{"id":14004,"date":"2026-10-28T01:53:22","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T05:53:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-legendary-chef-jacques-pepin-the-pursuit-of-mastery-cooking-for-presidents-meeting-julia-child-and-more\/"},"modified":"2026-10-28T01:53:22","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T05:53:22","slug":"the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-legendary-chef-jacques-pepin-the-pursuit-of-mastery-cooking-for-presidents-meeting-julia-child-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-legendary-chef-jacques-pepin-the-pursuit-of-mastery-cooking-for-presidents-meeting-julia-child-and-more\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Legendary Chef Jacques P\u00e9pin \u2014 The Pursuit of Mastery, Cooking for Presidents, Meeting Julia Child, and More"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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Please enjoy this transcript of a very special interview with culinary legend Jacques P\u00e9pin<\/a>, available exclusively on YouTube<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin\u2019s full bio<\/a><\/p>\n

Books, people, and resources mentioned in the interview<\/a><\/p>\n

Legal conditions and copyright information<\/a><\/p>\n

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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors.<\/p>\n

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Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Jacques, thank you so much for welcoming me into your home. I\u2019ve seen so many videos here, and you\u2019ve been my teacher from afar through books and videos for a very long time, so thank you for that.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Actually, yes, we did in the other house, but in this house, starting with the pandemic, Tom Hopkins is not here today, but started shooting here and we did, I think we had 200,000, 300,000 people before the pandemic, and we had two million, whatever. We did 10, 12 show a day. Those show of three, four, five minutes, just a little recipe too. So yeah, we\u2019ve done a lot of show here, yeah.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> You\u2019ve done a ton. And part of the reason I wanted to have you on the show is because when I found you, I was trying to learn how to cook, and I had failed many times. And when I found you, I though to myself, not only is this an incredible teacher of the culinary arts, but one of the best teachers of any skill I\u2019ve ever seen. And I\u2019m a bit of a collector of teachers. So I wanted to ask you in the case of these videos or just broadly speaking, how do you think about preparation before the camera starts rolling, the setting, the mise en place? Could you speak to that?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yes. Yeah, preparation is very important, but it should be unseen in a sense to look natural and it can be. I mean, for me, it\u2019s a question of making sure that I have the ingredient in the right place and that\u2019s it. I mean basically start cooking and following and I did that when I was doing show for PBS. I mean, I did a lot of different series of 23 show. At the beginning of the show, I mean usually the cameraman would come, like four of them, plus the producer and all that to a set. So I usually took them through the show and I say, \u201cI\u2019m going to start with B1, which is burner one. I put a thing in there and this and that, and I go through the whole show like this with three, four, five recipe.\u201d And they think I have the greatest memory of anyone they\u2019ve never seen.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really have any memory. I go in my head, I say, \u201cI\u2019m going to put that on the stove, and it\u2019s going to take a minute or so, so I can open the oven. I put that in, and during that time I can.\u201d I work it out as a cook following the recipe itself rather than the question of memory. And the same idea there, I try to visualize in my head when I do a recipe what\u2019s coming next, and what I need next and so forth.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> So I am fascinated by the overlay of skills, the transfer between different skills and arts. And before I did homework for this conversation, I did not know how involved you were in painting. And I looked at a lot of your artwork. Fringe of the Wood is one I really like. Fleur One, I also really loved. You have some incredible pieces and I\u2019m wondering what similarities you\u2019ve found between the culinary arts and the visual arts.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> There are, but I mean, cooking came way before painting. Painting came in this country after, in France I never did. I was in apprenticeship in 1949 so I mean, it\u2019s many, many years ago, over 70 years. But yeah, there are. I mean often, like in a recipe, I think that you have to test all the time. So if I do A and B, put together, I test and adjust, then test and adjust, and keep building the recipe until it\u2019s okay, that\u2019s fine. That\u2019s it. And to a painting, a little bit of the same thing. Sometime, I start with a color or two, especially if I work in something more abstract, and I kind of react to the color or the panting itself and I add something and I add another thing until I was satisfied with it. Is it good or not? I don\u2019t know, but if I\u2019m satisfied, I\u2019ll stop there. I\u2019m certainly probably better at cooking than at painting, but I\u2019ve been at it longer, I guess.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> So one part of your bio, and we\u2019re not going to go through every step because of course we\u2019d be here for probably seven hours if we did that, but one segue that I\u2019d love for you to speak to is your very beginning chapters of learning how to cook. How did you go from that to cooking for the French heads of state?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, it\u2019s a question of luck. At that time, certainly the cook was at the bottom of the social scale, quite different than here. I was a cook for several head of states, I mean three of them, and I had never been in an interview with a magazine or a newspaper or whatever, that did not exist. So now we are genius, we are famous. Not at that time. So anyway, I worked in Paris in some of the Plaza Athenee, [inaudible 00:07:58], I mean, the great place in Paris.<\/p>\n

And then I was drafted in the Navy and that was during the Algerian War actually. And I was supposed to go to Algeria, and then they didn\u2019t send me, they sent me back to Paris. And the reason was that my brother was already in Algeria, and they didn\u2019t send two brother at the same time. So I end up at the head of the Navy thing in Paris and start cooking for the officer there. I had a friend of mine who was working for the secretary of treasurer who came and he said, \u201cCould you come and give me a hand? I have some dinner to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

And I\u2019ve never worked in Paris in big place, so I don\u2019t really know, so I said, \u201cSure.\u201d So I start doing that, and at that time the government were changing at a fairly rapid pace in France under the Fourth Republic. And I end up being there with one of the head of treasurer and government change, and he became the prime minister of France. At that time, the prime minister was the highest-<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Station.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> \u2026 post that you could have in France because the president of the republic didn\u2019t really have much power. I end up staying there under three different presidents. The one that I started with, Felix Gaillard, lasted six months, six and a half months. And then I came eventually to the goal and I stayed with him and doing state dinner. [inaudible 00:09:37] Macmillan, I mean, big head of state, but as I said, never once did I get an interview with a thing, it didn\u2019t really exist. Otherwise, I work with the head of the house in that case to do the dinner for the week, and for the family and so forth. When it come to state dinner, then we had people from the outside coming to advise me what to do, not too long, or this or that, and so forth.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> How did the cooking in that capacity, cooking for the heads of state, most differ from cooking in the restaurants prior to that?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, this is more focused here. You\u2019re going to be focused to one person and the type of thing that they want to eat. So in a sense, it\u2019s easier or more complicated depending on the way you look at it. But for me, I felt relatively comfortable in that position. We did dinner usually for 6, 8, 10, I think 25, whatever the maximum of what I did. Then we had another organization who came if we had big, big things of over 100 or 200 people.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> I want to flash back a little bit to growing up in war-torn France. You previously said that your mother could cook with almost nothing and that informed your, and I think these are your words, not mine, miserly cooking style. Could you give some examples of what you saw your mother do?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> My mother would never throw anything out in the refrigerator and it became a bit of my motto too. And what my wife called fridge soup is probably one of the best example. I opened the refrigerator and I have wilted salad and an onion has been there for weeks and all that. We take all of that together with water, salt, put it in a pot to make a soup. She used to call fridge soup that we did and finish with some pasta in it or rice or nothing at all.<\/p>\n

So this was a normal thing to do, and certainly my mother was a little restaurant would work this way. Also, the fact that she didn\u2019t have, she had a refrigerator with a block of ice at that time. And so she bought meat, and she had to use it within a couple of days and so forth. So yes, things were used, and my aunt and my cousin, it\u2019s all women in my family in France was the little restaurant or cooking this way.<\/p>\n

And even when I was with the president in France, they were not particularly impressed by me. I remember going to [foreign language 00:12:34], which is a town not too far between Lyon and Geneva where my aunt had a little restaurant, going to the kitchen to give her a hand. She throw me out. \u201cYou\u2019re too much better. Get out of here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> I wanted to talk about someone maybe from the perspective of a lot of people who might read your bio, some unorthodox decisions that you made. And one is being offered a job at the White House to cook for John F. Kennedy and instead taking a job at Howard Johnson.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Right.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Could you walk us through how you made that decision?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, to start with, when I was in Paris, I worked in Paris for quite a number of years, and I loved America at the time, jazz and so forth. I wasn\u2019t married, but I said, \u201cI think I\u2019m going to go to America for a year to taste America and New York.\u201d I came on a student boat. I find a spot on a student boat, and I remember there meeting one of the teacher who spoke French, and I asked him, I say, \u201cI\u2019m going to be in New York and I need to speak English better. What do you think?\u201d<\/p>\n

He said, \u201cWell, there is a school in New York called Columbia University. They say you should go there. It\u2019s a good school to learn English.\u201d<\/p>\n

I said, \u201cOkay.\u201d<\/p>\n

I came here sponsored by a small restaurant called [foreign language 00:14:32]. The owner came to Paris at that point. I met him and he said, \u201cYeah, if you want to come.\u201d<\/p>\n

At that time, for some reason, the French were pretty easy to come. I got a passport and whatever I needed in a few weeks, and I came and I thought I said that I would stay there for a year or two. And so that man, that restaurant there, he didn\u2019t have a job, but he said, \u201cOh, I have a friend of mine, Le Pavilion. It\u2019s the best restaurant in New York and they need people like you to, I\u2019ll take you there to introduce you to the chef.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was Pierre Franey, and Pierre told me, \u201cWell, you want to start tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I said, \u201cOkay.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I started working at the Pavillon and Soule was the other pretty strong man with. And at some point, after a few months, there was some disagreement with the employee, with the union and with Soule, and he was going to close and so forth. And at the same time, one of the clients of the Pavillon was Howard Johnson, Howard D. Johnson, the father, the one who created the company. And so he approached Pierre, he said, \u201cCould you come and work for me?\u201d<\/p>\n

Pierre said, \u201cWell, I don\u2019t know. I\u2019ve never done that, but maybe.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I heard this, I say, \u201cCan I go too with you?\u201d<\/p>\n

So I ended up going with Pierre to Howard Johnson, which was a totally different type of job. And we had carte blanche with Mr. Johnson to do to a certain extent what we wanted. So I remember in the test kitchen starting with three chicken, poaching chicken, taking them out to do a chicken, cream sauce, whatever, and finishing with 3,000 pound of chicken in thousand gallon kettle doing it. So adjusting and doing like that without that was really a fascinating thing. I had never done recipe before, so I started doing, it was a totally different world for me of production, and I ended up staying 10 years at Howard Johnson. I learned a great deal in the writing of recipe and American eating habits and all that type of stuff.<\/p>\n

When I left Howard Johnson, I opened a restaurant on Fifth Avenue called La La Potagerie, which I did soup in mass production. And then I opened the World Trade Center with Joe Baum as the executive chef. We serve 40,000 people a day in different restaurant. Then I was a consultant at the Russian Tea Room. And I\u2019m saying all of that to say I would never have been able to do those type of job without the training of Howard Johnson. So Howard Johnson in a sense, it was an addition to what I knew and changed my life. Yes.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> It seems to me, I don\u2019t know if this is fair to say, but that you\u2019ve made some decisions looking at your bio to maximize for learning, right? Learning opportunity, and you seem to be inherently very curious, and it strikes me that gives me insight into how to teach. And I\u2019m curious, when you\u2019re writing books, I mean, you\u2019ve published so many books and you\u2019ve published classics that have become these iconic seminal works, how do you think about the right way to teach, say, culinary skills? Because a lot of cookbooks fail, right? People aren\u2019t able to use them. They don\u2019t acquire the skills, they don\u2019t acquire the technique. How do you think your approach to teaching differs?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Maybe because of the training that I had in France in the breaking down of ingredient. It become very important to have the proper technique to do. And those techniques are kind of universal, whether you do French cooking or Italian or Spanish or whatever, an egg is an egg, you poached an eggs or peel a tomato or bone out a chicken, that could be applied to any of those.<\/p>\n

I realized at some point that those technique and the way of breaking down things, that fit with my character and what I wanted to do, and this is the way I could teach people. That they would remember, instead of remembering a whole recipe, not remembering how to do that particular thing, how to remember how to poach an egg the right way and so forth. So yeah, I started to emphasize more of the technique than the recipe, but it was lucky. It just happened at that time that people asked me, \u201cDo you want to do this?\u201d<\/p>\n

At some point, I started giving classes. At some point in my life, I had very bad accident. I had 12 fracture. The car accident broke my back, my hip, leg too, and even that arm was totally destroyed so that my wife signed at the hospital removal of the left arm, it was all broken and then they somehow saved it. And most of the shows that I did after, but after that, people don\u2019t realize I can\u2019t really bend it much more than that.<\/p>\n

So when I started, it was coincidental at that time where a cookware shop were opening in New York with little cooking school offered in the back and they asked me, starting with at Bloomingdale, \u201cDo you want to come and give a class there?\u201d<\/p>\n

I said, \u201cSure.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I came, did a demonstration or two, and then I started going through the country doing this, and I was amazed when I did the, peel a carrot, and people said, \u201cWow, that\u2019s how you peel a carrot.\u201d<\/p>\n

I said, \u201cYeah, that\u2019s how you peel a carrot.\u201d So I couldn\u2019t believe. So I say, \u201cGo back to concentrate on the proper way of doing this, on the technique to more and more.\u201d And that basically is where I started doing book and one book after another book and so forth.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> So I want to really give you credit here because I study a lot of things. I work with a lot of coaches. I read books about skills I never intend to learn just to see how they are taught. And as someone who\u2019s studied a lot of languages, let\u2019s just say Chinese and Japanese, there are thousands of characters, and you can make millions of different words and so on, but fundamentally, there are, for instance, in Japanese, I think it\u2019s around 114 fundamental building blocks of all these characters. So if you learn those fundamentals, then you can assemble them in many different ways.<\/p>\n

And what it strikes me you\u2019re so good at is distilling things down to these fundamental techniques, and then teaching them in a very logical sequence so that people build confidence as they progress. I\u2019m curious, after your accident, was that transition to teaching from being a practitioner in the field to more so a teaching capacity, was that difficult for you? Or did it just come naturally and you found that you actually enjoyed the teaching in some ways more than you did being in the back of house?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> No, I think that it was pretty natural and I thought that I didn\u2019t really broke it down this way at the beginning, but instead of teaching cooking, teaching how to cook the basic recipe, and if you learn how to poach an egg, you learn how to poach an egg. You can do it Chinese style or Italian or French, it doesn\u2019t really matter at that point. So I was not trying in fact to stay French or teach only French cooking, I was trying to teach people how to cook that is to make your life easier, faster.<\/p>\n

I mean, when you\u2019re in a restaurant, as you know, it\u2019s 11 o\u2019clock in the morning, at 12 o\u2019clock you have 100 people sitting down where you have three cases of artichokes to do. It\u2019s not a question of doing it, it\u2019s a question of doing it in 45 minutes too. So the speed and all that to become very important in the process of cooking, and this is what I wanted to teach. So I started with, as I said, trying to break down the different technique, and show them how to do, regardless of whether those technique were more French or Italian or whatever.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> I want to talk about a few, I hesitate to call them ingredients. They seem more important, maybe they\u2019re worthy of a different label, but I was looking back at the 90\/90 campaign, so 90 years, 90 dinners, this nationwide dinner series that you did, celebrating your 90th birthday, raising money for culinary education, and I\u2019m looking at some of the stats here. So 37 dinners featured chicken, 40 featured egg dishes, and then 30 birthday cakes, and there are many other statistics.<\/p>\n

Do chicken and eggs have a special place in your heart and in your teaching? The number of people who have sent me videos when I told them that I was going to be interviewing you related to making omelets, or looking at your artwork and seeing that you have a piece that\u2019s entirely chicken faces basically, chicken heads. I\u2019m just wondering if these are particularly meaningful to you or they\u2019re useful as a core of cooking in some way. I\u2019m just curious if you have any special relationship to these ingredients, eggs and chickens.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, it seems that I do, but. I was born in France in a town called Bourg-en-Bresse and the chicken of Bresse are pretty well known. White plumage, blue feet and all that. They are considered some of the greatest chicken that you have in restaurants, so the poulet Bresse. So yes, in apprenticeship and before, I was always involved with chicken, and not only killing chicken, plucking chicken and all that when I was an apprentice. And by extension, the eggs, of course. And the eggs for me is always one of the greatest thing, an egg, there\u2019s so many variation that you can do with eggs and so forth. So yes, I often go back to chicken or eggs, whether I realize it or not, frankly.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Well, I\u2019ll show you the video afterwards. My friend, Jeffrey, I mentioned him before we started recording, sent me a video for you of his daughter and his son both using your techniques. He went to the French Culinary Institute, and has a lot of thanks to send your way. Could you share a bit about your foundation? How did the foundation begin? What is its purpose?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, I\u2019m very lucky this way because I do a lot of cooking. I did hundreds of show and all that, but to put things together, I\u2019m not that great, and my daughter, Claudine, is better than I am for this, and she married a chef. So he was very good at that, and he\u2019s been teaching at Johnson as well for 15 years. And so he took over and created the Jacques Pepin Foundation. At some point, he said, \u201cYou\u2019ve done so many, hundred and hundred of video and show. Who would you like to teach?\u201d<\/p>\n

I thought about it. I said, \u201cPeople who have been a bit maybe disenfranchised with life. People who come out of jail, or drug addicts, former drug addicts, people like this.\u201d Yeah, that would be nice. And because I feel that in five, six weeks, if I work with someone, I can show someone how to wash salad and poach an egg and do something and all the basic that you do in the kitchen. And that person, if they stay in that kitchen within maybe a year and a half, two years, they may be the chef they have become and they have kind of redo their life too. As we said, in the kitchen, there is no political implication in the kitchen, and so we all go to do the same thing, to make people happy.<\/p>\n

And so I started doing more of this because of my son-in-law, and he organized the Jacques Pepin Foundation and does a great job with that. And I\u2019ve been happy to work with him, I would never have been able to do that by myself.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> And we\u2019ll link to that in the show notes for people as well at tim.blog\/podcast. I\u2019ll add that at the end of our chat as well. I wanted to come back, since you mentioned your daughter, I think I\u2019m getting this date right, but 1967. So you publish The Other Half of the Egg with Helen McCully and your daughter is born in the same year. How did becoming a father and a parent change you?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, you always cook for someone, and my wife was very good at that. And yeah, we went to restaurant occasionally, but cooking at home was something which was very important. So it remind me that when I was a kid, coming out of school, you get into the kitchen. This is the place which is comfortable, the place where the smell, the look of the kitchen, the whole feeling of it was part of my life, and I wanted it to be more or less the same for Claudine, which I think it did. She end up, she didn\u2019t want to have anything to do with cooking, and then she married a chef, of course.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Funny how that works. Yeah.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> This is what happened in family. So yeah, she\u2019s a pretty good cook herself without any questions. So yeah, it was fine. I mean, as I said, in the kitchen, we always have a good time in the kitchen. We\u2019re the same, everyone looks the same in the eye of the stove, and it\u2019s true. In the kitchen, there is no political implication. You don\u2019t really have a good time.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> What were the first dishes that Claudine cooked as a child? Were there any early dishes or techniques that you remember teaching?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yes, I can think of it. Yes, I knew that. My brain, after 90, it\u2019s kind of going. I forget things that I knew all my life too. I think that Claudine worked, I think she worked with chicken or with egg also, like I did. But yeah, when she worked, I remember when she was at BU, Boston University, I ended up teaching there. So she had a little apartment. I went there to cook in her little apartment. And then a couple of them, she invited me. One time she invited me, and the chicken that she bought, she bought the most expensive chicken that she could find to roast for me, which ended up being an old male chicken, the cock, whatever, tough like hell. But.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Chewy maybe.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah. So she\u2019s good at cooking in the kitchen and make her happy. So I never thought when she was in school at BU, and then she went to France that she was going to marry the chef, but she did.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Destiny, unavoidable. How did you connect with the trinity of American cooking when you got here? That is to say these seminal figures, Beard and Child and so on, how did that come together?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, it started again at the Pavillon. When I was at the Pavillon, the time that I stayed there, Craig Claiborne, who started at the New York Times, came to review the Pavillon, did a glowing review of the Pavillon actually. And we closed not that long after, but I live on 50th and First Avenue, and Craig live on 53rd. So we become friend, and he\u2019s the one who introduced me to someone who live on 52nd Street, First Avenue, which was Helen McCully, was the full editor of McCall, House Beautiful, and so forth. And she was already a lady in her 60s and she took me under her wing in a sense and became kind of my surrogate mother, said, \u201cDon\u2019t wear this, don\u2019t wear that, do this, do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Helen spoke with James Beard every day for hours, so she was really much into the New York intelligentsia of cooking. And at some point she called me and she said, \u201cI have that woman here. She has a book, and she sent it to me, and she\u2019s coming to come next week to New York. And do you want to cook for her in my apartment?\u201d<\/p>\n

I said, \u201cSure.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said, \u201cShe\u2019s a very tall woman with a terrible voice.\u201d And of course that was Julia Child.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Julia Child.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> So I met Julia, and we became friends. In fact, we spoke French more than English. Her French was better than my English at the time. And so I stayed friends with Julia for years, and with James Beard as well, but in a different way. So the food world, to go back to your question was very small at that time. I didn\u2019t even know one except for Pierre Franey and a couple of things, I didn\u2019t know one French chef. Usually, the chef that I knew different hotel was Swiss, German, Italian sometime too. Not that many French, so thing changed.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> It\u2019s also wild to think about the chance encounters in life, and the incredible luck of living where you lived so close to all of these people.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yes.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> It\u2019s just remarkable how sometimes the cards fall in the right way. How did New York change you as a person being there at that time?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I think it challenged me being in New York completely. I didn\u2019t really realize it, but I love America. I love school, and I end up going to Columbia 1959. I took the subway the week after I was there and find someone who spoke French eventually to be able to enroll in English for foreign students. And so I started with this, and once on to school, remember I left school in France at 13 to go into apprenticeship after the certificate, which is where you have to go in France, which usually you finish at 14. I had finished at 13.<\/p>\n

But I went back to school at Columbia from 1959 to 1972 where I proposed a doctoral dissertation on the history of food context, civilization literature. And at that time, department there, they said food, you cannot talk about food for a doctoral dissertation. So food was really at the bottom again of the subject that you would have taken. And eventually they gave me a PhD years later, and I start teaching at BU, and Claudine went there and I asked Julia at some point to join me. And so we talked to the president of BU to create a master of liberal arts with a concentration in gastronomy, which was kind of unique. So he accepted it, and then we started teaching and Julia was teaching there too.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> How do you think of?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I cook other things.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Hi (unintelligible)<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> She doesn\u2019t just burn tough chickens<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Did you hear?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah! I heard. I\u2019ve been sitting right there.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Oh, you have. Okay. What did I say wrong?<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Hi there. Nice to meet you.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Nice to meet you too.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> So Claudine\u2019s going to come and correct me then.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> Do you want to come sit over here, Claudine? Okay. Let Claudine sit down and then.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> What is the first dishes that you did? I didn\u2019t-<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, you traumatized me. I tried to make Toll House cookies with the bag and you changed the recipe.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Oh.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> You made me do something else and it didn\u2019t taste like Toll House cookies. That, I very much remember.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> See that?<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Wow, this made an imprint.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah. I was like-<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> You always say you have to do the recipe exactly as written at least twice.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Right.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> You didn\u2019t follow your own advice.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> My mother \u2013<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> What are you allowed to do after you do it twice? You allowed to improvise after that?<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> Yeah, probably not with baking though, honestly.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Baking\u2019s, yeah. I remember somebody said to me once, they said. I was like, \u201cHow do you decide on sweet or savory if you have to choose one of those paths?\u201d<\/p>\n

And they were like, \u201cWell, do you like to fold your socks in your sock drawer?\u201d<\/p>\n

And I was like, \u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d<\/p>\n

They\u2019re like, \u201cIf so, you might want to do baking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I didn\u2019t think you started with something sweet.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, no. I think that before that, I did the spinach and the bechamel sauce.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Oh yes, one time.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Messed that up.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah, I remember.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I didn\u2019t mess that up. I actually changed the world with that.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> She did special, she changed my recipe.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I did.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> What was the recipe? Or what was the dish?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I mean, the recipe at the time, again, just like I was criticizing, not criticizing, but discussing with Julia who would do stuff in the older style because Julia always said we started cooking together. To a certain extent, it\u2019s true. In 1949, I was in apprenticeship. 1949, she came to France, start cooking. So then often when we cook together, she was still cooking in the old style.<\/p>\n

One time we were doing spinach, and so I had a skillet, took a handful of wet spinach, put it in the skillet to cover it. She said, \u201cNo, no, no, no. We got to blanch it.\u201d Yes, in France we have big things of water cooking and you put the green vegetable in there, bring them to a boil, boil them, few minute, drain it, cool it off, press it into bowl and you have spinach ready to be saute or do whatever you want.<\/p>\n

But this is old style. I said, \u201cWe don\u2019t do that anymore.\u201d But actually, the first time I did it was with her in a sense.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> With Claudine.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah. I said, \u201cWell, we\u2019re going to do spinach cream sauce.\u201d So I did a bechamel, a bit of a roux and some milk and cream, bring it to a boil. I said, \u201cOkay, we\u2019re going to cook the spinach.\u201d She took spinach, she throw them directly into the bechamel. I said, \u201cNo, we got to blanch it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Said, \u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n

I said, \u201cBecause we blanch them.\u201d I said, \u201cOkay, fine. We don\u2019t blanche them.\u201d So we throw them in there over there, that was the first time we actually corrected.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> How did it turn out?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> It was good.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> It was good?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Very good.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Look at that. All right.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah. All the nutrients.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> But you said something I want to come back to, which is you have to do the recipe exactly as it\u2019s described twice.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah, a couple of times. Yes, two.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> And then what are you allowed to do after that?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, after that you have the taste in your mouth, so you want to reach that taste. If you can reach it in a better way, faster way, that\u2019s okay. That\u2019s fine. But I know people, I\u2019ve seen people cooking with a recipe that they never follow at all, and I don\u2019t agree with that. At least once or twice, do it according to whoever did the recipe did it.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> So that you have the reference of that taste, and then you can try to get there in a more, I guess, elegant way.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yes.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> All right. Well, I like this. I like what\u2019s going on here.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> I\u2019m sorry. I realize we\u2019re going to make this hell for whoever\u2019s going to edit this, but \u2013<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> No, no. All good.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> Let me just give him a little bit of honey.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> But the other thing is you might decide you like it with more cream or more, you know, with your taste and then you can adjust it, right, Jacques?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Or no cream.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> Or no cream. Yes.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> The only thing that my mother would tell my father when he walked in the kitchen was don\u2019t touch anything.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Oh, yeah. Yeah, my wife would.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> All right, I want to hear more about this. I feel like this is gold here. All right.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> [inaudible 00:42:25].<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> So Claudine just said the one thing that her mother, your wife, would say to you when you walked in the kitchen is don\u2019t touch anything. Why?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Exactly. Here come that great chef, that I\u2019m there and I come into the kitchen, my wife is cooking. People would think that they would say, \u201cWhat do you think?\u201d Or whatever.<\/p>\n

No, she would say, \u201cDon\u2019t touch anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Leave me alone.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> That\u2019s the first thing that she would say.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Amazing. Any other greatest hits, golden stories? There\u2019s so much, I\u2019m sure.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I don\u2019t really know. It was interesting growing up in that household. Full of cooks, that\u2019s for sure.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah. I mean, what do you think differentiates your dad from other educators, teachers of these skills, of the philosophies and the principles behind the skills? What comes to mind for you?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Truthfully, I think that it\u2019s his equity. I always call my father from, he\u2019s like from carrots to caviar. So if he\u2019s cooking for people who may never afford or have never tasted truffles, he never talks down to anyone because you can\u2019t afford something, it doesn\u2019t mean you shouldn\u2019t learn about it or want to learn about it.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> \u00a0So that type of meritocratic approach to teaching as opposed to looking down, looking up, looking sideways or whatever the perspective might be.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Think about the quintessential French chef that you see in movies that is like.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Sure.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> But he\u2019s never been that way. The only time he goes, \u201cOof,\u201d is if you don\u2019t do it the way he wanted you to do it. Then you might get in trouble, but everyone should be exposed. And he\u2019s always so excited to find something new. I mean, it\u2019s never like, \u201cOkay, we\u2019re French. We\u2019re better than you all.\u201d When you went to China and they put bechamel on the pizza or something?<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Oh, can we talk about? Yeah, what was?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Something crazy. Crazy thing that there was a buffet, and some people were putting the bechamel on the pizza because they didn\u2019t know not to do it.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah, because I did a creme anglaise souffle for the dessert.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> This was in China?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I think they were filling a plate. They keep adding too, I say, \u201cAy yai yai, the creme anglaise end up on the roast chicken.\u201d But yes, people do that, but it\u2019s okay.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I\u2019ve never seen anybody more excited to find something he\u2019s never tasted. Still, now. I mean, you might hate it.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Still the most excited person in the room to find something you haven\u2019t tasted.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yes. Well, yes. It\u2019s already exciting to, yes. Yeah. And even to cook with people who have a different point of view that you have. So it\u2019s interesting sometime to go with someone and have a piece of chicken or whatever it is and say, \u201cIt\u2019s perfectly the way I want it.\u201d And for me, it is already too cooked or too this or too that. And it\u2019s a question of taste also. You can relate to certain type of taste which for you are just right, but some other people no.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> I\u2019ve read you quoted as saying that the food of one\u2019s childhood stays with them and becomes more than food. What are some foods from your childhood that you really remember?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, the taste of certain type of soup that my mother did, potato certainly because just out of the garden, she would have the tiny potato and saute them directly. So certain taste like this stay with you forever, and with ordinary ingredient most of the time. And even a salad, a salad seasoned the right way, which is not that easy. People wash the salad. Sometimes they don\u2019t drain it properly. There\u2019s still too much water in it. They do the mixture of oil and vinegar and mustard, too much of one thing or too much of the other one, or they mix it too early and then it gets wilted, or the salad is too cold. Sometimes it\u2019s a lot of little thing like this to say, \u201cWell, that salad is perfect. It\u2019s mixed just right and mix at the right moment. The temperature is good. There is no water still in there too.\u201d It doesn\u2019t happen all the time, so yeah.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> I feel like I want to indulge in this whole situation that\u2019s going on here. So we\u2019re going to do a little dance here. What are the adjectives that you think best describe your father? I mean, resilient comes to mind for me, curious comes to mind for me. What else comes to mind for you?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Learner.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Learner.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Teacher, definitely.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> For sure.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Impatient.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Impatient, okay. It takes one to know one in my case. I\u2019m also, my mom would say, \u201cFrom out of the box, very impatient.\u201d There are different flavors of impatience. So how would you describe?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I don\u2019t think that there\u2019s one thing. Just when he\u2019s run out of patience, or if you\u2019re going on too long to explain something, he\u2019s like, \u201cYeah, yeah, yeah. What\u2019s the point?\u201d<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> I\u2019m the same way. So I\u2019m very, very similar. I\u2019m not saying that to excuse it in all circumstances, but I sympathize. Sometimes I wonder if the impatience goes along with the learning, right? If you have a hunger for that and you want to get to some type of reward at the end of the rainbow. I mean, I have this voracious appetite also for learning, but there is a certain facet of it that I think is close to impatience also. I don\u2019t know. Just thinking out loud.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> And it\u2019s partly being a chef too.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Just intrinsic to being a chef is being impatient on some level.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> Yeah, because every, do it now. There\u2019s no, they\u2019re, \u201cDo it now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yes.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> That\u2019s it.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> If he says-<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> Clean it now. Cook it, do it now.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> \u201cI\u2019d like to see that book.\u201d It doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019d like to see that book in five minutes, it means get up and get the book. I am the same way because both my mom and my dad were like that. Do it now was just always an understood.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> Yeah, right.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> And I can look at my husband who\u2019s much more patient.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> The assumed is do it now, not in five minutes.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah. And I can say, \u201cHey, can you get some wine from the cellar?\u201d And he\u2019ll just sit there, and I\u2019m just seething.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> When I was even around 10 years old, I\u2019d be in a restaurant. I drink a lot of water. And if my water glass sat empty for more than two or three minutes, I would just get up as a kid and just walk into the kitchen. This is as a customer, right? I just get up, walk in and go find the water, come out and pour my own water.<\/p>\n

Who are some chefs that stand out to you as very skilled technicians or chefs, broadly speaking? Are there any names that come to mind who you respect for different reasons?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yes. I mean, certainly people like Thomas Keller and Pierre Franey that I work with, but yes, usually chefs who are able to organize a kitchen and make it work flawlessly without, it\u2019s like a ballet and very often camera will come into the kitchen, and if it\u2019s really a good kitchen like Thomas Keller, they\u2019ll probably say no more than five minutes and says, \u201cNothing is going on here. Let\u2019s go.\u201d Because it\u2019s like a ballet at work.<\/p>\n

They like to see people yelling, which is not really what happened in the kitchen which is well run. But many chefs that we have in this country now, I mean, a name-<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Jose.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Huh?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9piniu:<\/strong> Jose.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Jose Andres, yes.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Jose Andres is different because he has his own style and his own thing and he sticks out in a different way than-<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> He worked for El Bulli.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I know. Yeah, right. Yeah.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> Daniel Boulud, Daniel.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Daniel.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, yeah. Daniel is, I can\u2019t associate-<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> How does say Daniel differ from Thomas Keller? How are they different?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> To look at it in a different way, Daniel will be more, I guess, more French in the sense that the choice of his ingredient. And for me, he\u2019s from Leon particularly too, so I can feel more of a similarity with him than I would feel with Thomas. Even though Thomas, I remember Thomas when he works upstate New York in a restaurant called La Rive. His brother came there to put him there when he was 14 or 15 years old. Let him work there in that kitchen for a small French restaurant along the river, upstate New York in the Catskill. So I know him a long time, and he\u2019s a great chef, no question about it.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> I\u2019ll reiterate something that you said. I remember the first and only time I\u2019ve been to Per Se, Thomas Keller\u2019s, and I did a tour of the kitchen, which I like to do if I\u2019m allowed to. And it was, as you said, dead silent. It\u2019s like a library. And it had a number of tiled mottos on the walls related to excellence and precision, and it was like being in a library plus surgery at the same time. I mean, everything was very precise. It was very quiet, like you said, a quiet ballet. Food was, of course, impeccable. What does it take to run a kitchen like that?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, it takes a lot. Necessarily, it is in a sense opposite to little bistro that you would go in France, or in Italy, and so forth. When there was one person cooking, you go to the market and get your food and start cutting your food and doing it just like with one person too. So it\u2019s totally different than the organization of a brigade where you have 20 people working, each one assigned to very specific task in the kitchen, which is what I learned at the Plaza Athenee in Paris, but the opposite of what my mother and all that would do in a little restaurant too. So it\u2019s different way of looking at the food very often.<\/p>\n

At the Plaza Athenee in Peris, we were 48 cook in the kitchen so we did the lobster souffle, for example, a specialty. I\u2019m sure that 48 of us could have done it. He would never have done which one has done it. Is it good? Is it bad? At that time, this is the way it was taught. And I think that to a certain extent, this is the way you should teach so people have a body of knowledge that they are. And if someone does talent, you take that body of knowledge, and you transcend it and you put your role premature on this and do your own stuff so it\u2019s slightly different at that point.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> So if you\u2019re thinking about, for somebody who\u2019s not familiar, right? As you\u2019re mentioning these different stations, and hopefully this won\u2019t. I love the movie Ratatouille, I think it\u2019s a fun film, it\u2019s a Pixar film, but at some point they go around and they name the different stations, right? So I\u2019m using that reference for people who are coming from outside the culinary world. Is it structured on some type of military organization? Is Thomas Keller more like a general or a CEO or something else? Or is cooking really its own world? I\u2019m just thinking about the organization and the flow and the process and all these different responsibilities.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah. At this position where he is now, yes, it would be like a general, like a CEO and so forth, as opposed to if even himself, if you take him to the country and you tell him to serve dinner out of his house or out of a little thing by himself, all of a sudden it\u2019s going to be different. But in a professional kitchen, each one is allowed. I mean, at the Plaza Athenee in Paris, we had eight different type of soup, just the soup, the different consomme and all that. So the structure was very important to follow the rule, which on the other hand, if you cook at home and you have a little restaurant, you do your menu of the day and you work on that, on those tastes, without worrying too much about the way it\u2019s done in term of quantity and so forth.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Do you have any, and feel free to chime in also, right?<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> I mean, somebody like Chef Keller is a teacher too, and that they have a role and they have a duty to teach.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> That\u2019s part of it. Or it should be.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah, and a mentor.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> And a mentor, yeah.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah. I think for Thomas, he is always really supportive and happy when somebody he has taught and mentors goes and does something else as opposed to feeling resentful or he\u2019s slighted.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah. So just to echo since I\u2019m closer to the mic, so Claudine was saying how, in the case of Thomas Keller-<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> And Daniel.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> And Daniel. And I know Danny Meyer, also very similar, super-<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> And Tom Colicchio and many-<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah, many examples, extremely supportive of people who come out from under their wings and go on to do amazing things, as opposed to being jealous, resentful, or sniping in some way or another.<\/p>\n

Thomas Keller, just as a side note, since we\u2019re just having a jam session here, one of my favorite ways to cook roasted chicken came from not any dish prepared in his restaurant. Well, it was prepared, but it was for staff meals before service. Just a super simple, high temperature way of cooking roast chicken. I was like, \u201cMan, that\u2019s so simple.\u201d So few moving pieces, I just\u2026 Struck me as so elegant.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Did he do it breast side down and then flip it or no?<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> I think he did breast side down, and it was much higher temperature than I would\u2019ve expected. I\u2019d have to go back and look at the exact temp, but I was like, \u201cOh, interesting.\u201d And I was like, \u201cMan, I would think it would get very dry, but no, it\u2019s just perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> I worked for someone that had been kind of a protege of Thomas, and after I worked for him, he always said, \u201cIf anybody wants to open their own bakery, here\u2019s all the recipes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Wow.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> He will give you his.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> That\u2019s incredible.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> And that\u2019s the spirit, and that comes from Jacques and him.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah. Okay, got it. So just again, I\u2019m relaying different methods just in stories from around the room, but you were saying one more time, who was it? This is somebody you worked with?<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> Yeah, but the point is Jacques always says that chefs are generous.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah, chefs are generous.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> My personal story doesn\u2019t matter. The highest form of the chef in Jacques\u2019 model would be a teacher and generous and they\u2019re not going to say, \u201cYou can\u2019t have my recipe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> The point is that when you have a recipe that you give to people, you give the same recipe to five different people, you have five different dish, so it\u2019s not like it\u2019s exactly the same. You give that recipe and everything come exactly the same. No, it never comes the same exactly.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Everybody\u2019s got their unique fingerprints.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> So that\u2019s the point. The recipe is just a way of going, but it\u2019s not the whole thing. The rest of it is what you do with it.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Do you have any mottos or quotes that you try to live your life by? I\u2019m curious if there are any. You see what I\u2019m grasping for here, right?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Never be as good as you are today.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> Well, Jacques always says we are all equal in the eyes of the stove, which is our motto of the foundation.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> We\u2019re all equal in the eyes of the stove, which is an amazing. And then wait, what was the other one?<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> I didn\u2019t know that one, Claudine.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah, that\u2019s the kiss of death in a restaurant to the chef.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> Right.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> You\u2019ll never be as good as you were today.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> What does that mean? You\u2019ll never be as good as you are today. This is like during service?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> As good as you are today.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah. Oh, but what does that mean?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> How did you enjoy your dinner?<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Oh.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> You\u2019ll never be as good as you are today.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Oh, you\u2019ll never be as good as you were today. Meaning you\u2019re never going to top this.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> No. Yeah. But does it mean it was good?<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> There you go.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> It\u2019s like a very Confucius-type response. Okay, got it. Yeah, that\u2019s a tough one. I could see that somebody really having insomnia after getting told that.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, if that\u2019s what he says, then chances are.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah. Well, I do want to mention a few things just for people to follow up with. The foundation is jp.foundation.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> That\u2019s correct.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> And we\u2019ll link to all the social and YouTube and so on, but.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> And there are hundreds and hundreds of hours of free recipes on the website.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Is that on the foundation website?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yes.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Okay. So hundreds and hundreds of hours of free recipes.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah, the chef [inaudible 01:02:42], we have 300 chef, right?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yes. That\u2019s the recipe book, that\u2019s a little different.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah, but I mean they gave their time and they gave-<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yes, but that\u2019s still a different piece. But of my father\u2019s recipes, whether it\u2019s on YouTube, which is free, or through the foundation techniques, you can look it up by book, by show, by eggs or chicken, for instance.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Can you say that one more time? This is on the foundation website?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> On the foundation website. There\u2019s just hundreds of hours of free teaching because if what we\u2019re trying to do is to help people in their kitchens or get a job, the idea of charging for that information doesn\u2019t sit well.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> It\u2019s antithetical, yeah, to what you\u2019re trying to do.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I mean, we are a foundation. We do want financial support, of course, but we also want to provide hundreds of hours of free learning.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah. I have to say that when I think of it, I am more interested in teaching the home cook than the professional because I show you to make a recipe too, which in a professional kitchen, it\u2019s never the same exactly depending. I work at the Russian Tea Room, I mean the amount of, I had three guy behind the stove. We end up serving 1,000 people sometimes.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> God.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> So the quantity and all that, all that would look quite different. It\u2019s never the same.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Is there anything else that, I mean, we\u2019ve covered a good amount of ground, I mean, I\u2019m wondering if there\u2019s anything else that would be fun to cover or that you guys would like to cover.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I think waste in the kitchen is an interesting thing.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah, okay. What\u2019s a good way to prompt that, do you think?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I thought you were going to start into that. My father will tell a story of working at the Russian Tea Room, and they were doing asparagus something, and the guy just cut the asparagus and threw the bottom away.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah, right.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Oh, okay. Well, let\u2019s, what\u2019s the right question to ask then?<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> What do you find different between working in a professional restaurant and working in your own home as far as waste is concerned?<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Okay. I\u2019ll ask that.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> No, the question is not there. I said I\u2019ll get to the Russian Tea Room, and the bunch of asparagus are there, the broccoli are there, and they come in the way the guy cut the top of it and throw the rest in the garbage. Is it right or is it wrong? It\u2019s both right and wrong. I had three guy behind the stove. There is no way they could peel it and all that. So we do it because this is the way it is there. It is wrong by definition, you don\u2019t throw out food like this, but in place like this with the amount of production that you do, yes, you have all of your vegetable, you cut the head of the broccoli, you cut the head of the asparagus. The rest goes into the garbage because there\u2019s no way anyone has any time to do it and do anything with it. And it\u2019s wrong, no question.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah. Some staggering percentage of food production in the US is wasted. It\u2019s like 30%, 40%.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> And mostly wasted out of home refrigerators.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Which is sad.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> But she won\u2019t do that at home.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> No.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> No.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> She\u2019ll only do it here.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> She won\u2019t throw anything.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> When you\u2019re not looking. [inaudible 01:06:20].<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Well, Jacques, there are going to be a lot of people watching this and listening to this who are inspired to get started perhaps watching your videos, tiptoeing into the kitchen to try cooking for the first time. What would you say to them? What would you say to those people who are not yet home cooks but are hoping to learn? Maybe they are looking to create more opportunities for themselves. Maybe they just want to make a meal for their family, but they don\u2019t have the confidence yet. What would you say to them?<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Have a glass of wine.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Glass of wine.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah. And don\u2019t make it forward. I mean, it\u2019s good. You know that you\u2019re going to do something and it will come out good, very good, extremely good. Okay, but one way or the other it\u2019s going to be eatable. So just go with it and try to analyze it yourself. Say, \u201cThat was good, but I shouldn\u2019t have done that before. I should try to analyze your food, try to correct it, and next time you do better.\u201d So that\u2019s how you learn, I think. Yeah.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah. Trial and error. Have a glass of wine. Well, I think that\u2019s as good a place as any to start to land the plane. Certainly, people will check out jp.foundation. I\u2019ll put that in the show notes at tim.block\/podcast as well. Did we miss anything that comes to mind?<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> You could talk to Jacques for ever and ever. I think this was great.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I would like to mention that even though, or in addition to him turning 91 this year, he has two more books in the works.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> Thank you, buddy.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> All right.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> I think that\u2019s pretty exciting.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> That\u2019s amazing. All right. So turning 91 this year and you have two more books in the works.<\/p>\n

Claudine P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> [inaudible 01:08:22].<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, one of them, I did a book with Julia Child 2000, so 20 years ago, 26 years ago. They want to redo it with more of my drawing, painting and all that. So it\u2019s great. So we\u2019re doing that. And the second one did a book of menu. I don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve seen any book of menu? No?<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> No.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Well, we should give you one then.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Okay.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> And all that. I have about 12 book here of menu going back more than 50 years. I know there is a menu. She\u2019s five years old and she draw the chicken and all that. Yes. And when people come, we started doing the menu like this. My wife wanted to do that and we asked the people to sign on the other page.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> That\u2019s fun.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> They were there for dinner. So that\u2019s great memory. I mean, certainly I have my two brother who died, my mother, many, many people, my wife of course, were a partner in my life are in those book of menus. So it\u2019s a good memory to do that at home. So we are publishing that book of menu after with about a hundred menu or 120 menu, yeah. 150 menu.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> 200.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> 200 menu.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> 250. All right, we got there. And we can always do outro audio and stuff that I record after the fact if you think of other things to include. Super easy.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yes. You want to get one?<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> Well, yes. I already, sincere apologies.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> No, you\u2019re good.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> To your production.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> You\u2019re all good.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Which is done already.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> We\u2019re just having a party, I\u2019m good. I\u2019m good.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> And the yellow one that I\u2019m using there. Yes.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> So the delivery date for this will be May, but we\u2019re going to do Jacques\u2019s life and his menus basically.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Oh, these are cool.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> That\u2019s a more recent one, Jacques.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> It\u2019s not complicated to do. I mean, people do that at home.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> These are gorgeous.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Yeah. I do remember people come the year after and say, \u201cWhen did I cook the last time they were here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> This is really fun. When I finish a bottle of wine at home-<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Here is-<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> \u2026 I have the friends who make me sign the cork and we save the corks.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> \u2026 the book of menu.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> He had done previously, this was so you could fill out your own, but this one is going to be more narrative.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> So people can fill out their own menu.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah, beautiful. All right.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> So we\u2019ll give you one of those.<\/p>\n

Kelsey Whitsett:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah, thank you.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Each one of you.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Well, Jacques, thank you so much for taking the time.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Oh, you\u2019re welcome.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Thank you for having me here.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Thank you.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> It\u2019s lovely to finally meet.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Thank you for coming. I don\u2019t know whether I answer any questions.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Oh, you did. You did. I think I\u2019m going to take your advice on having that glass of wine at some point, but thank you again.<\/p>\n

Jacques P\u00e9pin:<\/strong> Thank you. Thank you for coming.<\/p>\n

Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> And for everybody listening and watching everything in the show notes, tim.blog\/podcast, and as always, be a bit kinder than is necessary. Until next time, to others and to yourself, thanks for tuning in.<\/p>\n

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