Cooking up great food… and theater: An interview with Jacques Pepin

     If you’ve already written the best-regarded volume on French cooking techniques, if you’ve already made a name for yourself as the Frenchman who more than any other brought French cooking to America, and if you have already conquered television with cooking shows that boast millions and millions of viewers, there’s only one thing left to do:  Take your act on the road.  Fabled chef Jacques Pepin and his daughter, chef Claudine Pepin, now tour the globe, appearing live onstage.  

     What can two cooks do on a stage?  “We demonstrate technique, since obviously we have no stove onstage,” Pepin says. “Then we take questions from the audience about food and about cooking.” A book-signing generally follows.  Pepin was born in a suburb of Lyons, France, to restaurateur parents. He moved to the United States to attend Columbia University in New York (where he earned an M.A. in French literature), while at the same time employed by Howard Johnson’s restaurants to upgrade their menus. He went on to write “La Technique,” the bible of French cooking, and to host a dozen different cooking-show series on television, including “Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home,” where he shared the studio with Julia Child.  

     At 81 years old, Pepin remains today active as chef, teacher, author – and now, it seems, stage personality. Thought of as the quintessential French chef, he prefers to think of himself as an American:  “I was for 30 years on (American public TV network) PBS. And when you look at my cook books, you will find things like black bean soup and southern fried chicken, which are not very French. After 50 years of cooking in America, I think I should be called a typical American chef, although”— he adds, with a chuckle – “I am told I have an accent.”  

     The importance of French cooking lies not in individual dishes or certain recipes, Pepin notes, but in the fundamentals.  “French cooking is a structure of technique, and then you take it from there,” he says.  Pepin recently made a somewhat controversial but undeniable point about recipes: They are not sacrosanct, and need to be adjusted according to circumstances. Asked to elaborate on this idea, he said:  

     “This is the paradox of cooking. When you do everything and write it down, saying ‘I did this and that,’ and you give the recipe to another professional, it is not enough. You start with a recipe, but there is a great deal of freedom involved. Suppose you start cooking a piece of fish and it gets dry and you add three tablespoons of water. So, you write that down. But now suppose another chef reads what you have written, but the circumstances are different – every piece of fish is different, after all – and he doesn’t need to add the water. If he does add the water, it may make the fish soggy. There are many other differences. It makes a difference, for example, if you are cooking with gas or electric.”  The solution?  “The first time, follow the recipe. Then, adjust according to circumstances, according to your own taste and sense of aesthetics. By the third or fourth time, you will have mastered it.”  

     Pepin’s adjust-as-you-go admonition amounts, he says, to realizing that replicating the taste, not the exact ordering of ingredients, is what matters.   “In order to be the same each time, a recipe must change each time,” Pepin says, echoing the famous French conundrum, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”  American cooking has changed utterly since Pepin came to the United States in the 1970s.  “When I first came to New York, a typical grocery store did not know what a shallot was, and there was only one kind of lettuce,” he says.  Now, food has exploded into a cuisine culture of high sophistication.  

     “I am very excited to see the changes in this country over the years,” says the man who had a lot to do with it.