Jacques Pepin Quotes

• When I left to go into apprenticeship in 1949, it was only four years after the war, and people don’t realize, we still had tickets for butter, meat and so forth in France until 1947. It’s not like the end of the war, everything was plentiful – it wasn’t.

  Jacques Pepin

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• When I pair food and wine, I start with the food. If I have a beautiful roasted bird, I might choose a Cabernet or Pinot Noir, or maybe a Syrah, depending on the sauce and what is in my cellar.

  Jacques Pepin

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• When I was a child, we always had wine on the table, no matter how simple the meal. The wine had no special identity; it was just ‘the wine,’ from the cellar cask. The rules were general: white with the first course, red with the main course.

  Jacques Pepin

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• When I wrote ‘Fast Food My Way’ in 2004, I hoped that my friends would prepare my recipes. Now, more people cook from that book than any other I’ve written in the past 30 years.

  Jacques Pepin

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• When you are at home, even if the chicken is a little burnt, what’s the big deal? Relax.

  Jacques Pepin

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• You can’t escape the taste of the food you had as a child. In times of stress, what do you dream about? Your mother’s clam chowder. It’s security, comfort. It brings you home.

  Jacques Pepin

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• You know, my parents had a restaurant. And I left home, actually, in 1949, when I was 13 years old, to go into apprenticeship. And actually when I left home, home was a restaurant – like I said, my mother was a chef. So I can’t remember any time in my life, from age 5, 6, that I wasn’t in a kitchen.

  Jacques Pepin

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• This June, I’ll travel once again to the Food and Wine Magazine Classic in Aspen, Colorado. For many years, my dear friend Julia Child and I have teamed up to teach classes together at the event; for the past seven years, my daughter, Claudine, has been my cooking partner on stage.

  Jacques Pepin

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• This is what a family is all about – one another, sitting around the table at night. And it’s very, very important, I think, for the kid to spend time not only around the table eating with their parents, but in the kitchen.

  Jacques Pepin

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• Thirty, 40 years ago, more than that now, even, the cook was certainly at the bottom of the social scale. And any mother would’ve wanted their child to marry a doctor, a lawyer, an architect, not a cook. Now, we are genius, it’s different.

  Jacques Pepin

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• The idea of old was to conform yourself to a style of cooking, it was not to create a style of cooking. Now the chef is so much into ‘I want to sign that dish and say I am the one who made that dish.’

  Jacques Pepin

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• Probably a mistake, you know, that people make in America, to think that all great chefs are a male… I’m still the only male in the family who went into that business.

  Jacques Pepin

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• My palate is simpler than it used to be. A young chef adds and adds and adds to the plate. As you get older, you start to take away.

  Jacques Pepin

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• My mother likes what I cook, but doesn’t think it’s French. My wife is Puerto Rican and Cuban, so I eat rice and beans. We have a place in Mexico, but people think I’m the quintessential French chef.

  Jacques Pepin

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• Most people who came here came for economic reasons or sometimes for religious or political reasons. I didn’t have any of this. I came here, I liked it, I stayed. So I’m a pure American – even more than people who are born here – because I did it by choice as an adult.

  Jacques Pepin

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• Just because I am a chef doesn’t mean I don’t rely on fast recipes. Indeed, we all have moments when, pressed for time, we’ll use a can of tuna and a tomato for a first course. It’s a question of choosing the right recipes for the rest of the menu.

  Jacques Pepin

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• If you have extraordinary bread and extraordinary butter, it’s hard to beat bread and butter.

  Jacques Pepin

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• I was chef to the French Presidents between ’56 and ’59, finished with de Gaulle, and during de Gaulle I remember serving Eisenhower, Nehru, Tito, Macmillan; those were the heads of state at the time. I never saw anyone. No one would ever, ever, ever come to the kitchen. You couldn’t even see them.

  Jacques Pepin

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• I was born on the eighteenth of December, 1935, in the town Bourg-en-Bresse, about thirty miles northeast of Lyon, the second of three sons of Jeanne and Jean-Victor Pepin. Weighing only two and one half pounds, I nearly died at birth.

  Jacques Pepin

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• I tell a student that the most important class you can take is technique. A great chef is first a great technician. ‘If you are a jeweler, or a surgeon or a cook, you have to know the trade in your hand. You have to learn the process. You learn it through endless repetition until it belongs to you.

  Jacques Pepin

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Jacques Pepin (32)

Birth:	18th December, 1935
Nationality:	French
Profession:	Chef, Television Personality

About

Jacques Pepin was born in Bourg-en-Bresse, France. He is a French chef, television personality and author working in the United States. He earned a BA degree from Columbia University in 1970. He received his MA degree in French Literature from Columbia University in 1972. In 1999, he co-starred in the PBS series Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home with Julia Child. The program was awarded a Daytime Emmy in 2001. In October 2004, he received France's ultimate civilian recognition, the Légion d'honneur. He was a guest judge on season five of the Bravo television show Top Chef, which aired in 2008. He was a guest on the television show Wahlburgers episode called Pauli Day. He received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Boston University in 2011. He has written several books include: La Technique, Everyday Cooking With Jacques Pepin, Jacques Pepin's the Art of Cooking, The Short-Cut Cook, Jacques Pépin's Simple and Healthy Cooking, Jacques Pépin's Kitchen, Essential Pepin Desserts, and A Grandfather's Lessons: In the Kitchen with Shorey.

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