From the Archives: Jacques Pépin

He’s worked as the personal chef for French President Charles de Gaulle, co-hosted a television series with Julia Child and has authored over 30 cookbooks. There’s simply no one in the world like French chef – and culinary icon – Jacques Pépin. The Emmy- and James Beard Foundation Award winner worked in more than 100 restaurants before becoming the Director of Research and Development for Howard Johnson’s. He then transitioned to educating the public in proper French cooking methods through his groundbreaking cookbooks like “La Technique” and his latest, “Jacques Pépin Cooking My Way: Recipes and Techniques for Economical Cooking;” as well as through his numerous television series like “Today’s Gourmet” and “Every Day Cooking.” He is also the co-founder of the culinary certificate program at Boston University and founder of The Jacques Pépin Foundation, which teaches underserved populations a path to employment through cooking. Alec speaks with Chef Pépin about how his family’s work in restaurants influenced his path, why he’s made the pivots he has throughout his career, and what a revered chef likes to eat in his downtime. Originally aired February 6th, 2024. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:06Alec Baldwin?

  This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today has worked in the best restaurants in the world, taught thousands of hours of culinary technique, authored over thirty cookbooks, and at the age of eighty-eight, shows no signs of slowing down. Legendary French chef Jacques Pepin. Chef Pepin has enjoyed, by all accounts, a most extraordinary life and career. By twenty-two, he was the personal chef for French President Charles de Gaulle. In 1959, he immigrated to America and worked at Le Pavillon,

• 2:46Alec Baldwin?

  the best French restaurant in New York City, before moving to Howard Johnson's. His next frontier was the American home, instructing audiences on proper French cooking methods. This began with his cookbooks, including the groundbreaking La Technique, and then through multiple PBS series like Today's Gourmet and Cooking at Home. Here, Chef Pepin taught the home chef both the basics for everyday meals and experimentation with gourmet flourishes. His most recent cookbook is called Jacques Pepin: Cooking My Way: Recipes and Techniques for Economical Cooking.

• 3:29Alec Baldwin?

  I wanted to know how growing up in a small town in France, with his mother working in restaurants, put him on the path to where he is today.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Well, we were in the farm country. We had a little restaurant just outside of Lyon. The life was quite different. I mean, I turned eighty-eight yesterday, so I'm talking about over eighty years ago. Life was relatively easy. My father was a cabinet maker, my mother was a cook. So my choice in life was, I'm a cabinet maker, I'm a cook. We didn't have the telephone, we didn't have radio or television, of course, any of this. So life was probably much easier for a kid than it is now. And certainly, we took the dog, my brother and I, going to the forest and all that on our day off. And the parents never... You know, we came back at night and no one worried about where you were.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  It was it was quite different than now.

• 4:26Alec Baldwin?

  And did your father take his cabinet making practice out into the country with you just outside of Lyon, or did he stay in the city and make his products?

• 4:34Speaker 03

  No, he did that in the country, but after he gave up anyway at some point to work in the restaurant with my mother. But my father was a cabinet maker, his father was, his brother was, what we call in France Ebeneist, from the word ebony. So it's fancy cabinet maker, you know, he used noble wood like cherries, oak and so forth, never use any nail. It's always, you know, cut and joint and glue and sculpture on the wood. It was that type of work, the Louis XVI, Louis XVII kind of furniture. I still have a couple of piece from him actually here in my house.

• 5:13Alec Baldwin?

  Now, your mother got into the restaurant business when you were how old?

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Well, after I was born, because I have exactly 20 years difference with my mother. I mean, she got married, I think she was 17 and a half, then had my brother with a year and a half older than me, than me, and another one. So she got into the restaurant business before the war, slightly before the war. She was a waitress, work in different restaurants, start helping in the kitchen. It was pretty common in France. I mean, in the family in France, I count 12 restaurants, 12 of them run by woman. My two aunt, the sister-in-law, cousin, niece, mother, they all are. I was actually the first male to go into that business. And those kind of formidable women were not very impressed by me.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  I remember when I was the chef to the president in France, go back down to Lyon, go to my aunt who had a little restaurant, I get into the kitchen, she throw me out. She say, you use too much butter, get out of here. They were not very impressed by me.

• 6:16Alec Baldwin?

  And who's managing all this enterprise, your mother?

• 6:20Speaker 03

  Oh, they didn't have 12 restaurants at the time. I'm calling in general my aunt had a restaurant in Bois. Another aunt at a restaurant somewhere else.

• 6:27Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  My mother had three, four restaurants, actually, at some point.

• 6:31Alec Baldwin?

  And what was it about, I mean, so I'm assuming you feel like you were born to this? There's no way you you could escape it? You said cabinet making or cooking.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:40Alec Baldwin?

  And then, but you found the kitchen more seductive, correct?

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Absolutely, more exciting, more seductive. And so I went into this. I mean, as I said, the choice was relatively easy for for kid at that point. And first, we were supposed to go to school until age fourteen, which I did at thirteen. And I I took all the the exam, you know, at the end of primary school, you have different exam. So I took all of those and I finished when I was barely thirteen. So I said, that's it, I'm going into apprenticeship. My older brother became an engineer, so he worked, you know, so it was not the question of me that I had to go to work. That's what I wanted to do, so. And I went to school later, so.

• 7:23Alec Baldwin?

  Do you think that people, I mean, there's next to no association between what I do for a living and what you do for a living, but in in the world of acting and theater and so forth, people will often say, I can't make you a good actor, but I can make you a better actor than you were when you walked in the door. But there needs to be some inherent inspiration. Is that same thing true about food and cooking? Do people have to have an inherent gift for that kind of thing?

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, certainly. I mean, for me, I'm talking about professionalism, professional chef. And on a professional chef, I did those book called La Technique, which is an illustrated manual of cooking technique, to know how to bone out a chicken, to poach an egg. And it's not a question of knowing how to do it. It's eleven o'clock and you have a hundred people sitting down for lunch. You really have to move. So this is the difference between a professional chef and a home cook, you know, the speed and all that, too. So you have to be a good technician to be a chef first. But I know a fair amount of chef who are good technician, run a good kitchen and are relatively lousy cook. The food is all right, but conversely, I know people who cook at home,

• 8:33Speaker 03

  who wouldn't be able to run a restaurant speed and all that, too, but the food is fantastic, great, you know. So to be a great chef like Tom Mascherano, Daniel Boulud. Well, you have to be a technician first, but then you have to have other things after. You know, you have to have imagination, talent to to bring it to another level, you know, I think.

• 8:52Alec Baldwin?

  Eventually, you moved to Paris.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:55Alec Baldwin?

  And if I I don't want to quote the number here because I find this fantastic. You work in many, many, many restaurants during that period, correct?

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Close to a hundred, probably.

• 9:04Alec Baldwin?

  How is that possible?

• 9:06Speaker 03

  It's possible because I worked at the Plaza at in Paris for like seven years. Put my day off, each day off, I work at different restaurants, most of the time, and that two day off a week. There is an organization called Société des Cuisiniers, Society of the Chef of Paris, which I was a member. In fact, I don't know why we don't have that in New York, but you go in the morning or someone or your cook doesn't come or whoever doesn't come, they call, they say, I need one cook for the day. So, you know, I will end up like at Messi, you know, Galerie La Fariette, to and do like three thousand plate with a slice, a piece of salad in between and an egg, you know. And the next time I end up in a two star restaurant. And next, so you never know where the society is going to to sign you.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  But that was great experience, you know, of working because in case like this, it's not like you have to wait for the day to learn the habit of the house. I mean, within fifteen minutes, you're there, the chef says, you gotta work. So it's great training, really.

• 10:04Alec Baldwin?

  So you have a job in one where you were at D'Atene.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 10:07Alec Baldwin?

  And you have a job, but it's you sound like we've had guests on the show who were some of the most legendary sessions musicians in history.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:16Alec Baldwin?

  And it sounds like you have the same kind of thing, you're you're gonna go in for a day and do so, and and is the culture there? I don't want to say uniform, but but approachable, where you can walk in and you're just accepted. You you walk in there, or do you see, are there conflicts with the way things are done sometimes?

• 10:32Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 10:32Alec Baldwin?

  You fit in?

• 10:33Speaker 03

  If you work in a job to stay for a couple of years, you may get involved in into that type of thing, but when you work for the day to days, no. And remember that at the time, the cook was really at the bottom of the social scale. Any good mother would have wanted her child to marry the lawyer, you know. A doctor certainly know the cook. So now we are genius. I don't know what happened. At that time, it wasn't the case. So when you went into a restaurant, it was to conform exactly to the habit of that restaurant. It was not to create or do something on your own. In fact, I don't think I ever used a recipe before I came to America. So you work in that place, you learn the taste of that,

• 11:14Speaker 03

  and those dishes, in a sense, become very visceral, very powerful. I mean, the dishes my mother did as a kid, you know, those tastes will stay with you the rest of your life. And I'll go, the place I was in Paris, for example, we did the lobster souffle. We were forty-eight chefs in the kitchen there. And the forty-eight of us could have done it, you would never have known who has done it. That was the way it was. Until Nouvelle Cuisine in the mid-eighty, ninety, when the chefs started creating and doing that type of thing, which is different now.

• 11:48Alec Baldwin?

  Now, you're a hired chef for the president of France.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 11:53Alec Baldwin?

  And you work with de Gaulle and some other heads of state. How long were you doing that job?

• 11:57Speaker 03

  From fifty-six, end of fifty-six to fifty-eight. And the fifty-eight, I came here at the end of fifty-nine. You know, you have to realize that at the time, again, as I say, the cook, I served people like, I don't know where, Nero, Tito, Macmillan, those other hell of a set. Not anyone ever would call you to get kudo in the dining room. Are you kidding? The cook was in the kitchen, that was it. If anyone came into the kitchen because something was wrong, it was to complain. So I had never had, and I tell you, well, television barely existed, but with radio or magazine, newspaper, that didn't exist. So it was a different world.

• 12:34Alec Baldwin?

  So you're at, what is certainly one of the summits of cooking in France, if you're cooking for the head of state there. You have this amazing job. And then when you're done in fifty-eight, you move to the United States, correct?

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Right. At the end of nineteen fifty-nine, I moved. I wasn't married, I had a great job in France, my brother, the restaurant, but I wanted to come to America. America was silly, the golden fleet.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  So I said, I want to go there for a year, two years, maybe learn the language a little bit, see what's going on. I was unattached to, so I came here at the end of fifty nine, and I'm still here.

• 13:13Alec Baldwin?

  But what you see up till then, before you settle in the United States, is it safe to say you have a very restless nature?

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Yes, well, at an extent, but that was the world of food was, in a sense, very restless, moving from one place to the other to learn, because if you keep your eye open, I mean, I can't work with anyone now, and you learn something, you know, you would never have thought of doing it this way, too. Sometimes you learn what not to do, but you learn something. But, yes, so in that sense, coming to America was different. It was the first time I worked at the Pavillon in New York, was considered, you know, the best restaurant here, and it was the first time that I did my, my day in one, in one shift. In France, we still did two shifts. I start nine o'clock in the morning until two o'clock in the afternoon. You're afraid from, from two to five, go sit down somewhere, and at five you start

• 14:05Speaker 03

  five to nine or ten. It was standard, you know. So here, I started doing, it was one shift. I thought it was like half a day of working. That's when I started going to school and did other things. I had plenty of time. And the people, I have to say, at the time, were very, very welcoming. I mean, they say, oh, you come from a great country, there's so much culture, you know. So I say, wow. I talked to the people in France, I left, they say, what are you doing? They don't even have bread, they don't have wine, they don't have cheese, you know, at the time. But, yeah, people were extremely welcoming here, so I loved it. Things went on, one thing after another, and I'm still here.

• 14:45Alec Baldwin?

  But the thing is, you come here, and you're at Pavillon for how long?

• 14:49Speaker 03

  I was at the Pavillon not too long, from September until next April, six, seven months. At that time, there was problem with Sule, the owner, and all kind of problem with the employee, and Pierre Frehne, who was the executive chef, and he had come with Sule in nineteen thirty nine for the World's Fair, at the Yoncomi, and he stayed there eventually, he was the executive chef. When I was there, I had a problem with Souley and he decided to leave. And coincidentally, at that time, Howard Johnson, Howard D. Johnson, who created Howard Johnson, was a regular patron of the Pavillon. So he hired Pierre, and Pierre told me, you want to come with me? And I said, okay, great idea. So that's, that's what happened.

• 15:32Alec Baldwin?

  Okay, let, let, let's stop there, because this is the turn that this is so amazing to me. So you hit the summit in France, you're cooking for the heads of state, you come to New York, you're at Pavillon in New York. And the Howard Johnson, the namesake of the business, comes to Pavillon. Is he a regular?

• 15:48Speaker 03

  Yes, he was a regular.

• 15:49Alec Baldwin?

  Okay, so he's a regular there, and he gets you to come and cook for the Howard Johnson's restaurant chain, correct?

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely.

• 15:57Alec Baldwin?

  How the hell did he do that? How did he get you to come?

• 16:01Speaker 03

  No, he actually asked Pierre to come, and Pierre decided to go. And Pierre told me, you want to come with me to assist me and do, and that's how I did. But the point is that, as I said, the cook was quite different than now, because on that spring of 1960, I actually, I was offered the job at the White House for Kennedy. And then, but I had done that, as I said, in France, I'd never been on a magazine, newspaper, so I had no idea of the potential for publicity too, because it truly did not exist. In fact, the one who went to the White House, Rene Verdon, was a friend of mine, who was the sous chef at the Six Hours in New York. And I called him, put them in touch, eventually he got the job. And a year later, he sent me a picture of him with President Kennedy, or Mrs. Kennedy. I said, wow,

• 16:46Speaker 03

  I never had a picture with the girl of.

• 16:48Alec Baldwin?

  Right, right.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  So it was already changing, a different world. But prior to him, who was the chef at the White House? I asked, and it ended up, knowing that it was a black lady from the South, somewhere, no one would have known her name, no more than they knew my name or whatever. So it was a different world. We have to look at it in that context. Howard Johnson was another world for me. American eating, American habit.

• 17:14Alec Baldwin?

  Well, that's what I want to ask you, which is when you come here.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:17Alec Baldwin?

  Again, head of state, France, Pavillon, you get offered the White House job. What's the first, you're in New York, correct? You settled in New York first. What's the first thing that strikes you about the way Americans eat in American restaurants?

• 17:30Speaker 03

  Well, I live on 50th, between First and Second Avenue, on top of a little restaurant called Latte Blanche, near a certain place, a very nice area. So there was a supermarket which happened, my first supermarket. I thought it was great. I didn't have to go to the fish guide, the vegetable guide, and so forth. But then there was a lot of package, package, package. Then there was some good meat, beef, lamb, lobster. But there was only one salad, that was iceberg. There was no lick, no shallot, no oriental vegetable. I remember saying, what are the mushrooms? They say aisle five, that was canned mushroom there. You didn't have any. So it was another world, you know, in term.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  Of course, at the Pavillon, we had great supplier, even from Europe, from different parts, for the fish and all that too. But, yes, it certainly, it was different.

• 18:21Alec Baldwin?

  So in France, it's very compartmentalized. You go to the fish market, you go to the butcher, you go to the vegetable place, all separate. The bakery, everything is separate. Now, I mean, I can only say this because it's true, and that is that, for me, Howard Johnson's occupied a very specific place because as a Catholic in the 60s, as a child, we couldn't eat meat on Friday. So the Howard Johnson's fish fry on Fridays was a staple in my house, going to have the coleslaw and the hush puppies and the corn or whatever it was. And fried clams. But Howard Johnson's, for the guy that's a restless guy, for the guy that's moving around and trying things, you stayed with Howard Johnson's for 10 years, is that correct?

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:04Alec Baldwin?

  Why?

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Well, to start with, Howard D. Johnson, the father, came to my wedding. He came to the christening of my daughter. So they were from the. He used to come to the commissary and Pierre Fred and I, he said, okay, you guys do whatever you want. We start changing butter instead of margarine, fresh onion, dehydrated onion. We start changing all the recipe and start working in the kitchen with four, four chicken to do a chicken pot pie. And we end up with three thousand pounds of chicken at the time, you know, I move on on the thousand gallon kettle. So it was a large production, you know, when I finish Howard Johnson. I opened a restaurant on Fifth Avenue called La Potagerie in New York, we serve only soup.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Then I was a consultant for the World Trade Center for Joe Baum, we serve a hundred, thirty thousand people a day. I was a consultant at the Russian Tea Room. I'm saying only that because other French chef, I would never have been able to do any of those jobs. You know, I didn't do anything about production, marketing, chemistry of food. So Howard Johnson was a good experience for me. I learned a lot.

• 20:11Alec Baldwin?

  The book is Le Technique. So the technique is as important to you as the artistry. Preparing food in a certain way, because you, as you, you've mentioned repeatedly in interviews, programs of yours. And then you're writing about your mindfulness about economics and cooking.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 20:28Alec Baldwin?

  Don't waste anything.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, economic of motion as well as economic of food and so forth. And La Technique, I published that technique, I think in seventy four or five, it's still in print. I don't cook the same way that I cooked fifty years ago or two, but the way you sharpen a knife, you know, peel an asparagus, poach an egg is the same way. So those books of technique kind of remain because of that.

• 20:57Alec Baldwin?

  Chef Jacques Pepin. If you enjoy in-depth culinary conversations, check out my episode with Chef Eric Repair of the legendary Le Bernardin. What I like about Europe is the quality of the products. When they serve vegetables, they test like what they're supposed to taste. Here is a bit of a challenge.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  Because we do not cultivate the same way. You know, like the soil is maybe not the same. I don't know, like an artichoke in the Mediterranean is not the same artichoke that we eat here. And you know, it's like those gigantic farms and they have ways of cultivating and maximizing the land and so on.

• 21:36Alec Baldwin?

  Factory.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  It's factories, the artichokes are grown.

• 21:40Alec Baldwin?

  To hear more of my conversation with Eric Repair, go to here's the thing.org. After the break, Jacques Papin tells us where a world famous chef dines in his downtime.

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• 24:38Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Jacques Pepin's culinary techniques, everyday cooking, and heart and soul in the kitchen, these are just a few of the many television programs Pepin has created to instruct the home chef. But of all his work as a television icon, one series he is most well-known for is his Emmy-winning show with Julia Child, Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  When I did a series with Julia Child, you know, we did, I knew her 50 years, you know, I met her in 1960. So we did the series together. We had no recipe. She said, what do you want to do? Just write down a hundred things of you want to do. We did 26 shows. And she did the same way. And I think three of mine made it in the show. You know, we cooked together without recipes, so it was harder for the cameraman, of course. They don't know whether we're going To go left, right, or whatever. But for me, I have a scallion in that dish because they happen to be on the table. So I throw them in. Much easier to work without recipe, just testing, adjusting. This. And the second thing, when we did our show, uh, of course, on PBS, you have a timeframe. The show is thirty minutes.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  They say don't go all the time, it's too expensive. Uh, but Julia said, we'll cook and when it finish, we'll tell you. Some of the show were eighty minutes, ninety minutes. I mean, it was amazing. You know, and then, so we had wine. We had good wine, we had no recipe and we had as much time as we wanted. So it's fun cooking.

• 26:13Alec Baldwin?

  I watched that documentary about her and I was enthralled by that film. It really was a magical, an opportunity to really get to know somebody you thought you knew.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:22Alec Baldwin?

  A woman who everybody in this country knew who she was, I mean, at least of my generation. But you really didn't know her and when you got to know her, it was really, really a wonderful film.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  But she was exactly the same way in person that she was on television.

• 26:35Alec Baldwin?

  Now, so when you're in the United States and you come here and before you go to Pavillon, and this speaks to also just your patterns throughout your life, whether you're in Europe or what have you. Do you like to go to restaurants? Do you enjoy eating out or do you much more prefer to just cook at home? Do you dine out with any regularity or you prefer not to?

• 26:55Speaker 03

  Both. I mean, uh, I love to cook at home with friend occasionally, we did last night. But otherwise, I love to go to restaurant, of course. I mean, usually pretty straightforward restaurant. For example, for American, in the psyche of American, I believe a lot, French cooking is understood in the context of Michelin star, you know. Well, there is twelve, I think twelve or fourteen, three star Michelin in France. There's about seventy, eighty two star and about four hundred one star. The whole star system of the Michelin is about six hundred restaurant. Where there is a hundred sixty eight thousand restaurant in France. All the restaurant that I was talking about, my mother or two, many of them have never been a three star restaurant in their Michelin guide.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  I'm saying that because in the psyche of the American people, often they look at French cooking in the context of Michelin, very elegant and famous.

• 27:49Alec Baldwin?

  High stakes dining, yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  Which is not really, it's part of it, but a small part to a certain extent.

• 27:56Alec Baldwin?

  Now, for you, when you dine out, what's the first thing that you look for in a restaurant that you, that you find attractive?

• 28:01Speaker 03

  What, to a certain extent, the service. I mean, you know, you get into a restaurant or you're on the road, you get into a restaurant. You go in just looking at the, the bottom of the, the chair or the, the table, whether they are clean or not, the smell of the restaurant and all that. I say, I'm staying or I'm not staying here. I'm not talking about famous restaurants. So there is that first impression, which is very important. And the way you receive there, the service too. Yeah, those first impressions are, are very important, I think, in the restaurant. I mean, I used to review a fair amount of restaurants with Craig Lebo in the New York Times because I knew Craig, again, when I came to the, to this country, I mean, through the pavilion.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  Again, so very often it's a job that I would not, in fact, I was proposed the job after he left and died, I mean, that, would you be interested? I couldn't do that. I mean, it's, it's very easy, I can tell you fifteen things wrong anywhere that you go, but this is not my type of thing. And after, I knew I would have been pretty bored and frustrated after, you know, a couple of weeks on the job.

• 29:09Alec Baldwin?

  Well, for me, my wife and I, we go out to dinner probably, you know, four nights a week because it's the only time I have my wife to myself.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:17Alec Baldwin?

  We have to put all the kids to bed and I go to dinner with my wife. And my feeling about restaurants is, you know, we basically try new things every now and then. Someone will say, oh, you must go here. But we go to the same four places over and over again. I want reliability. I walk in that restaurant, I know exactly what I'm gonna get.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Right, me too. In fact, a place where they do a fantastic roast chicken, I wanna go back there. And if I go back there and they say, we don't do it anymore, so what, what, what's going on? I mean, you know, I had, you know, so many twenty-three, twenty-four thousand restaurants in New York. The amount of ethnicity and the choices unmatched anywhere in the world. When you find six or eight restaurants that you can rely on, if you want Chinese or this and that, yeah, of course you go back there, that's what you want, and you want the same food.

• 30:04Alec Baldwin?

  Now, are there things you won't eat? Or did your training put you in a place where you eat anything?

• 30:09Speaker 03

  Yes, I'm a glutton, basically. Yes, I eat anything you put in front of me.

• 30:15Alec Baldwin?

  Really?

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Yes, I mean, I don't really think of many things that I don't like. It changes, I mean, your metabolism changes. At my age, I used to love a large steak. Now, if I have a steak, if I have two or three ounces, a piece of that, that's more than enough. So, you know, things change. I eat probably more soup than I ever did and other things like that. The way you cook, when you're a young chef, often you add to the plate, you add to the plate, you add to the plate too, presentation too. And when you get to be a certain age, if I have a great tomato out of my garden, at the right temperature, you know, a bit of salt, it's ripe, a bit of salt, bit of rivo on top, I don't need more embellishments on the plate.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  So I take away, take away from the plate to be left with something more essential at my age. But it's a normal progression with age and so forth.

• 31:09Alec Baldwin?

  I mean, beyond, I want to say this carefully because I don't want to get to say the wrong thing here, but it's like, beyond drugs and alcohol and things that have a grip on people in this very, very powerful way, beyond that, there's nothing that has a control of people more than food.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 31:24Alec Baldwin?

  Food is the most powerful reality in our lives.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  There is nothing also who bring people together like food. You know, you sit down at the table with people you don't know to, all of a sudden, you know, you start having conversation and all that. You may be sitting next to the governor on one side and maybe the dishwasher of the restaurant on the other side, but it really doesn't matter. I remember traveling in the northern of Europe and Yugoslavia and so forth in little village many, many years ago. People look behind their curtain, foreigners, you know, I mean, you're dangerous, you're foreigner. You sit at the bistro and you order by hand. If you don't know the language, you get the bottle of wine there and whatever bread too. And all of a sudden, people sit around you, you know, they look at you. You send them a bottle of wine and an hour later, you're speaking unknown language.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Language with those people because you're quote normal, you know, you eat like them or so forth. So food is very important. One of the most important thing for me is probably to follow the season. You know, I mean, the the supermarkets seem to be greater and more beautiful they have ever been. You have strawberry year round, but when you test it and when you go to a farm, buy a basket of strawberry in full season, you can see the difference.

• 32:38Alec Baldwin?

  Sure.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  So it seems to be very plentiful in some ways, but it's not. I mean, following the season is the best thing you can do. That's when a tomato really tastes good, full season, you have, that's when it's really cheap too.

• 32:51Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  And when nutritionally, that's when it's the best for you. So you know, you go to those place from the south of France to Sicily or or or Sardinia where people live over a hundred years old. They eat very simply, but they follow the season simply, have a glass of wine and eat, you know, what's in season simply, and that's great.

• 33:11Alec Baldwin?

  We had Eric Repair, obviously from Le Bernardin here on the show about a year ago. And when he described what it was like when he was young and he was in the kitchen, it's a lot of work, boy, it sounds like it was really, really, really a lot of work.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  It was, but we didn't know it was work, you know, and as I said, at that time, no recipe. The chef tell you do this, and if you say why, you would have said, because I just told you, right? So I worked for a year in apprenticeship, cleaning the floor and then started scaling fish, killing chicken at the time, we killed chicken, pork chicken, rabbit, scaling fish to without, just by looking and doing it. And then one day, a year later, the chef told me, you start at the stove tomorrow, start at the stove, I only get close to the stove to put wood and coal in it, at that point, there was no. And I work at the stove and I knew how to do it through osmosis, you know, at that time, the repeat and so forth. So that was a different way of learning as we do now.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  You know, I've been dean at the French Culinary Institute in New York for twenty five years and I teach at BU for forty three years, I think. So now you teach totally differently. The kids first are usually coming from not only high school, but often college. So they want to know more, totally different than the way I was taught when I was thirteen, fourteen, do this, do that, that's it.

• 34:30Alec Baldwin?

  Going back to when you were talking about a great tomato. What you see is I live on Long Island in the summer. We're out there for the summer, my family. And these farmers markets where it seems like people will pay just about anything to have a basket of something of the season. We have a garden in our house. We have a woman who comes, she prepares the garden. And then she texts me and says, here's what's ready to pick. The Japanese eggplant is ready to pick. The flowers are ready to pick. We've got a decent sized garden and my family, like I said, I've got seven kids. My wife and I, some people who help us, we can't eat everything that comes out of that garden.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  I know. I did two soup this summer with cucumber. I had so much. I peel it, took the seed out of it, put it in the food processor, emulsify it, salt, pepper, and I mix that with Bloody Mary mix. Very spicy cucumber. I had a gazpacho right there. And I did another one the same way, but then mix it with yogurt and mint to do yogurt soup during the summer. So often the recipe comes from that overabundance of things that you have.

• 35:32Alec Baldwin?

  Chef Jacques Pepin. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend. And be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Jacques Pepin shares how a near fatal car accident changed the course of his life.

• 35:59Speaker 02

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• 38:12Speaker 02

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• 38:42Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Chef Jacques Pepin's career boasts a seemingly endless list of accomplishments, from cooking for multiple heads of state to creating the culinary certificate program at Boston University. That's why I wanted to know why he chose to go back to school, earning his bachelor's and master's degrees from Columbia University in his adulthood.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  Well, to start with, I left school when I was 13 years old. So there was always, often in the kitchen, that complex about not having an education, you know, and all that. So I saw that even, as I said, when I was at Howard Johnson, for example, I was with Pierre Fréni. Pierre Fréni was a fantastic chef, great guy. He started working like I did, but he never went back to college after he was here. And I remember Mr. Johnson Jr. there, who was at Cornell. He used to come with his other kids, the same age, 22, 23. They come out of college and I know that Pierre was impressed, he didn't know what to do. When in fact, they knew nothing about cooking or anything. At that time, I was already in the graduate school at Columbia, so I wasn't impressed by them.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  So it changed your mentality, you know. And I said, one time I gave the commencement address at Columbia, actually, and I said a quote, I think, from Somerset Mohan, "Education is very important. Without an education, you're likely to fall in the deadly danger of taking educated people seriously." So it's true, to a certain extent, you know. I would never have been able to do everything that I've done without the education I get at Columbia. And I went to Columbia from 1959 to 1973. Seventy-three, I proposed a doctoral dissertation on the history of food in the context of civilization and literature. And at that time, they told me, "Are you crazy? Food? No, we cannot accept that."

• 40:39Speaker 03

  So they refused. So I left.

• 40:41Alec Baldwin?

  That's crazy.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  "Actually, I want to be you."

• 40:44Alec Baldwin?

  And you got your doctorate there?

• 40:45Speaker 03

  Colombia still gave me a PhD later. I think it's another world, the world of food now. I mean, the way we get respect and all that. And I have to say that American chefs start later than what it used to be. Thirteen years old in Europe and so forth. So they usually goes to school to they are more educated too. So it's a different business. They get much more into business now. So many chefs that I knew from Daniel Boulah, six, seven, eight restaurants. I never did that type of thing. I don't think that I would have been very good at that. I'm not very good at business in general. So, but the chef now is much more larger person than it used to be.

• 41:25Alec Baldwin?

  So a couple of quick things that I want to touch on. So you were in a very serious car accident.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:31Alec Baldwin?

  And this was back in what year?

• 41:33Speaker 03

  1974. You know, I tried to avoid a deer falling the ravine tree and I had 12, 14 fracture. And so I broke my back in three place, my two hip, leg, arm. They thought that I wouldn't live. They thought that I wouldn't walk again. And in fact, one of the first thing my wife signed, removal of the left arm. The left arm, there was only pieces, a good thing they didn't cut it off. So, yeah, that kind of changed my life too. It pushed me in the direction of writing about food. You know, I did for the New York Times.

• 42:05Alec Baldwin?

  You couldn't stand in the kitchen for very long, obviously.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Well, I can, but you know, not like 12 hours a day, all the time, every day, six hours. It's pretty taxing, you know, so.

• 42:13Alec Baldwin?

  Of course.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that changed my life.

• 42:15Alec Baldwin?

  Changed your life in an important way. I want you to mention two things. Your new cookbook is called what?

• 42:21Speaker 03

  Cooking My Way, I think. You know, I did 13 series of PBS show and each time there is a theme. So each time you have a book with a different theme and that's what I have so many book. I even did a book for the Cleveland Clinic for cardiac patient, weight loss. So you put your knowledge of food. To a very specific area. In The New York Times for eight, ten years, I had a column called The Purposeful Cook, which was to cook for a family of six for a minimal amount of money. So there, the idea was economy in the kitchen. So this is a bit of the same theme that I took back here. But I've been very lucky with all of the books that I've done and with PBS and so forth.

• 43:03Alec Baldwin?

  You've had an amazingly broad career. It's incredible.

• 43:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm very lucky.

• 43:08Alec Baldwin?

  Which brings me to, you said you just turned eighty-eight?

• 43:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yesterday.

• 43:13Alec Baldwin?

  So yesterday was your birthday, you're eighty-eight, which brings, and I have many friends, I have many friends who are older than I am. I'm sixty-five and my friends who are in their late seventies and rounding the corner toward eighty, who have great careers, they're like, they're never going to retire. They're like, well, this is who I am, this is what I do. Retirement is death to them.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Are you kidding? If you love what you're doing, you never have to go to work.

• 43:33Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, fantastic, yeah, fantastic. Now, one more thing. Your foundation, describe to us when you started that and what the mission of the foundation is.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  It was actually my son-in-law, my daughter does Facebook for me, my son-in-law does Instagram, all of those. He's a professor at Johnson and Weller. He's actually a professional chef, forty years, but then he went back to Johnson and Weller to teach and get his master and get a PhD. So at some point, about five, six years ago, he told me, you know, you've been teaching all your life, who do you think you would like to teach now? So we talked about it. I say, you know, people who have been a bit disenfranchised by life, you know, people who come out of jail, you know, homeless people, former drug addict, even veterans. So I feel that in six weeks, with the video that we are teaching and all that, in six weeks, I could teach someone in the kitchen, if they're interested, how to peel onion properly,

• 44:25Speaker 03

  how to peel asparagus, how to poach an egg, and then you know the basic. And if you like it, then keep at it. Fabio, later, maybe you're the chef there, you know, and you're in charge now of the kitchen and you make good money and it kind of redo your life. Those are not necessarily young people in the organization, you know, a lot of forty, fifty people, but we work through community kitchen a bit all over the country. And it's been quite rewarding and we need people like that in the kitchen, you know, to work.

• 44:56Alec Baldwin?

  Well, I must say, what a great honor it is for me to meet you. It is an honor. I'm a great admirer of yours.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  A great honor for me. I wanted to tell you, I have to say, yeah, my daughter and my son-in-law and my granddaughter, they love you.

• 45:09Alec Baldwin?

  Thank you, sir. Thank you.

• 45:10Speaker 03

  Happy cooking.

• 45:15Alec Baldwin?

  My thanks to Jacques Papan. More information about the Jacques Papan Foundation can be found at j p dot foundation. This episode was recorded at C D M Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeese, and Maureen Hoban. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.

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• 46:25Alec Baldwin?

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• 47:02Speaker 02

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• 47:34Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.