Jacques Pepin Quotes

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.

It’s more useful to have knowledge about cuts of meat than a lot of money.

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.

Cooking is the art of adjustment.

I taped my first series for PBS in 1982 at WJCT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida. The show, called ‘Everyday Cooking with Jacques Pepin,’ was about saving time and money in the kitchen – and it was a celebration of simple and unpretentious food.

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.

You have no choice as a professional chef: you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes part of yourself. I certainly don’t cook the same way I did 40 years ago, but the technique remains. And that’s what the student needs to learn: the technique.

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

The menus that remain, for me, are really the menus that you have with your good friends, with your wife, with your mother, with your kids. These are what stay in your mind.

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.

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.

When you’d get a note from someone, the government, it meant something was wrong. This was the way it was. Just goes to show you the way that being a chef has changed, you know – being on the bottom of the social scale and now being what we are, it’s incredible, it’s terrific.