Sirius XM Podcasts Jacques, I'm looking at your wall of pans behind you.
I don't like to go into the closet and look for pans.
So heat hanging, I think it's aesthetically pleasing.
Those are pots that I use all the time, back, forth, so it's easier.
My wife thinks I have too many pans.
Oh, okay.
Well, your wife doesn't know me.
This is The Sporkful.
It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman.
Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
Long before Alton Brown and Rachel Ray, before Emeril and Ina, Jacques Pepin became a household name as one of America's best-known celebrity chefs, back when that wasn't even a term.
He's been teaching people how to cook for 50 years, since way before food was a whole genre of television.
He's written dozens of books and hosted numerous TV shows.
There is nothing as simple and as good as just a fried egg.
There is a way of doing it.
I mean, my way of doing it.
Not everyone's way, but mine.
A month ago, Jacques turned 90 years old.
In celebration of that milestone, his foundation planned 90 chef-hosted events across the span of an entire year.
His work with his foundation shows that Jacques is still driven by the idea that anyone can learn to cook.
And he's still showing people how, including on Instagram.
What is the key to making a very good instructional video?
What makes some better than others?
If people can really relate to it, I mean, for me, as I say, I'm very to the point there.
I like to demystify it, peeling an asparagus.
You know, so in that sense, I like to break it down and say that's the important part.
And even when I see my video, there is never enough close-up for me.
I say, you should have had a close-up.
They don't really see it.
They don't have to see me.
You want them to show your hands.
Absolutely.
Only my hand.
At the end, if I present the dish, maybe my face would not...
But because you want people to learn.
Yeah, absolutely.
So while most of the top French chefs in America are serving caviar and truffles in white tablecloth restaurants, Jacques Pepin prefers to teach home cooks how to peel asparagus on Instagram.
As you'll hear, he spent a lot of his life defying expectations.
A few years back, I got to go to his house in Connecticut.
We sat down in his kitchen in full view of his glorious wall of pots and pans.
Jacques grew up in Bourg-en-Bresse, near Lyon, during and after World War II.
When he was six, his mother took him to a farm where he would stay for the summer.
When she said goodbye and left, he began to cry.
To comfort him, someone who worked at the farm led Jacques to the barn to milk a cow.
The milk was warm, foamy.
It's his first real food memory.
For Jacques, food was always a source of comfort. even when he got back home.
For me, there is no place more secure than a kid coming back from school to sit in the kitchen.
When I was a kid, you hear your mother's voice, your father, the clink of the equipment, the smell of the food.
Then you eat, then you share.
Those are very visceral memories which stay with you the rest of your life, sharing food the same way.
Soon after that summer on the farm, Jacques began working at the restaurant his parents owned.
He'd wash out wine bottles, peel potatoes.
When he was 13, he quit school and began apprenticing in the kitchen at a fancy hotel in town.
From there he moved from one restaurant to the next, climbing the military-style ranks of French kitchens.
By the time he was just 23, he'd been the personal chef to three French presidents, including Charles de Gaulle.
Jacques was one of the most prominent chefs in the country.
And then you left.
You went to New York, right?
Why?
Well, someone introduced me and said, that man was chef to three French presidents.
The three of them are dead.
So I better leave.
No, Jacques wasn't actually suspected of assassinating any French presidents.
He just wanted something different.
He figured he'd stay in the U.S. for a year or two.
He arrived in 1959, and he definitely found something different.
Oreos, iceberg lettuce, Jell-O.
He loved them all.
He also had his first ever supermarket experience one stop for all his ingredients, instead of five different specialty stores.
Jacques' first job was cooking at Le Pavillon, a famed French restaurant in New York City.
And even though he was still making French food, he found the culture in the US to be less rigid, more open to experimentation.
There was that type of freedom in this, all kind of thing in America that I probably wouldn't have done in France.
And that's why I stayed, you know, I discovered another world.
You will always, if you keep your eye open, learn something different, something new, you know, and that's what makes it exciting.
Soon Jacques had earned such a reputation that he got offered another job cooking for a head of state, this time for President John F Kennedy.
Seems like a plum gig, right?
But Jacques turned it down.
First, he says back then a job like that wasn't as glamorous as you'd think.
The chef was hidden in the kitchen, cooking in anonymity.
I had done that.
I didn't want to do that again.
I was doing things that I had never done, so I didn't want to leave New York.
Jacques wanted to keep doing things he had never done.
So he left Le Pavillon and went to work for Howard Johnson.
Instead of cooking for the president, he'd be cooking for the masses.
Now, you might know Howard Johnson as a roadside hotel chain with those orange roofs.
But in the 50s and 60s, you could eat there, too.
In fact, it was one of America's first big restaurant chains.
At its peak, when Jacques was there, Howard Johnson served more meals than anyone in America except the US.
Army.
Jacques was hired as Howard Johnson's Director of Research and New Development.
In the beginning he spent a few months getting to know the company by working as a line cook at the chain's busiest location off a highway in Queens, New York.
So he went from making cassoulet at Le Pavillon in the heart of the city to flipping burgers with a view of an exit ramp.
In the Howard Johnson test kitchen, Jacques worked with food chemists, something else he had never done before.
He began to blend his French training with American techniques.
He replaced margarine with butter, swapped in fresh onions and potatoes for frozen or dehydrated ones, but he also embraced the microwave and became an advocate for the blender.
He was having fun, experimenting and learning in the kitchen.
We cut the hot dog and you make an incision the long way.
Slice it down the middle the long way.
And then after every quarter of an inch the other way, put it in a skillet that it curl up.
It curl up like a round thing.
Okay, if you're having trouble picturing this.
When you slice a hot dog the long way and then make tiny cuts the short way and you cook it in a pan, the whole thing curls up into a circle.
A curly dog, Jacques calls it.
And we serve that on a bun, a hamburger bun or something.
I saw that.
That's so funny.
There's a brewery near my house on Long Island called Blind Bat Brewery, and that's how they serve hot dogs.
I'm not kidding.
Yes.
They must have seen that somewhere.
Yes, that's so funny.
Many, many years ago.
Wow.
We served it on English muffin or one of those.
That's how they did it on English muffin.
And it's so funny.
I mean, I thought it was very clever and fun to see a different way of doing a hot dog.
Well, I show it with the English muffin.
Maybe they show that.
But my eight-year-old daughter who ordered a hot dog was a little bit confused.
Oh, yeah, right.
She's like, what is this?
It's okay, though.
It's fun.
For Jacques, working in a big chain was new and different.
He loved that.
He also loved the sheer scale of it.
So we did the chicken pot pie, for example.
They put the chicken in cream sauce and so forth.
I started doing 10 pounds of chicken in the kitchen.
Then we did 50 pounds.
We ended up 3,000 pounds of chicken at the time.
We did, you know, 3,000 pounds of bone to do stock.
I learned a great deal about marketing.
I mean, chemistry of food.
As I said, I would never have been able to do those jobs after without the training of Howard Johnson.
In 1970, after a decade at Howard Johnson, Jacques moved on.
But as he said, he took what he learned with him.
Around this time, America's middle class was growing.
People were going out to eat more.
The pace of life was picking up.
There was pressure on restaurants to serve more food faster.
The classic French sauces that take hours or even days to make, it just wasn't practical.
So Jacques opened a restaurant that just served soup.
You ordered at a counter and got your soup with a fresh piece of bread on a tray, cafeteria-style.
Very democratic, as he put it.
The soup restaurant brought together everything Jacques had picked up over the years.
Classic French influence meets mass production meets new technology.
The place was a big success, but Jacques had a falling out with his partners, and it never expanded.
Still, he was prescient.
You can see the seeds of fast, casual places like Chipotle and Shake Shack in his concept.
As he told the New York Times around this period, you have to adapt to modern techniques.
Some stuff is better frozen.
Puff pastry bakes more reliably.
As for the blender, if Escoffier were alive today, I'm sure he would use it.
Yeah, I still agree with that.
I said at the time, it's true.
What do you think drives that evolution?
You don't cook the way you used to cook.
Restaurants aren't cooking the way that they used to cook.
No.
These things are always moving forward.
Culture art habits uh, life itself.
You know the speed to the internet or stuff.
All of that has an influence on the way you live and the way you live as an influence on the way you eat and the way you cook.
To go to the market now, you have pre-washed spinach, you have pre-sliced mushroom, you have skinless, boneless breast of chicken.
You come back, you have a non-stick pan.
You put that together.
You can do the same thing.
Use the supermarket as a prep cook, in a sense may not be the least expensive way of shopping, but certainly, you know it saves you a lot of work.
Coming up.
Before Jacques can figure out his next career move, an unexpected event forces him to leave restaurant kitchens forever.
Then later he tells me the best way to cook spam and we talk more about the creative process in the kitchen and beyond.
Stick around.
Time to cook up some advertisements.
Welcome back to The Sporkful.
I'm Dan Pashman.
And I got to tell you, I love popcorn at the movies.
It's an incomplete experience for me to go to the movies and not eat popcorn.
But not everyone feels that way.
In last week's show I attempt to convince French reporter Samia Bazil, a cinephile who does not think popcorn should be eaten at the movies, that she's wrong, that she should give it a shot.
And Samia goes on a quest to try to find out how popcorn at the movies became a thing at all in the US and in France.
So you basically, your family invented sweet popcorn in France?
We can say it, yes.
Will Samia be won over?
Will I eat popcorn?
Yes to the second one.
You'll have to listen for the answer to the first.
That one's up now.
Check it out.
Now, back to Jacques Pepin.
After his soup restaurant, Jacques had to figure out his next move.
But before he could, he had to change course again.
This time, not by choice.
One day, while driving, he hit a deer.
His car rolled into a ravine and exploded.
Doctors thought he might not be able to walk again, that they might have to amputate his arm.
Jacques' days in restaurant kitchens were over. but in classic Pepin style, he adapted.
He decided to focus on writing and teaching.
He had done a bit of that, but after the accident, it became his focus.
He began traveling around the country, teaching cooking classes.
In 1976 he published his seminal cookbook La Technique, a cooking Bible filled with a novel concept at the time.
Step-by-step photographs.
Instead of recipes, La Technique was like culinary school in a book.
A decade later, Jacques helped start the culinary arts program at Boston University, where he ended up teaching for more than 30 years.
Well, I always like to break down things and teach and understand why to go beyond the recipe.
As a professional chef, you never look at the recipe.
You know, the irony is that when I do a recipe, I start with an idea.
Maybe I write something in a book.
I go to the market.
Oh, they have beautiful mushrooms.
I say, I'm going to do this, that.
So I start with an idea.
And I take A and B and put it in the skillet. then all of a sudden it's different.
I'm reacting to the food.
So I adjust, react, adjust, react.
When I start that recipe, I have total freedom.
I can put anything I want in it.
There is nothing written to it.
By the time I give you the typewritten page, everything is structured and written.
So I could say, on a philosophical level at least, that the fact of writing down a recipe probably destroyed the recipe or the spirit of the recipe.
Right.
I think what you're getting at is that you're more interested.
There's a difference between teaching people a recipe and having them follow the instructions to make a recipe and teaching them how to cook.
That's true.
The recipe work or the way you explain, it doesn't really have to do with you.
It has to do with whoever is listening to it.
Ultimately...
To do a recipe is not to duplicate a typewritten page.
It's to duplicate a taste.
And where the hard part of it comes in for a professional chef that you go there.
It's always exactly the same at the end.
And to have it exactly the same at the end, you have to change it each time you do it.
Because when you do, if you cook a chicken, your chicken won't have exactly the same amount of fat than I am.
You cook on gas, I cook on electric.
You cook on cast iron, I cook with copper.
It's humid, it's not humid.
I'm in a good mood, you're in a bad mood.
All of that somehow are going to change tiny thing in your cooking.
Just as Jacques was really getting into teaching, another new technology came along.
But it wasn't a microwave or frozen pastry crust.
It was a new way to teach cooking, video.
Way back in 1975, Jacques cooked on camera for the first time in a bare-bones documentary.
Now we're going to do a julienne of mushroom.
This goes with the fish again.
In the 80s, Jacques made instructional VHS tapes for people to watch at home.
By the early 90s, he was a fixture on PBS.
He once filmed 105 cooking segments in two days, including maybe his most famous video of all time How to Make an Omelet.
This video still comes up on Reddit or YouTube every now and then, teaching a whole new generation how to properly whisk the eggs.
So it's not like you just stir the eggs back and forth.
You have to go from one hand to the other.
By the late 90s, Jacques had teamed up with another giant of early food TV, Julia Child.
The two had a hit show, Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home.
Today we're going to do soufflés.
And as everyone knows, the heart of the good soufflé is... Egg white, beaten egg white.
And I'm going to do mine in copper.
I beat it faster than the machine.
Well, we're going to see if you're faster than the machine.
All right.
Okay.
One, two, three, go!
From there, Jacques just kept teaching.
He never stopped.
In 2016, he and his family created the Jacques Pepin Foundation, which provides grants to community kitchens that train people who may struggle getting jobs, like those who have been incarcerated or unhoused.
Jacques has also never stopped learning.
In his recent cookbooks he has recipes for fish, tacos and vegetable spring rolls, right alongside recipes for French dishes like raspberry gratin, which he makes with frozen raspberries.
And, more recently, Jacques embraced another new technology and taken his cooking lessons to Instagram.
Dressed in a well-worn button-down shirt, sometimes with a TV on in the background, Jacques posting videos from his home kitchen.
You know I love hamburger, but I always have a hard time And I have a big mouth putting that in my mouth.
So I'm going to do it a bit differently for you today.
When the pandemic sent many people home and into the kitchen, there was Jacques on Instagram always always always, stressing that you can do this.
A few basic ingredients, use whatever you have around, throw it together.
He did a video for Fromage Fort, a traditional French spread where you just take whatever bits and pieces of cheese you have in the fridge, cut off the rinds, put them in a blender with some white wine and spread it on toast.
Then there was this one where the whole recipe is just spreading some butter and honey on a baked sweet potato.
That's it.
Sweet, buttery, and all that.
Great sweet potato.
Happy cooking.
With help from his daughter, Claudine and his son-in-law Raleigh Wiesen, Jacques posted hundreds of quick and simple recipe videos during the pandemic.
And during that time, his super basic approach took on new importance.
A lot of people turned to food pantries and other assistance programs during the pandemic.
By some estimates, four out of 10 of those people were using those programs for the first time.
So Jacques told me he tried to make videos with ingredients that might come from those sources, things people may not know what to do with.
My son-in-law, he told me, you know, I'm bringing you some food for you to cook with.
Canned salmon, canned chicken, canned whatever, that I've never really used.
He said, that's what they get in their package, you know, so do something with those.
There is nothing wrong with using that, you know, as well as other things.
It's new.
You already learned something.
You can also realize that if you have a good can of two-down oil, a can of anchovies or some good sardine i mean, you know, if i have a tomato i slice, put some sardine on top, a dash of vinegar and olive oil, so i have a great lunch, you know.
So it doesn't have to be complicated.
I hate to throw anything away.
Often i use leftover what my wife used to call fridge soup whatever is left over in the refrigerator wilted lettuce to retrieve it to show people.
I think the part of economy in the kitchen is very, very important.
One of the videos you made during the pandemic to teach people who were getting food from the food pantries was with spam.
Oh, yeah, right.
What's the secret to cooking up some good spam?
You know, it's funny because I remember spam during the war.
In France, we had canned.
My father was in the resistance.
Occasionally.
I guess he could get some kind of a sardine or whatever from American soldier or wherever he could get it.
And we had spam.
And spam, we call it du singe for some reason, monkey meat.
I don't know why we call it that.
But this was a great treat, you know, to have it.
And certainly my mother would do a lot with one can of Spam.
She would extend it with, you know, cabbage or potato, to make a lot about a little bit of that type of protein.
So there I did some steak of Spam by putting a mixture of a bit of honey, a bit of ketchup sugar to glaze it into the oven.
And it's fine.
It's good.
What do you think it is about instructional cooking videos that continues to keep people so interested?
Because it's certainly with social media.
There's only more and more and more of them, and people still love them.
What is it?
Well, I don't know.
The ones who don't like them don't tell me.
So opening an oyster, opening a clam, poaching an egg, sharpening a knife.
All those are very visual.
The manipulation that you do with your hand is very important and very visual.
I mean I take a knife and I take a stick of butter and I'll show you scraping it on top to do a rose with butter.
If I have to explain that in words, it took me a page.
Put your knife parallel to the thing, went after half a page.
What is he talking about?
You see it, you say, oh, yeah, yeah.
The food.
I mean, I used to poach an egg 50 years ago or 80 years ago in France, but you still poach the egg the same way.
So those techniques have been used over and over again, and they don't become obsolete.
The way you poach an egg hasn't changed.
But Jacques says in the years since he was a young chef, he's changed a lot.
And for him, that's not just about cooking.
It's more of a life philosophy.
As a young chef, you tend to add more to the plate, to add, to add, to combine, to add to And, older than I am now you take away, take away.
You know to be left with something more essential and without too much embellishment.
Is it better?
Better or not?
It's not really better or not.
It's different.
I think that's so true.
And I think that's true of the creative process in all different ways.
Yes, probably.
This is probably like a pretentious reference, but like Nietzsche's first book, he said after he wrote it that it was way too wordy.
He was just trying to impress people with how smart he was.
He put as many big words and long sentences in there as he could.
As he got older, it got more and more direct.
That's true.
But I find that in the kitchen culture Certainly doing a dish now there is a kind of minimalism, maybe that I didn't have before.
If I have a good olive oil, I saute that.
I cook it less.
I finish it up.
I say, that's it.
That's enough.
I don't need anything else.
And maybe in the way I dress.
Also maybe in the way I do other things.
I don't really realize, but probably follow that in.
Certainly the way I paint.
Jacques has been painting for more than 50 years.
He likes to listen to music while he does it, have a little wine afterwards.
He paints rural landscapes and farm scenes with lots and lots of chickens.
Maybe images that remind him of the farm where he spent that summer when he was six.
It's interesting just listening to you talk about your creative process cooking, and your art as well.
It's reminding me, I was reading this article about Paul McCartney's new album.
Right, oh yeah, right.
And it talked about it was kind of making the point that for decades now he has sort of just been experimenting.
He'll try this style.
He'll play with that band.
He'll play this instrument.
Then he'll try that instrument.
He's also someone who's dabbled in art.
I think that sometimes there's too much focus on the idea that you have to be like an expert or a specialist at one thing.
And sometimes like a creative life is more just about exploring.
Right.
I mean, there is no ultimate.
You cannot reach and this is it.
You're the greatest.
No, not really.
And someday you're better than another day.
You know, someday it doesn't work too well.
Sometimes, when I start a recipe, the recipe takes hold of me and starts moving in a direction that I didn't think would go.
Likewise with art, maybe even more so with art.
I start painting something, I have an idea, and sometimes it morphs into something quite different.
It's interesting because I look at painting that I did in the 60s and think, I'm kind of amazed.
I would never be able to do that now.
I'm not saying that it's better or not as good.
I'm just saying that I would not be able to do that.
I wouldn't even know where to start to do it this way.
I would love to be able to taste food that I did when I was in apprenticeship 50, 60 years ago.
All you have left is the food memory, which can be very powerful, but you don't know the way it was.
It's true, you don't know the way it was when you cooked that dish all those years ago.
But there are ways to hold on to memories of food and people.
At this point Jacques brings me into his living room, to his walls of bookshelves, floor to ceiling, crammed with sun-faded spines.
I have here, I can show you, I have 12 big books here.
Those books are books of menus.
Jacques pulls one of these books of menus off the shelf.
It's big and heavy, like a high school yearbook.
He flips through the pages.
In 1970 68, something like that my wife and I, when we had people coming to the house, we wrote the menu.
And people signed on the other page, saying funny things or whatever, too.
Jacques and his wife, Gloria, were married for 54 years.
As a young couple, they began a tradition, making books of menus.
When they had people over for dinner, Jacques would write up the menu, all the courses they were serving, and paint decorations on the page.
The book he's showing me is one of a dozen of them, from dinner parties going back 50 years.
He's hand-painted bright red cherries, shellfish, kitchen utensils.
There are finger paintings from when his daughter was four years old.
Each menu is signed by the people who attended the dinners.
I see my mother in it, my two brothers, many people who are gone now are in those books.
Gloria died in 2020, but Jacques continues the menu tradition.
You look at this one, it's Le Bidet, so it's not long ago.
This one was September... Salad niçoise, chicken tenders.
Yeah, 21.
And here is... This is one in... This is just a few days ago.
Creme de champagne, black chanterelles.
Yeah, creme de champignon with black chanterelles.
Champignon, right.
Pork shoulder butt braised with sweet potato.
Petit poids, la française salad shift fruit ice cream, coconut cream pie.
Ooh, coconut cream pie.
This is making me want to write down menus when I have people over and have everyone sign it.
You know, you have kid?
Yeah.
Right.
So, you know, what did your kid eat when he was a year old?
What was the dinner?
His first Christmas, his first Thanksgiving, his second one, his third one.
Oh, I could show you there Claudine doing the menu, growing the little chicken herself for her third birthday with all of her friends.
Sign it there.
She was three years old.
So those are great memory that you cannot-.
I love that when I can see, looking around your home that you have a lot of pictures and some people look through picture books to reminisce.
Yeah, I do too.
I love that you look through menus.
Oh yes, absolutely.
So yes, those are important to me.
How does it feel when you look back through those?
Well, there is a great deal of emotion, sometimes depending on the occasion.
It's a world of memory for those great meals that you share with your friends or your family.
Those books are my whole life.
After that, Jacques put his menu book back on the shelf and I turned off my recorder.
Then he offered me a glass of wine.
Now, I'm not a big wine drinker, but when Jacques Pepin asks you if you want to have a glass of wine with him, you say yes.
He opened a bottle of white and did something that I thought was a huge faux pas.
He put ice in his wine glass and offered me some in mine.
Ice in wine.
I don't think this is how they did it at Le Pavillon.
But let me tell you, it was delicious.
Best wine I've ever had.
And yes, I took a picture of the bottle.
It was Chateau de Roche Sauvignon Blanc 2019, which sells online for 15 bucks.
So I don't think it was the wine.
I think it was the ice.
And since then, I've been drinking white wine on the rocks on the regular.
I ordered at a restaurant and Janie was like, I don't even know who you are.
Then I said, look, I learned it from Jacques Pepin.
Thanks for having me.
And hey, if you want to make menus of your own dinner parties, check out his book from a few years ago called Menus a book for your meals and memories.
He painted the pages and left space on each one for you to fill in your own menus and memories.
Finally, if you want to see some photos from Jacques' menu books, plus his wall of pots and pans and more from our taping, I'll post pics on Instagram.
Follow me there at thesportful.
Next week on the show, I talk with comedian Tom Papa.
We get into the other thing he's famous for, which is baking bread.
And we try out an unusual snack and beverage pairing that might just be the hot new thing.
You'll have to tune in to find out what it is.
That's next week.
While you wait for that one, check out last week's episode with French podcaster Samia Bazil, who doesn't understand why Americans insist on chowing down on popcorn at the movies.
I feel attacked, Samia.
Can she learn to love movie theater popcorn?
That one's up now.
Check it out.
And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
Yes, the SiriusXM app.
It has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage.
Does your podcasting app have that?
And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more.
It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one.
And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXMcom slash Sporkful.
This episode was produced by me, along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O'Hara and producer Johanna Mayer.
It was edited by Tracy Samuelson.
Our engineer is Jared O'Connell.
Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcasts.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
And I'm Rose in Minneapolis, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
