French chef or American cook? Jacques Pépin

Jacques Pépin finds a little irony in the session he’ll lead at the International Association of Culinary Professionals convention on Friday. That session is called “What French Cuisine Can Offer Modern Cooks.”
“The irony of this is that after 52 years in America or so, even after 10 years, my mother would come, and I would be cooking. She would taste what I’m doing and say, ‘Ooh, this is really good, but it’s not French anymore,’\u2009″ said Pépin, the French-born chef whose face is familiar to television cooking fans ranging from the earliest PBS shows to the Food Network era.
“So I don’t think that I’ve cooked truly, purely French — certainly according to her — for many, many years. But I don’t really care. I don’t try to cook French, but by the same token I don’t try not to cook French. I cook things that I like to eat,” he said. “In that context, I may be the purer American cook, because I partake of different types of cuisine, and that’s what we do here. Maybe the definition of American cuisine is that it’s not definable.”
Pépin’s canon of dishes both classic and personalized is represented in “Essential Pépin: More Than 700 All-Time Favorites From My Life in Cooking” ($40, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), coming in October. In addition to his French cooking session, which is open only to IACP convention attendees, Pépin will be part of two IACP events open to the public on Friday. He’ll be part of a culinary book fair from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Friday at the Hilton Austin Hotel, 500 E. Fourth St. ($10 in advance at iacppublicevents.eventbrite.com or $15 at the door), and he’ll judge the Edible Texas Wine Food Match at 7 p.m. ($100, details at www.edibleaustin.com/ediblewandf ).
American-Statesman: With so many books and cookbooks to your name, how do you find something new to say?
Jacques Pépin: I’m hungry. I want to eat, and I want to cook. There is always a new way of doing something, whether it’s an idea that you get in a restaurant or at the market or some place or another.
As a man who came up through the kitchen apprentice system, what do you think of the instant food celebrity culture today?
Well, it’s another world altogether. We don’t learn the same way that we used to. Last week, I went to the French Culinary Institute in New York. I was there during the finals. This is a six-month program where they do 600 hours of cooking. It’s very, very intensive. When I see what they can do after six months, I am flabbergasted. I would never have been able to do half of this in three years of apprenticeship. I heard a couple of weeks ago that there are close to 500 television shows on cooking. Many of them don’t do that much cooking. It’s more entertainment, which is fine.
In your memoir “The Apprentice,” you described the nuanced simplicity of making an omelet. If you were to teach one dish to a young cook, what would that dish be?
Maybe a leek and potato soup or a roast chicken, something simple but really satisfying. (Recipes below.)
I was surprised by your enthusiasm for commercialized food when you worked for Howard Johnson’s. How did you come to embrace that so fully?
It was exciting to know about American eating habits and mass production, which I didn’t know anything about. It was exciting to know about the chemistry of food. We had several chemists doing coliform and bacteria counts and so forth. And certainly later on in my life, when I opened the commissary at the World Trade Center and the restaurant called La Potagerie in New York or when I was at the Russian Tea Room and all that, I would not have been able to do those things if I hadn’t had the training that I had at Howard Johnson’s. Remember that Howard Johnson’s was not really a fast-food restaurant; it was a family restaurant with sit-down dinners with waitresses and all that. It was a very comforting, simple restaurant. Quite good, actually.
La Potagerie, which was all about soup, seemed to pioneer the specialty restaurant in America.