He’s the quintessential American chef with a French accent.
Jacques Pepin, who has called Connecticut home for almost 50 years, turns 90 later this year and shows no signs of slowing down.
CT Examiner caught up with Pepin recently to talk about his milestone birthday, his 90 chefs/90 dinners national campaign supporting the work of his foundation helping to train the next generation of chefs and cooks…. and yes, releasing another cookbook in 2025.
Brian Scott-Smith: So first of all, I want to say to you Jacques Pepin happy 90th birthday before it occurs later this year in December. How does it feel being 90?
Jacques Pepin: Getting old is not that easy. I wish I were a bit younger, but I could be dead also it’s okay. (laughing).
Brian Scott-Smith: I want to take you back to when you were 13 years old, and I believe that’s when you left school to become an apprentice in a kitchen, which is where this all started for you. That was a young age, maybe not back then, but it certainly seems a young age today. What are your memories of that?
Jacques Pepin: I finished school. In France we had to go at the end of the primary school, which was 14 years old. And I was in that class when I was 13 already, and I took all the final exam too. So, I finished the exam. That’s where I said, okay, now I can leave. And I left.
My father was a cabinet maker. My mother was a cook in a restaurant.
I was going to be a cook or a cabinet maker. In our family we had four or five cabinet makers. But we also have a lot of cooks. In my family in France, I count through the years, I can count 12 different restaurants, and the 12 of them are run by women. My two aunts, sister-in-law too.
Brian Scott-Smith: By the age of, I believe 25, you moved to America. You left your home in France and basically, you’ve been here ever since.
What was the rationale for coming to America?
Jacques Pepin: America was the golden world, so I always wanted to come to America. I wasn’t married, I worked in Paris, I was free, and I came to America for a year. That’s what I thought I would do. And at that time, certainly the quota for French people were quite open, and I got a green card in three months or whatever.
So, it was pretty easy. And I said, I will come for a year or two, learn the language, and go back. I liked America because of the jazz music. That type of thing we heard during the war, when I was a kid, so that was my reason, and I loved it from the beginning.
Brian Scott-Smith: And you learned your English in America?
Jacques Pepin: Yes. I did take maybe a few months of basic English in a place in Paris before I came, but I had decided to come and came on a student boat, and there was a teacher on the boat and the guy spoke French.
And that teacher lived in New York, and I said to him that I gotta learn English somewhere. And he said Columbia University is the best school. Of course, I never heard of Columbia, but the week after I was here, I took the subway and end up at Columbia and somehow end up being able to speak to someone and register for English for foreign students, which I did for at least two, maybe three years.
Brian Scott-Smith: Why do you think you’ve never lost your accent?
Jacques Pepin: My Connecticut accent, you mean? (laughing)
I don’t know. I tried. I certainly tried. But it didn’t work out. I don’t know, with accents, unless you come to a country when you are young or like my daughter when she was a smaller baby too, otherwise when you come at 25 like me it’s not easy.
Some people do it, I haven’t been able to do it.
Brian Scott-Smith: You of course moved to Connecticut from New York state, you’ve been here I believe now for about 50 years?
Jacques Pepin: I moved in 1976.
Brian Scott-Smith: Obviously you fell in love with Connecticut as you’re still here.
How did America get introduced to you? Would you say when you started doing the TV show with Julia Child? How did that all start?
Jacques Pepin: I started way before Julia. I met Julia in 1960. So, at that time she just came from France and actually the first time I met with her, we spoke French.
She spoke French better than I spoke English, at the time. And at that time, she had never had a television show. She never had a cookbook. She was pretty unknown. And I met her through a friend in New York, and we became friends.
The first time that I did a series on television was 1982.
At the PBS station in Florida, in Jacksonville, I did a series of 13 shows. And then after that I forget exactly when, but I think the end of the 80s. Yeah, I went through, I was at that time I was doing 35, 40 weeks a year of cooking classes, it was the time when women’s liberation exploded and organic gardens and all kind of things.
People opened those little cookware shops with a cooking school in the back, and that was new, and I was asked to go to one or two, and they said, oh, can we book you for next year? And ultimately, that’s what I was doing, 30, 35 weeks, at least a year.
At that point, I was doing classes at Martin Yan, who had a cooking school in San Francisco, and he told me about KQED, a PBS station in San Francisco.
He said they asked me to do a show tomorrow, can you come and do it with me? I say, sure. So, we can both bone out a chicken and did whatever.
Anyway, the producer there asked me would you be interested in doing a series with us? And I said yes. And frankly, I didn’t expect it to happen because I was asked by WNET in New York and WGBH in Boston.
And I said yes, each time, but they never raised the money, so we never did the shows.
So, KQED eventually got the money and I did actually 13, 12 or 13 series with KQED.
I’m really indebted to KQED for all of those shows.
Brian Scott-Smith: Talk to us about your Foundation because that’s obviously very important to you.
That’s coming up for 10 years very soon. What was the purpose behind the Foundation and tell us who it helps?
Jacques Pepin: It was actually my son in law and my daughter who did it. I would never have done it. I’ve been very lucky this way.
So, at some point, like 10 years ago, or whenever it was, my son in law said you’ve been teaching all your life, who would you like to teach now? And I say, people who have been a bit disenfranchised with life, drug addicts or people who come out of jail, so that’s what we decided to do through Community Kitchen.
I personally feel that I can train someone in six weeks how to peel potato and clean salad and poach an egg and, very basic technique, and if that person likes it and stays there. Five, six years later, she or he is the chef there in a small restaurant, and you have redone your life.
And it’s been very gratifying also to do that. And that’s basically what the Foundation does.
And the chef world is very generous. At some point, during the pandemic also, my son in law asked all the known chefs from Thomas Keller to Daniel Boulud and so forth, if they wanted to do a video for the foundation to give to people.
And I think now we have 400 videos from chefs from all over America. So, if people come to the foundation, the young chef, they have access to all of that material which is very good.
Brian Scott-Smith: Talk to us about the 90 chefs, 90 dinners campaign that started last year and obviously will continue this year.
It’s a big undertaking for you, but it will actually help the foundation.
Jacques Pepin: Yes, again, my son in law and daughter were the father of that idea, it wasn’t mine. So, we already did Tom Colicchio in New York, we did Gramercy Tavern in New York, we did two or three, and already made, a fair amount of money.
So, people charge whatever they want. And even at home, people are doing some party at home, like Andrew Zimmern, for example, I think a couple of weeks ago, in Indiana, he did a party and I connected through Zoom with his people that were in his house.
And I have a lot of stuff on the West Coast coming up.
Brian Scott-Smith: Talk to us about the changing face of cooking. You’ve seen so many trends come and go. What are your thoughts about cooking and the whole sort of social media, of which you are a part.
We see all of these well-meaning people on social media doing recipes.
Does it make you happy or does it make you cringe sometimes when you see some of it?
Jacques Pepin: No, that’s good. If I cook with someone and I tell you, I already learned something of course, sometimes you learn what not to do, but you learn something.
It does change a great deal, but in some ways, I remember when I was a kid, we only ate what the garden gave or whatever. We didn’t even have refrigeration at the time and so forth.
And in America, it was the TV dinner at the time.
And then, through the years, it started changing because people going to Europe for vacation. They end up being in Italy, in France, in England. And they learn about wine, there was nothing when I came to this country.
So, they learn about this.
It’s quite different than it used to be, but people are going back now to home cooking, not only home cooking after the pandemic, certainly, but also organic cooking and all that. Having a garden, having that type of thing. I know my son in law is teaching sustainable food and so forth.
There is a dichotomy here in the sense that you have people who never cook, other people are really interested in cooking and in the production of food and in the distribution of food, and so forth. So, it’s quite different than it used to be.
Actually, in restaurants too. I worked in New York at the Pavillon, when I came here, it was considered to be the greatest restaurant in America, French restaurant that is. And it was very good actually. And, at that time, if you ask people, any great restaurant was called a continental restaurant or French restaurant.
Often written in French, the menu, totally misspelled usually, but it was that type of thing.
There was no great Italian restaurant, Chinese, Japanese, and so forth. There were some, of course, in Chinatown but not considered four or five stars. Now it’s quite different, of course.
Even myself. After all the books that I’ve done they say I’m considered maybe a quintessential French chef, but you take one of my books and on page 22 you have a black bean soup with cilantro on top, because of my time in New York, but the recipe is originally from Cuba and Puerto Rico.
So, you have those things, or you find a lobster roll from Connecticut or a clam chowder or stuff like that.
After all of those years, I consider myself probably the quintessential American chef. So, things change.
Brian Scott-Smith: I don’t think anyone’s going to argue with you on that. Talking of books, I understand you have a new one coming out this Fall?
What can we expect in that latest book?
Jacques Pepin: The best book that I may have done is called The Art of Cooking. And in the 80s, with my friend Tom, we did 34,000 pictures. And I kept 3,000 of them, and we did two volumes, 1,500 pictures each. It took five years; it was a long process. So, it was The Art of Jacques Pepin.
A few years ago, I wanted to show some of my paintings I do, some of my paintings of chickens, especially, and I asked my publisher, they said, yeah, absolutely. As soon as I send a couple of paintings of chickens, they say, can we have a recipe with that? I say OK. So, we did the Art of the Chicken.
So, this new book, we’re expanding to the Art of Jacques Pepin. I’m going to have a hundred recipes and a hundred paintings. We’ll see what happens.
Brian Scott-Smith: And give us a sense of what food Jacques Pepin is enjoying at the moment?
Jacques Pepin: It probably has to do with my age and my metabolism change, and when you’re a young chef we tend to add to the plate and add this and that decoration, and now I take away to be left with something a bit more essential without too much embellishments.
So, simplicity for me is still the best thing, and the quality of ingredients and so forth.
Brian Scott-Smith: It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you.
We wish you and your foundation continued success. We look forward to seeing the new book coming out this fall.
Jacques Pepin: Thank you, and happy cooking to you. And you can find out more about Jacques Pepin’s 90/90 campaign at – celebratejacques.org