THOUSAND OAKS : She Proved Women Belong in Kitchen

Kay Corning remembers the day she met famous French chef Paul Bocuse.

“Women,” he told her, “do not belong in the kitchen.”

The culinary world, Corning said, was--and to some extent still is--a male-dominated one. But that is changing.

Corning was recently elected the first woman regional vice president in the history of the American Culinary Federation, the largest professional chefs’ organization in the country. In four years, she will rotate into the president’s chair for a year and then onto the organization’s board of directors.

Corning, a Thousand Oaks resident, owns Kay’s Gourmet Catering in Westlake Village and has been a federation member since 1975.

“It used to be that the men in the kitchen, they would tolerate you,” she said. “They would tell a woman, ‘If you can pick up that 60-pound slab of meat over there, then I’ll hire you.’

“But today, the younger men chefs, the ones coming up, are quite willing to work with women and respect their talents.”

Corning was a reservations agent for United Airlines before she and her husband moved out to “the boondocks” of Thousand Oaks in 1965. She found the commute too long to handle, she said.

Not long after the couple had moved her husband called with urgent news. Remember that ad in the paper for a pie chef at Du-Pars? he asked her.

“Well, he’d told the manager how I used to make pies for my mother’s resort in Upstate New York, and the manager said he’d talk to me right then,” she said.

Corning rushed over, got the job, and stayed for a year before opening her own pie shop nearby. Soon, the pie shop became a bakery. Then the bakery grew into a catering business.

Corning said she has been involved with the federation since 1975. Five years ago, she accepted a post as the federation’s parliamentarian, in charge of keeping all the rules of order at the meetings, simply because no one else would have the job.

“That’s what gave me national recognition,” she said.

One of her goals as vice president and president of the federation, she said, is to get more women to join. “I think they could learn so much from sitting down next to someone like (renowned chefs) Wolfgang Puck or Paul Prudhomme.”