Jacques Pepin may be turning 80 in December, but he’s not sounding like a man about to pack up his chef’s knives and walk away from the stove or, perhaps, the camera.
“There’s always something new. Life continues,” says the celebrity chef, cookbook author and television cooking show star when asked how he’s doing. Life is continuing — and how.
This fall, Pepin launches a new public television series and a new cookbook. Both titled “Jacques Pepin Heart & Soul in the Kitchen” (Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35), they show how the chef is cooking and living today with his family and friends.
“I did the book on the way we eat at home, so it’s something more personal, maybe,” says the Madison, Conn., resident about the cookbook due out Oct. 6. “There are some very simple things I cook from my granddaughter to my wife and so forth.”
The new cookbook is very personal, profusely illustrated with Pepin’s own artwork and intimate photographs of him cooking, shopping and having fun. (There are shots of the finished dishes too.) He shares anecdotes about his life, his cooking, his family and famous friends like Julia Child, James Beard and Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food editor whom Pepin says was so instrumental in his career.
There are also lots of practical cooking tips anyone anywhere can use. As in previous works, this book features Pepin’s signature practicality and frugality. Indeed, humble canned beans are featured in the very first recipe, for a bean dip to serve with drinks.
“I don’t think it was planned in any way,” Pepin says of the recipe’s placement in the book. “It’s a recipe that I’ve done. It’s good, so I do it.”
You can, of course, cook the beans themselves from scratch as he does occasionally. But if there’s a can available and people arrive unexpectedly, he’s going to use it. Pepin is no food snob.
“At 80 years old, I don’t think I’m going to be apologetic. What we do, we do,” he says.
Nor is Pepin shy about voicing his opinions on food and wine and cooking in the book.
“The first requirement for anything I serve at my house is that it taste good. No compromises!” he writes in his introduction. “I don’t want people to come away from my table feeling that they have had some sort of ‘culinary experience.’ I just want them to say to themselves, ‘This was really good.’ I also prepare food with as little fuss as possible, not the least because I want to be able to enjoy the wine, food and companionship myself.”
Pepin writes that he has qualms about eating food he doesn’t recognize, gets turned off by an “obsession with creativity” that results in “weird” pairings, finds the “jammy taste of many expensive California reds overpowering and their alcohol content of 15 or even 16 percent too high,” and doesn’t get the fixation on ever-smaller vegetables.
“If this trend continues, we’ll soon be dining on unborn baby vegetables that will be both tasteless and outrageously expensive,” he writes.
“Maybe I was in a mood that day to exaggerate a little bit,” Pepin says of that passage now. “That obsession with undersize or oversize — anything regular, you can’t have it. It’s crazy.”
Pepin was born in France, was classically trained as a chef and cooked for Charles de Gaulle. He is, as he notes, “often looked at as the quintessential French chef.” But — and this is a point he has returned to often over the years — his cooking is his own.
“I never try to be French or try not to be French,” says Pepin. About the book, he says, “This is who I am, and this is what I do now.”
The new cookbook contains recipes rooted in cuisines around the world. Mexico, he writes, has had a major impact on his cooking, thanks to regular sojourns on the Yucatan peninsula. So you’ll find what he calls French-Mex dishes, like sole Riviera with pico de gallo, or poached grouper with black bean sauce. Another influence is his wife of nearly 50 years, Gloria, whose recipes and taste preferences are often mentioned.
“To a certain extent, I live in the present and the future,” he says of his cooking today. “I don’t think of what I did 20 or 30 years ago.”
Speaking of the future, Pepin says he’s been observing his 80th birthday for the past two years because of the book, the TV series and the taping of a celebratory birthday TV special at San Francisco’s Farrallon restaurant, featuring guest chefs Lidia Bastianich, Rick Bayless and Ming Tsai, which will air during the December pledge season.
“Jacques Pepin Heart & Soul,” produced by San Francisco public television station KQED, is Pepin’s 14th series (Chicago’s WTTW Channel 11 begins broadcasting the 26-episode series Oct. 10 at 1:30 p.m.), and it has been billed as Pepin’s last PBS show. But that doesn’t mean he’s through with the camera yet.
“I don’t say I won’t ever do anything,” he says. “In fact, I want to do something else with my granddaughter. You know, give her some lessons in cooking. Simple stuff.”
This could take the form of a television or Web series or “whatever,” he says.
What about another cookbook?
“I don’t know,” Pepin replies, “But if I were to do something with my granddaughter, probably. I don’t know.”
Eggs in Pepper Boats
Prep: 15 minutes
Cook: 8 minutes
Makes: 4 servings
“One day I decided to cook eggs in sweet peppers with a bit of cheese and cilantro. It makes a great lunch dish,” writes Jacques Pepin in “Jacques Pepin Heart & Soul in the Kitchen.” Pepin uses banana peppers, but poblano and cubanelle peppers may be substituted.
2 cubanelle, poblano or banana peppers (about 4 ounces each)
1 Tbsp. olive oil
4 Tbsp. water
1/2 tsp. salt
6 Tbsp. grated cheddar cheese
4 extra-large eggs, preferably organic
1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
About 2 Tbsp. fresh cilantro leaves
Split the peppers lengthwise in half, and remove the seeds and stems, if you want. Arrange them cut side down in a large skillet; add the oil, water and 1/4 teaspoon of the salt. Cook, covered, over medium heat, turning occasionally, until the peppers are softened somewhat but still firm, about 4 minutes.
Remove the skillet from the heat; if necessary, turn the peppers over so the hollow side is up. Place the cheese in the peppers. Break an egg into each one and sprinkle the eggs with the remaining ¼ teaspoon salt and the pepper.
Return the skillet to the stove, cover and cook over medium heat until the egg whites are set but the yolks are still runny, 3 to 4 minutes. Transfer to plates, sprinkle with the cilantro and serve immediately.
Cannellini Bean Dip
Prep: 15 minutes
Makes: 4 servings
A recipe from “Jacques Pepin Heart & Soul in the Kitchen.” The garnishes, Pepin writes, “make the dish look more attractive — and more like a classic hummus made with chickpeas.”
For the dip:
1 can (15.5 oz.) cannellini beans, drained (about 1 3/4 cups), rinsed
1 large clove garlic, crushed
1/2 cup diced bread
1/4 cup olive oil
1 Tbsp. water
1/4 tsp. ground cumin
1/2 tsp. each: salt, Tabasco sauce
Garnishes:
1/3 cup reserved beans (from above)
2 tsp. extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 tsp. paprika
1/2 tsp. poppy seeds
1 tsp. chopped fresh parsley
3 or 4 tostadas or hard taco shells, broken into wedges, or toasts or rice crackers
For the dip, reserve 1/3 cup of the beans for garnish. Put the remaining beans in a blender or food processor. Add all the remaining ingredients, and process until very smooth, scraping the bowl with a rubber spatula a few times if need be to help combine the ingredients.
Transfer the dip (you should have about 2 cups) to a shallow serving dish and create a well in the center.
For the garnishes, put the reserved beans in the well in the dip and pour in olive oil. Sprinkle with the paprika, poppy seeds and parsley. Serve surrounded by the tostadas or taco shell pieces, toast or crackers.
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