6117 Oley Turnpike Road
Oley, Pennsylvania 19547
Voice: (610)689-8215
Call: (610)763-4945
Fax:(610)689-8246
PierreDeRagon@personalchef.com
PierreDeRagonpersonalchef.com

Serving Berks, Chester,
Montgomery, Delaware and
Lehigh counties

Meet Personal Chef Pierre DeRagon

I had a great mother..... When I was a very little boy she recognized my love of cooking and gave me the freedom to explore and experiment. She would let me skip school for a day to cook her birthday dinners. I would go through old issues of Gourmet Magazine looking for recipes and spent the day at home, alone, cooking up a storm. She also let me skip school (yes, I actually did graduate) to bake Christmas cookies.

No matter where I lived-- and I lived everywhere-- I cooked and entertained, experimenting and teaching myself technique. When I reached middle adulthood I ceased the transient life and moved back home to Pennsylvania. I began cooking annual Mother’s Day dinners for the whole family, Thanksgiving dinner at my home became a tradition, and the entire clan gathers at my place for Christmas Eve supper.

What Gourmet didn’t teach me, Mama did: “clean up as you cook”.... “time your dishes so everything is done at the same time”. Mama learned from her mother, a genteel southern woman who ran a boarding house during the dark years of the depression. My grandmother fed her boarders three meals a day, seven days a week, and on Sundays anyone could go to her boarding house and get a roast chicken dinner for $ .35.

I think the most important lesson I learned from Mama, watching her as she cooked Sunday dinner, prepared Thanksgiving for hoards, and endlessly entertained on an intimate and grand scale – rarely breaking a sweat-- was that great food, prepared with heart, is the language of love. This is something I have internalized. My food is my gift to those I love. And now it is my gift to you.

The long and the short of it is that I have no formal training as a chef. I am one terrific cook, though, who has studied, teaching myself classical technique by practicing what I read in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and learning by cooking and cooking and cooking.

This is the thing: I love to cook and I’m good at it. People love my food. I think you will too.