Jacques Pépin’s advice to young chefs

It is difficult to overstate the amount of influence that Jacques Pépin has had on American cooking. From his work at Howard Johnson in the 1960s to his fabulous PBS shows to his numerous cookbooks to his more recent philanthropic work, he has solidified his legacy as a culinary icon. As he celebrated his 90th birthday, Food and Wine talked with Pépin about his 90/90 campaign to fundraise for the Jacques Pépin Foundation.

Started in 2016, the Jacques Pépin Foundation provides culinary training to people who face barriers to employment. In his discussions with Food and Wine about the foundation, Pépin provided advice to aspiring chefs, saying that “For a young chef, what you have to do is to work and conform wherever you go.” He believes chefs should view the food through the lens of the chef they are working for, learning from them for a year or two before moving on to the next experience. After years of doing this, a chef can then synthesize all of the skills and information and craft it to suit their own preferences.

This isn’t just advice for professional chefs, it applies to home cooks as well. In the home cooking context, it would mean making recipes as they are written and building up a repertoire of skills before creating one’s own dishes or changing up the recipes. I have been guilty of trying to riff on a recipe before I have fully mastered it, especially in the baking context. This has led to more than one baking disaster, the most recent being a filling that was far too loose for the cake roll I had planned.

What was going to be a showpiece dessert turned into a humble-looking (but delicious) trifle. It would have been better to look for a recipe that used the ingredients I had and noting the proportions instead of just going off the cuff. After all, I have hundreds of cookbooks – why try to reinvent the wheel when there is a world of great options at my fingertips?