Because all of his shows are on public-access television, and so you can watch them for free on YouTube, and he embodies the deep and profound safety of being middle class, real middle class, the kind of middle-class where your father had a good job and a house and his father had a good job and a house and so on and so on, an unbroken chain of good men with real jobs and property, and a family to raise therein, and this is your birthright, and you’re going to have it too; Julia Child safe, where you never check your bank balance and you always reach for the bill with the assurance of someone who’s never found anything to be beyond their grasp, and because you have here a good carrot and some nice chives and the fresh butter, and nothing is loud or gorgeous or sexy, just nice nice nice, it was nice yesterday, it was nice today, and it will be nice tomorrow, and you’re safe in the sea of knowing exactly what came before and what is still to come.
You want the carrots cooked, but you don’t want them falling apart. Maybe three pieces of shallot, like this. It could be sliced or chopped, in that case I’m going to slice them. Okay. The shallot could go in in a minute or so, or even now.
this is deeper insight into my Saturday mornings than I was prepared for…
Same.
I was thinking “damn that is a lot of chives” just as he said “more than enough.” Jaques and I are apparently en rapport when it comes to ingredient amounts so I would also like some of that feeling of financial safety and assurance that all will be well, please.
Before I even saw the video, my brain went “SHIIIIIIIVE!”
Any time Jacques comes up in conversation, we both just start saying that to each other.
Every time I watch him I think “oh, that looks pretty easy” and then never make any of his recipes.
Shop the shives! My favorite of his little French-isms.
I make his crispy chicken thighs all the time. I don’t usually do the sauce, but his technique for cooking the thighs is aces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GokR2C9wy0
His French onion soup!
My mouth is watering. I’ve never seen his version before.
http://blogs.kqed.org/essentialpepin/2011/09/18/onion-soup-lyonnaise-style/
Have you ever seen an episode with his daughter? Not his granddaughter–she is a delight. But his daughter. There is a woman does not believe yesterday or today or tomorrow is nice. She is perpetually in a state of high anxiety. I must bid adieu to Pepin when she arrives, or I catch her fear and it eats me much as Pepin eats nice carrots.
Yes! She’s a total pill, haha.
Guess it skips a generation.
I don’t know, I feel like he’s always correcting/criticizing her? At least in the early shows that she was on, which is all I remember seeing. If he can’t help himself criticizing, even on television, I wonder what cooking with him was like at home. Possibly quite nervous-making.
As a kid I watched Jacques cook, but it wasn’t until Cooking with Claudine came out that I actually started cooking. They are such a father and daughter. She’s so awkward and he’s so not… and I felt like I could move from one end of the skills spectrum towards the other, if I just tried.
The classic video of Pepin deboning a chicken exists to reminds us all that anything in this world can be soothing and beautiful, even something as gnarly as Animal Disassembly.
Oh my god, it’s like a little chicken puppet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uriZZ3Slz74
Everything Is Fine
Another option for a sweet old chef man: Gennaro Contaldo. He taught Jamie Oliver how to cook. Now, he’s got a LOT of energy and passion, so he’s not so calming as Jacques here, but his voice is my favourite thing in the world as he creates little tiny raviolis. Delightful!
I love Jacques Pepin. Like my Sicilian grandma, he likes to buy the slightly bruised or seconds of fruits and vegetables, rescuing them from the trash,and make delicious things out of them. He is very frugal.
He is my fantasy dad
He is my dad’s fantasy dad, which is super charming.
He reminds me very much of my dad in the kitchen. It’s pretty awesome.
Yo-Yo Ma and LeVar Burton are my fantasy dads.
Hmm. Now I understand why Mr Cleo and I have started watching so much Jacques lately.
Dang that is a lot of salt and sugar on those carrots. Maybe I understand the salt (I eat less salt than most people seem to) but carrots are already sweet man! Especially nice ones.
IN other news I am watching this instead of finishing job applications
me too
This is why vegetables often taste better in restaurants: salt and sugar. And butter, obviously, lashings of it.
Excuse you I happen to like my unseasoned dirt crops
Carrots have been bred for more sweetness in recent years, just like corn-on-the-cob. (And tomatoes. And grapefruits. And lots of other fruits and vegetables.) So a lot of recipes used to need added sugar, just to taste like the modern plain vegetable. By “used to,” I don’t just mean back in Victorian times. I mean back in the 1980s.
Also, sweet glazed carrots are a really popular holiday food. This looks like something my father might have made for Rosh Hashanah or Thanksgiving, but not some ordinary Tuesday.
I love everything about Jacques Pepin, but what I love the most is that he apparently once claimed he has no ability to tell good wine from bad. He just likes to drink it.
Also his autobiography is a great read.
One major, major regret of mine is that I have not mustered the skill and time to write a series of pieces on Create TV cooking shows for The Toast. I’m so happy to read this piece on Jacques, because yes, exactly. I also want to read about the strangely sexual tension of Joanne Weir and the grating use of produce by Annabel Langbein, and the fact that Steven Reichlen is definitely mummified at this point, look at his hands, he’s smoked them, they are no longer flesh but jerky and he will be buried inside a Big Green Egg.
I would read this series! I can’t handle Joanne Weir at all, so condescending.
I was watching Joanne Weir with my boyfriend’s dad one time and he made a joke about how aggressively she was hitting on the guest, and my first instinct was to defend her (I’d never seen the show before), but I kept watching and he was totally right!! She negs every single person she brings on!
Interesting! If I see her again I’m going to watch for this.
Ugh Annabel Langbein is the worst please tell me what you think of her.
Yess thank you for enabling me. I get that Langbein’s thing is being the “free-range chef” and having a ridiculously well-stocked produce garden and all sorts of farmer friends, but if I watch more than one episode it starts to bother me that there is zero acknowledgement of how unrealistic a situation this is. I mean, most TV chefs have a degree of fantasy to them, but because she’s built sort of a morality around “freshness,” it bothers me more than some others.
Additionally: why does she always use a dang teacup instead of an actual measuring cup when she’s baking?? (Answer: carefully measured tweeness)
That whole ‘I’m a real Kiwi I have veges and bees and eat lambs straight out of the paddock’ is the worst. No one even lives in Wanaka except you, Annabel! Fresh tuna!? who the heck can afford fresh tuna steaks??
Just go to Countdown like the rest of us and eat frozen hoki and sad veges that go off as soon as you look at them and shut your damn upper-middle-class lifestyle-block owning mouth.
I love you so much right now.
CAN WE TALK ABOUT “THE JAZZY VEGETARIAN” PLEASE
I ACTUALLY HAVE VERY LITTLE TO SAY ABOUT IT BECAUSE I CAN’T STAND TO WATCH IT FOR MORE THAN 30 SECONDS BUT I SIMPLY CAN’T BELIEVE IT REALLY EXISTS
YES WE CAN. I’m also a vegetarian, and literally none of her recipes look good to me (it’s all… magarine and blended tofu and no spices), so that’s one thing. As for the rest of it, I’m like completely delighted and completely embarrassed by it at the same time. I *cackle* when she starts singing the ingredients, while my boyfriend nearly crawls under the table in secondhand shame.
That’s exactly how I feel about it, delighted and catastrophically embarrassed at the same time.
As long as we’re being cantankerous, I also hate the lady who moved back to her childhood hometown in North Carolina to open a restaurant in what was, if you listen to her, a desolate wasteland where no one had ever heard of this exotic “restaurant” business prior to her arrival.
She is pretty terrible in her entitlement and the weirdness you mention. Her food looks good, though!
I also get weirded-out by some of her visits to local growers and cooks. I can’t tell if they are just shy on camera, or is she clueless (at the least) to them off camera?
The NC restaurant lady makes me roll my eyes. No one made you accept money from your parents to open a restaurant back in your hometown, sweet cheeks, you could’ve stayed in the promised land of NYC.
I imagine many people in her hometown feel the same.
I actually like her a lot! She is bad fucking ass. I keep rooting for her to leave her husband,he is 100% complaining and foodsplaining 100% of the time.
tbh, I’d probably like her fine without the intro. But the whole ‘my parents gave us a money for a restaurant but we had to move back from NYC (!!!)’ is what irks. Especially since when I was watching, it was on North Carolina PBS, which was jammed full of shows with very nice restaurants in the middle of nowhere.
Otherwise, she was okay.
I LOVE Create TV! Ming is my husband and I’s favorite. He always has some other chef on the show that makes something pretty good, but then Ming busts out his dish and it is always far superior and he just acts so casual about it. And Joanne Weir is always fun for squirming awkwardly from the comfort of your own couch.
I thought my brother in law and I were the only ones who feel like Joanne Weir is totally macking on her guests!
You could pitch it to the Hairpin?
Oh gosh, bless you. That’s a good idea, although I have no confidence in my creative writing ability. Maybe I’ll try!
Um, can we talk about regular ol’ PBS show chefs (which I grew up watching with parents and grandparents, see also This Old House), and specifically Lidia Bastianich? I love Lidia so much, even though I can make almost none of her stuff. SO MUCH.
Lidia is so charming, I love how sloppy but appealing all her food turns out. She’s on Create, now, too, as is This Old House– it’s just the digital second channel of PBS!
I KNOW THIS ARTICLE IS SIX DAYS OLD BUT YOU ARE MY PEOPLE.
I have literally told my partner that Annabel Langbein uses a teacup to measure things specifically to be as twee as possible.
I ran an event where we brought in Jacques Pepin, and I’m happy to say that he’s just as lovely and nice nice nice in person. Being around him makes you feel like everything going to be okay and taste delicious.
I heard him on Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me recently and he was so sweet and funny.
My grandmother loves Jacques Pepin. Mallory is on par in the utmostliness. If she could please see fit to create an entire year-long calendar of Mr. Pepin daily meditations my grandmother’s joy would be unbridled.
His memoir, The Apprentice, is beyond charming. He did not lead a peaceful early life! He was hustled off to the countryside when France was invaded!
I did not know he had a memoir, thanks for the heads up! It looks like there’s also an audiobook, but sadly not read by him.
it took me an unusually long time to read the memoir because I had to use his voice in my brain to pronounce every word.
This is seriously helping me with some work related anxiety. Thanks Mallory!
The convergence between my obsessions and those of The Toast is nearing complete.
Also, I would totally read a biography of his mother. According to his memoir, she was a glorious person. Bicycled around the French countryside buying fresh ingredients from farmers and dairies and bakers and vintners, running a series of restaurants, raising her boys, while her husband was off fighting with the French resistance.
Jacques is like the embodiment of “quiet competence” and I love it! Watching him on the weekend is like the perfect anti-stressor to balance out the week.
Also, his super chillness reminds me of my (late) grandpa, who had the same easygoing attitude while he did technical things. Just being around him made me feel like everything was going exactly to plan, even if that plan was constantly changing. We need more people like this in the world!
I went on a Jacques Pepin binge watch a couple of weeks ago. His voice and manner are basically Xanax to my always-anxious soul. Plus, the way he handles the ingredients is just so earthy and sensual to me, idk. If a hot guy/lady were to cook the same way for me, I’d be putty in their hands.
This is a lovely, lovely, lovely tribute to Jacques Pepin. I am not a gourmand, or especially fond of French cuisine, or someone who watches cooking shows, but I have read this essay three times and each time it has brought me to tears. Jacques Pepin strikes me as an unusually wise and generous man.
I meant to attach a link to an essay by Brett Martin, “The Chef Who Saved My Life.” I also like the meditation.
http://www.gq.com/story/food-and-life
This was beautiful.
Wow this is seriously delightfully calming and wonderful. Thanks Jacques and Mallory.
I have loved him for going on forty years. And he talks to his child the way I talk to mine: “Go! Go sit over there before you ruin something else!”
A couple of months back I was watching Heart & Soul and I realized how long I’d been watching Jacques Pepin and it occurred to me that he would die one day and MAN.
It's not, that thing's fucking weird.
The Husband and I are working on mastering his French omelette technique:
http://www.nytimes.com/video/dining/1000000011167…
It is a daily meditation all its own!
Please do “If Jacques Pepin were your Grandfather” before you go away?
Ugh I am having a stressful morning at work and this honestly was a nice way to calm down and center myself. Mallory you are queen of my heart.
Last week, I put a bunch of Jacques Pepin DVDs on my 3 year old’s Amazon wish list. He loves to watch Jacques on CreateTV at night to calm down and fall asleep. “I really like him talking, Mommy. I love Jacques Pepin” (but he says it more like “Dakapan”) I have high hopes for this kid.
I love "quiet competence" and I think I will make it my new life goal. Which I will surely fail at, but. I shall try. Thank you.
I forgot to reply but- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apsIU58Tu9Y