The Art of Living
There’s health and law, science and chemistry, in cooking. So much of it has to do with life.” —Wilma Stephenson
Grill
Power
SHE’S PART TEACHER, part drill sergeant:
“Talk in my class and you’ll give me 50 push-
ups,” says Wilma Stephenson, 64, of the cooking
course she teaches at Frankford High School in
Philadelphia. Many of her students come from
disadvantaged or troubled homes. Yet those who
survive her no-nonsense elective class routinely
win cooking competitions, and her teenage sous-chefs have earned hundreds of thousands of
dollars in college scholarships. Her blue-ribbon
teaching methods were captured in a 2009 documentary, Pressure Cooker. “I work my students to
death,” she says, “but they never give up. They get
out of here and do well.” —Annette John-Hall
