Moncton’s Line Pelletier is Serving Up Family History
Having grown up in a community of mostly boys her age and served in the Air Force, Moncton-based Line Pelletier is no stranger to fighting to excel in male-dominated fields.
Pelletier says she’s found the world of chefs to be no different. As MasterChef Canada’s season 2 runner-up, Pelletier is now developing her own brand, The Saucy Line, and working on a number of projects as she prepares to take her course to become a Cordon Bleu certified Grand Maître.
Pelletier has been awarded a full scholarship by Le Cordon Bleu to complete the course, an opportunity she says is meant to increase the visibility of women in chef positions. Since there are so few women certified Grand Maître Cordon Bleu, she hopes women who see her representing the certification will be inspired to pursue it as well.
“Females in the chef industry have to work twice as hard and they’re not as recognized as a man because in everyday society, it’s usually the woman who cooks the meals,” Pelletier explained. “But if a man can cook, ‘oh my god he’s a chef.’ It’s like a double-edged sword in the sense that women are awesome, phenomenal cooks, but that’s just it. They’re just cooks.”
Pelletier says she has always had to put twice as much effort into what she does to be seen as an equal to the men she’s worked with. But the challenge of someone telling her she cannot do as well simply because she is a woman has motivated her to go above and beyond in anything she does, even when she was young.
“Where I grew up, me and my sister were the only two females,” she said “We were surrounded by boys. All my of my dad’s friends had sons so they’d go to the ball games with their dads. They’d go fishing and hunting with their dads. They’d go because they were boys and my dad didn’t have any sons so I’m the one who tagged along.”
“My dad would always say to the other men and their sons ‘it doesn’t matter if she’s a girl, she can do anything that you guys can do.’ … He would say [to me] ‘don’t let anybody stop you because you’re a girl and don’t let anybody tell you you can’t do something because you’re a girl.'”
“To this day if somebody tells me ‘you shouldn’t do it because you’re a female’ or ‘you can’t do it because you’re a female,’ it just lights a fire under me to want to prove them wrong.”
Pelletier says that while this determination still serves her as a motivator, when it comes to cooking, what motivates her the most is her love of the craft. Pelletier digs deep into her roots for inspiration and puts everything she has into foods that represent her background and her journey to get to where she is today.
“The thing I enjoy the most is to see people’s faces when they eat my food and that I gave them a little piece of myself on that plate and that they’re enjoying it and I always said that I cook with love. So when I make something, I make it with my heart and soul.”
“That’s what makes me the happiest. My fondest childhood memories were about sharing meals together, cooking with my grandmothers, my mom, my dad. The best present I ever got was an Easy Bake Oven at four years old. In my regular jobs that I’ve had, the way that I would de-stress or my therapy was always cooking.”
Pelletier recently created a signature sandwich for Les Gourmandes Cheese Delicatessen and Chocolates shop in Moncton. The smoked duck and brie sandwich with cranberry chutney is crafted using the Chateau de Bourgogne cheese she cherished with her daughters when they were younger as a treat for special occasions and Première Moisson bread they’d all share. The duck is inspired by her own childhood when her father was a hunter and duck and partridge were a regular part of her family’s diet.
Pelletier is now in talks for a television series and is involved in partnerships to create how-to cooking demos. She is also searching for a New Brunswick fashion designer to help create a line of chef jackets especially for women, something she says is constantly overlooked. In December she will appear on the Food Network’s Beat Bobby Flay, the first Canadian to do so.
Pelletier says that if she can inspire even one female chef of the next generation by being strong and outspoken, that will be enough.
“I got an email from Holland College where a woman is in her first year of culinary and they have to do a project on who inspired you to become a chef,” she says. “This girl saw me on [MasterChef] and I guess I inspired her because everyone was telling her she shouldn’t do it because she’s a girl.”
“Just the fact that she went ahead, she’s doing it right now and she’s following her dreams, doing what she wants to do even though people didn’t think she should because she’s a female. If I touched one person that way, for me that’s a big deal.”