Jacques Pépin Is Still Cooking for You (Online)

[00:00] hi. I didn't see you there. I'm YouTube cook  Adam Ragusea. Are you like me? A millennial with   a weary, battered soul and you long to feel safe  again? To feel like there are grownups in charge  

[00:17] who aren't you? Well, you can step right back  into the comfort of grandpa's kitchen right now,   right here on YouTube, where Jacques Pepin  is still waiting to make you some eggs.  

[00:30] at home. I want to show you how to make scrambled  eggs. Scrambled eggs my way or the classic way.   I'm doing a little bit of a garnish here, you  don't have to, or you can have all kind of other  

[00:46] things. Here I have a couple of mushroom. Adam:   Jacques Pepin is the longest tenured celebrity  chef in the US. I would call him the GOAT,   but in my opinion, that title goes to  his longtime collaborator, Julia Child,  

[01:01] and I'm guessing Jacques himself would agree  with me on that. But Jacques Pepin is number   two. And the thing about him is he's still with  us at 90 years old. He's dropping fresh content   on his YouTube channel, cooking in the same modest  Connecticut home that he's lived in since 1976.  

[01:18] first of all, he was going to drive my mother  absolutely insane if he didn't have a project.   Adam: Claudine Pepin, as she  

[01:31] naturally pronounces it, is Jacques's daughter.  And Rolley is her chef husband. And yeah,   during COVID, they got dad doing some basic recipe  videos at home and they just kept going. And now   there is a treasure trove of these things. What  I love is how incredibly unpretentious they are.  

[01:48] This is one of the greatest classical French chefs  of his generation. He was personal chef to Charles   de Gaulle for God's sake. And now here he is  telling us what he really does at home at 90.  

[02:00] to the Chinese restaurant, Japanese restaurant.  I always end up taking the rice leftover at the   end. And I want to show you how to do a kind of  a fried rice or a mixture of rice that you do.  

[02:15] Claudine confirms that Jacques Pepin does not,  repeat, not DoorDash. He gets Chinese takeout   A little on top, and this is it. My  leftover fried rice. Happy cooking.  

[02:33] Adam: That dish look good to you? Guess what?   JP don't care what you think. That rice is not for  you. When you cook at home for basic sustenance,   not to have a little project, not for fun, not  to impress anyone, but just to feed yourself,  

[02:50] when you do that multiple times a day,  you just get much less precious about it,   even if you're Jacques Pepin, especially if you're  Jacques Pepin. This is a man who's had nothing   left to prove for more than half a century.  Let us do a close read of this pork recipe.  

[03:07] Jacques: Filet pork are available   at any market. They are relatively inexpensive.  They are very tender, very moist, very lean.   of pork. And the first thing that he emphasizes  is how lean of a cut it is. Jacques has a habit  

[03:24] of mentioning the calories of the food that he's  cooking, with specific emphasis on fat. In a way,   I find this comforting because this is the way  that people talked about nutrition during my   formative years in the '80s and '90s. Today, we  understand that too much fat absolutely is bad  

[03:40] for you, but fat is not the nutritional final boss  that it was made out to be. More of a level boss.   Just like today, we have a more nuanced  understanding of salt. Salt is not always  

[03:52] bad for you, which leads me to thank LMNT, sponsor  of today's video. As someone who works out really,   really hard, I have had the experience of not  having enough sodium, and it's awful. You get  

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[04:50] we were talking about my man Jacques Pepin and  how he still talks about calories and fats kind   of in the way that people did in the late 20th  century. And I find that oddly comforting.   the '80s because when he was shooting the Today's  Gourmet series, that was very, very popular in  

[05:09] common culinary culture to talk about nutrition  and nutritional values. And so they really amped   that up when he was shooting Today's Gourmet. And  so he got in the habit of talking about whether   And salt, pepper on top of it. Adam:  

[05:27] lake of butter popping in the pan next to  him. He is a Frenchman to the end. Also,   notice that he did not wash his hands before  grabbing that lid. You see it in all of these  

[05:40] vids. He touches the raw meat or whatever, and  then he just wipes his hands on the cloth. I would   get so roasted in the comments if I did that today  on YouTube. Not here to be the food police.  

[05:52] Adam: Yeah, that is   an example of literal survivorship bias, but it  reminds me how neither of my grandmothers worried   that much about sanitation in their kitchens. It  was really the public health scares about E. Coli  

[06:08] burgers in the 80s and 90s that got the word out  and got people like my parents washing their hands   in between every operation. JP didn't have time  for that in professional kitchens, and he didn't   have time for it recording hours of recipe content  live to tape, meaning almost no edits the way they  

[06:25] used to shoot it. You got to keep things moving  in that context. And Jacques Pepin is actually   much more careful about cross-contamination  than maybe it might immediately seem.   Claudine: If you really watch, you'll see that he naturally  

[06:39] goes from dry to wet ingredients, right? There's a  progression there. And also, if he picks something   up, he'll pick it up with these two fingers that  didn't ever touch the weird, wet whatever. There  

[06:55] are several different tricks to the trade in doing  that because he moves quickly and efficiently.   I will cover it at least partially like  this so it doesn't splatter too much.  

[07:09] people use lids on frying pans anymore. That used  to be really common. Almost every kind of skillet   used to come with a lid. I suppose the current  emphasis on extreme browning argues against using  

[07:24] the lid and thereby trapping steam. Steam doesn't  brown things, but you'll notice that he's leaving   a crack open for some steam to escape and his  kitchen is certainly much cleaner for it.   and prune go very well together. Adam:  

[07:40] Oh, prunes. You don't see prunes much anymore.  Dried plums. In the late 20th century,   prunes were heavily advertised as  a home remedy for constipation,   probably because of the fiber content and the  naturally occurring sorbitol. I think of prunes,  

[07:56] I think of these classy Southern Bells that  Sunsweet cast for their commercials in the   80s. Look at her. She knows this is going to  fix her little problem right quick. Anyway.   Jacques: And I have about 10, 12 prune here. About a  

[08:10] cup of V8 or tomato juice you can use. Adam:   V8 as a sauce base. I just did that  in a recipe video the other day and   I probably absorbed the idea from sitting  on my parents' living room floor watching  

[08:23] Jacques Pepin on public television because it  was one of the only channels that we could get   on our antenna. V8 was heavily advertised as  a health drink in the late 20th century.   grate the garlic on this here. Adam:  

[08:38] What is up with that greater design? Jacques'  kitchen is filled with all kinds of quirky,   forgotten appliances that companies probably sent  him through the years. Lord knows people send me   all kinds of unsolicited junk. Imagine if he were  Jacques Pepin. I love when he pulls out some weird  

[08:55] yellowing plastic food processor or something  that's been in one of those cupboards for decades,   At one of our recent events, we put up an auction  item that we call Jacques' Kitchen Treasures.  

[09:09] And we had a couple of really nice things in  there, like a really lovely copper pot that came   from his kitchen. But we also dug through the  cupboards a little bit and I found this set of  

[09:21] McCormick food color dyes that were literally  like 50 years old. I recognized the script and the   little colored hats, the pointed colored hats that  were on top of those little squeeze bottles.   Claudine: I was like, "Yes, you too can own this. "  

[09:36] that auction item was like, "Oh my God, did  you really take that from his kitchen?"   Rollie: ... "Yes. Yes, it has," in fact.   that exact same box of food coloring, and we may  have used the same box for my entire childhood.  

[09:53] I bet some of those dyes are illegal now. But I  bet that you remember some weird pantry item that   you visited like an old friend every Christmas in  your grandparents' kitchen when you would open up   So you see, I have a good two  teaspoon maybe of garlic.  

[10:10] in these videos is that Jacques gives measurements  for almost everything. Even the stuff that he is   clearly just eyeballing, and he always gives  it in the standard measurements of his adopted  

[10:22] homeland. Those US standard measurements are now  fading into obscurity as they should. It's time to   join the global metric party. But even when JP is  eyeballing something, he gives a quantity. Why?  

[10:35] he had, one of the big jobs he had was working for  Howard Johnson's, and he was in their development   kitchen. Imagine the measurements. And then  writing books, you have to give a measurement.  

[10:50] salt and pepper to taste. Rollie:   I really loathe recipes that say salt  and pepper to taste, because if you're   Jacques: Right.  

[11:04] now because as you may know, I almost never give  measurements for salt unless it's in a baked good,   which can be kind of hard to taste before it's  done. I give almost no measurements at all in my  

[11:19] own recipe content. Part of that is that I'm not  publishing cookbooks like Jacques did his whole   life. Traditional publishing is all but dead,  and I can make way more money just making videos.  

[11:31] And the videos we make today are much clearer  and sharper and close up. And as a result,   you can clearly see about how much salt I put  in there, and that gives you a starting place.   Back in JP's day, it was amazing how little you  could see the actual food in a food show. Food  

[11:49] shows were mostly shot from really far away,  like a multi-camera sitcom. The lighting was   on the host's face more than the food, and TV was  standard definition. All TV looked blurry until HD  

[12:03] became the standard in the early 2000s. Today on  YouTube, you can see the individual flakes of salt   as I am throwing them in there. And that is just a  really different context for making food content.  

[12:15] That would be good, of course, with a pasta or  a rice or something like that. A bit of chive on   top. And here we are. Our filet of pork. Adam:  

[12:30] Look at that. No starch for thickening, no monte  au beurre. Just slap the food on the platter and   eat it because it's for you, not for Instagram. Jacques:   With prune and tivero sauce, happy cooking. Adam:  

[12:48] "Appy cooking." This man has lived in the  US since the Eisenhower administration,   and he still steadfastly refuses to  pronounce his H's. That is so boss.   Rollie: And sheet pans always bring out a giggle.  

[13:04] Rollie: Well, a little more like an I than two E's.   Adam: Now, some of these cooking at home videos   are on the YouTube channel of KQED, which is one  of the many public TV stations that Jacques has  

[13:19] worked with through the years. Some of them are on  the channel run by the Jacques Pepin Foundation,   which Rolley and Claudine run. They do culinary  education for people who might normally have   work. And it's the Foundation that produces  these cooking at home videos. The content is  

[13:39] relatively fresh, but they've not shot anything  so far this year. JP's wife died in 2020. He   talks about her sometimes in the present tense  in these videos, and it's not always clear if  

[13:51] that's because the video is old. He's getting up  there himself, living in that house all alone.   Claudine: Rolley and I are going to be moving there in the   summer, because he's 90, he's earned our care. Adam:  

[14:05] Yes. He is. It's awful. And I  don't know what to do. Yeah.   arm never really recovered from a car accident.  He barely survived back in '74. You can see him  

[14:22] struggling with it as he cooks once you know to  look for it. Life is fragile and nothing lasts   forever. But Jacques Pepin has lasted for about  as long as anyone could, and he will still be here  

[14:34] waiting for us in that kitchen in Connecticut  long after he is gone. It makes me wonder if   someday I will be a comfort item for somebody  who grew up watching me cook, me and the other  

[14:47] bozos on YouTube. Well, as long as this website  is here, so shall we be. "Appy cooking."