Jacques Pépin is still cooking for you (online)
Adam Ragusea
0:00 watching videos.
0:02 Doo Oh, hi.
0:03 I didn't see you there.
0:04 I'm YouTube cook Adam
0:06 Regusia.
0:07 Are you like me?
0:08 A millennial with a weary, battered soul, and you
0:12 long to feel safe again, to feel like
0:15 there are grown-ups in charge, who
0:17 aren't you?
0:18 Well, you can step right
0:20 back into the comfort of grandpa's
0:22 kitchen right now, right here on
0:25 YouTube, where Jacqu Papan is still
0:28 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
0:37 eggs.
0:38 Scramble eggs my way or the
0:40 classic way.
0:41 I'm doing a little bit of a
0:42 garnish here.
0:43 You don't have to or you
0:44 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
0:53 chef in the US.
0:55 I would call him the
0:56 goat, but in my opinion that title goes
0:58 to his longtime collaborator Julia
1:01 Child.
1:01 And I'm guessing Jacques himself
1:03 would agree with me on that.
1:04 But Jacques Papan is number two.
1:06 And the thing about
1:07 him is he's still with us at 90 years
1:09 old.
1:10 He's dropping fresh content on his
1:12 YouTube channel, cooking in the same
1:14 modest Connecticut home that he's lived
1:16 in since 1976.
1:19 The whole concept of the cooking at home
1:21 was first of all, he was going to drive
1:22 my mother absolutely insane if he didn't
1:25 have a project.
1:26 Um
1:27 during the pandmic.
1:28 During the pandemic,
1:29 Claudine Pepin, as she naturally
1:31 pronounces it, is Jacques's daughter and
1:33 Raleigh is her chef husband.
1:35 And yeah, during COVID, they got dad doing some
1:38 basic recipe videos at home and they
1:41 just kept going and now there is a
1:42 treasure trove of these things.
1:44 What I love is how incredibly unpretentious
1:47 they are.
1:48 This is one of the greatest
1:49 classical French chefs of his
1:51 generation.
1:52 He was personal chef to
1:53 Charles de Gaulle for God's sake.
1:55 And now here he is telling us what he really
1:58 does at home at 90.
2:01 Very often I go to Chinese restaurant,
2:04 Japanese restaurant, I always end up
2:07 taking the the rice leftover at the end
2:10 and I want to show you how to do a kind
2:12 of a a fried rice or a mixture of rice
2:14 that you do.
2:15 He loves Chinese restaurant takeout.
2:17 That's his thing.
2:19 Claudine confirms that Jacqu Papan does
2:21 not repeat not Door Dash.
2:24 He gets Chinese takeout or he cooks a bit on
2:27 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
2:42 for basic sustenance, not to have a
2:45 little project, not for fun, not to
2:48 impress anyone, but just to feed
2:49 yourself.
2:50 When you do that multiple
2:52 times a day, you just get much less
2:54 precious about it.
2:56 Even if you're Jacqu
2:57 Papan, especially if you're Jacques
2:59 Papan.
3:00 This is a man who's had nothing
3:01 left to prove for more than half a
3:03 century.
3:04 Let us do a close read of this
3:06 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
3:21 how lean of a cut it is.
3:23 Jacques has a habit of mentioning the calories of the
3:25 food that he's cooking with specific
3:27 emphasis on fat.
3:28 In a way, I find this
3:30 comforting because this is the way that
3:32 people talked about nutrition during my
3:34 formative years in the 80s and '9s.
3:36 Today, we understand that too much fat
3:39 absolutely is bad for you, but fat is
3:41 not the nutritional final boss that it
3:44 was made out to be.
3:45 More of a level
3:46 boss.
3:47 Just like today, we have a more
3:48 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
4:52 he still talks about calories and fats
4:54 kind of in the way that people did in
4:56 the late 20th century.
4:57 And I find that
4:58 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
5:04 Gourmet series, that was very very
5:07 popular in uh you know, common culinary
5:10 culture to talk about nutrition and
5:13 nutritional values.
5:14 And so they really
5:15 amped that up when he was shooting
5:16 today's gourmet.
5:17 And so he got in the
5:18 habit of talking about whether uh things
5:21 had calories.
5:22 And uh so salt, pepper on top of it.
5:27 It is of course funny that Jacques is
5:29 talking about this while he has a lake
5:31 of butter popping in the pan next to
5:33 him.
5:33 He is a Frenchman to the end.
5:35 Also notice that he did not wash his hands
5:38 before grabbing that lid.
5:39 You see it in
5:40 all of these vids.
5:41 He touches the raw
5:42 meat or whatever and then he just wipes
5:44 his hands on the cloth.
5:45 I would get so
5:46 roasted in the comments if I did that
5:48 today on YouTube.
5:50 Not here to be the food police.
5:51 He's still he's still alive and so are
5:54 we.
5:54 So, you know,
5:56 yeah, that is an example of literal
5:58 survivorship bias, but it reminds me how
6:01 neither of my grandmothers worried that
6:03 much about sanitation in their kitchens.
6:05 It was really the public health scares
6:07 about E.coli coli burgers in the 80s and
6:09 '9s that got the word out and got people
6:12 like my parents washing their hands in
6:14 between every operation.
6:16 JP didn't have time for that in professional kitchens
6:19 and he didn't have time for it recording
6:20 hours of recipe content live to tape,
6:23 meaning almost no edits the way they
6:25 used to shoot it.
6:26 You got to keep things
6:27 moving in that context.
6:29 And Jacques Papan is actually much more careful
6:32 about crosscontamination than maybe it
6:34 might immediately seem.
6:35 If you really watch, you'll see that he
6:38 naturally goes from dry to wet
6:40 ingredients.
6:41 Right?
6:41 There's a progression there.
6:43 And also, if he picks
6:45 something up, he'll tend to not pick it
6:49 up.
6:49 He'll pick it up with like these two
6:50 fingers that didn't ever touch the weird
6:53 wet whatever.
6:55 There are several different tricks to the trade in doing
6:58 that because he moves quickly and
7:00 efficiently.
7:01 The butter and I will cover it at least partially
7:06 like this so it doesn't splatter too
7:08 much.
7:09 Lids.
7:10 It's amazing how few people
7:12 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
7:22 extreme browning argues against using
7:24 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
7:30 for some steam to escape.
7:31 And his kitchen is certainly much cleaner for
7:33 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
7:43 anymore.
7:44 Dried plums.
7:45 In the late 20th
7:46 century, prunes were heavily advertised
7:48 as a home remedy for constipation,
7:51 probably because of the fiber content
7:53 and the naturally occurring sorbital.
7:54 I think of prunes, I think of these classy
7:57 southern bells that Sunswuite cast for
8:00 their commercials in the 80s.
8:02 Look at her.
8:03 She knows this is going to fix her
8:04 little problem right quick.
8:06 Anyway, and I have about 10 12 prune here.
8:09 About half a cup of V8
8:13 juice.
8:13 You can use V8 as a sauce base.
8:16 I just did that in a recipe video the
8:18 other day and I probably absorbed the
8:20 idea from sitting on my parents living
8:22 room floor watching Jacqu Pen on public
8:25 television because it was one of the
8:26 only channels that we could get on our
8:28 antenna.
8:29 V8 was heavily advertised as a
8:31 health drink in the late 20th century.
8:34 And some garlic.
8:35 Yeah, I can grate the
8:36 garlic on this here.
8:38 What is up with that grater design?
8:41 Jacques's kitchen is filled with all
8:43 kinds of quirky forgotten appliances
8:45 that companies probably sent him through
8:47 the years.
8:48 Lord knows people send me all
8:50 kinds of unsolicited junk.
8:52 Imagine if he was Jacqu Papan.
8:53 I love when he pulls
8:54 out some weird yellowing plastic food
8:56 processor or something that's been in
8:58 one of those cupboards for decades along
9:00 with god knows what else.
9:02 At uh one of
9:03 our recent events, we put uh up an
9:05 auction item that we called Jacques's
9:07 kitchen treasures.
9:09 And we had a couple
9:10 of really nice things in there, like a
9:12 really lovely copper pot that came, you
9:14 know, from his kitchen.
9:16 But we also like
9:16 dug through the cupboards a little bit
9:18 and I found like this this set of um
9:21 McCormick food color dyes that were
9:24 literally like 50 years old.
9:25 Like I I recognized the script and the and the
9:28 you know the little colored hats, the
9:30 pointed colored hats that were on top of
9:31 those little squeeze bottles.
9:33 I was like, "Yes, you too can own this."
9:36 The winner of that auction item was
9:38 like, "Oh my god, did you really take
9:40 that from his kitchen?
9:41 Has it been there
9:42 for 50 years?" I'm like, "Yes, yes it
9:44 has." In fact,
9:46 my parents used to have that exact same
9:48 box of food coloring.
9:49 And we may have
9:50 used the same box for my entire
9:52 childhood.
9:53 I bet some of those dyes are
9:54 illegal now, but I bet that you remember
9:57 some weird pantry item that you visited
10:00 like an old friend every Christmas in
10:02 your grandparents' kitchen when you
10:04 would open up that one cupboard.
10:06 So, you see, I have a good uh two
10:09 teaspoon maybe of garlic.
10:11 Another thing you'll notice in these
10:12 videos is that Jacques gives me almost
10:14 everything, even the stuff that he is
10:16 clearly just eyeballing.
10:18 and he always gives it in the standard measurements of
10:21 his adopted homeland.
10:23 Those US standard measurements are now fading into
10:26 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
10:33 gives a quantity.
10:34 Why?
10:35 Coming to the United States, one of the first jobs he
10:38 had, one of the big jobs he had was
10:40 working for Howard Johnson's and he was
10:42 in their development kitchen.
10:44 Imagine the measurements.
10:47 Imagine writing books.
10:48 You have to give
10:49 a measurement.
10:50 And I love that he
10:51 doesn't say salt and pepper to taste.
10:55 I really loathe recipes that say salt
10:58 and pepper to taste because if you're
11:00 teaching somebody how to cook, they
11:02 don't know what it's supposed to taste
11:03 like,
11:05 right?
11:06 I'm mugging for the camera right now
11:08 because as you may know, I almost never
11:10 give measurements for salts unless it's
11:12 in a baked good, which can be kind of
11:14 hard to taste before it's done.
11:16 I give almost no measurements at all in my own
11:19 recipe content.
11:20 Part of that is that I'm
11:21 not publishing cookbooks like Jacques
11:23 did his whole life.
11:25 Traditional publishing is all but dead, and I can
11:28 make way more money just making videos.
11:31 And the videos we make today are much
11:33 clearer and sharper and close up.
11:35 And as a result, you can clearly see about how
11:39 much salt I put in there.
11:40 And that gives you a starting place.
11:42 Back in JP's day,
11:43 it was amazing how little you could see
11:46 the actual food in a food show.
11:48 Food shows were mostly shot from really far
11:51 away, like a multi- camera sitcom.
11:53 The lighting was on the host's face more
11:56 than the food.
11:57 And TV was standard
11:59 definition.
12:00 All TV looked blurry until
12:02 HD became the standard in the early
12:04 2000s.
12:05 Today on YouTube, you can see the
12:08 individual flakes of salt as I am
12:10 throwing them in there.
12:11 And that is just
12:12 a really different context for making
12:14 food content.
12:15 JP is old school and I
12:17 love him for it.
12:18 And that would be good
12:19 of course with a pasta or a rice or something like
12:23 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
12:36 the platter and eat it because it's for
12:38 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
12:51 US since the Eisenhower administration,
12:54 and he still steadfastly refuses to
12:56 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
13:04 kettle.
13:06 Yeah.
13:05 How does he say sheetpan?
13:07 Well, a little more like an I than two
13:09 e.
13:10 Little pan.
13:12 Now, some of these cooking at home
13:13 videos are on the YouTube channel of
13:15 KQED, which is one of the many public TV
13:18 stations that Jacques has worked with
13:19 through the years.
13:21 Some of them are on
13:21 the channel run by the Jacques Papan
13:23 Foundation, which Raleigh and Claudine
13:26 run.
13:26 They do culinary education for
13:28 people who might normally have trouble
13:30 finding a job.
13:31 People who have been
13:31 incarcerated, for example.
13:33 It's really great work, and it's the foundation that
13:35 produces these cooking at home videos.
13:38 The content is relatively fresh, but
13:40 they've not shot anything so far this
13:42 year.
13:43 JP's wife died in 2020.
13:46 He talks about her sometimes in the present tense
13:48 in these videos, and it's not always
13:50 clear if that's because the video is
13:52 old.
13:52 He's getting up there himself,
13:54 living in that house all alone.
13:56 We're Raleigh and I are going to be moving
13:58 there um in the summer and um and so
14:02 because you know he's 90, he's earned
14:04 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
14:12 to do.
14:13 Um yeah.
14:16 Yeah.
14:16 Jacques's right arm never really
14:18 recovered from a car accident he barely
14:20 survived back in' 74.
14:22 You can see him
14:22 struggling with it as he cooks once you
14:24 know to look for it.
14:25 Life is fragile and
14:27 nothing lasts forever.
14:28 But Jacqu Papan has lasted for about as long as anyone
14:32 could and he will still be here waiting
14:34 for us in that kitchen in Connecticut
14:37 long after he is gone.
14:40 It makes me wonder if someday I will be a comfort
14:43 item for somebody who grew up watching
14:45 me cook me and the other bozos on
14:48 YouTube.
14:49 Well, as long as this website
14:51 is here, so shall we be.
14:54 Happy cooking.