The Blue and White: You graduated from Columbia's General Studies program—what year was that?
Jacques Pépin: I think I graduated in '69 or '70, because I graduated from the graduate school in '72.
B&W: You went to graduate school at Columbia as well?
JP: Yes, I was scheduled for a PhD and I acquired a master's along the way, and basically I finished all my requirements for the PhD but never wrote my thesis because they didn't accept the idea of my dissertation. Interestingly enough, because now they would be very happy with it. It was a history of French food—context, civilization and literature—and in 1970, or whatever, they said, "Food, are you crazy?" Now I've been teaching at Boston University for 23 or 24 years and we have a class in the graduate school at BU on the history of food—context, civilization and literature—which I started maybe twelve, fifteen years ago, with Julia Child. So it's interesting the way things come around.
B&W: So food is now considered an intellectual endeavor?
JP: Certainly, yes. We have had a bunch of dissertations at BU in the last eight, ten years and certainly there have been some very serious studies, especially in anthropology, sociology, and history, on food. I mean political decisions decide the flow of food in the world and who is going to die of hunger and who is going to eat. You have people like Lévi-Strauss, a famous anthropologist, discussing food at great length. Of course for me I came from the other end, having been a cook all my life, since I left home when I was 13 years old to go into apprenticeship.
B&W: In France?
JP: In France, yes. And I came into studying after I came here. I went to Columbia for—forever, practically! I came to this country in September 1959 and three weeks later I was enrolled at Columbia.
B&W: So you went here for almost 15 years, then?
JP: Oh yeah. I'm very stubborn. I went on the student boat, which picked up people in Le Havre, in France, and those were all American students who spent the summer in Europe, so we were, I don't know, a thousand students. It was a chartered cruise boat—there were barely planes at the time, remember. All of those students were from all over the country. So I asked someone, a professor who was on board, I said, "I'm going to New York"--we spoke French because I didn't speak English. I said, "What is the best school there?" He said, "Well, it's Columbia University." I said, great, I'd never heard of it; I went to Columbia. Two weeks after I was here I went into an office in General Studies, and I eventually found someone who spoke French and I said I want to enroll in the class and that's what I did. It cost $30 a credit at the time.
B&W: Did you like Columbia?
JP: I loved Columbia! It was my second home.
B&W: Do you remember 1968? Were you involved at all?
JP: Well, I was yelling like everyone else, walking around. It coincided with the whole upheaval of the students in 1968 in Paris, and I think it still was during De Gaulle and since I used to work for De Gaulle, I was interested.
B&W: What did you do for De Gaulle?
JP: I was the chef of De Gaulle in France.
B&W: His personal chef?
JP: Of three presidents, yes, before I got here. I was 20 years old, 21.
B&W: So you reached success fairly quickly—you'd already been cooking for seven years.
JP: At the time, the cook was at the lower hand of the social ladder. Now we are geniuses, I don't know what happened. But at that time any good mother wanted her child to be a lawyer, a doctor, not a cook.
B&W: Did your mother want you to be a cook?
JP: Not really, no. But my mother had a restaurant.
B&W: So you were born into it.
JP: Well, sort of. We had blinders because my father was a cabinetmaker and my mother was in the restaurant business. I never thought that I could be a doctor or a professor or anything like that. See we didn't have television and there was barely any radio so I didn't know I could become famous in 30 minutes.
B&W: What do you think inspired that change, where all a sudden this obsession with food and eating and cooking developed?
JP: This is not something new for Europe, you're born with that. In Italy, in France, the family cooks, you sit down for dinner, food is an integral part of your life, in communication and in being together. And you are defined often by your culinary identity. In America, there was never a cuisine that dominated; we are part of a country that is made of ethnic groups. But after the war all those G.I.s came back from Europe, and then people went back on vacation, so all of a sudden everything started changing. And people started turning away from the TV dinner of the 50s—they wanted to re-discover their roots and all that. And the women's liberation of the 60s: women wanted to get out of the kitchen, so they became professional chefs, and men went into the kitchen to invade the domain. There was a type of crisscrossing current. In the 60s, you know, organic gardening and health and so forth, all of that was part of a movement, and nouvelle cuisine in the 70s. And after that, the explosion. All of a sudden people were concerned about what they were putting in their mouths.
B&W: There's sort of this reputation that people in France eat so differently than they do in America.
JP: There is actually much more similarity than there was 50 years ago. In France the kids are getting fatter, they eat between meals, which we never did. They eat a lot of candy and stuff that we never did when I was a kid, we never drank soda. There was no soda anyway! It didn't exist! We drank water. And then by the time we were five they put a little bit of wine in your water, like off a teaspoon, so that you would be part of it too. And conversely, in America, people are getting very much into organic food.
B&W: Are you one of those people who subscribes to the idea of the meal as a sanctuary? Or do you think you can eat while you're doing something else?
JP: Well, both, certainly. You go to the ballpark and eat a hotdog looking at whatever. That's fine! But certainly, in almost 43 years of marriage, I can't think of anytime that my wife and I would be at home and we didn't sit down, open a bottle of wine, sometimes two, and eat. That's a ritual we've had going for over 40 years. I can't ever think of anytime we eat standing over the sink.
B&W: I've read about the organic movement and how much better it is to eat organic but I'm a student, sometimes I can't afford organic produce and products, so how do you get around that, what do you say to people—
JP: Well, so you won't die in good health!
B&W: That's it?
JP: It's kind of a joke in many ways for me. When I came here, and when Alice Waters opened the restaurant in 1971, Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and the whole movement started, and people said organic, I said, "What's the big deal?" My mother was an organic gardener—of course, she never heard the word organic. We didn't have any artificial fertilizer; we used to go to a farm and get cow manure or horse manure or whatever. Everyone was an organic gardener whether they liked it or not! But now the movement gets crazy, with vegetarianism and vegan and so forth.
B&W: What do you think about vegans and vegetarians?
JP: Well, for me it doesn't really make much sense. If people want to be this way, fine with me. But when they become militant against you...then you know, that's terrorism in another way. They can be this way if they want, don't ask me to be this way. The people who know animals the best of all are the farmers, who live in communion with animals in the context of nature, who would never mistreat an animal. I'm not talking about those enormous feedlot farms, I'm talking about a farmer who has a couple of cows and chickens. I've never met a farmer who was a vegetarian.
B&W: But those kinds of farmers are disappearing, no?
JP: Yeah, unfortunately. They're coming back in some other ways but it's pretty disheartening what we've done in the last 20, 30 years to the soil, to everything. It's terrible, so it's time to go back to organic farming, which we can do!
B&W: Do think that's it important to have an academic education to be a chef?
JP: Yeah, to be anything. When I was a young man in Paris, and you met a girl and she said what do you do, you said, I'm a cook and by the time she heard that, well, that didn't rate very well. So I went to Columbia and at some point I thought that I would even teach. But then I went back to cooking because that's really what I know the best, what I love the best, but I came back with another psychological outlook. I don't have a complex because I have an education. If you don't have an education you are in terrible danger of taking educated people seriously. That's quite true, probably Oscar Wilde who said that.
B&W: Do you have any guilty pleasure foods, like pre-packaged foods? Do you eat Oreos, or something like that?
JP: Nothing is guilty for me, if I feel like eating it. I love Oreos! I don't eat them very often, but yes, I love Oreos.
B&W: So you don't have any strict rules for yourself about food?
JP: No. I've never really followed a diet in my life, which I probably should—I drink way too much wine. But the point is that anything in nature cooked simply in small portions with some wine, it's not going to hurt you. Following the season is very important, I think, much more than people realize. That anticipation--you know, you're in January and you see those raspberries and they may be good, I mean your eye may believe it's raspberry, but your palate doesn't really believe it.
B&W: A couple years ago I heard you speak at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, Connecticut. I remember you saying that your favorite food as a child was a baguette and dark chocolate.
JP: Oh yeah, and even now people say, what is the greatest food in the world you can think of? I say, if you really have an extraordinary bread—baguette—and if you have extraordinary butter—to beat bread and butter, it's very hard.
B&W: This a broad question, but what do you think food says about a society?
JP: Well, it's an interesting thing, if you look through the tribulations of French food, the chef came to the top as we are now and then back to the bottom and so forth. But it seems when the cooking comes to the greatest apex, there is always some type of cataclysm to follow. We had the apex of French cooking just prior to the French Revolution. Then we had it during the Belle Epoque, just prior to the first World War, and so forth.
B&W: Maybe it's a sign of too much comfort, and indulgence.
JP: Probably, just like the cooking during the Roman Empire. A level of sophistication, and more sophistication, from eating pearl to eating the brain of red flamingo, to whatever it was. I guess we're getting there here.
B&W: Uh-oh, the apocalypse is coming.
JP: Apocalypse now. Or later, rather. Yes, but what has happened in America in the last--certainly my time, 40 years or so--has been nothing short of miraculous, you know, in the food, and then in the wine, and now in the cheese, and bread-making and so forth. The sophistication of people is just amazing compared to what it was. It has changed a great deal. And for me that's very important. This is an expression of civilization, around the table. I couldn't define cuisine better than I think Lévi-Strauss, who said that cooking is the process by which nature is transformed to culture. And it's true, the difference between our far, far away ancestors eating raw meat and all that...by the time the fire was discovered, and cooking, and then all of the elements, all the tradition, all the culture and all the rituals of the table coming out, whether it's for a baptism or a Bar Mitzvah or a marriage, bring the people together, and those different rituals in different countries are what civilization is all about.
Louis XVIII in France at the Congress of Vienna in 1823 talked to Talleyrand--Talleyrand was his foreign minister and a great epicurean and hedonist. The King said, I have to give you more advisors. He said, no, I need more pots and more cooks. This is what politics is. And deals are decided around the table. I mean for me—I do a new book, first thing my editor invites me to a good restaurant in New York to discuss an idea.
B&W: And the wine brings out the ideas, right?
JP: Exactly. That's how a man seduces a woman, too, with food and wine, right? Partly, you know?
