At 90, Jacques Pépin Is Still Teaching And Learning

Jacques Pépin just turned 90, and he’s spent his career defying expectations. By 1958, at the age of 23, he had cooked for three French presidents. But he left that life to work at a high-end restaurant in New York, then gave that up to cook at Howard Johnson’s, making food for the masses.

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

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

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• 0:41Dan Pashman?

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• 1:06Speaker 01

  Sirius XM Podcasts.

• 1:14Dan Pashman?

  Jacques, I'm looking at your wall of pans behind you.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  I don't like to go into the closets and look for pans for heat tang. I think it's aesthetically pleasing. Those are parts that I use all the time, back and forth, so it's easier.

• 1:29Dan Pashman?

  My wife thinks I have too many pans.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. Well, your wife doesn't know me.

• 1:37Dan Pashman?

  This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Long before Alton Brown and Rachael Ray, before Emerald and Ina, Jacques Bepen became a household name as one of America's best-known celebrity chefs. Back when that wasn't even a term. He's been teaching people how to cook for 50 years, since way before food was a whole genre of television. He's written dozens of books and hosted numerous TV shows.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  There is nothing as simple and as good as just a fry. There is a way of doing it, I mean, my way of doing it, not everyone's way, but mine.

• 2:15Dan Pashman?

  A month ago, Jacques turned 90 years old. In celebration of that milestone, his foundation planned 90 chef-hosted events across the span of an entire year. His work with his foundation shows that Jacques is still driven by the idea that anyone can learn to cook, and he's still showing people how, including on Instagram. What is the key to making a very good instructional video? What makes some better than others?

• 2:39Speaker 02

  If people can really relate to it, I mean, for me, as I say, I'm very to the point there, I like to demystify it, peeling an asparagus, you know? So in that sense, I like to break it down and say, that's the important part. And even when I see my video, there is never enough close-up for me. I say, you should have had a close-up, they don't really see it, they don't have to see me.

• 3:00Dan Pashman?

  You want them to show your hands.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely, only my hand. At the end, if I present the dish, maybe my face, but not.

• 3:06Dan Pashman?

  Right, but because you want people to learn.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 3:11Dan Pashman?

  So while most of the top French chefs in America are serving caviar and truffles in white tablecloth restaurants, Jacques Papin prefers to teach home cooks how to peel asparagus on Instagram. As you'll hear, he's spent a lot of his life defying expectations. A few years back, I got to go to his house in Connecticut. We sat down in his kitchen in full view of his glorious wall of pots and pans. Jacques grew up in Bourg-en-Bresse, near Lyon, during and after World War II. When he was six, his mother took him to a farm where he would stay for the summer. When she said goodbye and left, he began to cry. To comfort him, someone who worked at the farm led Jacques to the barn to milk a cow. The milk was warm, foamy. It's his first real food memory. For Jacques, food was always a source of comfort, even when he got back home.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  For me, there is no place more secure than a kid coming back from school to sit in the kitchen. When I was a kid, you hear your mother voice, your father, the clink of the equipment, the smell of the food, then you eat, then you share. Those are very visceral memory which stay with you the rest of your life, you know, sharing food the same way.

• 4:15Dan Pashman?

  Soon after that summer on the farm, Jacques began working at the restaurant his parents owned. He'd wash out wine bottles, peel potatoes. When he was 13, he quit school and began apprenticing in the kitchen at a fancy hotel in town. From there, he moved from one restaurant to the next, climbing the military-style ranks of French kitchens. By the time he was just 23, he'd been the personal chef to three French presidents, including Charles de Gaulle. Jacques was one of the most prominent chefs in the country. And then you left. You went to New York. Why?

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Well, someone introduced me and said, that man was chef to three French presidents. The three of them are dead. So I kept on leaving.

• 4:56Dan Pashman?

  No, Jacques wasn't actually suspected of assassinating any French presidents. He just wanted something different. He figured he'd stay in the US for a year or two. He arrived in 1959 and he definitely found something different. Oreos, iceberg lettuce, Jell-O. He loved them all. He also had his first ever supermarket experience. One stop for all his ingredients instead of five different specialty stores. Jacques's first job was cooking at Le Pavillon, a famed French restaurant in New York City. And even though he was still making French food, he found the culture in the US to be less rigid, more open to experimentation.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  There was that type of freedom in this, all kind of thing in America that I probably wouldn't have done in France. And that's why I stayed, you know, I discovered another world. You will always, if you keep your eye open, learn something different, something new, you know, and that's what makes it exciting.

• 5:47Dan Pashman?

  Soon Jacques had earned such a reputation that he got offered another job cooking for a head of state, this time for President John F. Kennedy. Seems like a plum gig, right? But Jacques turned it down. First, he says, back then, a job like that wasn't as glamorous as you'd think. The chef was hidden in the kitchen, cooking in anonymity.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  I had done that. I didn't want to do that again. I was doing things that I had never done, that I didn't want to leave New York.

• 6:11Dan Pashman?

  Jacques wanted to keep doing things he had never done. So he left Le Pavillon and went to work for Howard Johnson. Instead of cooking for the president, he'd be cooking for the masses. Now, you might know Howard Johnson as a roadside hotel chain with those orange roofs. But in the 50s and 60s, you could eat there too. In fact, it was one of America's first big restaurant chains. At its peak, when Jacques was there, Howard Johnson served more meals than anyone in America, except the US Army. Jacques was hired as Howard Johnson's Director of Research and New Development. In the beginning, he spent a few months getting to know the company by working as a line cook, the chain's busiest location, off a highway in Queens, New York. So he went from making cassoulet at Le Pavillon in the heart of the city to flipping burgers with a view of an exit ramp.

• 6:56Dan Pashman?

  In the Howard Johnson test kitchen, Jacques worked with food chemists, something else he had never done before. He began to blend his French training with American techniques. He replaced margarine with butter, swapped in fresh onions and potatoes for frozen or dehydrated ones, but he also embraced the microwave and became an advocate for the blender. He was having fun, experimenting and learning in the kitchen.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  We cut the hot dog and you make an incision the long way.

• 7:20Dan Pashman?

  Slice it down the middle the long way.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  And then after every quarter of an inch the other way, put in a skillet that it curl up, it curl up like a round thing.

• 7:29Dan Pashman?

  Okay, if you're having trouble picturing this, when you slice a hot dog the long way and then make tiny cuts the short way and you cook it in a pan, the whole thing curls up into a circle, a curly dog, Jacques calls it.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  And we serve that on a bun, a hamburger bun or something like that.

• 7:45Dan Pashman?

  I saw that. It's so funny. There's a brewery near my house on Long Island called Blind Bat Brewery, and that's how they serve hot dogs.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  I'm not kidding.

• 7:52Dan Pashman?

  Yes.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  They must have seen that somewhere.

• 7:54Dan Pashman?

  Yes, that's so funny.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Many, many years ago. We serve it on English muffin or one of those.

• 7:58Dan Pashman?

  That's how they did it on the English muffin. And it's so funny because, I mean, I thought it was very clever and fun to see a different way of doing a hot dog.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Well, I show it with her on the English muffin, maybe they show it with you.

• 8:07Dan Pashman?

  But my eight-year-old daughter, who ordered a hot dog, was a little bit confused.

• 8:14Dan Pashman?

  She's like, what is this?

• 8:17Speaker 02

  It's okay, it's fun.

• 8:19Dan Pashman?

  For Jacques, working at a big chain was new and different. He loved that. He also loved the sheer scale of it.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  So we did the chicken pot pie, for example. It was a chicken in cream sauce and so forth. I started doing 10 pound of chicken in the kitchen. Then we did 50 pound that. We ended up 3,000 pound of chicken at the time. We did, you know, 3,000 pound of bone to do stock. I learned a great deal about marketing, I mean, chemistry of food. And I said, I would never have been able to do those jobs after without the training of Howard Johnson.

• 8:54Dan Pashman?

  In 1970, after a decade at Howard Johnson, Jacques moved on. But as he said, he took what he learned with him. Around this time, America's middle class was growing. People were going out to eat more. The pace of life was picking up. There was pressure on restaurants to serve more food faster. The classic French sauces that take hours or even days to make, it just wasn't practical. So Jacques opened a restaurant that just served soup. You ordered at a counter and got your soup with a fresh piece of bread on a tray, cafeteria style, very democratic, as he put it. The soup restaurant brought together everything Jacques had picked up over the years. Classic French influence meets mass production meets new technology. The place was a big success, but Jacques had a falling out with his partners, and it never expanded.

• 9:38Dan Pashman?

  Still, he was prescient. You can see the seeds of fast casual places like Chipotle and Shake Shack in his concept. As he told the New York Times around this period, "You have to adapt to modern techniques. Some stuff is better frozen. Puff pastry bakes more reliably. As for the blender, if Escoffier were alive today, I'm sure he would use it."

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I still agree with that.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  I said at the time, it's true.

• 10:04Dan Pashman?

  What do you think drives that evolution? That you don't cook the way you used to cook. Restaurants aren't cooking the way that they used to cook.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  No.

• 10:12Dan Pashman?

  These things are always moving forward.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Culture, art, habits, life itself, the speed to the internet or stuff. All of that has an influence on the way you live. And the way you live has an influence on the way you eat and the way you cook. To go to the market now, you have pre-washed spinach, you have pre-sliced mushroom, you have skinless, boneless breasts of chicken. You come back, you have a non-stick pan. You put that together, you can do the same thing. Use the supermarket or the prep cook in a sense. It may not be the least expensive way of shopping, but certainly, you know, it saves you a lot of work.

• 10:56Dan Pashman?

  Coming up, before Jacques can figure out his next career move, an unexpected event forces him to leave restaurant kitchens forever. Then later, he tells me the best way to cook spam, and we talk more about the creative process in the kitchen and beyond. Stick around.

• 11:19Speaker 03

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• 11:25Dan Pashman?

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• 12:08Dan Pashman?

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• 14:34Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman, and I got to tell you, I love popcorn at the movies. It's an incomplete experience for me to go to the movies and not eat popcorn, but not everyone feels that way. In last week's show, I attempt to convince French reporter Samia Bazil, a cinephile who does not think popcorn should be eaten at the movies, that she's wrong, that she should give it a shot. And Samia goes on a quest to try to find out how popcorn at the movies became a thing at all in the US and in France.

• 15:01Speaker 05

  So you basically, your family invented sweet popcorn in France?

• 15:05Dan Pashman?

  We can say it, yes. Will Samia be won over? Will I eat popcorn? Yes to the second one. You'll have to listen for the answer to the first. That one's up now. Check it out. Now, back to Jacques Papin. After his soup restaurant, Jacques had to figure out his next move. But before he could, he had to change course again, this time not by choice. One day, while driving, he hit a deer. His car rolled into a ravine and exploded. Doctors thought he might not be able to walk again, that they might have to amputate his arm.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  I had 12 fracture. I broke my pelvis in five place, my two hip, my leg, arm. I mean, standing 12 hours a day behind the stove wasn't possible anymore.

• 15:50Dan Pashman?

  Jacques's days in restaurant kitchens were over. But in classic Papan's style, he adapted. He decided to focus on writing and teaching. He had done a bit of that, but after the accident, it became his focus. He began traveling around the country, teaching cooking classes. In 1976, he published his seminal cookbook, La Technique, a cooking bible filled with a novel concept at the time, step-by-step photographs. Instead of recipes, La Technique was like culinary school in a book. A decade later, Jacques helped start the Culinary Arts Program at Boston University, where he ended up teaching for more than 30 years.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Well, I always like to break down things and teach and understand why, to go beyond the recipe. As a professional chef, you never look at the recipe. And you know, the irony is, is that when I do a recipe, I start with an idea. Maybe I read something in a book, I go to the market, oh, they are beautiful mushroom. I say, I'm going to do this, that. So I start with an idea. And I take A and B and put it in the skillet. Then all of a sudden, it's different. I'm reacting to the food. So I adjust, react, adjust, react. When I start that recipe, I have total freedom. I can put anything I want in it. There is nothing written to. By the time I give you the type written page, everything is structured and written.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  So I could say on a philosophical level at least, that the fact of writing down a recipe probably destroyed the recipe or the spirit of the recipe.

• 17:17Dan Pashman?

  Right. I think what you're getting at is that you're more interested, there's a difference between teaching people a recipe and having them follow the instructions to make a recipe and teaching them how to cook.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  That's true. The recipe work, or the way you explain. It doesn't really have to do with you. It has to do with whether he's listening to it. Ultimately, to do a recipe is not to duplicate a typewritten page. It's to duplicate a taste. And where the hard part of it come in for a professional chef, that you go there, it's always exactly the same at the end. So and to have it exactly the same at the end, you have to change it each time you do it. Because when you do, if you cook a chicken, your chicken won't have exactly the same amount of fat than I am. You cook on gas, I cook on electric. You cook on cast iron, I cook with copper. It's humid, it's not humid. I'm in a good mood, you're in a bad mood. All of that somehow are going to change tiny thing in your cooking.

• 18:13Dan Pashman?

  Just as Jacques was really getting into teaching, another new technology came along. But it wasn't a microwave or frozen pastry crust. It was a new way to teach cooking: video. Way back in 1975, Jacques cooked on camera for the first time in a bare bones documentary.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Now we're going to do a julienne of mushroom. It's good with the fish again.

• 18:33Dan Pashman?

  In the eighties, Jacques made instructional VHS tapes for people to watch at home. By the early nineties, he was a fixture on PBS. He once filmed 105 cooking segments in two days, including maybe his most famous video of all time: How to Make an Omelet. This video still comes up on Reddit or YouTube every now and then, teaching a whole new generation how to properly whisk the eggs.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  So it's not like you just stir the eggs back and forth. You have to go from one hand to the other.

• 19:00Dan Pashman?

  By the late nineties, Jacques had teamed up with another giant of early food TV: Julia Child. The two had a hit show, Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home.

• 19:10Speaker 06

  Today, we're gonna do souffle. And as everyone knows, the heart of the good souffle is...

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Egg white, beaten egg white. And I'm going to do mine in copper. I beat it faster than the machine.

• 19:23Speaker 06

  Well, we're gonna see if you're faster than the machine.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  All right.

• 19:25Speaker 06

  Okay. One, two, three, go!

• 19:38Dan Pashman?

  From there, Jacques just kept teaching. He never stopped. In 2016, he and his family created the Jacques Papin Foundation, which provides grants to community kitchens that train people who may struggle getting jobs, like those who have been incarcerated or unhoused. Jacques has also never stopped learning. In his recent cookbooks, he has recipes for fish tacos and vegetable spring rolls, right alongside recipes for French dishes like raspberry gratin, which he makes with frozen raspberries. And more recently, Jacques embraced another new technology and taken his cooking lessons to Instagram. Dressed in a well-worn button-down shirt, sometimes with a TV on in the background, Jacques posting videos from his home kitchen.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  I love hamburger, but I always have a hard time. And I have a big mouth, putting that in my mouth. So I'm going to do it a bit differently for you today.

• 20:27Dan Pashman?

  When the pandemic sent many people home and into the kitchen, there was Jacques on Instagram, always, always, always stressing that you can do this. A few basic ingredients. Use whatever you have around. Throw it together. He did a video for fromage fort, a traditional French spread, where you just take whatever bits and pieces of cheese you have in the fridge, cut off the rinds, put them in a blender with some white wine, and spread it on toast. Then there was this one, where the whole recipe is just spreading some butter and honey on a baked sweet potato.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  That's it. Sweet, buttery, and all that. Great sweet potato. Happy cooking.

• 21:03Dan Pashman?

  With help from his daughter Claudine and his son-in-law Raleigh Weeson, Jacques posted hundreds of quick and simple recipe videos during the pandemic. And during that time, his super-basic approach took on new importance. A lot of people turned to food pantries and other assistance programs during the pandemic. By some estimates, four out of 10 of those people were using those programs for the first time. So Jacques told me he tried to make videos with ingredients that might come from those sources, things people may not know what to do with.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  My son-in-law, he told me, you know, I'm bringing you some food for you to cook with. Canned salmon, canned chicken, canned whatever, these that that I've never really used. He said, that's what they get in their package, you know, so do something with those. There is nothing wrong with with using that, you know, as well as other things. It's new, you already learned something. You can also realize that if you have a good kind of toux oil, a kind of anchovies, some good sardine, I mean, you know, if I have a tomato, a slice, put some sardine on top, a dash of vinegar and olive oil, so I have a great lunch, you know, so it doesn't have to be complicated. I hate to throw anything away.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Often I use leftover, what my wife used to call fridge soup, whatever is leftover in the refrigerator, wilted lettuce to retrieve it to show people. I think the part of economy in the kitchen is very, very important.

• 22:23Dan Pashman?

  One of the videos you made during the pandemic to teach people who are getting food from the food pantries was with Spam.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, right.

• 22:32Dan Pashman?

  What's the secret to cooking some, cooking up some good Spam?

• 22:35Speaker 02

  You know, it's funny because I remember Spam during the war in France. We had canned, my father was in the resistance. Occasionally, I guess he could get some kind of a sardine, whatever, from American soldier or wherever he could get it, and we had Spam. And Spam, we call it du singe, for some reason, monkey meat. I don't know why we call it this way, but it's what a great treat, you know, to have it. And certainly, my mother would do a lot with one can of Spam. She would extend it with, you know, cabbage or potato or to, to, to make a lot about a little bit of that type of protein. So there I did some steak of Spam by putting a mixture of a bit of honey, maybe ketchup, sugar to glaze it into the oven, and it's fine, it's good.

• 23:19Dan Pashman?

  What do you think it is about instructional cooking videos that continues to keep people so interested? Because it's certainly with social media, there's only more and more and more of them, and people still love them. What, what, what is it?

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know, the ones who don't like them don't tell me.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  So, so opening an oyster, opening a claim, poaching an egg, sharpening a knife.

• 23:41Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Sharpening, all those are very visual, very, the manipulation that you do with your hand is very important and very visual. I mean, I take a knife and I take a stick of butter and I'll show you scraping on top to do a rose with butter. If I have to explain that in word, it took me a page, put your knife parallel to the thing when after half a page, what is he talking about? You see it, you say, oh, yeah, yeah. The food, I mean, I used to poach an egg fifty years ago or eighty years ago in France, but you still poach the egg the same way. So those techniques have been used over and over again and they don't become obsolete.

• 24:24Dan Pashman?

  The way you poach an egg hasn't changed, but Jacques says in the years since he was a young chef, he's changed a lot. And for him, that's not just about cooking. It's more of a life philosophy.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  As a young chef, you tend to add more to the plate, to add, to add, to combine, to add, to, and older than I am now, you take away, take away, you know, to be left with something more essential and without too much embellishment. Is it better, better or not? It's not really better or not, but it's different.

• 24:51Dan Pashman?

  I think that's so true, and I think that's true of the creative process in all different ways.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Yes, probably.

• 24:56Dan Pashman?

  This is probably like a pretentious reference, but like Nietzsche's first book, he said after he wrote it that it was way too wordy. He was just trying to impress people with how smart he was. He put as many big words and long sentences in there as he could, and as he got older, it got more and more direct.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  That's, that's, that's true, that's true. But, you know, I find that in the kitchen, certainly doing a dish now, there is that kind of minimalism maybe that I didn't have before. If I have a good olive oil, I saute that, I cook it less, I finish it up. I say, that's it, that's enough. I don't need anything else. And uh maybe in the way I dress also, maybe in the way I do other thing. I don't really realize, but probably follow that thing, certainly the way I paint.

• 25:39Dan Pashman?

  Jacques has been painting for more than fifty years. He likes to listen to music while he does it, have a little wine afterwards. He paints rural landscapes and farm scenes with lots and lots of chickens. Maybe images that remind him of the farm where he spent that summer when he was six. It's interesting, just listening to you talk about your creative process, cooking and your art as well. It's reminding me, I was reading this article about Paul McCartney's new album.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Right, oh yeah, right.

• 26:05Dan Pashman?

  And it talked about like, it was kind of making the point that for decades now, he has sort of just been experimenting. He'll try this style, he'll play with that band, he'll play this instrument, then he'll try that instrument. He's also someone who's dabbled in art and just, I think that sometimes there's too much focus on the idea that you have to be like an expert or a specialist at one thing. And sometimes like a creative life is more just about exploring.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Right, I mean, you don't, there is no ultimate, you know, you cannot reach and this is it. You're the greatest. No, not really. And someday you're better than other day, you know, someday it doesn't work too well. Sometime when I start a recipe, the recipe take hold of me and start moving in a direction that I didn't think would go. Likewise with art, maybe even more so with art. I start painting something, I have an idea and sometime it morphs into something quite different. It's interesting because I look at painting that I did in the sixties and I'm kind of amazed, I would never be able to do that now. I'm not saying that it's better or not as good or this, I'm just saying that I would not be able to do that. I wouldn't even know where to start to do it this way.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  I would love to be able to test food that I did when I was in apprenticeship fifty, sixty years ago. All you have left is the food memory, which can be very powerful, but you don't know the way it was.

• 27:25Dan Pashman?

  It's true, you don't know the way it was when you cooked that dish all those years ago. But there are ways to hold on to memories of food and people. At this point, Jacques brings me into his living room, to his walls of bookshelves, floor to ceiling, crammed with sun-faded spines.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  I have here, I can show you, I have 12 big book here. Those book are book of menu.

• 27:48Dan Pashman?

  Jacques pulls one of these books of menus off the shelf. It's big and heavy, like a high school yearbook. He flips through the pages.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  In 1970, 68, something like that. My wife and I, when we had people coming to the house, we wrote the menu. And people sign on the other page, saying funny things or whatever too.

• 28:05Dan Pashman?

  Jacques and his wife Gloria were married for 54 years. As a young couple, they began a tradition: making books of menus. When they had people over for dinner, Jacques would write up the menu, all the courses they were serving, and paint decorations on the page. The book he's showing me is one of a dozen of them, from dinner parties going back 50 years. He's hand-painted bright red cherries, shellfish, kitchen utensils. There are finger paintings from when his daughter was four years old. Each menu is signed by the people who attended the dinners.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  I see my mother in it, my two brother, and many people who are gone now are in those books, so...

• 28:40Dan Pashman?

  Gloria died in 2020, but Jacques continues the menu tradition.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  You look at this one, it's le be day, so it's not long ago. This one was September...

• 28:51Dan Pashman?

  Salad niçolas, chicken tenders?

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, 21. And here is...

• 28:55Dan Pashman?

  This is one in, this is just a few days ago. Creme de champagny, black chanterelles?

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, creme de champagny with black chanterelles. Pork shoulder, butt, braise with sweet potato, petit poil de française, salad, cheese, fruit, ice cream, coconut cream pie, we had...

• 29:08Dan Pashman?

  Ooh, coconut cream pie.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  Alan Scott.

• 29:11Dan Pashman?

  This is making me want to write down menus when I have people over and have everyone sign it.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  You know, you have kid?

• 29:16Dan Pashman?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Right, so you know, what did your kid eat from first, from when he was a year old? What was the dinner, the first, his first Christmas, his first Thanksgiving? His second one, his third one? Oh, I could show you there, Claudine, doing the menu, drawing the little chicken herself for her third birthday, with all of her friends, signing it there. She was three years old. So those are, those are great memory that you cannot.

• 29:40Dan Pashman?

  I, I love that like, and I can see looking around your home that you have a lot of pictures. And some people look through picture books to reminisce.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do too.

• 29:48Dan Pashman?

  I, I love that you look through menus.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, absolutely. So, yes, those are important to me.

• 29:57Dan Pashman?

  How, how does it feel when you look back through those?

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Well, there is a great deal of emotion, you know, sometime depending on the, on the occasion. It's a world of memory for those great meals that you share with your friend or your family. Those books are my whole life.

• 30:19Dan Pashman?

  After that, Jacques put his menu book back on the shelf and I turned off my recorder. Then he offered me a glass of wine. Now, I'm not a big wine drinker, but when Jacques Papan asks you if you want to have a glass of wine with him, you say yes. He opened a bottle of white and did something that I thought was a huge faux pas. He put ice in his wine glass and offered me some in mine. Ice in wine. I don't think this is how they did it at Le Pavillon. But let me tell you, it was delicious. Best wine I've ever had. And yes, I took a picture of the bottle. It was Chateau de Roche Sauvignon Blanc 2019, which sells online for 15 bucks. So I don't think it was the wine. I think it was the ice. And since then, I've been drinking white wine on the rocks on the regular.

• 31:03Dan Pashman?

  I ordered at a restaurant and Janie was like, I don't even know who you are. And then I said, look, I learned it from Jacques Papan.

• 31:26Dan Pashman?

  My thanks to the one and only Jacques Papan, chef, TV personality and teacher. He's the author of dozens of books, most recently, The Art of Jacques Papan, which includes some of his favorite recipes and his own artwork. And he does a lot of work with the Jacques Papan Foundation, which, as I said, supports free culinary training for people with high barriers to employment. Hey, if you want to make menus of your own dinner parties, check out his book from a few years ago called Menus, a book for your meals and memories. He painted the pages and left space on each one for you to fill in your own menus and memories. Finally, if you want to see some photos from Jacques' menu books, plus his wall of pots and pans and more from our taping, I'll post pics on Instagram. Follow me there at the Sporkful. Next week on the show, I talk with comedian Tom Papa.

• 32:11Dan Pashman?

  We get into the other thing he's famous for, which is baking bread. And we try out an unusual snack and beverage pair that might just be the hot new thing. You'll have to tune in to find out what it is. That's next week. While you wait for that one, check out last week's episode with French podcaster Samia Bazil, who doesn't understand why Americans insist on chowing down on popcorn at the movies. I feel attacked, Samia. Can she learn to love movie theater popcorn? That one's up now. Check it out. And hey, did you know you can listen to the Sporkful on the Sirius XM app? Yes, the Sirius XM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app,

• 32:56Dan Pashman?

  all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the Sirius XM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. This episode was produced by me along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern. And senior producer Andres O'Hara. And producer

• 33:11Speaker 07

  Johanna Mayer.

• 33:12Dan Pashman?

  It was edited by Tracy Samuelson. Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Sirius XM Podcasts. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 33:24Speaker 08

  And I'm Rose in Minneapolis, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.

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