Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Nations coming to you live. Actually, I'm not in the studio today. I uh have the COVID again. So I'm at home.
But we got Joe Hayes and rocking the panels there in New Stan Studios in Rockefeller Center. How are you doing, Joe? I'm doing great, man. Good to hear from you. I'm sorry you're feeling so poorly.
Yeah, you know, whatever. You gotta do what you gotta do. Gotta gotta quarantine, do do all the right stuff. And you got John there in the studio with you? Yep, I am here.
Holding on the fork. Nice. And then we uh yeah, we have uh we have over in uh Vancouver Island, we got Quinn. How you doing, Quinn? Hey, I'm doing good.
Yeah? Yeah. And then uh in LA, we have uh Jackie Molecules and Nastasia Lopez. How you doing? Okay, great.
Beautiful. Yeah, yeah. So uh any you guys have any uh any interesting stories from the week? My only story is uh I got the COVID, so I didn't get to go to Harvard and do all of the fun Harvard y stuff there. But uh you guys got anything?
Yeah, we uh took me to this salon event where they were debuting plant-based cheese called Climax Foods. And we both kind of walked in like, oh, this isn't gonna taste very good. Um, but it was surprisingly good. We were both very surprised. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What about the yeah? No, we were so like we were ready to hate it, you know. Yeah. Um, so it took a lot for us to be like, oh wow, we were wrong. That was pretty good.
Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. So let's just say that it's a delicious product, because I trust you both on saying it's a delicious product, right? Yeah. Is it cheese though?
Um, I want you to try it, Dave, because I feel like if it was a flying taste, you would not know. Truly. I I brought you loved the conversation with the woman. And I was like, I feel like my business partner would like this. Truly.
I I have I have an open, closed mind. You know what I'm saying, right? I'm oh I'm I'm gonna be a yeah, I'm gonna be a jerk about it, but I'm I'm open. But uh because I'll say this like back in the day when people used to pretend that like uh frozen yogurt was a health thing, you remember that? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. No, yeah. Yeah, anyway. So that that used to be a thing, frozen yogurt health thing. So my wife was always like, she would buy these like like yogurts, right?
And then try to serve them to me like they were ice cream. And I'm like, this tastes good. This is not ice cream, this is frozen yogurt, which is its own thing. That's my only point. Like, is it its own new product, or do you say it actually tastes like cheese?
I understand what you're saying. I think that you know, if you put if I served it to you on a cracker, and you and I was like, here's some cheese. I want to know, like, and you had no idea. I feel like you wouldn't, yeah, I feel like you would think it was cheese and not like new product. Yeah, I think I agree with that.
When this when the sample size is that small, I'm like, if I'm just at a party, a cocktail party, having a little bite of cheese on a cracker, I would not think twice. If I was sitting there and having a lot of it, maybe maybe then other notes might come up, if that makes sense. Yeah, okay. And uh big mainly spready or or like all different textures? No, no, there was a a Chev, a blue, uh, feta, um, what was the other one?
The idea of calling it Chev, it's just like I gotta say, I want to taste it. The idea of calling it Chev bothers me a little bit just because that's like a thing. John, aren't you feeling me here? Yeah, it's not Chev like, I guess. Whatever.
I want to taste it though. I want to taste it. I want to taste it. I definitely want to taste it. And then if we if we like it, we're gonna have her on, right?
The producer? Yes, good idea. I asked her. She never got back to me, so maybe she actually never know. You never know.
I'm terrible judging that stuff. Speaking of uh coming on next week, next week we have the food grio, Tanya Hopkins on, so I'm excited for that. Uh and if you're listening live, you're gonna want to call in to ask a question of today's special guest. And John, how do they call in? What's the number and how do they join Patreon?
Uh they call in using 917 410 1507, and they can sign up a pay uh on our Patreon at patreon.com slash cooking issues, and it gets you a bunch of benefits like prioritize questions for awesome guests like today, um access to Discord and a whole bunch of other neat little things. And there's a bunch of affordable membership levels, so everyone should join. Yeah, and uh and I I think you know, we uh we got good stuff, we got good stuff. We got good stuff on our Patreon, but today you're gonna wish that you had the ability to call in and ask a question live because today's special guest is uh one of the Mike idols, uh, you know, as a as a young cook, as someone who, you know, I used to watch his television show. And I can't uh when I started working for the French Culinary Institute in 2004, I could not believe that I was going to get to work with him in the real life.
Um we have today on the show Chef Jacques Papin. Uh hi, how are you doing, Chef? How's everything good? Okay, how are you? Doing well, doing well.
Uh so I guess um I wanted to start uh just by asking you uh maybe to say a little bit about uh Chef Alain Sayac, who uh was uh a great man, a mentor to many of us at the French Culinary Institute. Uh your friend, you worked with him for for many years, and he, you know, he um died last week. Do you want to talk about him a little bit? Yes, he was certainly a great friend and a great chef. I mean, you know, chef at Le Firc chef in the best restaurant in the country.
And uh he worked at uh I work with him at the French Culinary Institute for for over ten years. And uh he was a very gentle person, very giving and fun and all that and uh certainly he's going to be missed. I mean certainly I miss him um you know in the kitchen you you create some very tight bond sometime and uh stay with you forever. So uh yes I will I will miss him and uh and miss his talent and his fun and his uh you know the his good humor and so forth so yes he was I will miss him yeah yeah he was a funny guy he had a very dry sense of humor and he could throw you these looks you know I mean I'm sure he never threw a look at you like he would throw at me or at uh some of the other people working but maybe not no I don't know yes yeah and you know for those who don't know you know know who he is because he never became like a household name like you did chef uh but he was mentor to thousands of students at the French culinary institute like thousands of students. No question.
And prior to that, you know in the in the restaurant that they work, whether you work at the 21 or at Le Cirque for many years, he taught a lot of uh he taught a lot of chef how to cook the right way. So yeah. Three star, you know, the missile three star, four star in the New York Times, you know, so that's uh the maximum he got. Yeah, didn't he where where did he get the four star? That was at Lecine.
Uh uh no at Le Cirque, I think. Oh Cirque? Yeah. And did he recruit you to be the dean at the French Culinary Institute? How did that work?
No, no, I was there before him, a number of years before him. Yeah, I know. I uh I was recruited directly, you know, by Dorothe Kahn, who was the owner of the place when uh not long after he happened. So and uh and after that, uh Alain worked uh at the 21 for a number of years, and at that point he wanted to kind of retire a little bit or do less, and he came and uh he decided to come with us at the French Culinary Institute, and eventually we had Andre Saltner coming with us. Yeah.
Yeah. Saltner, another giant. Oh my god, I love Andre Saltner. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Um and Jacques Terrest. I mean, when you guys were all together, the four of you at the French Culinary Institute, it was kind of like an unbelievable team of people. It was kind of an unbelievable place in in my opinion. I was very proud to work there. Um yeah, it was.
I mean, I uh I enjoyed my my year there. It was very special. And the restaurant itself had the quality of the food and the price was very low. Uh so it was a great place to cook and a great place to go and have dinner. Yeah.
So uh I want to talk to you. We'll talk about the uh Jacques Papin Foundation also with uh, you know, because uh you're apparently you're doing uh I did a video for you uh based on my favorite one of your books, and I I think I've told you this before, but the two-volume The Art of Cooking is one of my most cherished cookbook possessions again, the whole world. Everyone should go buy a copy of this book. And you would always say that it was not successful because it was too much, it was too much money for people to buy, and Americans didn't understand skinning baby lambs. But you want to talk about this series of books?
Yes, I mean uh I think it's probably the best book that I've done too. I mean, to a certain extent, depending on the on the way you look at it, but uh it's definitely one of the least successful uh books that I've done. And uh it had to do with uh I wanted to show I show in la technique and the method prior to that, uh the technique and the basic technique of cooking and uh the food and so forth. And uh but often I never finished it with uh with recipe. Here it was I wanted to do the same thing, but finish it with a recipe to exemplify it what I was talking about, and it was also in color.
So we did 34,000 pictures in uh about five years period, it took me. And we kept 3,000 pictures, 1500 for each of the volume. We had two volumes. And you know, I I went uh fishing in Long Island to to get a uh um to get a skate because you cannot get a whole skate. You can only buy the wing.
So I wanted to show you how to take the wing out. I went fishing in my pond here to get frog to show you how to take the the skin out of the frog and do it. And people often maybe get pearled off with that when in fact you don't really have to take the skin out of the frog. You can start a picture eight or nine or whatever when it's all done and go on with the recipe. You know, and I did a whole uh Lego veal, for example, about 40 pound, where I explained people uh, you know, top round, bottom round, iron, top knuckle, top filling, the whole pieces of uh the whole different muscle and uh and did a recipe for each of those muscles.
Again, uh in that case here you can buy a piece of meat and do one of those recipe. You don't have to follow the whole thing, but that's the way it was, and uh uh you know, I'm I'm I'm very happy with that book too. And uh I um I still have a couple of copies, I guess, but uh it's totally different than uh book that I did, like Fast Food Night Way or The Shortcut Cook or thing like this. So but it's it's good to investigate cooking in uh in different ways, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, whenever I see a copy, I usually buy it and then give it to somebody because I love it. But I want to talk about I want to talk about your new book that that just came out, which I wasn't expecting to love this book as much as I do. But the art of the chicken, I think I love this book. Because thank you. I mean, what it what uh what I love about it is it's kind it's it traces a similar story to your memoir that came out what, maybe twelve years ago, 10 years ago.
Um twenty years ago, yeah. Twenty geez, I'm getting old too, huh? So, like I mean so, but this book, it traces you through your life through the lens of chickens, and it gives many, many recipes, but the way a cook would give a recipe to somebody, not the way that you would write in a cookbook, you know? Right, it's a very narrative sense. And uh and to a certain extent for me, it's the first book that I bring together uh my cooking and my panning and my writing.
Uh because uh this is not, as you said, written in um in a conventional manner with recipe and so forth. It's just narrative style, telling you, you know, my mother used to do this, that too, or when I went at the Plaza Latin in Paris, we used to do this, that and you know, this is the way you explained to a friend, uh certainly another cook who asked you, How did you do that? So uh some recipe are feasible. Some are probably not really feasible. Uh it's interesting.
Excuse me, you say that that uh my editor at um you know at Simon Anchester uh gave me um at some point we discuss because I I I didn't really want to do a book of recipe. I wanted to do a book of my planning of chicken. And now I start signing uh uh picture of chicken, they say, can we get can we get uh some recipe with that? And uh so I I I said I don't want to do recipe. So I finally end up doing story about chicken and of course about eggs.
At some point she tells me, Oh, I think I need more, you know, more explanation and more ingredients and stuff. I said, but it's not that type of thing. She said, Well, I say, All right, fine. So I gave her a recipe from La Mère Brazie in Lyon. Lyon, where I come from, down in France, but very well known for the formidable woman uh cook, you know, like uh, well, in my family, actually I have uh 12 restaurants that I can think of.
Twelve restaurants owned by women, uh, including my mother, several restaurants. So Lyon was very well known for those. And the Maire Brasier was in the 40s, she had a three-star restaurant in the 40s, a long time ago. And even Bocuse, one of the greatest French chefs, did his apprenticeship there. So La Mère Brasier's recipe was a chicken, chicken of breast, of course, the best quality chicken where I come from, with truffled under the skin, but it was poor in a pig's bladder, you know.
And all she put was a lick, carrot and an onion in the pig bladder, play, and it was poor slowly. So it was brought to the dining room, you know, all inflated, so very impressive, but to a certain extent, very, very simple. It was just poison there. Then the juice was removed, reduced with butter and served with a chicken. Uh very impressive, but you know, uh very simple in a sense.
So when she asked me that, I said, okay, the chicken male brasier, I need a pig bladder, two truffles, one chicken, a breast. And she said, What are you talking about? I said, Well, you want you want an ingredient? He was a list of ingredients, I'm doing your list of ingredients. She said, All right, fine.
But we had a bit. But they never asked me again. Yeah, that's that's a good that's a good way to end that conversation, right? Yeah, right, all right. Although I have to say, uh the first time I ever saw somebody cooking in a pig's bladder was I think on uh Iron Chef, uh Japanese one.
And I looked for years in New York City in the late 90s trying to find a pig's bladder. You cannot buy it anymore. That recipe cannot be made anymore. I don't know. I had it on the West Coast uh a few years ago.
I forget the whether the chef it did squab, you know, in the pig's bladder too, and that was great. So uh yeah, it's certainly that's what I said in that book. I will use the the you know the the chicken waffle and the unborn eggs, uh chicken comb and uh chicken feet and many, many things like that that people don't use. So as I said, some recipes are not uh pretty feasible. Although I wanted to emphasize the use of the also, you know, uh from the feet to uh to uh to the neck to um you know, as I said, uh the coxcomb, but all of that have always been used.
Chicken liver certainly, it's uh most important the gizzard and so forth, uh, rather than just people often use only the breast of the chicken or a couple of things, uh when in fact uh I choose the chicken also because that may be the most democratic of all of all foods, because you will have a chicken in a truck stop, you know, and then uh in a cafeteria next door, and certainly if you go to the hospital, they'll probably give you chicken, but then you have it in that three-star restaurant with truffle under the skin. So there is and I don't think I've been, you know, from China to Russia, from West Africa to Portugal or Italy, and I don't think I've ever been in a country where they don't have chicken. Um and often chicken uh is uh you know a life-sustaining type of thing. I remember in West Africa, in little villages, you know, people are very poor, but they are three or four chicken, you know, for the eggs probably more than anything else, and eventually to kill the chicken when you are too old and do some type of stew with it. But it was kind of a life-sustaining thing, yes.
So uh yeah, that's what I choose chicken, and as I say, of course the eggs, which is maybe more important than the chicken, and all of the awful the variety of meat that we don't really use. I mean, chicken bladder and chicken uh uh gizzards and the the liver and the feet and so forth. Right. So so speaking of the waddle and the comb, the recipe you give for that in this book is the banker's chicken, the the financier. But so why would the rich people be going for the w the waddle and and the comb?
It was an interesting kind of juxtaposition, no? Yes, but at that time it was considered like truffle, like other type of things, something very special and and it is very special. So we don't we don't use it anymore much. Uh yeah, it was in a puff paste, it was considered quite elegant and all that. And going back to uh I mean actually the 17th century.
And speaking of gizzards, you do have a huge section in the book on uh gizzards. So one question, I've never, I don't know, because I'm stupid maybe, I've always just braised them. I've never done the confid. What's the difference in texture when you confide the gizzard versus when you do the brace? Well, it's there is similarity, but I mean when you confuse it, it ends up being creamier and more pasty creamier, and also you keep it in the fat in the refrigerator, you can keep it a long time.
Actually, you can do the liver in the same way too. Excuse me. I often uh put salt paper, a bit of cognac, some garlic on whole liver, and uh I uh poach them slowly in fat and uh until they are still rare inside or pink, and uh keep them in in the refrigerator in the fat of the chicken, and I keep that for weeks, you know, and you take one out, you slice it almost like a foie gras, and it's really very relatively very inexpensive. I mean, certainly where I did my apprenticeship, which was in Bourg en bref, where those chicken come from, the chicken of breast, I mean, the the fat of the chicken was probably uh uh more price or half-priced practically as butter. I mean, we use it for everything to saute potato and do all the kind of things.
One thing that I use also in the book is the chicken skin. The chicken skin for me, uh, I find it better than bacon. You know, each time that I do a chicken, I take the skin out and fill it flat onto a skillet, a dash of salt onto a cookie sheet or whatever, and cook it in the oven uh uh until it's crisp like bacon and uh and I scramble it on soup or on salad or on stew and the fat, of course, which is rendered, then you use it to sort a potato or other type of vegetable. So that's the way, you know. I mean, that the way I was taught how to cook, and also the fact that I uh uh, you know, when I was a little kid, it was during the second world war.
So certainly my mother and other people cooking were very miserly cooked because uh ingredients were uh inexp they were very expensive and you couldn't get them. So uh you used everything certainly. So uh another one you you you have in this uh using the parts of the chicken. Of course, chicken liver, I guess it is cheap. It shouldn't be cheap, but it is cheap.
You in the 80s put uh a recipe on or 90s on one of your shows that I used to make constantly, and then you have it in the chicken book again. They kind of your your style of chicken liver mousse where you uh almost make like a micwi in a pan, you fry it very quickly, and then you blend it so that it gets some parts cooked and some parts not. It's a great way to make uh a fast mousse. Oh, yeah, that's that's good. And I I do it two or three different ways.
You do it usually when you get a whole chicken at the opening of the chicken, you have one lump of fat on each side. If you took those two lumps of fat together, they about equalize the weight of the liver. So it's uh mother nature organized it this way. So you can cut that uh that fat into pieces and render it, and I put thyme bay leaf, uh black paper and stuff, and then the the liver potion it and eventually emulsify. So you can do it this way.
You can also do it by buying, and you can buy now uh very easily uh on the internet or whatever. You buy chicken fat or duck fat and use uh rounded fat and start it this way. Another way that I do it in another book, I poach the chicken liver in a bit of chicken stock with a bit of onion, and uh remove that and put that in the food processor, not the liquid, but uh, and then with the same amount of butter and uh with butter, it does the same thing too. So there is different way of doing those mousse. Uh and the beauty of it is that you do it and it freeze quite well.
So, you know, you you do uh you know half a pound of chicken liver and you put that into a small container, you have it in your freezer, and when you have people coming for drink, you take that out to defrost it and put it on toast, and it makes an excellent uh, you know, things to serve with cocktail or with drink. And uh a couple more things from the books, just so people uh I definitely want people to check this book out. So in the original art of cooking, you have Danny Kay's chicken salad recipe, which by the way, right? Is uh yeah, it's a technique I still use where you you know you just bring the bird basically up to the simmer and then let it ride and then you you you bone it out. But in the new book, you give a new secret that you didn't give in the old, which is that he used to stick silverware into the bird to keep it sinking in the stock and not floating.
Right. I mean, that was like a joke. When I went at his house, he told me I'm gonna show you how to post a chicken. So he took a handful of uh knife and fork and all that from his drawer, he put it into the chicken, put it in a stock pot. I said, What the heck are you doing?
He said, Well, like that, the chicken doesn't come to the surface, it stays in the bottom. It will stay in the bottom anyway, one way or the other. So that's not uh a necessary step, but it's not fun. So that's what I mentioned it in there. Yeah, yeah.
Yes, that's funny. So uh one of my co-workers at the French Culinary Institute, uh Hervé Malivaire, he used to do that for sous-vide and low temperature because uh if you weren't, yeah, if you weren't using the vacuum, right? If you were just rolling like uh doing like a uh a ballotine or something, and you were rolling it, it might float. And so he would always roll in uh butter knives so that they would sink to the bottom of the bath anyway. Oh I didn't know that.
Yeah. Uh okay, another thing you mentioned, uh black pepper in your in your uh liver mousse, and I read in the book that you have the correct opinion that black pepper is superior to white pepper, but that Julia Child did not agree with you. No, that's true. I mean, the those those are small uh differences that we had, and we argue to, I mean, uh in the old classic way, she said any white sauce, you should have white pepper corn, the white paper, not black one. And it's true that it was done this way.
But I mean, people don't realize that uh green pepper corn, white pepper corn, black pepper corn is the same berry. You know, you have green pepper corn when the berry is not ripe and it's very flavorful and with less hotness, green paper, and then if you let it dry, then the skin shriveled on top, and uh and it turns red uh when it's when it's uh when it's uh you know ripe, and then you let it dry out and the skin turns black on top, and you have black pepper corn. And during your drying process, they wet it and wash it, and it wash the skin of the tub, and then they have the center, which is the white paper corn. Ultimately, the white paper corn, the green one, the black one is the same one. I feel that the black one has more taste because of the skin on top, which hasn't been removed, it's more flavor.
But you know, it's a question of taste. Speaking of uh Julia Child, something I did not realize until I read this book is that the famous Dan Aykroyd sketch where he pretends to be Julia Child and cuts himself and sprays blood all over the kitchen is actually from a real thing that happened when she cut herself on your knife on a show. Yes, that's true. It was Tom Snyder. It was Tom Snyder at a show called the Tomorrow Show.
And I did it a couple of times with him in New York, and then he had moved to the West Coast, and he asked me, Can you do it with Julia? And it was like an hour and a half, just the two of us. And uh so I said, sure. So Julia happened to be on the West Coast because she'd originally from there. She was in the kitchen.
And uh so she bought uh enough food to feed probably 50 people. And uh because Tom Snyder said, I don't need recipe, it doesn't matter, just cook with Julia, and uh so I said, Great. So they I I was on a book tour actually for my book, uh La Method, the second after La Technique. So it was 1978, I believe. And so they picked me up at the airport and I was on that book tour.
So uh the plane, I mean, we were taping in the afternoon, and uh they had to pick me up and rush me to to the the studio because uh I would the plane was a bit late and so forth. And so I rushed there, they they put me on stage five minutes before we start, and Julia told me, okay, I have this this on the food, and I had my knife because I was on a book tour. I had a little knife with me in my pocket. At that time, you could uh you could bring a knife with you on the plane. Because I do a show in the morning for like uh 30 seconds.
They want me to cut something, so I do a tomato rose or whatever on television, so I had that knife with me. So I took that knife and I put it on the counter when she was telling me what she had. He took the knife to cut a shallot and almost took the end of her finger off. So uh I push, I push it back together and tie it with uh with the towel. And Tom Snyder was crazy.
He said, What are we going to do? And Julia was mad at herself. She said, We're not going to do anything. We're going to cook uh and I'll taste and Jacques cook, and I don't want to talk about uh my finger. He said, Okay, so we start the show, and uh uh I think Julia was in the middle, and she said, We are by order of size, yeah, because I think Tom Snyder was 6'7, he was very, very tall, and she's like 6'2, and uh me on the other side.
And the second thing, Tom Snyder said, Julia, do you mind if I say that you cut your finger? Of course, so the camera narrowed down on her, and that was the end of it. So uh uh two days later, she was on the Jodie Carson show, and they talk about her finger. A week later, I was with her on another show. We were supposed to do omelet.
All we did was to talk about her finger, so it became a big thing, and eventually they did that uh that thing in uh Saturday Night Life, which was very funny. She actually liked it very much, you know. I mean, it's a classic sketch. I've seen it, I've seen it dozens of times. Yeah, classic.
Yeah. All right, so here's some other couple of strange things in the in the book, interesting recipe ideas. So you have an ex Jeanette, and that was that's named after your mom, you said? Egg Jeanette? Yes, right.
Yeah. My mother used to that do that when we were kids. It's a conventional part cooked eggs, but then she took the yolk out and crushed it. Usually she used a fork, uh, crush it with chopped garlic and chopped parsley, a persid, you know, and uh and uh and the egg yolk and salt paper, a dash of milk to make it pasty, and we stuffed the eggs, and then we saute the eggs stuff side down for a minute or so, it browned beautifully. And she already had a little bit of the stuffing left over, so she had it with mustard and only wanted to do a mustard sauce to serve with it.
So we've done that at my house forever, you know. So the egg janet. I even remember my wife one time. We had a big party, so she decided to do egg janet with quail eggs. So she had like three dozen of quail eggs.
She said, I'll never do it again. Oh my god. To peel those quail eggs and cut them and stuff them. Yes. Peeling quail eggs is the worst job in the world.
Peeling quail eggs, I hate peeling quail eggs. Oh my god. I know me too. But uh but it's a very uh, you know, simple and classic recipe and quite good. But is it amount almost to like an am like uh I know not stuffed as much, but like almost like an American deviled egg that's fried on the one side.
I mean, it's such a to to as an American growing up with deviled eggs, it's like it's kind of a I was like, oh my god, I can fry a deviled egg. Sounds good. Yeah, no, but the well is it's different. Remember there, I have garlic in the chopped garlic and parsley, and that's why it's cooked this way. And uh it's not stuff that is uh you your uh your deviled eggs, you cut it in half, but you you pile up the the stuffing on top so it's higher.
Here it's level. You just put uh enough uh stuffing to have it level so you can fry it, you know. So yeah, yeah. And another thing I had never heard of before, you said that when you were in uh, I think it was in France before you came to the U.S., that you would make the French toast with with creme anglaise, actually melted vanilla ice cream as the instead of like uh I never thought to do this, and it sets up enough, there's enough egg in the in the anglaise to set it up. Yes, absolutely, because remember that uh uh the classic uh uh French ice cream, Chatany vanilla ice cream is done with a creme anglaise and the English castard cream is done with egg yolk, and three egg yolks per cup of milk.
So at the Pazatine in Paris, we did uh a lot of different types of ice cream. But when I was uh breakfast chef, sometime pressed by time, you know. Uh instead of having all the eggs and all that to do that, I would I would take uh eight or ten scoops of uh vanilla ice cream, let it melt on the counter. And when I start having order for scrambled eggs, I dip slice of brioche in it and saute it and serve it with uh you know maple syrup, so it was very good. All right.
I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna try it, but don't go trying it, people, with Philadelphia style ice cream. It must have the egg in it, right, chef? No, not really. It will work with that as well.
Yeah, oh yes. Huh. I'm gonna try it. I'm definitely gonna try it. Um, okay.
Uh I have some questions from before I go more into the book and the foundation. I have some questions from our uh listeners. Uh this is from Fly Jamerson. He said, uh, hey Chef, I'm so uh stoked for this episode. When I started listening to the show seven or eight years ago, I was also teaching myself how to cook by watching uh Jacques Specials and his amazing show with Julia.
Now I'm a pastry chef uh and I listen to the show and follow the foundation on Instagram. You've been so influential over the years for me and for so many people. I've always loved uh this is for you, Chef. I've love seeing you share your love of cooking with your family. My two-year-old loves to help in the kitchen at home, and I wonder if you have any advice for cultivating and teaching very young chefs.
Well, you have to get the kid involved with you from the moment they are born. I mean, when my daughter was a year and a half old, I hold her in my arm and she stirred the pot. I say, okay, melons. Right. So she would stir it so she quote, eat it, because of course she made it, quote, uh, with her father when, you know.
And uh likewise, uh, you know, my granddaughter, I have done television show with her, and uh when she was small, so you know, she stand next to me with on a little stool uh at the counter, and I say, Give me the salad, you see it's clean, do you want to clean it up, help me do that and go to the garden with her and say, Okay, get me some parsley. I say, No, this is chai, okay. This is parsley, test this, test that. And I take her to the market, you know. I say, I need some uh some tomato or I need some pear.
Make sure it's ripe. Did you smell those pear? You think they are ripe? You know, so you get the kid involved like that. And uh and then of course, uh by the time you finish uh cooking, then you you share the food with them and discuss the discussion continue.
So it it's very important. And also I think important uh to give the kid what you are eating exactly in the same way. I don't think I ever did uh uh you know, b baby food for for my daughter when she was small. Uh we uh uh whatever I cooked before I put too much salt paper in it, seasoning, I put it in the in the blender and uh and that's what she had so you know uh by the time she was six or seven years old if we gave her some spaghetti and clam sauce she knew the taste because she added in a puree when she was small you know so that's important to uh to do that too I think and uh Frank wants to know what is the most fun experience you had uh doing the PBS show uh cooking with uh Julia Child what was the most fun if you remember anything specifically oh yeah we had many many fun shows to start with people don't realize that we had no recipes there uh conventionally when you do a series and I do I did uh you know 12th series of 26 shows so you do a series of 26 shows uh you usually come with a book and uh or at least the manuscript of the book to get an idea to the back kitchen what you're going to do and so forth. Here we had no recipe we had a list you say okay let's do skew tomorrow let's do this that too so it was a bit more complicated for the cameraman probably to to follow us because they didn't know what we were going to do.
And uh but for us it was more fun cooking you know if I put scallion in that dish it's because they happened to be on the counter and I was cooking and I put them in I didn't have to worry about a recipe. That was one thing. The second thing is that when you do show like I did on TBS, I was told at the beginning uh you have to do it on time because editing is very expensive and all that. So uh for several series, I did it on time with a guy going by saying uh 10 minutes, five minutes, three minute wrap-up and so forth. Uh with Julia, she did she said, Well, we're gonna cook, and the moment it finished, we'll tell you.
Some show we're like 70 minutes, you know. Uh so we had no recipe, we had no uh no time limit, and we had a lot of wine. So it was a fun show to do, you know. Um a friend of uh mine and an FCI graduate, by the way, who has a very successful uh pastry uh business in Nebraska, Angela Garbats wants to know from Goldenrod Pastries how did you uh take on leadership and the teaching of students' employees? You were always good at it at the FCI, but I'm curious how you took that on and learned the best ways early in your career to be a mentor.
Well, uh I am um I don't know, I'm very Cartesian. Uh so I like to break things down, and that's what I started to do with that technique. Breaking things down into simple techniques to show people how to do it. I would never really have thought of it when I started cooking and doing show on the road. Uh I would never have showed people, I don't know, how to peel a carrot.
I said, Well, anyone knows how to peel a carrot, except when I did it. So people say, Oh, that's how you do it. You can't, yeah. So I started taking those really basic techniques, how to peel a. And this is why my book, La Technique and all that, it's still in print, you know, and it's over 50 years old now.
So and I don't uh I don't cook the same way that I did 50 years ago, but the technique remained the same. The way you sharpen a knife, or the way you peel an asparagus, you know, or the way you push an egg is the same way that it was 50 years ago. That's why those books are still in print. So it started there for me, uh teaching people, explaining all of those basic principles. So uh so that my uh you know I always like to teach and explain and so forth.
So that was the beginning of it. So speaking of the way to do things and the things that don't change there are many, many, many ways to bone out a chicken. And then there is the Jacques Papin way to bone out a chicken, which I learned I saw you do it on TV. I saw you do it many times at the French Culinary Institute. How many seconds did it used to take you to bone a chicken?
I don't know in a few minutes but it's not uh it's important I think because if you know how to bone out a chicken and cut exactly in the joint of the hip and in the joint of the shoulder and you know how to do a duck, you know how to do a quail, you know how to do a goose, you know how to do a turkey and you know how to carve in the dining room when the bird is cooked too because uh all of those cuts are always in the same place where you cut to to break down take the meat of the carcass you know so it's important to take some uh and you know all of those techniques are important and basically uh it's a question of repeat repeat repeat which is the way we were trained certainly when an apprentice when I was an apprentice uh you know well of course I was 13 14 years old so I was young and the chef would tell you do this and uh you would never have said why because if you had said why you would have to tell you it's because I just told you that was about the end of the explanation. So the learning was through osmosis more at some point the chef told me, okay, tomorrow you started the stove. I said, I started the stoke. I never got close to the stove except to put coal in it or wood at that time. And so then I started at the stove and I knew how to do it.
So, you know the the the learning was was different. You get, you know, you transcend the level at which you have to think about it. If I am on television, I don't have to think about it. Uh, you know, my hands are just working, and I just think in terms of uh texture or or the color of the ingredient or whatever. So it's uh it's a different way of uh learning, but but certainly uh uh I think that any great chef from uh uh Daniel Boulut, Thomas Keller or Top Cole Q and all that, are first good technicians.
And then they happen to have talent, and they happen to have talent, and they happen to have drive, and they happen to have uh other things than just the technique. But the technique I think are very very important to start with. Uh I know a fair amount of chefs who are very good technicians and run a good kitchen and uh uh with a good uh food cost and so forth, and are relatively up by doggies, right? And uh run relatively uh a good kitchen and are not great chefs at all. They are relatively ordinary cook, but you need to really be as I say a great chef, then you have to be a good technician and then have talent and so forth, you know.
So uh another question I have for those that you know know your career. You were for a time the equivalent of the White House chef in France, and you were the chef for Charles de Gaulle, which is kind of an amazing, it's an amazing thing to have on your on your resume. And Sam wants to know what's the and I kind of know a little bit just from reading the book because you talk about what he likes to eat in the chicken book, but uh Sam wants to know what's the weirdest thing that uh de Gaulle liked to eat. The weirdest thing, there was nothing weird that he likes to eat. It was, you know, you have to realize that when you are cooking for head of state, I serve people like I don't know, Ivanware, Neru, Tito, I mean the head of state at the time.
Uh you try to please the people that you're going to serve with different coming from different countries. And uh, but uh when I cook only for the president himself, uh, that is on Sunday, for example, uh they were devout uh churchgoer and uh Catholic. And uh so at that point, after that, the family always came to eat the children, grandchildren, and the whole family. And at that point, of course, they ate exactly what they wanted. And what they wanted was relatively simple food from a leg of lamb to a poach fish, and uh I would discuss the menu with uh, of course, Madame de Gaulle and decide what they wanted.
But uh there was nothing really weird or unusual. Well, yeah, and you said that uh your boss before him had spent a lot of France's money having you cook all sorts of crazy things, and that the de Gaulle family was very kind of above board. Yes, I mean uh when uh you know you you you do special uh special reception for head of state I mean you have cavier, you have foie gas, you have very expensive stuff. But uh when I cook on that Sunday meal for the family, then Madame de Gaulle is it on paying from their own pocket which was as I said uh kind of a drop of water in the amount of money that we spent it's not a question of principle very uh ethical type of uh people you know uh chef Andy Ricker wants to know and of course you have recipes in here so uh and I know the answer do you ever cook with chilies with yeah of course yeah I I do yeah I mean uh uh you know I had a house in uh I mean I had an apartment in Playa del Com in Mexico uh and for it over 10 years 15 years my wife and I we used to spend a couple of months during the winter so regardless of the country where I am yes I would go to the market and buy all kind of dry chili and and uh and cook with them and pull around with them have different recipe in different of my book with them. Hey uh Quinn you said we had a couple more questions for chef off the Discord.
Uh what do you got? Uh yes we do and nice to talk to you chef. Um Matt from Mystic asks I'm curious what uh Jacques thinks of modernist techniques like C V low temperature and how they fit into the history of cooking well I tell you something for 10 years from 1960 to 1970 I was a director of research for Howard Johnson and I worked there. At that time we were attacked a recipe that we developed on Sousa with the Africa. At that time, I would take uh a whole uh a whole breast, double breast of Turkey, for example, put it into a plastic bag and draw the air out of it, and that's what's called cryovax.
Cryovax, and we lower it into water, not too hot and cook it this way. So uh the Souvid was called, I say cryovax at that time, and it was technique that we did uh for many, many years, uh, you know, to uh control the food and to control the quality and so forth. So yes, those old techniques, I mean those new techniques which seem that have been uh just to the air. I can find them very often back uh 30 years, 30 years ago, you know. So um another question.
Um what's the method or recipe for the most delicious thing you made in the past year? That's from Dave Clayman. No, I don't have any answer to that question. The most delicious thing that I did in the last year is probably a Friday like today for my breakfast, you cook every day in different ways. So I mean, I don't have one thing that uh I'm gonna cook all the time only this way.
I mean, people already ask me what is the best thing to eat. Uh I tell you, if I have an extraordinary baguette and extraordinary butter, it's very hard to beat bread and butter. So it is very hard. And uh remember the French culinary had very good bread. I don't know if you remember how good the bread program was at the French Culinary Institute.
That's what I said. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Um I had a follow-up on you mentioned uh the Howard Johnson, the hojo, like uh when I was growing up, like that was uh still a like a real place.
You said that uh it started changing a lot when you left in the early 70s, but one of the things they were famous for is the crispy clam strips. Now, did you have anything to do with the crispy clam strip from Howard Johnson? Yes, yes, of course we did it at the time. I don't think it'd be possible to do it today because uh we did that with clam, which were over a pound big. Uh deep clam, I don't know where people find it.
There was a special uh supplier of those enormous clam. And uh we opened them and we only use the tongue. It was the tongue of the clam. We put through a machine to do long strip to cut them into long strip, and the belly, the belly of the clam was used for clam solder because we used to do you know 3,000 a gallon of clam solder at the time. So uh uh yes, and the the the fried clam were pretty uh pretty well known at the time, yes.
So and uh it was great too. Yeah, no, that was the thing. My wife loved it, I loved it. I mean, uh the clam strip, that was uh you know, that was a thing. Uh so follow up, because you've lived on the on the coast of Connecticut for a long time.
Are you a when you have fried clams, do you prefer with the belly on or do you prefer it hojo style, just strips? Well, either one, uh frankly, you know, I like I like some time with the belly on sometime, just but as I say now, you would not find the tongue as big as we used to have to do it the same way, uh, because I don't think it's the sea is depleted of that type of uh big, big plants. Also, you mentioned in the book that when your mom came to visit you in the States you made her a lobster roll and I want to say and so John who's in the studio who you know I work with who's uh also a chef he's from Connecticut uh and uh we all believe that the lobster roll should be warm as opposed to the way they do it maybe up in Maine and that's how you serve it to your mom a warm lobster roll do you do you always prefer a warm lobster roll or do you also like the cold ones? No I I like both frankly my wife liked it better with mayonnaise I like it better with butter and hot so but you know uh if you give it to me with mayonnaise I will did it too. Yeah.
Um all right um something else I learned again I I hate I'm only bringing up this book because I learned so much in this book everyone should go get the book I didn't realize so my my favorite cookbook series ever is the Time Life uh foods of the world and you I didn't know this but you did a lot of the cooking for the uh classic French uh cooking volume including the crazy dish on the cover with all the shimmering aspic and the and the uh with the you know the the white sauce the chauffeur sauce over the over the the uh poolard do you want to talk about uh that experience because that's maybe the greatest cookbook series ever and it came out before most Americans even knew anything about kind of food of the world so you you want to talk about that series at all or yes it was uh the series was done by uh well uh Craig Le Bourne was the food editor of the New York Times writing it. And Pierre Fresh was uh my friend and my boss at Howard Johnson and at the pavilion uh was asked to do the food with me so he asked me to do the food uh especially for the picture to work in studio and so forth uh we had no recipe for that either and I said do you want me to make recipe they said no no no we will we'll follow you and go out the recipe well I tell you it would be totally impossible to have look at the book of recipe to follow a recipe to what they wrote you know when I did it but anyway those were all classic recipes and when we did the cover of the book Pular de Landeva you know so it was uh the breast you know the the whole chicken poached and eventually the breast removed and cut into uh and to slice and coat with uh with a chauffeur you know which is a cold uh uh velute uh with uh with gelatin in it and decorated and glazed with aspic on top that's a very classic dish too but I mean uh pretty complicated and stuff with a mousse of gras inside we did it uh and when I did that one uh they took picture of it and uh they should it from the top very close and it was beautiful because people say what is this they didn't know what it was so so we have to redo it again and they did it a second time they wanted to put champagne next to it to balance it and again the the art director or whatever decide decided they didn't like it either so we did a third time so I did that thing at least three times but uh when I was there working in studio and that was in 63, four five in those areas, you know, though. So but that was an interesting book. I still look at uh I agree with you, I still look at uh that uh 30 plus volume book uh going from uh different parts of the world, you know, other reference. It's a very good reference book.
Julia Child did the first one of the theory, which was country French cooking, and the second one was that classic French cooking, and it went on and on from uh American cooking in different areas to to Chinese, Japanese, uh Portugal, Italian, Spanish, and so forth. So it's a great series to look at for reference. Yeah, when I found out you were a part of it, I couldn't believe it. Yet another way you've influenced me, Chef. Um, speaking of uh the cover of this book with all of the aspic, why is it you think that Americans we can't wrap our head around aspic?
And you actually have a story in the chicken book about eggs and gele. And uh I have to say that's one of the only things, also, because I got food poisoned once from it, that I don't eat eggs and galae either. But you know, what do you think it is about Americans in aspect? Why we can't uh why we can't, why we don't like because you were because you don't have it when you're a kid, you know, there is many recipes from other parts of the world that you are have a kid, and those recipes become kind of visceral. I mean, very powerful, those tastes which your mother or whoever did it.
But if you never had that, all of a sudden through middle age, you know, or whatever, you get a new recipe which sometimes doesn't correspond with uh your sense of taste. You say, oh, I'm not eating that. And that happened to any country. And especially here, that the only time that you usually have a spic uh that is uh a jelly would be with jello. And jello, of course, is done with fruit and fruit, I mean, done different way, but I mean, usually with fruit and juice and so forth and sweet.
So when you have the same type of texture too, and which happen to be salted and strong to have cold people, kind of uh uh, you know, uh I mean, not everybody, but many people uh don't go for it yes here. But I love it. I still do it in summer. The uh it's nice to have cold dish in summer anyway. Um so I I learned also in the book, uh but I'm gonna have you pronounce it because I'm not gonna try the French word for the oyster in the back of uh poultry in the back of a chicken.
You know, we call it uh the oyster, but uh I don't know how to describe it. When you're boning out the back of the bird, there's a little, there's two little pockets in the that you have to make sure your knife goes in and gets them out when you're taking off the thing, and we call it the oyster. But what's the word in French? The word in France is solely less, and it's actually three words. S-O-T, uh L apostrophe Y, and the third word is L-A-I-S-S-E, and the soli-less just means the dumb leave it.
Uh so that's the name of uh, and certainly uh I remember uh in France in um you know in the 15s and all that when I was working in Paris, doing a free cassette of those uh which would take four or five chickens for one portion because there is only two blue chicken. So that was a kind of very fancy, fancy type of uh dish to do, certainly. Uh now, one more chick. Sorry, one more chicken, a couple more. I mean, like I just read your book on chicken, so I have a lot of chicken questions.
I apologize. But do you still do the full old school trussing when you cook uh when you cook your chickens? Like keep the legs in tight. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, depending whether I do it for myself simply or whether I have some guests I want to present it a bit nicer. So yeah, one or the other.
I don't think people even flip birds at all anymore. I mean, I I haven't heard someone I haven't heard someone write this recipe this way in million years, but even back in the day it was top bottom. But uh I'm now gonna try the side side uh and on the back. You think that's the best way? Well, to start with, you have to remove the wishbone, you know, of your chicken.
Uh it makes it easier to curve. Secondly, I cut usually an incision between the drumstick and the thigh. Uh that's where often it stays a little red and people say, Oh, it's not cooked enough. So you end up overcooking the breast because this is not cooked enough. So that's the second thing.
And and to cook it on the side as I do, it's great. It's great sometimes, sometimes not. You have to have uh a pan that you use all the time that you know is not going to stick, or then you have to use an off thick pan because people will put it on the side and the skin will stick to the bottom, and then you make a mess out of it. So uh in case like this, very often I don't turn it either. I just baste it, you know.
But that to do it this way prevents you from having to baste all the time, you know. Hey, Chef, have you tried the uh uh the American uh breast style chickens and are they any good compared to the French ones? I I don't know what you're talking about. The American, why? They so they they imported the same breed that they have in breast, the same chicken over the big the oh the breast chicken, yes, right.
Uh I uh I haven't actually tried the breast chicken which they import. I mean, I so I don't really know, but I also know that uh uh I used to have a friend who was raising very close uh chicken in the same way. And um uh often people who are used to uh the standard chicken from the supermarket have a chicken like that. It has more taste. The meat is uh moist but more attached to the bone, a bit tougher too, and they end up saying, hmm, I'm not crazy about that chicken because it doesn't reflect uh, you know, when you're used to one type of chicken, like the one in the supermarket and having another one, it's like the beef.
My friend Jean-Claude used to raise his beef, and when we killed it, the kids say, ooh, uh it was stronger in taste. It was uh it was different, even though in my opinion it was better. But if you're not used to that, uh conventionally, you know, you you go back to uh to the the taste that you are used to and don't find the other one that attractive. All right, well, chef, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it.
Uh it's been a pleasure by the book, The Art of the Chicken, and on the way out, can you describe the Jacques Papin Foundation and where they can go to join and what you do there? Well, the JPF, the Jacques Pepin Foundation was created by my son in law uh Raleigh with a chef, but he also had a PhD teach at uh Johnson and Well and at Boston University as well. And my daughter, and uh, you know, I have all of those shows that I've done through years. So at some point, two years ago, he said, who do you want to teach now? And I thought that uh people who have been a bit disinfluencialized by life, like people who come out of jail or homeless people, or uh, you know, um even veterans or former drug addicts, uh, people like this.
So we teach people like that, usually through community kitchen. I was in Boston teaching that last week. I was in New York uh a couple of months ago teaching in another school. So those community kitchen usually are not, you know, only young people, 20, 30, 40, even 50 years old. And then we try to bring people, give them um, you know, uh a new live-on life if you want by teaching them some of the principle of cooking so that they can reintegrate the the workforce and work in a restaurant, and we need people like this too.
So it's been quite uh successful. And by the way, thank you for doing a video for us. You did a video for uh for uh the series of chefs, right? That uh we have part of the the Jacques Pepin Foundation. So thank you for that.
Oh, yeah. I based it on your uh old grapefruit granite recipe. Oh, you did, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh well, anyway, it was a it was a great honor, Chef.
Thanks for coming on. Everyone, check out the JPF Foundation and the good work they're doing. Check out the art of the chicken, cooking issues. Thank you.
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