The Bizarre Food Combination That Kickstarted Curtis Stone's Passion For Cooking

Chef Curtis Stone was trained in Europe and is currently the proprietor of The Pie Room in Beverly Hills, California, but he first developed a passion for food as a small child in his native Australia. One of his earliest culinary memories involves his grandmother's fudge, which just about any child would enjoy. Another, however, revolves around something that might seem a bit odd to most of us. No, Stone wasn't smitten by Vegemite (one of Australia's most popular snacks that we tasted ourselves), nor was he falling for fairy bread (which is buttered bread covered with colorful sprinkles, or what some call jimmies). Instead, his mom found him noshing on raisins dipped in butter.

Stone, who was just five years old at the time, had figured out how to locate both the butter in the fridge and the raisins in the pantry, and he decided to combine the two. His mom put an end to his unauthorized snack, however, since she didn't want him consuming too much butter. Still, the fact that Stone was able to intuit that these two ingredients would taste good together, without first having tried them, is pretty impressive. Dried fruits like raisins are irresistibly sweet, of course, but the moment seems to have been an early indicator that Stone had an advanced sense of taste imagination that allows a chef to dream up new food pairings.

While our tastes change and adapt over time, some of our earliest food impressions stay with us. Curtis Stone not only named his first restaurant after his fudge-making granny, Maude, but he still retains a fondness for his mom's corn and bacon muffins. He also continues to insist that butter and raisins make for a brilliant flavor combo, and several of his recipes reflect this.

One of these is for a holiday dessert of fruit mince tarts, a dish Stone credits to his mother. The dough is made with half a pound of butter, while the filling calls for more butter, along with both brown and golden raisins, and raisin-adjacent dried currants. His spiced apple pie also includes both of his childhood favorites, since again there's butter in both the pastry and the filling, while raisins are scattered among the apple wedges. Stone's homemade granola once again features butter and raisins (just the golden ones this time, but they're supplemented with Craisins). The butter is combined with brown sugar, maple syrup, and spices to make a syrup that's drizzled over the mixture of rolled oats, nuts, seeds, and dried fruit.