Jacques Pepin Quotes
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.
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.
If you have extraordinary bread and extraordinary butter, it's hard to beat bread and butter.
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.
When you are at home, even if the chicken is a little burnt, what's the big deal? Relax.
After 45 years of marriage, when I have an argument with my wife, if we don't agree, we do what she wants. But, when we agree, we do what I want!
When you become a good cook, you become a good craftsman, first. You repeat and repeat and repeat until your hands know how to move without thinking about it.
I am a glutton. I'll eat whatever is there. Pizza. I love hot dogs anywhere. I've got nothing against any of that. If I feel like eating, I eat. I don't feel guilty about it at all.
One of the biggest problems with young chefs is too much addition to the plate. You put cilantro and then tarragon and then olive oil and then walnut oil or whatever. It's too much.
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.
Children never lie...I remember my daughter standing in her crib the first time I gave her caviar. I put it on bread. She ate it and said, "Encore, Papa."
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.
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.
All the great chefs I know - Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten - they are technicians first.
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.
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.
