Jacques Pépin is still cooking for you (online)

0:00 watching videos.

0:02 Doo Oh, hi.

0:03 I didn't see you there.

0:04 I'm YouTube cook Adam Regusia.

0:07 Are you like me?

0:08 A millennial with a weary, battered soul, and you long to feel safe again,

0:14 to feel like there are grown-ups in charge, who aren't you?

0:18 Well, you can step right back into the comfort of grandpa's kitchen right now,

0:24 right here on YouTube, where Jacqu Papan is still waiting to make you some eggs.

0:30 Hi, I'm Jack Pep and I'm cooking at home.

0:35 I want to show you how to make scrambled eggs.

0:38 Scramble eggs my way or the classic way.

0:41 I'm doing a little bit of a garnish here.

0:43 You don't have to or you can have all kind of other things.

0:46 Here I have a a couple of mushroom.

0:50 Jacqu Papan is the longest tenured celebrity chef in the US.

0:55 I would call him the goat,

0:56 but in my opinion that title goes to his longtime collaborator Julia Child.

1:01 And I'm guessing Jacques himself would agree with me on that.

1:04 But Jacques Papan is number two.

1:06 And the thing about him is he's still with us at 90 years old.

1:10 He's dropping fresh content on his YouTube channel,

1:13 cooking in the same modest Connecticut home that he's lived in since 1976.

1:19 The whole concept of the cooking at home was first of all,

1:22 he was going to drive my mother absolutely insane if he didn't have a project.

1:26 Um during the pandmic.

1:28 During the pandemic, Claudine Pepin, as she naturally pronounces it,

1:32 is Jacques's daughter and Raleigh is her chef husband.

1:35 And yeah, during COVID,

1:36 they got dad doing some basic recipe videos at home and they

1:41 just kept going and now there is a treasure trove of these things.

1:44 What I love is how incredibly unpretentious they are.

1:48 This is one of the greatest classical French chefs of his generation.

1:52 He was personal chef to Charles de Gaulle for God's sake.

1:55 And now here he is telling us what he really does at home at 90.

2:01 Very often I go to Chinese restaurant, Japanese restaurant,

2:06 I always end up taking the the rice leftover at the end and I want to show you

2:11 how to do a kind of a a fried rice or a mixture of rice that you do.

2:15 He loves Chinese restaurant takeout.

2:17 That's his thing.

2:19 Claudine confirms that Jacqu Papan does not repeat not Door Dash.

2:24 He gets Chinese takeout or he cooks a bit on top.

2:28 And this is it.

2:29 to my leftover fried rice.

2:32 Happy cooking.

2:34 That dish look good to you.

2:36 Guess what?

2:37 JP don't care what you think.

2:39 That rice is not for you.

2:41 When you cook at home for basic sustenance, not to have a little project,

2:46 not for fun, not to impress anyone, but just to feed yourself.

2:50 When you do that multiple times a day, you just get much less precious about it.

2:56 Even if you're Jacqu Papan, especially if you're Jacques Papan.

3:00 This is a man who's had nothing left to prove for more than half a century.

3:04 Let us do a close read of this pork recipe.

3:08 Filler pork are available at any market.

3:12 They are relatively inexpensive.

3:14 They are very tender, very moist, very lean.

3:17 Okay, so he's cooking filt of pork.

3:19 And the first thing that he emphasizes is how lean of a cut it is.

3:23 Jacques has a habit of mentioning the calories

3:25 of the food that he's cooking with specific emphasis on fat.

3:28 In a way, I find this comforting because this is the way

3:31 that people talked about nutrition during my formative years in the 80s and '9s.

3:36 Today, we understand that too much fat absolutely is bad for you,

3:40 but fat is not the nutritional final boss that it was made out to be.

3:45 More of a level boss.

3:47 Just like today, we have a more nuanced understanding of salt.

3:50 Salt is not always bad for you.

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4:48 Thank you, Element.

4:49 Anyway, we were talking about my man Jacques Pen and how he still talks about

4:53 calories and fats kind of in the way that people did in the late 20th century.

4:57 And I find that oddly comforting.

4:59 You're absolutely right to to attach that to the 80s

5:02 because when he was shooting the Today's Gourmet series,

5:06 that was very very popular in uh you know,

5:09 common culinary culture to talk about nutrition and nutritional values.

5:14 And so they really amped that up when he was shooting today's gourmet.

5:17 And so he got in the habit of talking about whether uh things had calories.

5:22 And uh so salt, pepper on top of it.

5:27 It is of course funny that Jacques is talking about this while

5:30 he has a lake of butter popping in the pan next to him.

5:33 He is a Frenchman to the end.

5:35 Also notice that he did not wash his hands before grabbing that lid.

5:39 You see it in all of these vids.

5:41 He touches the raw meat or whatever and then

5:43 he just wipes his hands on the cloth.

5:45 I would get so roasted in the comments if I did that today on YouTube.

5:50 Not here to be the food police.

5:51 He's still he's still alive and so are we.

5:54 So, you know, yeah, that is an example of literal survivorship bias,

5:59 but it reminds me how neither of my grandmothers

6:02 worried that much about sanitation in their kitchens.

6:05 It was really the public health scares about

6:07 E.coli coli burgers in the 80s and '9s that got the word out and got people like

6:12 my parents washing their hands in between every operation.

6:16 JP didn't have time for that in professional kitchens and he didn't

6:19 have time for it recording hours of recipe content live to tape,

6:23 meaning almost no edits the way they used to shoot it.

6:26 You got to keep things moving in that context.

6:29 And Jacques Papan is actually much more careful

6:32 about crosscontamination than maybe it might immediately seem.

6:35 If you really watch,

6:37 you'll see that he naturally goes from dry to wet ingredients.

6:41 Right?

6:41 There's a progression there.

6:43 And also, if he picks something up, he'll tend to not pick it up.

6:49 He'll pick it up with like these two

6:50 fingers that didn't ever touch the weird wet whatever.

6:55 There are several different tricks to the trade

6:57 in doing that because he moves quickly and efficiently.

7:01 The butter and I will cover it at least

7:06 partially like this so it doesn't splatter too much.

7:09 Lids.

7:10 It's amazing how few people use lids on frying pans anymore.

7:15 That used to be really common.

7:17 Almost every kind of skillet used to come with a lid.

7:20 I suppose the current emphasis on extreme browning

7:23 argues against using the lid and thereby trapping steam.

7:26 Steam doesn't brown things.

7:28 But you'll notice that he's leaving a crack open for some steam to escape.

7:31 And his kitchen is certainly much cleaner for it.

7:34 Dad will do a sauce with prune.

7:37 Pork and prune go very well together.

7:40 Oh, prunes.

7:41 You don't see prunes much anymore.

7:44 Dried plums.

7:45 In the late 20th century,

7:46 prunes were heavily advertised as a home remedy for constipation,

7:51 probably because of the fiber content and the naturally occurring sorbital.

7:54 I think of prunes, I think of these classy southern

7:58 bells that Sunswuite cast for their commercials in the 80s.

8:02 Look at her.

8:03 She knows this is going to fix her little problem right quick.

8:06 Anyway, and I have about 10 12 prune here.

8:09 About half a cup of V8 juice.

8:13 You can use V8 as a sauce base.

8:16 I just did that in a recipe video the other day

8:19 and I probably absorbed the idea from sitting on my parents living

8:22 room floor watching Jacqu Pen on public television because it was

8:26 one of the only channels that we could get on our antenna.

8:29 V8 was heavily advertised as a health drink in the late 20th century.

8:34 And some garlic.

8:35 Yeah, I can grate the garlic on this here.

8:38 What is up with that grater design?

8:41 Jacques's kitchen is filled with all kinds of quirky

8:44 forgotten appliances that companies probably sent him through the years.

8:48 Lord knows people send me all kinds of unsolicited junk.

8:52 Imagine if he was Jacqu Papan.

8:53 I love when he pulls out some

8:55 weird yellowing plastic food processor or something

8:58 that's been in one of those cupboards

8:59 for decades along with god knows what else.

9:02 At uh one of our recent events,

9:04 we put uh up an auction item that we called Jacques's kitchen treasures.

9:09 And we had a couple of really nice things in there,

9:11 like a really lovely copper pot that came, you know, from his kitchen.

9:16 But we also like dug through the cupboards a little bit and I found like

9:18 this this set of um McCormick food color

9:22 dyes that were literally like 50 years old.

9:25 Like I I recognized the script and the and the you know the little colored hats,

9:29 the pointed colored hats that were on top of those little squeeze bottles.

9:33 I was like, "Yes, you too can own this."

9:36 The winner of that auction item was like,

9:38 "Oh my god, did you really take that from his kitchen?

9:41 Has it been there for 50 years?" I'm like, "Yes, yes it has." In fact,

9:46 my parents used to have that exact same box of food coloring.

9:49 And we may have used the same box for my entire childhood.

9:53 I bet some of those dyes are illegal now,

9:55 but I bet that you remember some weird pantry item that you visited like an old

10:01 friend every Christmas in your grandparents' kitchen

10:03 when you would open up that one cupboard.

10:06 So, you see, I have a good uh two teaspoon maybe of garlic.

10:11 Another thing you'll notice in these videos

10:12 is that Jacques gives me almost everything,

10:15 even the stuff that he is clearly just eyeballing.

10:18 and he always gives it in the standard measurements of his adopted homeland.

10:23 Those US standard measurements are now fading into obscurity as they should.

10:28 It's time to join the global metric party.

10:30 But even when JP is eyeballing something, he gives a quantity.

10:34 Why?

10:35 Coming to the United States, one of the first jobs he had,

10:39 one of the big jobs he had was working

10:40 for Howard Johnson's and he was in their development kitchen.

10:44 Imagine the measurements.

10:47 Imagine writing books.

10:48 You have to give a measurement.

10:50 And I love that he doesn't say salt and pepper to taste.

10:55 I really loathe recipes that say salt and pepper

10:58 to taste because if you're teaching somebody how to cook,

11:02 they don't know what it's supposed to taste like, right?

11:06 I'm mugging for the camera right now because as you may know,

11:09 I almost never give measurements for salts unless it's in a baked good,

11:13 which can be kind of hard to taste before it's done.

11:16 I give almost no measurements at all in my own recipe content.

11:20 Part of that is that I'm not

11:22 publishing cookbooks like Jacques did his whole life.

11:25 Traditional publishing is all but dead,

11:27 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.

11:35 And as a result, you can clearly see about how much salt I put in there.

11:40 And that gives you a starting place.

11:42 Back in JP's day, it was amazing how little

11:45 you could see the actual food in a food show.

11:48 Food shows were mostly shot from really far away, like a multi- camera sitcom.

11:53 The lighting was on the host's face more than the food.

11:57 And TV was standard definition.

12:00 All TV looked blurry until HD became the standard in the early 2000s.

12:05 Today on YouTube, you can see the individual flakes

12:09 of salt as I am throwing them in there.

12:11 And that is just a really different context for making food content.

12:15 JP is old school and I love him for it.

12:18 And that would be good of course with a pasta or a rice or something like that.

12:24 A bit of sh on top.

12:26 And here we are.

12:28 or fillet of pork.

12:30 Look at that.

12:31 No starch for thickening.

12:33 No monte a burr.

12:35 Just slap the food on the platter and eat

12:37 it because it's for you, not for Instagram.

12:41 With prune and tomato sauce.

12:43 Happy cooking.

12:48 Happy cooking.

12:50 This man has lived in the US since the Eisenhower administration,

12:54 and he still steadfastly refuses to pronounce his hes.

12:57 That is so boss.

13:00 Hungry.

13:00 Really hard.

13:02 And sheet pans always bring out a kettle.

13:06 Yeah.

13:05 How does he say sheetpan?

13:07 Well, a little more like an I than two e.

13:10 Little pan.

13:12 Now, some of these cooking at home videos are on the YouTube channel of KQED,

13:16 which is one of the many public TV

13:18 stations that Jacques has worked with through the years.

13:21 Some of them are on the channel run by the Jacques Papan Foundation,

13:24 which Raleigh and Claudine run.

13:26 They do culinary education for people who

13:29 might normally have trouble finding a job.

13:31 People who have been incarcerated, for example.

13:33 It's really great work,

13:34 and it's the foundation that produces these cooking at home videos.

13:38 The content is relatively fresh, but they've not shot anything so far this year.

13:43 JP's wife died in 2020.

13:46 He talks about her sometimes in the present tense in these videos,

13:49 and it's not always clear if that's because the video is old.

13:52 He's getting up there himself, living in that house all alone.

13:56 We're Raleigh and I are going to be moving there um

13:59 in the summer and um and so because you know he's 90, he's earned our care.

14:05 Is he in pain all the time?

14:09 Yes, he is.

14:09 It's awful.

14:10 And I don't know what to do.

14:13 Um yeah.

14:16 Yeah.

14:16 Jacques's right arm never really recovered from a car

14:19 accident he barely survived back in' 74.

14:22 You can see him struggling with it as he cooks once you know to look for it.

14:25 Life is fragile and nothing lasts forever.

14:28 But Jacqu Papan has lasted for about as long as anyone could and he will

14:33 still be here waiting for us in that kitchen

14:36 in Connecticut long after he is gone.

14:40 It makes me wonder if someday I will be a comfort item for somebody

14:44 who grew up watching me cook me and the other bozos on YouTube.

14:49 Well, as long as this website is here, so shall we be.

14:54 Happy cooking.