Isaac Mizrahi chats with Jacques Pépin about his must-have kitchen tool, how the food industry has evolved, what he wants as his last meal and more.
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(Recorded on June 20, 2023)
What is your last meal? Tell me what your last meal is?
Well, from caviera to hot dog, from ham and egg to a pigeon to squab. You know everything that I like. I would like it in front of me with all kinds of things and a lot of friends around, and I would eat it until I ate fall dead. Ah.
This is Hello Isaac, my podcast about the idea of success and how failure affects it. I'm Isaac miss Rahi and in this episode I talked to world renowned French chef, cookbook author and TV personality Jacques Pepin.
Hello Isaac, this is Jacques. I'm so glad to be with you again and to learn something about cooking. I need to learn something about cooking from you. I always do. See you soon, very soon, I hope at cook well, eat well, enjoy life.
I don't know where I first met Jacques Papina. It was definitely on a food demonstration somewhere, like on my show or Martha Stewart's show or somewhere, and we automatically liked each other a whole lot. And one thing that Jacques does, I think to everybody he meets, which is why everybody adores him so much and learns so much from him. Is that he kind of puts everybody on the same level as him, Like all of a sudden, you are a peer with this person who just knows every damn thing, like trillions and trillions more than you know. But somehow he treats you like a peer. It's sort of the way my mother, bless Her, used to operate with my friends. I remember my friends really loved her so much because she would speak to them like adults. She never spoke down to them. They were always on the same level as my mother. She would tell them jokes and they would have this rapport. It's the same with Jacques. You know. When I met him, we not only cooked together, we sang. Had Ben with me, and Ben played the piano and we sang together. He got to know my dog, my dog Harry, who automatically loved him because he fed him scraps off the table. I remember we were cooking once together and there was garlic in the recipe and a lot of it, and it had to be peeled, and so I showed him this thing where you snip off the little woody end of the garlic clove and you put all the garlet clothes together in a bowl like two shallow metal mixing bowls, and you shake them vigorously and then all the peels fall off. It's a miracle. And I showed that to him, and I swear to you it was like he was seeing God for the first time. That was like a garlic hack that I taught the great Jacque Papan. And when that happened, I thought, this is the greatest teacher in the world, who is like learning from me, the greatest fool in the kitchen. That's what keeps Jacques Pepin so eternally young, is this ability to learn from his students. So let's get into it. Jacques Pepin, how are you. It's great to see you.
It's so great to see you too. Is that your bedroom, Yes, this is your bedroom.
Yes, it would be very intimate today, very intimate. And is that your pot rack behind you?
The kitchen domain.
So I usually start interviews by asking my guests to surprise me. But in your case, I'm going to ask you to tell me what you ate today.
But I just had a whole bunch of cherries now, and before that for lunch, I had a sandwich that clued Indeed, yesterday and she lived, and she said that sandwich she wore. I forget what was in it. I know they were proshiro and tomato.
Delicious, delicious lies. I'm going to talk for a minute with you about eating, because I've never heard you speak too much about eating, Darling, What was the greatest thing you ever ate in your entire life?
There are many of those, but I mean, certainly for me, it always goes back to maybe the food my mother. I mean, those are kind of very visceral tastes, the stuff that you eat when you have a child, you know, so you can't find that. I always talk about post and the effective memory im proost, and you know, the memory of the senses as op pulls to the memory of the brain. That is, the smell, that touch, the look and especially to smell and so forth. So you know, I can't be walking in the woods with my dog, I don't think about anything, and I smell world mushroom and all of a sudden, I'm seven years old with my father my brother picking up world mushroom. So those tastes are very visceral. So if I tell the chicken that my mother used to do as a kid, you know, chicken with crimsons and tarragon right away. I am seven years old, and I remember those tastes.
Yes, that's a great thing to love. Do you cook that often? Do you cook that particular dish that way that your mother cooked it?
Occasionally? You know, when we go on that test memory type of thing. Including my daughter is here and she wants something for her grandmother. It's funny because for her, she had dishes that she likes the best done by your mother by wife, and she's going to the other one by your grandmother, other one by me. But it's quite different than the dish that I like.
Since COVID, you know, I get a little bit dull with my routine. You know, I roast the fish or I roast the chicken. You know, it's a very simple menu, and I cook the same things again and again. Are the things that you cook all the time, aside from the things you see on your website?
Yes, absolutely, And especially when you get older, your metabolism changed, and as a young chef, I tend to add and to add and to add to the place. Now I take it away, take away, take away from the plate to be left with a couple of more essential things without too much embellishment on the plate anymore, you know, So I would go back to what my wife used to call fridge soup. You know, I opened the fridge and a letters which is wilted, and a piece of carrot or a couple of black marshal might do a soup with it. So fridge soup is very cool, right.
You taught me another fantastic thing once. We were deglazing something together and you said, oh, you know, you could use chateau de sinc which means wire basically, right, because usually deglaze with wine. But you made that joke, and I thought that was a very good joke. Darling. You've always been such a good looking guy and such a slim guy with all that eating constantly. Well now, of course everybody wears the spanks and we all do that, but how did you do that all these years?
I'm basically a glutton, you know. I eat whatever you put in front of me. I am probably ten pound of fifteen pound of a weight whatever. But I've never been on a diet in my life. And my wife was even better than that. I mean, she ate from the you know, the bacon and all the fat and all that too, and she never went above one hundred and twenty pound. I mean, you know, she was all the very thing. So she was very lucky. Not I could put all the weight, but I'm never really put on that much weight.
Did you have to watch it all those years? Did you have to stop yourself from eating?
Not really. When I felt that I eat a bit less, but I never went on a specific diet of no eating this all that or two. I've never really stopped myself from eating bread and butter. Right.
But you know what, when I discovered that I was a good cook, which was about I don't know, twenty years ago or something, I cooked constantly, like every meal was something, you know, every day was three meals, and we marketed constantly. Are you at the market a lot?
Yeah? I love the market. I already love the market. I do it less now, but especially the market in seasons when I go to the film market and look at saying than bye. But conversionally, because of what I do on television and on show that I do, I use conventional supermarket, you know, stop and shop whatever the best that I can find there, but still so that people can relate to what I'm buying there.
Do you trust others to do your marketing for you or do you prefer to pick out your chicken?
I trust everybody, but I like to look at it myself, you know, test it. And very often I'll go to the market as I'm going to I don't know, roast chicken tonight, and I go there and they are the dog for sale two for one. I'm going to send my menu.
All right, you're such a cheapskate. I forgot about that, Jack, no question, but not exactly a cheap skate. I think it's about being a good word, is parsimonious or you know, you would execute to the ence degree. That's what you taught us, was that you don't waste anything. You don't overdo, you don't underdo. You do exactly what is necessary. But you know, I use to be able to like make stock and use it, you know, and freeze it and use it because I was cooking more, you know. But when you cook less, or when you make the stock and then you throw it away six months later, because even in the freezer it goes bad. Are you cooking now for a bunch of people or are you just cooking for yourself?
I need a true stock away, my god, even if it's a year old. Noah, No, I do well cooking. But like Friday, we're cooking for twenty two people. I'm cooking so with my son in law and Michelle Nicheon is going to give me a hand, and my daughter. We got to play bull, you know, the yes batche type of French petan, you know. And we have twenty two people for dinner, so we have big menus.
What are you cooking? Is it a big clam bake? Is that the clam bake thing that you do in Connecticut?
No, no, no, no, the climbakers, it's done already. No no, this one is very fancy caviar. And then we have a salmon in puff paste. And then I have a shoulder of veal roasted with a gotta of cauliflowers. We have a salad with payer too, and then I'm doing some little swan with shoe paste to look like swan, you know, for the said fancy dinner for people who she put the foundation and pay a fortune to come and have dinner and play boull with Niso.
Getting back to this parsimonious thing about you know, a good chef is always washing dishes and you know, collecting bones and putting them in the freezer. I remember this story from your incredible memoir. It's called The Apprentice, right, yeah, And I remember the story about maybe it was when you were on your honeymoon or you were on a trip with your wife and there was an attack of snails, so you took the snails and you cooked as calf go. And I thought to myself, you know you had that big accident with was it a stag or something? And I thought that I'm sure someone came and got the stag, and when you recovered, you cooked the stag, right, because the stag? Right? So do you cook for a lot of people right now? More than twenty two people? But on a regular basis.
Not really, Although Friday night were eight people at my table, But very often I'm by myself or two people too, so I don't. But usually my daughter I get crazy because when I go to her, heut. I opened the refrigerator, things are falling out. I don't know what's in the back. I mean, you can open my refriser. You have three things, and she said you reg already empty. Yes. I don't like to have things. I used things in my refrigerator or in the freezer or whatever. But I am very richy, you know, in the kitchen. And I learned that probably from my mother. I mean during the war when I was a kid, you know, we didn't really have much to it, and my mother could make things with nothing from sugar that she met with root bits that she made a syrup because in the sugar to other things. My mother with a great cook, and I learned as she supposed to be very misy only in the kitchen because of her. And this is a style of cooking. I am very much more oumpressed if I work with a chef who cook something to and you have some leftover, he does this with it and do that than for someone does a beautiful plate, but there is leftover for five people put all over the plate. That doesn't impress.
Me, now me either. I'm with you on that, all right. So I always wanted to know from your perspective, what was the highlight of your career.
I think I have many, many highlights in my career. But I'm very existentialist this way, you know. I always thought that in life, you do this decision which don't seem to be that much at the time and change all your life, and it projects you in different directions. For example, I decided to come to America, you know, in nineteen fifty nine, and I came for a year, said I come for a year and go back. I had a great job in France. My parents at a restaurant too, and I'm here sixty years later. So you do those decision which throw you in a different direction, and from then you and do another, you know. I worked for Howard Johnson for ten years, and I was a further job at the whire House in nineteen sixty for Kennedy and I went to Howard Johnson, but why well to Southwist. At that time, the cook was at the bottom of the social scale, and I had no idea of the potential for publicity because it really did not exist. But I was with the president in France. I'd never been once on the newspaper magazine too. No one would ever call you a kudo in the dining room did not exist at the time. So I went to Award Johnson ten years. It changed my life. When I left Howard Johnson nineteen sixteen nineteen seventy, I opened a restaurant on Fifth seven you called a potagerie mass productions. Then I opened the World Trade Center with Joe Baum with forty thousand people a day. That I was a consultant at the Russian Theoroom and never have been able to do that at a friend chief and even by accident. You mentioned my accident. I left the kitchen at that point, I mean the work behind the show itself, and I started, but any other in the New York Times, I started moving more in that direction of writing book and so forth. So you know, thing that happened to you, They tell, I mean, what you're going to do? Nothing is planned.
That's incredible. There wasn't a grand scheme.
Oh no, no, no, there was never a grand team. And then you know I came here and I said, well, I left school when I was thirteen years old to go into apprenticeship, so I said I better learn English properly, which didn't really happen, you see. But so people say say, oh, the best school is Columbia University. Of course I'd never heard of. Took the subway when there. Three weeks after I was here, I was enrolled at Columbia at English for Foreign students. So that was eighteen fifty nine, and I said Columbia until nineteen seventy three. Because one thing led to another to another. So life is full of those type of surprise, and I always think that you should try to appreciate that, try to realize that what happened to you you can always do something with it. Move forward.
Great advice, that's really great, yeah.
Agre, Yeah, you have to be positive in life.
So back to school for a minute, because I know that mostly you learned to cook from the family restaurant. There was a small restaurant, as I remember.
Reading a little bit when I was a kid.
Yes, right, they put you to work. You had to start very very young because of the war, etc. Right, and so you knew a great deal about cooking. Or did you go to cordon Bleu or did you go to school or.
Yeah, the school did not exist at the time, right, high school for cooking. So when I finish in France, you had to go to school until the other of primary school, which at fourteen years old. So at thirteen I took all of the final exam and that's thirteen a half. I left home to go into apprenticeship in a big hotel in book On was the town where I was born, to do a four three years apprenticeship behind the stove. So I started there from thirteen, and then I went on to Paris and you know, work a different place.
So you learned practically on your feet in the kitchen.
Oh absolutely, I mean you started the kitchen and I do a lot of cleaning. And at that time apprentice was able to take care of the stove. So you not only light up the stove with paper and wood, and care to keep that stove really hot so that at twelve o'clock eying is red. Otherwise you scrubbed the whole dining room and kitchen if your stove is not exactly right. So the working of the stove was already a big deal, you know. And then you do that for a year, a year and a half, cleaning up, cleaning up parsley and avicereating fish and killing chicken and plocking chicken and all that type of stuff, until at day the chef tell you you started the stow tomorrow. Wow, no kidding. So I no one ever told me anything. So I come to the store and I knew how to do it. So the learning was by osmosis in a different way than now, there was no recipe, nothing written say do this, do that, and do chefs tell you to do this? If you say why, you would have said because I just told you.
And by the way, I remember when I was younger, right, visiting friends of mine who were starting in kitchens, or visiting my famous friends who were chefs, and going into these kitchen cultures. And I don't have anybody made it through any of those kitchens, really, so many of them. There were these horrible bullies. And I can only imagine, like take that back forty years and you're talking about how you grew up, and it's completely different now. You get if you say something this way out of line, you get canceled.
You know, oh absolutely, what was it like?
How brutal those kitchens were, even in the nineteen eighties and nineties, you know, and the early two thousands. Talk about that for a minute, if you please.
Well, I was in an apprenticeship in nineteen forty nine, so anyway, yes, but I have to say the chef was very fair. That doesn't mean it didn't kick you in the rear rand occasionally and yelled at you too. That's was the way it was, you know now, And as you say, the wetdress would go Bible and whistle the wetdress and talk to you. Now you wouldn't do that now, but it was part of the culture.
Yes, yes, back to this idea of learning, because I think of you as a teacher, but somehow you had to learn. Did you read a scoffier or caram or something. Did you read a lot?
Not reading at all? I never read a cookbook before I came to America. So because in France you learn the chefs they do that, and you do and you repeat, you repeat, your repeat. At that time you work in restaurants, you tense the food and you strive not only to adjust but to duplicate that. You know, the question of feeding part out of it. You. We were not there to innovate or change the recipe or whatever. Know, you were there to conform to exactly that recipe and that the prosuct And in Paris we were four yeg chef in the kitchen. For example, the lob sales to fray was very famous. I think it's sit is well. Forty year of us could have done that lot sales to pray. You would never have known which I've done it. So the idea, and that one was to conform to do this, you know, differently than now now where the chef will tell you make sure that they know I'm the one who did that, I'm signing it and all that too. Yeah, that didn't exist at the time, so it were a different way.
Wow, if you had to think of like the most obvious way that industry, the restaurant industry, or the food industry for that matter, has changed in the forty years or the fifty years that you're talking about, would you say that's the biggest change or is there something else that comes to mind?
Yeah, I know, probably the biggest change also starting with novel cuisine where the chef started putting thing on the plate and arranging them on the plate. I mean my mother at a restaurant in France. There was twelve restaurant I count in my family in France, twelve of them run by women. I was the first male in that business. To my aunt, my cousin, my sister in law, everyone so but my mother. Even on a small restaurant, it was five francs one dollar, five francs. When I came to America, her old male, first horse man course, they said a caravan of wine, tax tip, everything included was gondola. At that point she saw fish like mackerel or whiting, you know, in X twenty fish. She would always serve it on a plattern, never on a plate, even in a restaurant like this. So the service on a plate was another world all together. And that service on the plate, which started with doul cuisin in the seventy kind of in the sounds, destroyed the dining room because all of a sudden, the way it was just people who pick up that plate, bring it there. There was no more work in the dining room. With four years for me, the whole thing happened in the dining room, the calling the thing. So I missed that a little bit too. I mean, the work of the dining room was much more important. And in France when I was in Paris, if you wanted a new job, you didn't go to other chefs. You go to all the metro d and all that were all in charge of an erring chef and all that they were the one, not the chef. Now it's totally changed.
Right, And I remember this idea. If you go someplace and you order some kind of chicken plate, they take it and bring it to the table and serve it to you. It's not all arranged. You know something you started talking about a little bit earlier, which I get a little crazy about. You know some of these cookbooks where they say you have to use this Jerusalem artichoke from this farm in northern California, and you think, well, there's half of these things in this book. I can't make you know, of course, and that there is some other chefs who who go, here's you know, like some frozen shrimp, and I'll give you a very very good idea to do with frozen shrimp. Where do you stand in all of that? What do you like and dislike in all of that?
Well? I feel for me that you know, we're still a mash Potero maker. I mean we're not genius, so I mean some people take it too seriously. But if you buy proper and grady and good food, you do food. But if I do a recipe with that, I know that the people who are going to do that recipe, it cannot be the same. Because even for me, if I do the same recipe that it's my recipe, it's never the same. And that's what happened in a professional kitchen, people don't realize that you do a chicken sotay with the mushroom Okay, the same night, I have eight order for that same dish. If someone was behind me to write down exactly what I did for each of those, they all say's exactly the same way I said it. But if someone were behind me to take note exactly what I do eight times, it would have been different. Why because maybe the chicken they gave me was thinner, thicker, mast was warmer. So you know, it's a question of adjust. You stop cooking, you adjust, put a table of that, adjustice to If it comes out good, you're likely to do it again. So a second sad time, but three fourth sandwich, I think I'll put a bit more. Do that, and a year later it is your recipe, you message it and also it becomes yours. That type of progress is what I think should go on in the recipe.
Right, you know, like you're talking about specific recipes, and I think there are many people who are very good at following recipes and even creating recipes and creating beautiful food. I'll tell you, For me, the hardest thing is doing a meal by myself. What if my husband and me, and it's just as to Darling, you cannot believe what I am capable of creating in the kitchen a whole meal and dessert and everything. But like, if you're creating a meal for four people, like that's what, that's an entree, that's an appetizer, that's it's a side dish, or maybe two side dishes, dessert, that's a lot. Like what's the best advice you can give me?
Well, you're absolutely right there, and my advice is going to be different whether a clothing is giving me a hand or I'm by myself. Altho it's winter summer, what can I get at the market? To all of that coming to consideration when I have decided on the meal, however, that it's a question of breaking it down. What can I do with the de before? What can I do ahead? But can I do that? So you know, it's totally different that I'm going to do a demonstration in front of a camera. Do I do the dish? If I have to do it within the context of a menu, I don't do it the same way because I do half of it. I put it on the side and finish it up later. Well, this is cooking, I'll do this. Well, this is cooking, I'll do that. So the making of a meal, it's not like the making of a dish, where you go from the beginning you go to the end. Very often the making of a meal is made of tiny part of each of the recipe individually that you do put on the side. You open your wine, you leave it on the side. You clean up your salad, you drain it, you put it on the side. You'll season it later. You do this, and this is where being a profession that is good because you break down the recipe in your head, and you know all of the different aspects of the recipe to do the finish on here or not the finish on there.
So you know, right.
But making a good meal like that sure was a lot of knowledge of cooking because you break down all of those things and so forth.
And I think also practice, you know. I remember it's a very sly friend of mine I used to cook with a lot. I adore. Her name is Susan, and she's a big fan of yours. One of these days she's going to meet you and she's going to start screaming. She's a very big and she gave me a recipe of yours for a standing roast, and she neglected to tell me to bring it to room temperature before I cooked it right, and it was so undercooked and I was so freaked out. So that's a mistake that you make right. And the more you practice things, the more you do it's like, oh, you put the past and now don't forget. You better set a time or leave the lid off or something. You know, you get better and better at so little tiny thoughts that you wouldn't necessarily think to write down in a recipe for one thing.
Right, No, it's true all the feeling. And I know people who write book about chemistry of food and all that, and they can't tell you exactly what you're around that. So if you bring it to that temperature breakdown, they tell you everything which is wrong. When you do and you go eat at their house, the food is unditable. And then you have the grandmother at the corner of the street in Italy or in France, who does the greatest food you ever had, just as the most of mine she never measured. She never measured and never had anything. So you know, it's totally different way of thinking about food.
Yes. And by the way, what I love is if you could see behind Jacqie has about three million pans and they're not even parts of their pants.
I don't use the copper too much. Is to heavy?
I know me too, But Darling, I like you have a lot of things, like things. I like gadgets because sometimes they just make things easier, you know. And after having the tiniest kitchen in the world for the first seven years of my existence, and as an adult, you go, you know what, if you can if you have the space for a food processor, isn't it better to have a food processor? What is your favorite kitchen implement? What do you absolutely just go? I can't live without this. Besides the knife, my hand hands, that's a good one.
I think that paths are attractive, visually pleasing, and you have them outside, you grab them sort of looking on the drawer. You know, it works very right. My hand is good. I have a good boat, a slid boat that doesn't bounce back, a good knife, but I caught a good knife with a sharp one and sort it and you know, and a good pad. That's all you need it.
Darling, how did you live without a food processor? How did you live without a hand mix.
You know the mix, you're right there. I remember the planet and in Paris we have that big mortar in granite like this. We used to have ten pounds of fish with a mushroom, a wood mushroom, enormal banning that, bonning that, and then after that to have screened with a wood mushroom to the screen to make the pury. Then we put that on ice, then tablespoon, buy table spoon, we start working the cream in it and so forth.
You've put it on it, you just whizz it through. And you know what, when I read those old recipes, there's always about putting it through a seven. I never understood what the hell that was about, but I guess that's to make something very very finely finally, finally.
Puree, finally, and there is always some fiber in the fish that has to be removed, you know, so we certainly, yes, it's totally different now with the type of equipment. And I know that if coffee had been here when the food process is coming, it would have been very happy.
Exactly what's very overrated? You think in the kitchen? Is there something that you don't need where to tell people not to buy.
There are for example, you see the path that I have on the wall there, and those are real copper, sick copper, and there is a lot of fake one. You have a fake path which is in the standard sil or two and they cover it with a bit of copper and you pay a fortune for it and everything burning it. It doesn't have the conductivity of good copper. So often there is those things that you buy. Knife is the same thing. You know, you buy some knife and then you can leave a sharpen them or a board if you buy a cuting board which is too thin and everything bounced back on top of it too. It's a question of a couple of piece of equipment, but good equipment, you know.
Right, Jack. I think that you were the first person I ever saw work with a food processor, a Queasin art food processor.
The first time that I did it was Carlson Timer. Do you remember Carlson Timer. It was the president of Quisina. What is the one who created.
Cuisin now, yes, I do, yes.
It was American, but he went to school in transfer it with a kid. Anyway, went back to France and saw that machine which was called mix mixed, and he bought it and created the name and he came back and I did at Gimble Gimble in New York. On the first one he asked me to do a demon fresh and wet meschine. Wow, a great mass.
Absolutely absolutely. Now, Jacques, I want to talk to you about failure. About something that you failed at, that you came back from and that you learn something from, you know, like something you did or did not do and you regret or something, but then you moved on and it taught you a great lesson.
Are you talking about in a recipe?
Let's talk about in your life, because I think that's more important. And you know, you spoke about your accident, which of course is a major setback. But is there something that you regret.
I don't frankly regret much, I mean whenever. At Columbia until nineteen seventy two. In nineteen seventy three I proper the doctoral dissertation on History of food context Civilization Literature, and at that time I thought it was very superfluous, I mean, very very inimportant and say you cannot do that, So I left. But yeah, maybe if I had to go back, because I had basically finished by phg except my thesis, I probably would have finished it, but not that you could have made any difference in my life, just personal satisfaction. But otherwise, in the cooking itself, you do dishes. We sometimes work better than some other time. But for a professional, I mean cooking is the out of recovery, you know, the hourt of compensation or the out of adjustment. I mean you do a biscuits, you know to do a bisky rule, or in the oven you needed three form in too much, or you didn't beat the egg white too properly. That the thing is dry, you don't throw it out, can row thorly, you cut it into strip, you put the thing in between. You do a cake in a different way, but you use it. So there is those type of recovery. Except one time I was in the oh it was the early seventies, the Good Natural Tour. I did with a whole bunch of people who were dancing, and I had the food segment of like fifteen minutes, and we had like three, four or five thousand people and we were in Sacramento. So I get there, I get into the kitchen and they calculated the thing was two hours. They calculate for me to come at a setten moment and finished. So I did a cheese surfly. You know. So when I went from my turn, I went on in the morning, I opened the store. I look, the oven is working. That's working. And so I did my demonstration in the fifteen twenty minutes whatever I did, and I had to leave the stage for forty five minutes, come back at the end with get my surfly out of the oven. Right. But I had no way of checking in between. But when I finished cooking, put it into the oven. I put my hand. The avent was working. I didn't. The oven went on self flinning, self finning, like seven hundred degree seven. Oh god, you've never seen a food free us burnt. I understand out of vision. People are so happy. No recovery.
I have to tell you, no recovery. You can't recover. That is divine that story. But I have to tell you I use your cheese soufle recipe or your soufle recipe as the basis. I'll tell you what, Jacques, I think that's your particular genius is not specific recipes, but those books that you did that La Method and Law Technique Darling. I have originals, I have first copies I mean I bought them, not in the time. I bought them from rare booksellers, Darling. But but just so you know, I'm telling you, like that soufle recipe, you could adapt it to And I think that's your genius. Is this that you give a good sort of patsucree recipe, a good soufle recipe, a good roasted fish, you know, and so all of those things you can add. I think that's your genius. You make your own, You make them your own. And I think that those books that you did were a kind of a desperate pulling forward. You pulled us into by showing us pictures, many many many pictures. If you don't know what those books are, they're almost like early kind of step by step video, but before video. And so you did that, and I tell you I learned the most cooking from those books.
Yeah, it's interesting because I did, let take seventy five, but I don't cook the same way that I cook in seventy five, I mean fifty years later. But there were you shop on a knife plan as far as goose, pila and onion or postion and egg is the same. So those technique kind of remain the same.
You can make a Radish swan in exactly the same way. I do love a Radish swan. You know, it's hard to talk to you about your life without kind of defaulting to food and defaulting to cooking. But what if you had not been such an incredible kind of close part of this community of restauranteurs, you know, would you have done something else?
I guess so. But you know, again, I'm eighty eight years old. So I was in the kitchen when I was seven eight years old, so eighty years ago. At that time, we didn't have television, of course, we didn't have the radio, we didn't have the telephone, we didn't have any of this. So my father was a cabinet maker by trade. My mother was a cook. So in life my choice was cabinet maker or cook. I never thought that I could be, you know, a lawyer or doctor. This us so far from our life too, it so I never even thought about that. I followed with my mother, and I loved in the kitchen with my mother. So I went this way by moving that direction, and I was happy with it. So I never really changed.
Okay, But so do you go to friends a lot?
Not really, you know, I am culinary director of a cruise line, Oceania Cruise Line, so I do a couple of cruise every year. And in September, I know we'll be in Marseill, Monte Carlo and then Barcelona and all the mad her and islands, including is a godmother one of the ships, so we do that. I do that with her too, But otherwise, you know, in France, I have a couple of cousins Nie left, but basically no one else. So I haven't really gone to France and spent much time there.
Well me either, you know. And I remember when I was very young, seventeen eighteen years old, going back to France, and you could literally stumble into any little restaurant in Paris and get the most beautiful food ever. And now it's such a global idea, this idea of food. Is there one place that you think is now the kind of culinary capital of the world.
I would see New York now, you know, because twenty four thousand restaurant, at least, she said too, is unmuch anywhere in the world. And you know, when I came here, all the great restaurants were called French or called Continental, and all of the other restaurants with menu in French totally totally misspelled, but all in from There was no great Italian, Chinese, Mexican or Japanese restaurant too. At that time, everything was in the great French restaurant or something else. There was restaurant with mid bowl and pasta, but not high class. Now it's such a little different. You know, there's some good French restaurant, but there is some extraordinary Chinese, Italian, Japanese another restaurant. And the level of the palette of the people are changed so much. I mean people going to Europe going into wine tour, learning about wine. I mean when I came to America, there was no bread here, no cheese, no wine, right, you know, and now you got extraordinary wine, cheese, bread and so forth. So it's very very different.
Do you read about food? Do you read criticism? Do you read Pete Wells?
Not much anymore? No, No, you know, since the beginning of the pandemic, I've been doing those. Facebook did show that my daughter wanted me to do that, so we did like three hundred of those. But otherwise no.
Well, I have one penultimate question for you, because you know you've been around darling. And you've seen the change of history. You've come through so many generations in terms of just the way you live. Is there something that you hand down to your granddaughter about your childhood, your teenage, your adulthood. Are there a few things that you tell this young woman about that are still truthful?
Yes? I mean when I was a kid, I mean the greatest place for a kid coming back from school was in the kitchen. The sweat of the kitchen, the noise of the instrument, you know, the voice of your mother, your father, and so forth. Those are visceral days to say with you. When Clodine was two years old, my daughter, I hold her in my hand or a year old, and I said, okay it malas so stir it. So she's strid, so she quote eat it because she quote made it. So. Likewise, my granddaughter, when Sherry was five six years old, she helped me in the kitchen. And that creates a platform if you want, or a screen onto which you start having discussion not only in the cooking process, but I mean in the sitting process and sharing the food, and that become very important in our family.
But I think if you teach someone something specific like that Jack, you also teach them how to think in a way. You know, it's like learning one thing in depth.
Yeah, and you need to eat every day.
Okay, My last question for you, darling, tell me the headline for your ottle bit and what you would like it to say. Did Jack Papin one hundred and three.
Go, Yeah, I ate my last meal for a long, long, long long time. I mean what we for like a month?
What is your last meal? Tell me what your last meal is?
Well, from from caviar to hot dog, from ham and egg to a pigeon to squab. You know, everything that I like, I would like it in front of me, with all kinds of things and a lot of friends around, and I would eat it until I fall dead. I did that with my dog. One of my dogs had to be put to sleep many years ago, and I take the best thing that he liked, steak, and I hold it in my hand, and the doctor gave him a shot and I fed him and he ate eighty eight and his head went down.
Oh God, was that story. That's going to make me cry? You wait to the end to tell that story.
That's great. Oh boy.
I did something similar with mine, except with bacon because we're when it comes to dog. All right, So your cookbook, I want to know about that.
Okay. So I have a book coming out in September which is Cooking My Way, So it's pretty economy in the kitchen because I just did that book of Chicken a year ago or so. And that book of Chicken was actually not a cookbook. I wanted to do a book of my panting of chicken and there was one hundred planning in there. But they wanted recipe, right, I said, I don't want to do recipe. So I did that a bit like I did in The Apprentice. I tell story about chicken and egg from China to France. So it was a book of story and I was surprised went on the best seller on the I can't believe you know that it was so successful. I've been very, very lucky, so no question about it.
Lucky and hard working and beautiful.
Thank you, thank you very much, thank you for having me the best happy cooking.
So yet another case of someone not planning, not envisioning, and yet responding to the universe and becoming literally a legend like this person, Jacques Papin is a living legend. And for me, he represents everything good about French cooking, and he has taught me so much. I have to say we are kindred spirits in that we're both parsmonious. We don't like to waste stuff, we don't like to waste time, we like to clean while we cooked. We're these cooks that are not just cooks, but we're also very bossy. I don't know if you've ever seen him in the kitchen with his daughter Claudine, but he's quite a bossy chef. Even with Julia child he was a little bossy, right, So we have this bossiness in common. But I'll tell you every time I am in his presence, I learn so much. That's the great gift of Jacques Pepin. Darlings. If you enjoyed this episode, do me a favorite and tell someone, Tell a friend, tell your mother, tell your cousin, tell everyone you know. Okay, and be sure to rate the show. I love rating stuff. Go on and rate and review the show on Apple podcasts so more people can hear about it. It makes such a gigantic difference, and like it takes a second, so go on and do it. And if you want more fun content, videos and posts of all kinds. Follow the show on Instagram and TikTok at Hello Isaac podcast and by the way, check me out on Instagram and TikTok at I Am Isaac MSRATI. This is Isaac Misrahi, thank you, I love you and I never thought I'd say this, but goodbye Isaac. Hello Isaac is produced by Imagine Audio, Awfully Nice and I AM Entertainment for iHeartMedia. The series is hosted by me ISACSSROI Hello Isaac is produced by Robin Gelfenbein. The senior producers are Jesse Burton and John Assanti VI. Executive produced by Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Karl Welker, and Nathan chloke At Imagined Audio production management from Katie Hodges, Sound design and mixing by Cedric Wilson. Original music composed by Ben Wilson. A special thanks to Neil Phelps and Sarah Katanak at I AM Entertainment.