Jacques Pépin has toured the world, working in the most elite kitchens and sharing his expertise across classrooms, on T.V., and beyond. Now, from his picturesque Connecticut oasis, the chef-painter tells fellow food connoisseur Padma Lakshmi how the journey has shaped him, one menu at a time.
Jacques Pépin seems to know the key to a life well-lived—that’s why so many still tune in to his beloved cooking shows after all these years. To say that this is just his nature (which is not not true) would be to discount his decades of pioneering work in the culinary world, bringing his love for food to the masses with a warm smile and a you-can-do-it-yourself attitude. Of course, it’s also in his DNA. The descendent of a family of women cooks, he left school at just 13 for his first apprenticeship at the Grand Hôtel de l’Europe in his hometown of Bourg-en-Bresse, France. Eventually, Pépin found himself cooking for three French presidents, including Charles de Gaulle. Yet in search of something more, he left the comfort of formal kitchens and moved across the Atlantic to take on a new culinary challenge.
In the decades since, he has conquered the menus of the best American restaurants, most notably Le Pavillon in New York, developed recipes for Howard Johnson’s mass-produced meals, hosted cooking shows that have infiltrated pop culture, and created the first academic food studies course with his best friend, the late Julia Child. Not to mention his dozens of books, 16 James Beard Foundation Awards, five honorary doctoral degrees, the American Public Television’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and many more recognitions. Today Pépin, who turns 90 next year, spends his days at his quiet, woodsy home in the secluded Madison, Connecticut, where he continues to cook and paint nearly everyday, sharing the fruits of his labor with family and friends.
Similarly to Pépin, Padma Lakshmi puts her heart into the meals she prepares—and operates beyond the kitchen, from television and writing to mentorship. The former Top Chef host and creator of Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi has never shied away from sharing her personal life in her work. Intelligent, self possessed, and elegant, she combines a wide breadth of knowledge and technical skill with her sharp wit and refreshing vulnerability. Like Pépin, she uses food as a conduit for connection. In conversation, the pair’s mutual admiration shines through, as does their shared culinary ethos: Food is life.
As a young aspiring chef, it was deeply impactful to be a part of Lakshmi and Pépin’s conversation, a part of their world. Like Lakshmi, I fondly return to Pépin’s iconic cooking series. I recently, in fact, watched an old episode of Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home where Child and Pépin stand joyously in the kitchen making a turkey in May. Nearly in sync, the iconic chefs smile into the camera and proudly proclaim, “You can have a turkey dinner anytime of the year!” It’s nearly impossible to take your eyes away; their enthusiasm and conviction is infectious. A fundamental generosity—a love for food and people—radiates in everything Pépin does. You feel it in every bite of food of his you take, even if he’s not making it directly for you.
Padma Lakshmi: What was it like for you to grow up in Bourg-en-Bresse?
Jacques Pépin: I was raised during the Second World War, so things were tight. Otherwise, we had a very happy childhood. I remember when we were off from school, my brother, the dog, and I would go to the woods where we live. We came back at night, and no one would worry about it. It’s different now...
PL: It was fine to have more independence, right?
JP: And life was simpler. We didn’t have a television. We didn’t have a radio. We didn’t even have the telephone, no magazines or newspapers! That’s probably the reason I decided to leave and go into apprenticeship. My mother was a cook, and my father was a cabinetmaker, so my choices in life were to be a cabinetmaker or chef...
My family in France had about 12 restaurants that I can think of, and all of them were run by women. My aunt, cousins, sister-in-law, and niece—they all had restaurants. I was the first male to go into that business. My mother had several restaurants in Lyon, one after the other. The women of Lyon are formidable women in the cooking world. When I worked for the presidents of France between ’56 and ’58, I would go on vacation to visit my family in Lyon. I’d often see my aunt in Nantua on the lake. She had a beautiful little restaurant there. Once, I went to the kitchen, and she threw me out! She said: “No, you use too much butter!”
PL: What was it like working for the president of France? I know you worked for [Charles] De Gaulle, and other people, too, at the state department, right?
JP: Yes, three presidents at the time under the Fourth Republic. The government was changing at a fairly rapid pace. You have to look at it in the context of the time, you know? I served people like [Jawaharlal] Nehru, [Josip Broz] Tito, [Harold] Macmillan. The cook was in the kitchen, and that was it. We were quite low on the social scale.
PL: That’s changed now! Now everybody’s a celebrity.
JP: I don’t know what happened. It’s changed a great deal. But, some young chefs can take it too seriously. We are still mashed-potato makers, you know!
PL: Yes, exactly. Cooking in restaurants is such a hectic environment. There’s so many things going on. When you were young, what was your way of getting away from that restaurant life?
JP: Well we didn’t really have much. I worked in Paris at the Plaza Athénée, Fouquet’s, Maxim’s, and so forth, and we still worked two shifts a day, starting in the morning at 9:00 a.m. and finishing at 2:30 p.m. in the afternoon, and starting again at 5:30 p.m. until 10 p.m. So in the afternoon in Paris, I went to museums a lot, because it was basically free. On my day off, I would go to the opera because at that time, it was not even a third of the price of going to the movies...
PL: And then after that, you came to America for a job at Le Pavillon, right?
JP: No, I didn’t have a job when I came here. Most people usually come to America for economic reasons—to get a better life—or for political reasons, or racial reasons, or religious reasons. But I didn’t really have any of those. I had a great job in Paris, and my parents had a restaurant. But I said, “I’m gonna go to America, learn the language, and stay there for a year or two.” And now I’ve been here for over 60. The day after I came here, I started at Le Pavillon. It was only one shift a day, so already for me it was like half the work, you know? And that’s when I started going to Columbia University... I had left school at 13, so I wanted to learn English, and eventually I went on to study more.
PL: That’s incredible. A bachelor’s and then a master’s as well?
JP: Actually, I finished my doctorate except for the...
PL: Thesis.
JP: ...which they refused. I proposed a thesis on the history of French food in the context of civilization and literature in the 16th to 17th century. They told me, “Are you crazy? Food? No, you cannot do that. It’s not academic enough.”
PL: I don’t think that would happen now.
JP: Actually, you know, I’ve been teaching at Boston University for more than 45 years now. In the ’80s, Julia Child and I wrote to [John] Silber, the president at that time, to bring gastronomy into one of the programs. We wanted to do it for undergraduates, but he decided no, he wanted to make it a master of arts with a concentration in gastronomy. That program is still going on at BU. To my knowledge, it’s the only program in the country.
PL: I’m so glad that place exists. It’s wonderful what you created. But even before you created the gastronomy program at BU, you also helped with the French Culinary Institute here in New York, with André Soltner, and other people—with Dorothy [Cann Hamilton].
JP: I knew the owner, Dorothy, who decided to create that school after she had gone to France and was inspired by the Ferrandi in Paris. She asked me if I’d be interested in coming as one of the deans, and I did. I was there for around 25 years. We had a great time.
PL: Did you know I had a very serious car accident when I was 14, like you did in your 40s? In your accident, you were trying not to hit a deer, right?
JP: Yes. I had 12 fractures. I broke my two hips, my pelvis in three pieces, leg, arm, and shoulder. I wasn’t supposed to walk again. I wasn’t supposed to live! Even my wife signed up at the hospital to remove the left arm, because it was totally crushed. Good thing they didn’t.
PL: That must have been so scary, to have such injuries to your shoulder. Is that what made you shift to teaching?
JP: Certainly, the decision had a great deal to do with my accident. I still drop food because I severed my sciatic nerve. So going back into the kitchen was not possible. That happened in 1974, when I’d already started writing for House Beautiful and The New York Times...
PL: And Gourmet and Food and Wine?
JP: Absolutely. It was a time of women’s liberation, organic gardening, and a lot of women had these little shops with a cooking school in the back. I was asked to teach in a couple of those schools, and I ended up teaching almost 40 weeks a year.
PL: Wow.
JP: I opened a restaurant on Fifth Avenue called La Potagerie, between 45th and 46th Streets. Then I was a consultant for the Russian Tea Room. Then I opened [food operations in] the World Trade Center with Joe Baum, where we served 40,000 people a day from the commissary that I set up. I’m saying that to say, I would have never have been able to do any of those jobs without the training of Howard Johnson. As a French chef, I knew nothing about mass production, and the chemistry of food, and the recipes, and the things that I did later on, so it was a very good decision for me.
PL: You were there for such a long time. You were in charge of research and development, right? What was a mandate you remember?
JP: [Johnson] said, “You do whatever you want. It’s fine.” So we had no limit. We started doing a chicken pot pie, for example. Then I would be in the test kitchen: I’d cook four chickens and freeze them. I had two chemists working with me; they would look at the specific gravity or bacteria count. We ended up doing 3,000 pounds of chicken at that time. Same thing from beef burgundy to fish. We used a lot of very classic French dishes. It was a great, great time for experimenting and... you know, improving the quality.
PL: What is the biggest thing you learned during that experience?
JP: I had never worked with mass production and recipes. It was a very different world of cooking than I had been used to, and a great way of learning. In that context, I have to say that I have, like, 34 books now, and so I’m considered very often as the quintessential French chef, but then you open one of my books, and I have black bean soup, Kentucky fried chicken, a lobster roll from Connecticut, and New England clam chowder... I mean, when I came from France, I didn’t even have a cookbook. I’m probably the quintessential American chef now after so many years here.
PL: And then in 1982, you did your first show.
JP: For some reason, I ended up doing [Everyday Cooking] in Jacksonville, Florida with PBS. That was the first time that I was exposed, really, to television...
PL: Then, of course, you did these beautiful series [Jacques Pépin’s Kitchen: Cooking with Claudine, Jacques Pépin’s Kitchen: Encore With Claudine, and Jacques Pépin Celebrates!] with your daughter, Claudine.
JP: She was very comfortable and happy on camera, so I said, “I’d like to do a series with her.” She would ask the questions that people would want to ask if they could. I didn’t tell her what we were doing beforehand, so we just had a good time.
“You cannot cook indifferently. You have to give some of yourself.”
— Jacques Pépin
PL: And then books came out of those shows as well, right? You’ve published so many books I can’t keep track. You’re going to be 90 next year. Is there anything you haven’t done that you would like to do in this next decade of your life?
JP: My son-in-law Rollie [Wesen] created the Jacques Pépin Foundation years ago to help people who have been a bit disturbed by life—people who have come out of jail, have experience with homelessness, face addiction. We teach them through community kitchens throughout the country. This year the foundation has launched the 90/90 Dinner Series, connected to my birthday. That’s 90 parties! The first part started in New York at Gramercy Tavern and Craft. Next year I have a big party, 85 people, at The French Laundry with Thomas Keller. I’m illustrating a few of the menus, but I’m not going to go to all 90 parties... I don’t think so. But one in New York, and maybe one on the West Coast.
PL: Your whole life is centered around food, and writing, and teaching, and lecturing, and traveling. Is there any time that you get away from any of that? And if so, what do you do for leisure?
JP: The secret of life for me is... if you can make a living out of something you love to do, you never have to go to work. Food is so much a part of who I am that I don’t think of it in terms of work, but that being said we play pétanque, which is like a bocce ball game. I have a court in my house, and we play boules and do these big dinners. I used to go fishing on Long Island. I used to go pick up wild mushrooms a lot... I still do actually. I picked a chanterelle last week.
PL: Oh wow. I have a lovely recipe book with beautiful drawings of yours that I think Claudine sent me a few years ago. It was very sweet, and I know you are an artist as well...
JP: It started when I was married for 54 years. When people came over to the house, I wanted to write the menu to remember what we did and have them sign on the other page. Now I have 13 books of menus that I did over more than half a century. In fact, Claudine is 56... She came here a few months ago, and she said: “Do you know what I ate for my 4th birthday?” I said “Yes, let’s look.”
PL: Let’s look it up!
JP: We found her 4th birthday where she drew a little chicken. Those books of the menus are my whole life of memories. I’ve been working with my friend, the photographer Tom Hopkins, for 41 years. He’s the one who decided to create the Jacques Pépin art site; he’s selling my paintings and reproducing them. I would never have done that myself. I’ve been very lucky.
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PL: You know, I’m not a chef—I never wanted to be a chef. I never wanted to cook food and sell it in any way. For me, cooking always was about home and doing it for leisure, or for friends, or an occasion, or no occasion at all, for family, and I always love looking to you because as long as I’ve known you, you’ve managed to have such a wonderful, inspiring career that has nothing to do with restaurants in the last four decades.
JP: Cooking is really an act of love in many ways. You cannot cook indifferently. You have to give some of yourself. After I cooked professionally for many many years, for example, four years ago at the beginning of the pandemic, Claudine said: “Why don’t you do three-minute shows for Facebook?” We did 380 episodes with really ordinary stuff that I have left over in the refrigerator, to show you what to do with it. And we have almost 2 million people on Facebook. So, you know, there is always a way of connecting with people. You know Julia [Child], and James Beard, too, said, “I’m not a chef. I never cooked in a professional kitchen.” And it’s true! They brought their knowledge of home food. It doesn’t really make much difference to me now, whether I cook for professionals or at home.
PL: We met on Top Chef when you were a guest of ours many years ago. Gosh, it was one of the early, early seasons—I don’t even remember when exactly. But I remember you told me your favorite meal that you would always order was squab with peas. Is that still the case?
JP: Yes, yes. With peas it’s a very good thing. One of the greatest things that I can think of eating is probably an extraordinary baguette and extraordinary butter. Bread and butter, it’s hard to beat.
PL: Well you have to come and eat at my table in New York. I would love to host you, my gosh, what an honor it would be.
JP: Twenty or so years ago, the night before the Smithsonian Institution took Julia’s kitchen, I remember I had dinner with her and about 20 people, and we sat in the dining room. It was the first time I ate there. I always went to her house through her kitchen through her back door.
PL: All these years, you never saw it?
JP: Thirty years. Always cooking in the kitchen. And when we were cooking, doing our show, we had no recipes. People don’t realize this.
PL: Oh, really?
JP: We just cooked with ingredients that we decided on the night before.
PL: I think that’s the best way to cook, frankly. Instinctual cooking is what bears a lot of interesting food.
JP: Absolutely. If you put food on the table, I’ll cook it one way or the other. I’ll do something with it.
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