Pleasure and perfection

When you acknowledge, as you must, that there is no such thing as perfect food, only the idea of it, then the real purpose of striving toward perfection becomes clear: to make people happy. That’s what cooking is all about.

But to give pleasure, you have to take pleasure yourself. For me, it’s the satisfaction of cooking every day: tournéing a carrot, or cutting salmon, or portioning foie gras—the mechanical jobs I do daily, year after year. This is the great challenge: to maintain passion for the everyday routine and the endlessly repeated act, to derive deep gratification from the mundane.