Chewing the Fat: Chef, Author, and Icon Jacques Pepin

Chef Jacques Pepin and Washington Post Food Editor Joe Yonan

Your new book is called More Fast Food My Way and is the follow-up to your last book and PBS series, Fast Food My Way, which introduced your idea of fast food to viewers. The “fast food at home” movement in American food has been growing with shows like Rachael Ray’s and others. How do you differentiate yourself from that movement?

The point of it is that I always cook this way. It’s not something new. I may still cook for hours over the weekend. But my mother cooked this way and many French chefs cook this way. You may cook for hours over the weekend and then on Tuesday you go shopping and you’re in a hurry and you go home and you grab a can of cannellini beans and a chorizo from the fridge and you make a soup because you’re in a hurry. To me this was about extrapolating those recipes and to show that type of food.

Also, certainly, I use the supermarket as a prep cook. In a professional kitchen, someone will bone out a chicken for you, bone out the fish and by the time you’re at the stove with the first order you have a fillet of sole, some white wine, some shallot, you put it in a skillet and in a minute and a half it’s cooked. But that is, as I said, because you have everything ready for you. So…I go to the supermarket and I buy skinless, boneless breasts of chicken, pre-sliced mushrooms, pre-washed spinach…and in eight to ten minutes, I can do a dish from scratch.

This book is the companion to your new PBS show. When will the new show air?

It’s already started. It started last week. It’s More Fast Food My Way. I mean, fast food is a catchword, of course, that I use. Maybe it should be More Food Fast My Way.

It’s interesting you say that because “fast food” has a certain connotation, especially for Americans.

That’s what I mean, we use it as a catchphrase and it’s not that I’m not aware of it or not familiar with it. I was Director of Research for ten years for Howard Johnson so, you know, I worked in that world. But the appeal of those fast recipes is that, let’s say I go to the market and my wife calls me and says, “I saw Maury and Jim asked them to stay for lunch,” at the same time I am hearing that the rotisserie chickens are ready. So I pick up a chicken and some Boston lettuce – I love Boston lettuce. Then I go home and I cut the chicken into pieces with poultry shears and lay it on a bed of the Boston lettuce. In a skillet with some olive oil I put some garlic, some onion, some herbs, the juices from the chicken, some cracked pepper and then I pour that on top. And just like that, this is now my chicken.

I know a lot of your earlier books were focused on the basic techniques behind cooking. How do the new books fit in? Are you writing to that same reader or is it a different audience?

This is probably the antithesis of those books. I think the best book I did was probably The Art of Cooking in the mid-eighties. It was two volumes and we took like 34,000 pictures. It took me five years and in the end we kept 3,000 pictures for the two books. For that book I went fishing in Long Island to get skate to show you how to take the wing out of skate because you can only buy the wings…I went looking for frogs in my pond to show you how to take off the skin and all of that. You know, if I bought veal I bought a leg of veal which was like 50 pounds to show how to break it down into top round, bottom round, eye round, etc. It was probably the best of what I’ve done, but it also sold the least. The point was that you don’t have to skin the frog, you can just buy the frog legs, but if you want to know how to do it, it’s there.

This book is not so much about that. This is about making people’s life easier so they can be home more and spend more time in the dining room with their kids and their spouse because it’s become that easy to cook. You can do it now with the supermarket more than you could. There are so many foods that are not cooked, but prepared, like I said, as a prep cook would do. It’s not the least expensive way of cooking, it’s actually more expensive. But then it’s a toss-up. You pay for your time.

Well and it’s interesting timing because now that America is starting to face a more difficult time economically, people may not be able to go out as much and may want to stay home and cook but, in many ways, there’s a generation that never really cooked much.

It’s true. And with this, even though it’s a bit more expensive to buy a pre-washed salad than to buy a head of lettuce it’s still much less expensive than going out to dinner, you can control what you’re eating so nutritionally it’s better, and certainly it’s always much better to sit down with your family and eat. That’s important. I mean, certainly to me it is; I’ve been married 43 years and I don’t remember any time I didn’t sit down with my wife for dinner.

When you’re not on the road and you’re at home, are you cooking pretty much every day?

I would say so. Practically every day. I’m either doing recipes [for the show] or doing stuff that I like to do, from a pig's head to whatever. And certainly in the summer when the garden is full we cook every day basically.

And when you’re at home, what kinds of dishes are you cooking?

Depends on how I feel. I published a book last year called Chez Jacques, and it’s kind of a visual autobiography. I wrote a cook’s memoir years ago called The Apprentice, but this was kind of the visual. There were photos of me at my home, some of my artwork. There are about 100 recipes and those are the recipes that are really important to me. They are the recipes I had as a kid. And with them, there is no context of time. A lot of them take a long time, some of them don’t.

And finally, what are the restaurants you enjoy eating at when you come to D.C.?

The best is, of course, Citronelle. I am good friends with Michel Richard. I also enjoy the Italian chef, Roberto Donna.