MARCIA GAGLIARDI: So it is no small honor
to be here today in conversation with Jacques Pepin-- or as I
like to say, the man, the myth, the legend.
Many of us have felt like we've grown up on his cooking shows
on public television, and I hope we all
have at least a couple of his 25 books on our kitchen shelves.
I see quite a few in here today.
Jacques has been in the kitchen for more than 60 years,
beginning with his formal apprenticeship at 13 years
old-- they start them young in France.
And he left his home for Paris, cooking
in some of the most revered establishments,
like [? Norise ?] and Plaza Athenee,
and eventually cooking for French president Charles
de Gaulle.
He made his way to New York, and ended up at Howard Johnson's
as the director of research.
What follows is his career in food
that we all benefit from-- as a chef on public television,
an instructor, an author, a columnist, and an artist.
And let's not forget his many awards, including
France's ultimate civilian recognition,
the Legion of Honor.
Right now, we're lucky to have Jacques with us
in the Bay Area, as he's currently
shooting "Jacques Pepin: Heart and Soul," with PBS.
The 26-episode series is set to broadcast on PBS stations
in fall of 2015, and will show Jacques
at home, tending his garden, or in the studio,
cooking everything from veal chops
dijonnaise to fast fougasse, and showing you the techniques
that he's known for.
Expect many stories from his past, including
tales of Julia Child, of course.
And some guest chefs will be making some appearances
as well.
And there will also be a companion cookbook, coming out
in October 2015-- "Jacques Pepin: Heart and Soul
in the Kitchen," with over 200 recipes,
including the secret to his great burger recipe.
[LAUGHTER]
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: So before we dive
in to what you're doing now, I have a few questions
about your earlier years.
So let's take a little trip down memory lane.
We'll go in the way-back machine.
When you came to the US, it was 1959?
JACQUES PEPIN: Yeah.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Were the cooking techniques
different to those in France?
What did you see here?
JACQUES PEPIN: Well, it was another world altogether.
I mean, to tell you the truth, when I first
came here, it was the middle of the September, I believe,
the day after I started at the Pavillon in New York.
And the Pavillon was the quintessential French
restaurant, considered the greatest French restaurant
in America.
So relatively the techniques were not
much different than what I did in France.
Product were different.
We lived-- my friend Jean-Claude and I-- joined me pretty soon.
We had an apartment on 50th and First Avenue.
And on First Avenue, that's where
I met my first supermarket.
I'd never been in a supermarket before.
And it was kind of the beginning here.
So a lot of package, a lot of package,
a lot of package-- but no mushroom, no parsley.
But the meat was great.
I mean, the beef, lamb-- inexpensive.
Lobster, too.
But the products were different.
I mean, certainly, when you cook as a chef, you cook by taste.
You don't cook by recipe.
I mean, the recipe is purely a typewritten page
that doesn't really mean much.
So you go behind this.
And doing a lobster souffle in Paris at the Plaza Athenee
and doing it in New York, in order
to achieve the same taste, ingredients
have to be different.
You keep testing.
I mean, the tarragon or the type of thing have much less taste,
so you put more.
Ultimately, fine-- you reach the taste that you want.
But what was your question?
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: So it was about the techniques
that you found here.
JACQUES PEPIN: Oh, techniques.
Right, right.
No, otherwise, the technique with this,
of course when I left Howard Johnson-- when
I left the Pavillon and went to Howard Johnson, that
was a different world, a world that I knew nothing about.
Mass production, the chemistry of food--
I'd never heard word like coliform or bacteria.
So anyway, I learn about mass marketing and so forth.
So that was very useful for me later on in life,
when I opened restaurant and did other things.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Very different experience.
And when you were the personal chef for Charles De
Gaulle, what was one of his favorite dishes?
JACQUES PEPIN: Well, someone introduced me a few weeks ago
and said, that man was chef to three French presidents.
The three of them are dead.
[LAUGHTER]
It's true, they are dead.
Well, when you deal with a president, of course--
I dealt with Madame De Gaulle for the menu of the week.
Maybe secretary of state, whatever.
The family and certainly the Sunday meal
all were very important.
They were very devout Catholic.
And after church on Sunday, there
would be the whole family-- 10, 12 people, children,
grandchildren, and so forth.
And for that it was the menu that she wanted,
cooked the way she wanted.
She wanted a leg of lamb-- not too rare, no
good for the blood of the president, whatever.
It was the way she wanted.
And I have to add, even, that every week,
I did my accounting-- whatever we spent during the week--
to pay the supplier and so forth.
And that Sunday meal had to come from their own pocket.
They wanted to pay for it themselves,
even though they were not very wealthy.
So it was a question of, I think, ethical or moral.
That was the president.
When you deal with a state dinner-- you know,
I served people like Eisenhower at the time, Macmillan, Nehru,
Tito.
Those were head of state at the time.
Then you deal with the protocol--
that is, someone comes to you and say,
OK-- like for President Eisenhower--
they say, OK, the president already, they
have two or three meal together, either at the American embassy,
whatever.
They already served that fish, this, that.
You don't want to duplicate those things.
Or it's show.
Lunch has to be 45 minutes, or it's a complicated dinner--
it has to be 2 and 1/2 hours.
You know, different courses and so forth.
And in addition to this, there is other requirements.
For example, you're not going to serve a roast of pork
to the King of Monaco.
So they tell you-- this, this, this.
And within that frame lines, then you
show the menu, duplicate too.
So at that point, it's much less the taste
of the president than the--
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: What the event is.
JACQUES PEPIN: The affair itself, yeah.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: So how did you make the segue from chef
for the president of France to TV star,
and how did you make your way to public television?
Could you share that story with us?
JACQUES PEPIN: I guess it was luck.
I don't know.
When I came to America, still, 50 years ago, the cook-- chef--
was really at the bottom of the social scale.
And any good mother would have wanted her child
to marry the lawyer or doctor, but certainly not a cook.
Now we are genius.
I don't know what happened exactly.
[LAUGHTER]
So things changed a great deal.
I have to say that after nouvelle cuisine
in the '70s, late '60s, maybe late '60s,
started to shine-- women liberation, organic food,
health food store.
It was a social charge, which maybe react against the TV
dinner of the '50s and so forth.
So things started to change.
Prior to that time, I didn't know any white American chefs.
The only chefs that I knew cooked with me
were the kids I worked with at Howard Johnson, which
were very often African American.
And all the chefs that I knew in New York in big restaurants
were German, Swiss, Italian, French.
There was no kid who'd get into that business.
And then the thing exploded and changed.
There are extraordinary chefs in this country now.
So it was very, very different.
And for me, I worked at Howard Johnson.
I learned a great deal in terms of production.
That's why I could open the World Trade Center after,
with [INAUDIBLE].
Then I was a consultant for the Russian Tea Room in New York.
I opened a restaurant on Fifth Avenue
called La Potagerie in 1970.
Again, mass production-- I could not
have done that if I hadn't had the training at Howard Johnson.
And I don't know, I started writing.
I was friends with-- three months,
six months maybe after I was here,
I met Craig Claiborne, who started at the New York Times.
He came to the Pavillon-- yeah, it was here at the Pavillon.
So maybe three, four months after I was here.
And I became friends with Craig.
He introduced me to Helen McCully.
She was a foodie, [INAUDIBLE], "House Beautiful."
And she was never married, never had any kids,
so she kind of became my surrogate mother.
Don't wear those stupid socks you wear in France.
[LAUGHTER]
Don't do this, don't do that.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: She gave you American training.
JACQUES PEPIN: And through Helen-- Helen told me one day,
oh, I have that manuscript I just received here
from someone who wrote that cookbook.
You want to take a look at it?
I said, that's pretty good.
She said, well, the woman, she lives in California.
She's coming next week.
You want to cook for her?
I said, sure.
And she says, she's a very tall woman with a terrible voice.
Of course, that was Julia.
[LAUGHTER]
So that's how I met Julia.
And Helen spoke with James Beard like twice a day,
about anything going on in the food world.
My point is that less than six months after I was here,
I knew kind of the trinity of cooking, which
was Craig Claiborne, James Beard, Julia Child.
So you can see that the food world was very, very
small at the time.
It was totally different.
So I started writing because Helen
was writing for "House Beautiful," and so forth.
And I started doing a column.
She pushed me into writing a little more,
and that led one thing to another.
And I don't even know how I came on to do television.
But doing one show or another, I was
asked to go one place or another.
Actually, I did a series in 1982, I believe,
in Jacksonville, Florida, called "Everyday Cooking."
And then after that, even WGBH in New York,
WGBH in Boston, WADT in New York-- they were big--
asked me, will you be interested in doing it?
I said, great, I'd love to.
But it never went anywhere.
They never raised the money.
And then I came here.
It was '88, maybe '87.
And I gave classes all the '70s and the '80s
after I did-- I was traveling like 30,
40 weeks out of the year, giving classes all over the country.
It was the time when cooking school opened,
cookware shop, all that type of thing
which didn't exist before.
So I went to give classes.
They say, can you come next year?
We'll put you on the calendar.
So I was kind of booked ahead.
So I end up giving class in Foster City
here, at Martin Yan, who just opened a cooking school there.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Yep.
JACQUES PEPIN: So he asked me, I have to do a show on KQED.
Do you want to come with me?
And I said, sure, I'd love to.
So I came there, did that show with him, too.
And Marjorie Poore, who was the executive producer at the time,
told me-- maybe a week later, called to say,
would you be interested in doing a series with us?
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: You were a natural.
JACQUES PEPIN: I said, sure, I'd love to.
I didn't really expect it to fly, but they raised the money.
I did it and I've been there over 25 years.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Incredible.
So tell us a little bit about a day
in the life of filming right now at KQED.
I understand you are on quite a schedule.
JACQUES PEPIN: Yes.
We do two or three shows a day.
Yesterday we did three.
Day before, two.
Day before, three.
So yes, it's pretty intense.
The point is that it's very well organized.
Fantastic team-- Tina Salter, the producer, Paul Swensen,
the director.
We have a big, big team.
I don't go in the control room so I don't really
know what's going on there.
So I can't really see what they see
or what it looks like because from my point of view--
but to a certain extent, nothing is script.
I'm not an actor.
If I had to read, I'd be totally messed up in my cooking.
So for me, I have a recipe to do.
I know what I'm going to do.
More or less, I tell the cameraman,
OK, I'm going to start with that and I'll continue there.
Then while this is cooking, maybe I'll do this, too.
And it works more or less this way.
And so there is nothing script-- at least
we have the recipe here.
Maybe I don't follow them exactly,
but that gives an idea to the back kitchen and all
that, what we're going to do.
When I did the series with Julia, we had no recipes,
so that was quite different.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Wow.
That was very ad hoc.
And do you plan the themes?
You work together--
JACQUES PEPIN: Yes.
Yes.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: How does that all work together?
JACQUES PEPIN: It can't really be anyone else but me
who do the recipes.
I've been working on that book for a couple of years,
and then the book of about 200-some recipes.
So we choose 26 show, about four recipes-- three, four,
five recipes-- per show, so it's about 140 recipes, maybe,
that we extrapolated from those.
We tried to get them into theme.
So I did actually two shows with Jean Claude-- one
cooking in the country with him.
The stuff that he likes-- like, he killed deer every year
with his bow and arrow, so we did deer.
We did stuff like this.
And another one actually, cooking for the president.
We were in France, so it was a more elaborate type of meal.
Then my daughter and granddaughter were here.
They just went back last week, to Rhode Island.
And I did six shows with Shorey, my granddaughter,
who is 10 years old, and my daughter.
So that was fun.
Different theme.
We did a show on the economy.
I want to show people to cook for very little money.
We did even a show on offal, you know, the variety meat,
because now the young chefs are into pig's feet--
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Tongue and heart.
JACQUES PEPIN: --brain and kidney, on and so forth,
which people did not a number of years ago.
We did a couple of shows on the Mexican influence, if you want,
because I have an apartment in Playa del Carmen.
We go during the winter.
So cooking there, going to the market.
So you know, it was a little bit--
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Varied.
JACQUES PEPIN: Themed, yes, right.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: And I would love to talk a little bit more
about Mexico.
So how long have you been going there?
JACQUES PEPIN: Well, with that apartment,
it's about 12 years old.
We went there a couple of years prior to this, and we liked it.
And we decided to escape the winter of Connecticut.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Yeah, because you're in Connecticut.
Yeah, that's not an easy time.
JACQUES PEPIN: So usually my wife and Claude's wife
and I-- the four of us, we go.
And we have some friends coming, too.
So yeah, we have great fun.
We go to the [INAUDIBLE], struggle with our Spanish.
You go buy fish directly from the fishmonger,
or rather, the fishermen.
We go there and it's fun.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: And so are you really excited about exploring
more about Mexican cuisine or some of the regions?
Has that, over the years, grown?
JACQUES PEPIN: Yes, well I've worked with Rick Bayless,
with the great specialist of that.
Actually, two weeks ago-- two or three weeks ago,
right-- we did, when I first came, at Farallon
in San Francisco, one of the greatest restaurants there.
The chef, Mark Franz, is really fantastic.
And anyway, they were hosting us for a special for PBS,
which will come out next December-- not this one,
the one after.
And a special for the pledge of PBS, so it's an hour or an hour
and a half special which will be used all over the country.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: It's kind of a big occasion, that episode,
I understand.
JACQUES PEPIN: Right.
It was Lydia Bastianich, Rick Bayless--
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: It's for his 80th birthday, so.
JACQUES PEPIN: Yeah, that will be
to celebrate my 80th birthday next year.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: You made it.
JACQUES PEPIN: Nothing to celebrate.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: What are some of the dishes they're
cooking for you in the show?
Can you give us a little--
JACQUES PEPIN: Well, Lydia cooked a roast of pork stuffed
with prunes and some spaetzle and all that.
Ming Tsai, more in the Chinese style.
A red chicken-- that is a chicken poached into a broth
with a great deal of hot pepper and different type
of hot sauce.
And actually, Rick Bayless did three different types
of ceviche.
Because we cooked together in my apartment in Playa,
he came to tape a series on the Yucatan peninsula,
and we cooked a couple of shows together.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: And when you're in San Francisco,
are you hitting any taquerias?
Have you had any Mexican food since you've been here?
JACQUES PEPIN: Any Mexican food?
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: I don't think you find a lot in Connecticut.
JACQUES PEPIN: Yes, we had tacos the other day,
I think from a truck.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: The best.
JACQUES PEPIN: But no, otherwise, we
work usually until 7 o'clock at night.
And we've done a fair amount of dinner
which were already staged or planned
for one reason or another.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: And while you've been in San Francisco,
I'm sure everybody is thrilled to have
you come to their restaurant.
I know you've been on the town a bit.
Are there some places you've really
enjoyed during your visit?
JACQUES PEPIN: Well, I went to see
Roland Passot a couple of times at La Folie and all that.
He's from my hometown in France.
And certainly, we went to a good Yunnan restaurant.
And at Farallon, we ate there twice, otherwise.
We had a fantastic meal.
Otherwise, we ate at Le Colonial, the two of us
the other night.
And we ate in a Korean restaurant around the corner
also.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Nice.
A little international.
So let's hear some fun stories about being
back in the studio for you.
How's that been?
Good times with the crew?
JACQUES PEPIN: It's fun.
I mean, it's a lot of pressure.
But as I said, we don't really have anything structured,
or no script or anything like that.
So I know that I'm going to talk about chicken
or about broccoli, but I don't really
know what I'm going to say until we start
and I'm trying to explain.
Still, when I cook, I still try to show the process of cooking.
I still try to explain the technique.
I was told-- I went to a place a few weeks ago
and there was a food historian who
said that there are 407 cookery shows on television now.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Amazing.
JACQUES PEPIN: I don't know whether it's accurate,
but if it's not-- maybe 350.
In any case, a great deal of those are reality
shows, fighting--
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Competitions.
JACQUES PEPIN: And it's fine.
It's different.
But this is not what I do.
I still try to teach a little bit.
And I'm sure a lot of people look at it, say,
that guy is really boring, too.
Fine.
Doesn't really matter.
You cannot please everybody.
When I go to the Food and Wine Festival in Aspen--
and I will be there in June-- and that
will be number 32 for me, for 32 years.
I think the festival is 33 or 34.
You go there, everyone is there, from Bobby Flay,
to Mario Batali, to Thomas Keller, to Lydia Bastianich,
me.
So people will come and tell me, I
look at all the show on television.
You're the best.
And why do they tell me that?
Because the people who don't like
me don't come and talk to me.
[LAUGHTER]
Only the people who like me come and talk to me.
They go to Bobby Flay and say, I look at all the show.
You are the greatest, and so forth.
And that's fine.
That's the way it should be.
Everyone can relate to someone and it works well on that.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Yeah.
And is there anyone you've ever wanted
to film with that either you asked and they couldn't or is
there someone you would love as a guest on your show?
JACQUES PEPIN: Yes.
I mean, there is many, many people
that I like to cook with.
But ultimately, my friend Jean-Claude, my daughter,
granddaughter, my wife-- if I asked her to film,
I would get a divorce after 48 years of marriage.
She hates to go on the television.
So we did a couple of shows together,
but she wasn't crazy about it.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Oh no?
JACQUES PEPIN: Usually, you go back
to doing it with your friend, your family,
and that's where you enjoy the most.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: And if you and Julia could cook one more meal
together on TV, what would you love to make with her?
JACQUES PEPIN: Actually, we did two shows last week
in memory of Julia, inspired by her.
I don't know, you know.
She was a pretty good [INAUDIBLE] woman.
We also shared a great many bottle of wine.
The point is that if I had to have a last meal,
we would have things that we like to eat from hot dog
to caviar, from foie gras to roast chicken.
And it will be a very, very, very, very long meal.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Yes.
JACQUES PEPIN: The last one.
It would have to be.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Why just have one meal?
JACQUES PEPIN: If I know that I'm dying tomorrow,
going to the guillotine or whatever,
probably won't have much appetite.
So my last meal would be [INAUDIBLE].
[LAUGHTER]
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: So I understand
that you're quite the forager.
And I'd love to hear what you forage,
and who taught you which mushrooms you can eat.
JACQUES PEPIN: Well, we pick up about, I would say,
20 different type of mushroom.
There is over 4,000 type of mushroom in the world.
And if you don't know it, especially in the Amanita
family, there is a lot of deadly mushroom.
So you have to be careful.
For me, I have my wife taste it, so it's fine.
[LAUGHTER]
Just kidding.
Yeah, we get from wild leek to, I don't know, a lot of stuff.
We go fishing.
And I did, when Claudine, my daughter, was a kid.
And now I do it with my granddaughter.
We go net fishing and get those tiny white bait
at the end of the summer that usually the fishermen
use for bait.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Fry them up.
JACQUES PEPIN: And you press on the belly to extract the center
and wash them, roll them in flour,
deep fry them like French fries.
And in France, if you go there, in England and all that,
they're expensive.
But are very good.
We do a lot of things like that, go for mussels, clams.
And, of course, in the wood, we get even
at Hammonasset Beach, where I go in Connecticut,
like last summer I picked up a lot of the wild
rose coming out in summer.
They are not sprayed or anything.
They are incredibly fragrant.
So I take petal to crystallize with sugar, and all that to-do.
Then we take the bulb at the end of this summer to do
rose hip jelly.
And then there is plum beach.
They're a tiny wild plum.
So I pick them up to put them in alcohol with either a grain
alcohol or vodka and a bit of honey.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Perfect.
JACQUES PEPIN: So things like that.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: You can raise a glass to Julia.
And you're also a gardener as well.
JACQUES PEPIN: Well, not as good as Claude.
I mean, he's got leek that big.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: That's crazy.
JACQUES PEPIN: My leek are about that big.
Yeah, we do always some salad and of course I
have a lot of different type of herbs.
In the summer, some tomato and a few eggplant, zucchini.
It's not a big garden.
You know, what happens is that when your tomato are ready,
well, they're already in the farms around,
and I can get a bushel for like $4.
But no, it's great to get it just out of the garden.
There is nothing better than that.
When I was a young chef, I see food like many young chefs.
You keep adding to the plate.
You put one herb and more, and this and that,
and this and that.
And now that I'm old, I take away, take away from the plate,
to be left with one tomato.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Perfect tomato.
JACQUES PEPIN: Right out of the garden, lukewarm.
Perfect olive oil, coarse salt.
That's it.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Alice Waters would approve.
So I understand that you are from Lyon.
JACQUES PEPIN: Yes, actually, I was born in Bourg-en-Bresse.
Next to Lyon, yes.
But my mother had a restaurant in Lyon.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: One of the most amazing culinary places
in the world.
JACQUES PEPIN: I don't know.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Well.
JACQUES PEPIN: I don't say that.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: So what are some of your favorite recipes
and dishes from that area and from home?
Do you make anything?
JACQUES PEPIN: Well, you know, memories-- food memories--
are very, very powerful and very strong.
I think it was a Chinese philosopher, name
of Lin Yutang, I believe, who said, what is patriotism?
Patriotism is the taste of the dishes you had as a kid.
And there is a great deal of truth there.
I mean, I'm paraphrasing, maybe not exactly.
But it's true.
Those dishes that you had as a kid
will stay with you the rest of your life.
And those tastes will haunt you, and there
will be nothing better than that.
I remember, my wife was born in New York City.
And her little brother was a farmer in New York.
And I remember him coming one time at the house.
I had fresh asparagus.
I did.
He doesn't like fresh asparagus.
He liked canned asparagus, and he'd drink the juice.
It's horrible, but that's what he had as a kid.
So for him, he remembered that taste.
And I will, too.
So I did a couple of show there, in food memory of my mother,
and so forth, so chicken in cream
sauce my mother used to do.
The canard, the pike dumpling that she would do.
A gratin of cauliflower stew.
The simple soup with vermicelli and leek in it.
All of those dishes.
I did the same thing with Claudine, my daughter.
She had the dish in her head.
And for her, this is what the great food is,
and we are all like this.
So when you look at different people
and different ethnic groups, different cuisines,
you have to understand that even a cuisine--
I did a fair amount of time in West Africa, for example.
Then you have a thieboudienne or different type of broken rice
and you say it's pretty-- not very good, pretty dry, too.
But if you had that as a child, this
is a very essential dish for you.
And those memories are there to stay.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Forever.
And on that note, what are some of your favorite smells
in the kitchen?
JACQUES PEPIN: My favorite smells?
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Smells in the kitchen, yes.
JACQUES PEPIN: Red wine.
[LAUGHTER]
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Beef bourguignon?
JACQUES PEPIN: No.
Leek and potato soup, when it cooked,
it's very, very special.
A chicken, when it's really roasting in the oven.
As a chef, you use your senses-- not only your eyes,
even your ear can go in front of the oven and tell you
the chicken is cooked.
Just hearing it.
At some point, you know, the fat of the chicken come out
and it start frying a little bit,
and there's another sound that it's roasting.
So, by habit, you use all of those kind of senses.
Yes, so those smells tell you the quality of the chicken
or a squab or a duck.
When it comes from a farm, really organic and good,
it smells quite different than the square thing with plastic
on top that is called a chicken in the supermarket.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: In a body bag.
JACQUES PEPIN: It doesn't have any feet,
it doesn't have any head or anything like this.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: And so what do you
think are five dishes that every good home
cook should know how to do well?
JACQUES PEPIN: Well, you should know how to cook an egg well.
I mean, eggs-- for me, I couldn't live with eggs.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Cheers.
JACQUES PEPIN: And when we were kids,
we get our protein much more from eggs than with meat,
because it was less expensive.
So a gratin of eggs-- you know, I did some on the show,
in fact-- gratin of egg with Swiss chard underneath,
cheese on the top.
The hard-cooked eggs, different type of omelette
and all that are very important.
So eggs, yes, certainly.
Potato.
I love potatoes.
So potato and chicken.
I roast potato.
I roast chicken.
You know, for me, it's still an essential dish.
For dessert, maybe an apple tart.
I go back to my mother and just the dough,
the apple, sugar, and butter on top.
That's it.
You know, things like that.
A good salad, a good vinaigrette is very important.
A salad which is washed properly,
which is drained properly, which is with the proper percentage
of vinegar to oil, dash of mustard, bit of garlic in it.
A salad is really a thing that you go back to.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Again and again.
And what are some dishes that your friends and family
ask for you to make for them at home?
A couple of favorites?
JACQUES PEPIN: Well again, it's so different.
Claudine will come home and she'll
want me to do a cheese fondue or something like that, or a soup,
because that's what she'd like me to do.
My granddaughter will ask me for something else.
She'll ask me not for eggs, too, but usually
for maybe chocolate truffle or usually dessert.
My wife loves offal.
So my wife asks me to saute some kidney or calf's liver
or whatever.
And then when I am with Jean-Claude, it's different.
We'll do also, very often, a variety of meat or things
like that.
But otherwise, big roasts and so forth.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Perfect.
So let's talk a little bit about wine-- one
of my favorite topics.
I almost brought us some champagne earlier.
I was like, that would be-- is 11:00 AM too early?
No?
[LAUGHTER]
JACQUES PEPIN: Are you kidding?
You know what time it is in France?
[LAUGHTER]
JACQUES PEPIN: 5 o'clock.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: My watch is always
set to champagne o'clock, always.
I would love to hear some of your favorite wines to drink,
maybe just some of your everyday drinking wines,
maybe a few special occasion wines.
What's your palate with wine?
JACQUES PEPIN: We are lucky.
In New York, Connecticut, we get wine at a really good price.
And I rarely pay more than $12, $15 for a bottle of wine.
And I can [INAUDIBLE] some great wine.
For me, I go back to-- I'm from Beaujolais,
so I'm going back to that type of wine, maybe Cotes du Rhone.
I like a wine which-- I don't like the wine too oaky.
In the whites, certainly, I like something crisp.
Relatively low in the 12, 12.5% alcohol.
I like a great wine occasionally.
A great [INAUDIBLE] wine from California, as well as
a great French Bordeaux or whatever.
But unfortunately-- or fortunately, I
guess-- because of who I am, I'm invited
and people are going to give me five
of those great wine in a row.
After the second one, I want a Beaujolais or something
like this.
One great one to remember.
If I have too many, I don't remember, and likewise
with the food.
I'm not crazy about menu degustastions, where
you have nine different dish, big like this.
Each time you have that much wine that you have to analyze,
too.
It's like going to work.
[LAUGHTER]
I want to go out, have a taco and a beer somewhere and relax.
But I would love a glass of champagne, of course.
And then after, a white wine.
And then, a red wine.
And that's about it in a meal.
Not nine in a row.
I think it's too much.
And my tastes are pretty simple, not complicated.
I'm not difficult to please.
I'm satisfied with the best.
[LAUGHTER]
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: One of my favorite quotes.
JACQUES PEPIN: Oscar Wilde, who said that, right?
Wasn't it?
I think.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Yes.
JACQUES PEPIN: Yes.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: So we also had some Google Moderator
questions.
Some people online wanted to ask you some questions.
So I have one here that says, "I love cooking and have
had great success with a variety of recipes, including
complex ones.
However, I don't have confidence not using a recipe.
How would you suggest venturing out without a recipe,
how to develop a sense of seasoning to taste?"
JACQUES PEPIN: First thing you do in the kitchen,
you have a glass of wine.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Cheers.
Yes.
Good answer.
JACQUES PEPIN: Second thing you do is another glass of wine.
After, the recipe, it works out very easily.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Everything tastes great.
JACQUES PEPIN: Don't worry too much.
This is not brain surgery.
And it's not because you forget, I
don't know, to put in the vanilla in your cake
or something like that.
You're not going to the guillotine or anything
like this.
Fine.
And if the chicken is a bit burned,
you have a third glass of wine.
By then, you don't really care.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Then you have take out.
No.
I remember, I was making Christmas cookies
and the dough was sticking and it was just a nightmare.
And I called my dad and he said, honey, first things first--
did you pour yourself some bourbon?
He's like, why don't you drink that and call me
in five minutes?
You're too upset.
JACQUES PEPIN: It's true.
People say, how do I start?
I said, do you have a friend who cooks?
I mean, everyone has a friend who cooks.
Say, OK.
Next time you're invited to her house or his house,
you say, can I come an hour ahead?
I want to cook with you.
I'll bring a bottle of wine.
And then you cook.
You do something simple.
And boost your confidence a little bit.
Then you do it a few time and then,
hmm, better try on my own.
And, of course, if you have my recipe, you have no problem.
[LAUGHTER]
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Another person wanted
to find out, "what are your favorite or most important food
items to have on hand?"
JACQUES PEPIN: On hand?
I mean, in refrigeration?
You're going to have eggs.
I mean, of course.
You are going to have certainly onion, leek, scallion--
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Cheese.
JACQUES PEPIN: I'm trying to look in my refrigerator.
Sriracha-- I mean, some hot sauce.
And truffle.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Good.
JACQUES PEPIN: No, no.
You know, again, of truffle, you use it.
I tell Claude, if you have some left over,
you put it in the refrigerator next to the beer.
Because when one person say, do you have a beer?
I say, next to the truffle in the refrigerator.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Very high low.
Another person wrote-- you get a compliment in this, too.
"You are a consummate chef, a talented artist,
a prolific writer, but I believe you're
the best culinary teacher ever--" all in caps.
JACQUES PEPIN: Oh boy.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: I know.
Pat C in Oceanside.
Which of your talents came the easiest to you
and which do you enjoy the most?
It's interesting.
You do have many talents.
JACQUES PEPIN: I paint for 50 years.
And that kind of gratifies, satisfies me
in one way, which compliments maybe my cooking.
But on the whole, I am a cook.
That's basically what I am.
Even after I went to college and studied, I could have taught.
And I taught literature a little bit.
At some point, I taught skiing.
That's how I met my wife.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: You taught skiing?
Where were you teaching skiing?
JACQUES PEPIN: Upstate New York.
The Catskills.
That's when I was working in New York.
But what I'm saying is that, ultimately, I
go back to cooking.
That's what I love the best and that's what I'm the best at.
But the rest of it can complement your life
in a different way too.
But as long as I'm hungry, then I will keep cooking.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Yes.
And as long as you have your good friend
here bringing you venison.
"What is one of the most important life lessons
that a life in food has taught you?"
JACQUES PEPIN: Well, I think the cooks are very generous people.
They are giving people.
I see all of those chefs.
I go to the office of any chef that I know.
I will ask five or six requests every week
to give your time to cook for cystic fibrosis, heart,
battered woman, this.
All of those organizations, you want to raise money.
And someone want to talk about the state of your heart.
If you have to pay $200 for that, people won't come.
But if you have 10 chefs coming, cooking, five wineries
and so forth, then people will pay for those.
So a lot of those fundraising are done through food.
And the chefs give a great deal of their time for that.
The chefs are usually very generous with time.
And this is part of who we are because you cannot really cook
differently.
For me, you have to be a technician first.
You have to know how to add-- that is, a professional chef,
particularly.
And if you happen to have talent,
like someone like Thomas Keller or Mark Franz at Farallon,
then you take that knowledge you have in your hand,
you take it farther.
And if you put a bit of love into it,
then you can really get to extraordinary food.
I paint for, as I say, many years.
But I'm not a good technician.
I didn't spend years and years and years of my life
learning the technique of painting.
So I may start something, it come out halfway good.
I'm happy with myself.
Sometimes I paint over.
But I don't have as much control that I
would have in the kitchen.
Yet however, if you spent four, five years in art school
and learned the law of perspective
and learn how to mix yellow and blue to make green,
learn you do that with your thumb,
you do that with a spatula.
Then you learn all the trick of the trade, if you want.
And you can sit outside now and do one painting after another.
Does that make you an artist?
Not really.
At that level, you're a good technician.
You're a craftsmen.
And likewise, in the kitchen.
You can spend a few years and really--
and I know many chefs like that, working
pretty fast, good technician.
They can run a kitchen.
And they are relatively lousy cook, the food is not.
You can still run a place.
Now, if you happen to have talent, however,
and you're a good technician, then you
can really take it higher.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Another person online wanted to find out,
"plesae tell us what you like the least and the most of how
the internet has changed the world of cooking, the kitchen,
and how we eat."
JACQUES PEPIN: Well, I have an iPod.
No, iPhone I mean.
Claude doesn't have a computer, doesn't have a iPhone,
doesn't have any of this.
So the computer has changed, of course, a great deal of life
in the last 20 years, but for us, probably
minimally in many ways.
I send email, I do that type of thing,
but otherwise I can rely on my wife to do that type of thing.
I don't really look at the computer very much.
I look at TV.
I like TV.
Usually I look at either PBS or CNN or thing
like this, or some old movie.
But I am not very savvy with, I have
to say, unfortunately with the computer.
I haven't really learned much about it
and spent much time with it.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Well, you were on "Top Chef" as a judge.
Are there any TV shows that you like
to watch, like with Anthony Bourdain, or--
JACQUES PEPIN: Yeah, I was on "The Chew"
a couple of weeks ago and I'm supposed to go again soon.
I was on "The Taste," that show with Anthony Bourdain,
not too long ago, and I did "Top Chef" a few times.
But if I happen to know what it is, if I don't miss it,
I will look at it.
But most of the time, I miss it because you do it ahead
and I don't know when it comes.
And even my show.
Occasionally, my wife says, Saturday, usually your PBS show
will show over the weekend.
My wife says, oh, you're on at 4 o'clock this afternoon.
So I may look at it.
But very often we miss it, because not there.
It's very exciting when you do a book or a television show,
what I'm doing, so you have all of them to get them excited.
But by the time the book comes out,
after all of it and the editing, you
don't even want to look at it.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Yeah, you're done.
JACQUES PEPIN: And the television, the excitement,
it's kind of gone.
And yeah, it's coming out now.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: You're already moved onto your next thing.
JACQUES PEPIN: What happened with PBS, too too,
I am lucky enough to be in probably 90% of the market.
And there is about 470 stations or so.
But we don't really keep track of it.
I don't, because it's different in each town.
So I'll be in Des Moines, Iowa, and they say,
how come you're not there on Wednesday afternoon anymore?
I don't even know I'm there on Wednesday afternoon.
The programmer take it in the different city and program
the way they want.
I'll go somewhere, they show me twice a week,
three times a week.
I go another place, they don't show my show at all.
So it's hard to track it down.
Usually in Connecticut, it's on Saturday and in New York
it's on Sunday.
And Long Island, it's on Monday, for some reason.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: And what do you
think is one of the most exciting cities
or cuisines to watch right now?
JACQUES PEPIN: This is a leading question.
Well, frankly, I don't think there's
any place like New York.
There is 24,000 restaurants in New York.
And the amount of ethnicity, different type of group,
is just amazing.
And even not only in Manhattan.
You go into, well, Brooklyn now, but in Queens.
In Queens, especially Asian food around Flushing.
I went there on a little sentimental journey
a few months ago for a magazine.
The magazine of Queens wanted to feature me on that
because I worked for Howard Johnson ten years.
It was in Queens Village.
At that point we live in Flushing.
So we went back to revisit those place.
And I was amazed at the diversity, quality food,
and how cheap it was.
I have to say that San Francisco is pretty close behind, too.
I don't know how many restaurant there is in San Francisco.
But frankly, 20, 25 years ago, when
food started erupting and so forth,
it was East Coast, West Coast-- New York, San Francisco.
And then the center of the city, from Chicago to Philadelphia,
to Dallas started going.
And now you go to very small town
and the chef-- there has been so many
cooking school-- the CIA, Culinary Institute
of America, Johnson & Wales.
And now there are thousand and thousand and thousand
new chefs, which is different than it used to be.
And those young chefs often go back to a small town,
somewhere in the middle, and open a small restaurant there,
which was not done even 15, 20 years ago.
So it's very exciting in that way.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: So in terms of some questions from the room,
are we outfitted with a microphone?
JACQUES PEPIN: Yeah, I have one.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: They can come up and ask your yours.
So if anyone has some questions for Jacques,
please come on up to the mic.
AUDIENCE: I just wanted to ask, what dish have you
made the most?
JACQUES PEPIN: What dish have I done the most?
Probably soup.
We always have soup at home during the winter, too.
Often, what my wife calls French soup--
open the refrigerator, what's there
from salad leftover, a carrot, this, that too.
In fact, I remember, the first series that I did
called "Today's Gourmet."
It was in 1989, I believe, at KQED.
And Claudine, my daughter, at that time was in college at BU.
I teach at BU also for 32 years now.
So Claudine was at BU, and she came to the show with me.
And Peter Stein was the producer at the time.
And we finished.
We went fast.
He say, you have three minutes left.
What can you do?
I say, well let's do a soup, or whatever.
So I went into the refrigerator, pick up
the wilted carrot, a piece of [INAUDIBLE].
I tell Claudine, what do you have in your refrigerator
at school?
So she brought me all that stuff.
She said, well, we throw that out.
I said, uh-uh.
So I did a soup or whatever I did with her,
and it was one of the segments people loved the most.
[INAUDIBLE]
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Love it.
JACQUES PEPIN: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: The relationships with people around me
have a profound influence on my cooking.
I tend to try to perfect dishes that the people who I love
love.
And if I want to go home and do something nice for my wife,
I've got a bouquet of flowers and a bag of buckwheat flour
to make her blini.
I'm curious if the relationships you have
have had a similar influence on your cooking,
and is there a particular dish that you've
tried to perfect to make somebody happy?
JACQUES PEPIN: Well, you always cook for the people love,
without any question-- for the family, the most important.
But after 48 years of marriage, my wife
may have asked my advice years ago.
Now, usually, when I go into the kitchen, she's cooking.
She don't tell me, darling, what do you think?
She tells me, don't touch anything.
So yes, being born in New York from a Puerto Rican
mother and a Cuban father.
So there is some Caribbean influence
in it, too, and taste.
And she loves Japanese cooking as well as Vietnamese, too.
So she cooks some of that, we cook some of that together.
But we do cook together.
But after those years, so many years,
we don't even have to talk too much.
We have our area, which have been pretty much divided
throughout the years.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Like the closet.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
It's great to be here.
Thank you.
I'm reading the book, "The Third Plate" by Dan Barber right now,
the future of our plate.
And I was wondering what you thought about that.
What would be-- what does our plate look like in the future?
JACQUES PEPIN: I'm sorry, I couldn't-- I'm old.
AUDIENCE: So that's the future of our plate.
What does our plate look like in our future--
near future, far future.
What does our plate look like?
JACQUES PEPIN: What our food will look like in general?
What I hope that-- actually, there is hope.
We are going back, it seems to me, more the way
we cooked many years ago.
Maybe not the way.
I talk about my mother-- my mother died a month
and a half ago.
She was 99 and 1/2, too.
And I went to see her in July this summer.
I talk about my mother and my father.
I said, my mother was an organic farmer.
My father, too.
Well, the word organic did not exist anyway.
But since chemical fertilizer did not
exist either and fungicide, insecticide,
pesticide did not exist either, everyone was organic.
That was the way it was.
In addition to this, my mother had a small restaurant there,
which may sound pretty romantic now,
which we didn't think it was romantic at the time.
My brother and I, before going to school
in the morning at 8 o'clock, at 6:30, 7 o'clock,
we followed her to the market.
There was no car at the time.
Market was about a mile, half a mile long.
She walked one way, look at the ingredient, buy on the way
back.
Everyone knew her.
So she going to buy a case of mushroom, which you know
is dark.
She know the guy's got to sell it.
He cannot give it to her.
And she want to argue the price and so forth.
Get back to her restaurant, start cooking
for her lunch and dinner.
Remember, there was no refrigeration at the time.
There was an icebox.
So she bought a block of ice every day
to put her fish and her meat.
It would have to be finished by the day, her vegetables, too.
So the day after, everything was new again.
So all the product were organic because nothing else existed.
It was not a big deal.
And everything was fresh, and too,
because you didn't have refrigeration or freezer.
So it was a different type of thing,
which was very menial and very ordinary at the time,
is coming back now, in a sense-- the vengeance
of something very fancy.
Organic food, local food, and stuff like this.
But we come to exaggerate in America
going one end to the other end of the spectrum.
And now you have an organic food.
I've been in a restaurant where they bring the carrot to me
and said, that carrot is called Nella.
She was born on the 7th of December.
[LAUGHTER]
That's my carrot?
So it can go a little too far this way too.
I hope we get away from processed food.
Processed food is the worst thing you can eat.
If you start looking at what's in it,
first you don't know what it is.
And according to my grandmother, you should never eat anything
you cannot recognize to start with.
And on those things, not only it becomes
dangerous the kids are eating this.
And now I have seen young kids not only recognizing
the product, but recognizing the color of the box.
I want the red box, or I want the blue box.
And by the time we get away from food, that much-- I mean,
that kid should know that a chicken's got a head and feet.
It's not a square thing with plastic on top.
So we try to teach the kids, take them to the garden,
get stuff out of the ground to make them test it,
and so forth.
And it's not that complicated.
My granddaughter, she doesn't like to weed the garden,
but she does a great job anyway.
Anyway, so I hope the future is more than the food of the past.
And it seems that it's coming back, certainly, here
at Google.
I have been here before at your restaurant.
I was very impressed by the quality of the food
that you serve, the employees too.
I was even more impressed by the price.
No one paid anything.
[LAUGHTER]
That's amazing.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
JACQUES PEPIN: Thank you.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: So we are going
to be looking forward to "Heart and Soul," launching in fall
of 2015, and take this wonderful trip through your memories
and all these people in your life,
and to see some of the places that are part of your home.
JACQUES PEPIN: Thank you very much.
I'm looking forward to it, too.
And I hope I continue to do some show with my granddaughter
and with my daughter and with my friend.
If not, it's OK.
The world of chef has changed tremendously.
And as I said, when we get into that business,
we didn't want into that business, quote,
"to become famous," because at that time when
we work in Paris, we go out dancing somewhere.
And you invite a girl and she says, what do you do?
You say, I'm a cook.
Even at the Plaza Athenee or the great place in Paris,
it was pretty low on the social scale.
Now it's very, very different.
And the chefs are recognized in many ways, maybe too much.
And I know that at the French Culinary Institute in New York
or at BU, when I'm there teaching
and you have a student coming to talk to me for an exit
interview.
And they say, Chef, I have a great idea for a cooking show.
I have a great idea to do a book.
They don't even know how to peel a carrot yet.
And so this is not the right reason
to go into that business, because it's very likely
that it will never happen.
And you still work 12 hours a day.
You still get varicose veins by the time you're 40 years old.
And you sweat a lot, and you work Saturday and Sunday.
And you're not paid that much, unless you
get at the last echelon.
Don't get into that business to, quote, "become famous."
But if you do it for the right reason--
that it gratifies you, that you're
happy to cook for someone, it pleases you, makes you happy,
the type of life that you want to do-- then, well, you'll
be happy.
And maybe you'll become famous, too.
It may happen.
But even if it doesn't, you'll have a happy life.
I mean, I've been cooking for over 60 years.
When people see me, usually they smile.
I bring pleasure to the life of people.
If I were a doctor, they'd kind of
look at me with not too much anticipation.
So it's a good life to be in if you go in for the right reason,
I think.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: Wonderful advice.
It's been such an honor to speak with you today.
JACQUES PEPIN: Thank you.
Thank you very much.
MARCIA GAGLIARDI: And to hear your stories.
Thank you so much for your time.
[APPLAUSE]