Beyoncé’s mother Tina Knowles recalls horrible kitchen accident

Tina Knowles is sharing a story that proves moms really can do it all—even when life quite literally turns up the heat. In her newly released memoir Matriarch, the 71-year-old fashion designer and mother of Beyoncé and Solange opens up about a terrifying kitchen accident that landed her in the hospital with serious burns and a skin graft back in July 2004.

Trying to carry on her own mother’s beloved tradition of cooking big Sunday dinners, Tina was frying fish in a skillet at her New York home while then-husband Mathew Knowles and stylist Ty Hunter were visiting. 

Meanwhile, she was multitasking on the phone with her pregnant daughter Solange, who needed help making chicken using a “cooking bag.” 

Tina walked her through it—well, almost. She accidentally left out one critical detail: putting the bag in a pan before it goes in the oven.

Solange, now 38, called back after dropping the meal, and Tina had a good laugh. But the mood took a sharp turn. 

Right after hanging up the phone, she accidentally hit the handle of the hot skillet, sending its sizzling contents flying straight toward her.

"The oil melted through the stretch of the jeans, then my skin, continuing down through my skin to the muscle," Tina writes in the memoir. 

She described the pain as so intense that she couldn't even scream. The boiling oil had poured down her left leg, causing deep burns. While she lay in agony, Mathew and Ty had no idea what was happening just a room away. 

Eventually, Mathew discovered her, and Ty quickly called 911.

She was rushed to the hospital, where doctors warned that her left leg would end up smaller than her right. Tina lost feeling in her fingers and spent over a week in recovery, undergoing daily procedures to treat her skin, which she called torture.

"Showers of high-powered hoses held on the burnt skin to get the top layer off," she wrote, adding that she could hear fellow patients screaming from the same brutal treatment.

Despite the pain and doctor’s orders, Tina refused to miss her daughter’s big moment. Solange was having her baby shower in Houston the day before Tina’s scheduled skin-graft surgery. 

Determined, she boarded a private plane, attended the shower, and even showed up for a Destiny’s Child photoshoot in New York the next day.

Though her surgery was pushed back due to her whirlwind travel schedule, Tina offered a heartfelt apology to her doctor. Thankfully, the procedure went smoothly.

"Killed that surgery," she wrote proudly, describing how skin from her hip was grafted onto her thigh.