I need to give you a little bit of background. I come from what would be considered a pretty normal modern family; Parents divorced when I was young, they have gone through a few marriages each since then and to top it all my father lives on the other side of the world. I have one full brother, but more about him another time. My mother (aka – The Matriarch) and I, have always been quite close. Yes, we have our ups and downs but we have mostly been a bit like brother & older sister in our relationship. In other words a great deal of banter.
One of the many things that I am exceptionally grateful to my Mother for is teaching me to cook. I was very lucky, she was Cordon Bleu trained and we owned 2 restaurants which I had the great pleasure of working in during my younger years. I do love to cook, I love cooking for people and love the peace of making dishes. {As an aside, all the PG team love to cook, one of the reasons we are working on our Culinary Gentleman strand which we will start with some articles in beginning in Easter and working up to our Cook book later this year.}
Anyhow, my Mother is heavily involved with Amateur Dramatics and as a part of fundraising they do Dinner Theatre evenings and a couple of times a year and my Mother does the cooking….with help. I usually get a phone call from her asking what I might be doing a couple of weekends of the year. Which usually means that I will be cooking and helping her out. We usually do two nights of anything between 70 – 100 or so covers each night. It is quite a bit of hard work in a domestic kitchen but the working together is a lot of fun. It is a weird way to bond with you family but it works. I have even roped Mrs F-B into it.
I always make time to do this ‘little favour for you mother’ as she so sweetly puts it. We all need to bond with our family and though its a strange one, it works for us. Whether its with your parents, your siblings, your cousins, your kids or whomever. We all need some family to lend us support. Though family does have to be your blood, in fact a great many cases I know that blood relations are not the family that support you. Family can come in a great many shapes and sizes, from a military brotherhood, a religious group, a group of friends, indeed its a shared group with a common bond. But it takes a step beyond that for a family is a group that shares not only its success and troubles but is there to lean on when you need a hand, whether that’s to cook for a hundred strangers or not.
One of our aims at The Perfect Gentleman is to be that family for men, a place to share and a place to lean. We will over the course of the next year put the flesh on the bones of that plan. But in the meantime, we are here on email, on Social Media, at our courses to be a kind of family. I might be calling on you next year to cook for a hundred people, you never know!
Respectfully yours as always,
PG1
