Jacques Pépin (1935–)

What a treat this was! Part professional memoir, part art book, and part foodie fodder in a handsome volume that will stay in my permanent collection. I have always enjoyed watching Jacques Pepin cook, but I never realized that for several years during my childhood, I was the beneficiary of his craftsmanship in the kitchen. For most of the 1960s, shortly after coming to the US, he was assistant to another French chef, Pierre Franey, working in the industrial kitchen of Howard Johnson's, developing the recipes that would be used in HoJo's restaurants around the country. Whenever my family traveled on vacation, we stayed and ate at Howard Johnson's motels and restaurants a LOT. I fondly remember the fried clams, Southern fried chicken, and chicken pot pies...well, thank you Jacques and Pierre, because their skill and talent perfected those items and more, making HoJo's consistently, reliably, palatable fare for ordinary folks like us. Incidentally, Pepin turned down an opportunity to cook for the Kennedy White House to take that job--having already served as chef for General and Madame DeGaulle, he felt he'd done the "presidential routine", and wanted a new challenge! Along with the fascinating stories of his professional cooking adventures, Pepin gives us general descriptions of innumerable ways to prepare chicken (including ALL its parts) and eggs, but no actual recipes. He maintains that for much of his career (industrial kitchen duties excepted) and most of his home based food preparations, he did not use them...hence one definition of the "art". The other aspect of the art of the chicken is...well, real Art. That is, painting. Pepin's chicken portraits are simply delightful, and this book is full of color plates of his imaginative renderings, from the fairly representational to the abstract to the downright whimsical.
As I said, the whole thing is a treat.… (meer)