The Tradition of Good Taste: An Interview with Jacques Pépin

Even amidst the busy bustle of the farmer’s market where crowds of locals and summer travelers picked through the ripe and colorful produce, his familiar smile drew me straight to him. Indeed, he had already drawn quite a crowd to his little booth off in the shade where he sat signing his new book, Chez Jacques: Traditions and Rituals of a Cook; but it wasn’t the crowd of admirers that gave him away. It was this smile of Jacques Pépin, so familiar and inviting, that instantly helped me to recognize one of the first and most esteemed celebrity chefs of our time.

A resident of Madison, Connecticut, Mr. Pépin lives just minutes away from the town in which I grew up. Throughout my growing up in Connecticut, I had occasionally heard of Monsieur Pépin’s comings-and-goings about town; making celebrity appearances at local epicurean events, signing books at R.J. Julia Booksellers, performing cooking demonstrations at Cook’s Kitchen. I had even spotted him once, late one night on the Shoreline East commuter train. But when I heard that Mr. Pépin would be in person at the Florence Griswold Museum’s annual Connecticut Farmer’s Market, I quickly arranged an interview with him, then jumped on the MetroNorth from New York and made my way home.

Yet despite all of his local fame, Jacques Pépin is not just a local celebrity. He is one of the original celebrity chefs who brought French gourmet cuisine to the United States, and has since taught chefs and ameteur cooks alike about the elegant possibilities that can be had in every meal.

Born in France near Lyon, Mr. Pépin came to the United States in 1959 and soon became a rising culinary entrepreneur and one of the original celebrity chefs. He has accomplished so much throughout his career; from cooking for Charles de Gaulle to cooking with Julia Child, Jacques Pépin is unquestionably one of the culinary greats. But unlike many celebrity chefs of the moment who portray a chef's career as fame, glamour, and glitz, Mr. Pépin has always maintained a sense of humility and realism about working in the kitchen: “You still sweat a lot, and you still work Saturday and Sunday, and you still work 16 hours a day, you don’t make that much money. So you really have to go into that business for the right reason, which is really having the bug and loving what you are doing.”

Now in his early seventies, Mr. Pépin looks as though he could still handle the energy and the stamina required by this life of a chef. On that summer afternoon of the interview, wearing a patterned short-sleeved button-up shirt with his grey hair swept into a dapper coif, Mr. Pépin had the relaxed yet sophisticated air of an epicurean Frenchmen, truly in his element surrounded by food. He welcomed his admirers with sincerity and signed their books with care; even after decades of international celebrity, it seemed as though Mr. Pépin still had an appreciation for these simple rewards of his fame. “I certainly did not go into that business [of being a chef] to ‘become famous,’ because it was totally unheard of until 30 or 40 years ago.”

When Jacques Pépin first started his career, being a chef was not the glamourous career that a culinary career seems to have today with the current obsession with foodie culture. Back then, being a chef was still very much considered a position of service: “At that point, we were quite low on the social scale. Any good mother would have wanted her child to marry a lawyer or a doctor, or to become a lawyer… but a cook? But now, we are genius.”

Being a “genius” is one thing that Mr. Pépin can include on his list of qualifications, not only for his culinary aptitude, but also for business savvy, his ability to translate French cuisine to Americans (and vice-versa), and his academic background in liberal arts. Like any great artist, Mr. Pépin dedicated much of his life to learning all of the nuances of his craft. After beginning in his mother’s restaurant, Le Pélican, at age 12, Mr. Pépin left school the following year to begin his French apprenticeship under chef Lucien Diat at the Plaza Athenée. Upon coming to the United States, Mr. Pépin enrolled for a PhD in Civilization Literature. Yet even though Columbia did not accept his final thesis about the history of French cooking within the context of French literature, Mr. Pépin’s educational experience gave him a context into which he could place his own work and translate the nuances of French cuisine to his American audience. Later in life, he used this academic background to become a teacher himself: “I teach that [field of study] at Boston University now, the same class, and there is a Master in liberal arts with a concentration in Gastronomy. The crazy part of it is that we’d be very happy to have that today at Columbia.”

All the while that Jacques Pépin was learning about the art and literature of French cuisine, he was simultaneously learning about American food culture of mass production during his ten-year apprenticeship with the Howard Johnson Company. It might seem anathema for a French gourmet chef to be learning from the hands of a chain-restaurant entrepreneur, but for Mr. Pépin, it was the birth of his American gourmet career. “I wanted to work in a totally American environment, learning the language and learning about American eating habits and about production – mass production – and chemistry of food.” He credits the success of his work with New York restaurants to his experience at Howard Johnson, both his consulting on Windows of the World in the World Trade Center and his restaurant, La Potagerie on Fifth Avenue.

It seems so very hard to believe that the McAmerican way of cooking could provide anything of use to the hands of a young French chef. But Mr. Pépin fully esteems his American experience, and was even ready to defend American produce over a comparison to French. “The earth is the earth. If you grow it the right way, it is the same result.” A walk with him around the local farmer’s market showed that such a claim might be true; but ultimately I got Mr. Pépin – an avid gardener himself – to admit that there was some truth to my bias for European goods. We discussed wild mushrooms (Mr. Pépin is an avid mushroom-hunter in Connecticut and upstate New York as well as in Europe), which he cited as evidence to the mystery of diminished taste in American produce: “Now I’m talking about walking 15 miles up the mountain here or there, so it’s not like its cultivated or anything. It just doesn’t have as much taste as it has in Italy or in France.”

Just like Mr. Pépin may have to apply extra seasoning in America to bring out the flavors of produce, he also makes an effort to keep some of his French “rituals and traditions” in his life here in the United States. Like true epicurean, Mr. Pépin’s culture is one that truly involves the use of all of his senses. “My culture is a culinary culture, and that takes place around the table, and there is much more than food.” He and his wife, Gloria, are avid epicureans, and he cooks often with his daughter, Claudine, who has also made herself in to a well-known chef. Summer seems to be the time when these cultural traditions come about most easily: “From going mushrooming to playing pétanque, you know we play boules, to going frogging as we did the other day, to going to the beach to get the tiny little white bait that we fry like French fries, to doing the garden.”

For Mr. Pépin, incorporating these epicurean traditions into his life is what defines him. Much in the spirit of building a community, Mr. Pépin sees his culinary culture – particularly the communication of recipes – as a way to keep traditions and pass on cultural rituals. “If we do a ritual like playing boules, those rituals are part of a culture and part of the culture is those rituals, and those rituals are expressed in traditional recipes.” Like the academic that he deeply is, Mr. Pépin cited Claude Lévi-Strauss: “The process of cooking is the process by which nature is transformed into culture.”

The ritual of cooking is, for Mr. Pépin, the ritual of narration. Is it telling a story, keeping traditions, and bringing people around the table in conversation. As we made the last turn to a stall in the farmer's market, I couldn't help but ask him what he was planning on making for dinner. Gloria had purchased red leaf lettuce, fresh corn, and a few tomatoes, and I was curious what he was crafting with those simple ingredients. But like any good chef, Mr. Pépin did not have a recipe in mind, and would just follow his senses: "For dinner? Well, we'll just go home, look at what we have, and then, well, we'll see."