There are 24,000 restaurants in New York, and of course you can list probably 100 restaurants that are very famous, but what happened to the other 23,900? When someone asks me, “You know my daughter or my son, has an interest in cooking. It’s not particularly good for young people who want to go into that business to become famous because it’s likely that it’s not going to happen. (From Jacques Pépin) Do you see any downside to the celebritization of food? It makes it probably the most exciting cuisine going on now in the world. The amazingly diverse food that we have in this country. That’s about the only thing that you can talk about and have a good time. I think it’s also maybe because, in our time of political correctness, we cannot talk about gender, about race, about religion, about anything, so people feel comfortable with food. Certainly during all my years it was this way, and apparently now we are seen as kind of genius. I’m very happy in one way because the cook used to be really at the bottom of the social scale. It’s just amazing, and now a great deal of them are reality shows. I don’t know whether this is accurate, but I think of it a lot. I was told a few weeks ago by a food historian that there are 405 cookery shows on television. How do you feel food culture in America has changed in your lifetime? It slowly became another world altogether. No one went into that business, and then of course it started changing with the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America, and so forth, in the ’60s. All the big restaurants in New York that I knew were either French, Italian, Swiss, German and so were all of the executive chefs. White American chefs - I didn't know any. I worked for Howard Johnson and all the kids that I worked with in the kitchen at Howard Johnson and in the commissary were all black kids. It was so small, in fact, I did not know one single American chef that was white. That shows you how very small and very little the food world was. When I came to America at the end of 1959, six months after I was here I had made friends with Julia Child and James Beard, and Craig Claiborne had just started at the New York Times. When you first came to America in 1959, what was the food world like? I think if you talk about something you love, talk about something you know something about, then you’re just talking to people, and trying to help them and make them happy, and make them understand.
I kind of felt comfortable because by then, I had been teaching a little bit all over the country, and I looked at it like the class that I was doing, teaching, except that it was for hopefully more people than 40 people or whatever.
We went there with my wife and a friend of mine, Gloria Zimmerman, and the three of us, we did a series of 13 shows in about five days.
The first series that I did was in Florida for a TV station in Jacksonville, and that was in 1980 or something like that. What was the initial experience of being on TV?Īs long as I was cooking, I felt relatively comfortable. You were a chef on TV long before the Food Network. But still, in my memory now, that really changed me. I had that first bowl of fresh milk, and in a sense, that was it. I was kind of sad, so the wife of the farmer took me to the barn to feed a cow and make me milk the cow, put my hand on the teat and all that. School was over, so she took me on her bicycle there for 35 miles, and I was left there on that farm. During the war in France, I was about 6 years old, and my father left to go in the resistance and my mother took me to a farm for the summer. Interestingly, this moment is what the show begins with. What was the dish that initially showed you that there's more to food than sustenance? That it could be an art or something more? This interview has been edited for length and clarity.įor the record: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that the documentary airs May 27 at 10 p.m. The documentary airs Friday, May 26 at 9 p.m. The documentary will focus on Pépin’s childhood in France, how he fell in love with America and came up in the food world - the story of how a French immigrant became one of America’s most celebrated chefs.
PBS’ newest culinary edition of the “America Masters,” a series of comprehensive profiles on American culture’s most creatively notable, is about to give us a never-before-seen view into the life of Jacques Pépin, the French American chef who pioneered cooking for television alongside Julia Child on “Jacques and Julia.”