actually listened to something you've said, you know, through example. Not what you've said, but watched what you've done. And they end up doing something that makes you proud.
And I can see that with my oldest, my fifteen-year-old. She actually, when it comes right down to it, she will get up at 6:30 in the morning and go feed the chickens and the pigs and pitch in when she needs to. And you see that willingness to work hard when she doesn't have to, after years and years of being slothful and stubborn and everything else. You start to see that. I think that's when I get proud of my kids. When it really comes down to it, they'll pitch in and do the work. They know how to work hard. The one thing we always tell our kids is, "Life isn't fair." And they, of course, don't accept that notion. But when you start to see that they get that, and therefore just do what needs to be done, for me, that's the top of the list. Doesn't happen that often, I admit. But that would be my example.