The New Yorker Radio Hour - Home Cooking with Jacques Pepin and Klancy Miller

Episode Date: August 24, 2021

For generations of cooks, Jacques Pépin has been the master. Early in his career he cooked for eminences like Charles DeGaulle, and was offered a job at the White House. But after a serious car accident ended his time in restaurants, Pépin remade a new career as a teacher, cookbook author, chef, and broadcaster. On television—at first alongside his friend Julia Child—he brought the gospel of French cooking into so many American homes, at a time when there was no other fine cuisine. At eighty-five, he is still active on Facebook Live, with a notably humble variety of use-what-you-got cooking that’s well suited to the pandemic era. Pépin consented to a one-on-one lesson with David Remnick, a cooking novice, and together they tackled the subtle art of making a crêpe. Plus, Klancy Miller, the author of “Cooking Solo,” talks with the food correspondent Helen Rosner about her underlying philosophy: you should treat yourself as well as you would treat anyone else. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm in my kitchen, standing at the stove with a laptop on the counter. And meanwhile, as the pan heats up, I'm zooming into another kitchen in Connecticut, where Jacques Pepin is perched on a chair. He's 85 and looks 20 years younger. He came to prominence as a chef in the 1960s after years of of cooking and regimented French kitchens. He cooked for Charles de Gaulle and other French leaders, and he was offered a job at the White House too. But starting in the 1970s, Papin wield a new career into being, teaching, publishing books, and broadcasting. He trained generations of chefs, and on television, first alongside Julia Child, he brought the gospel into many, many American homes.

So it's a little unnerving, uncanny, looking at Jacques-Bapan because I've seen him so many times in this kitchen, but now he's looking back at me, and the expression in his hazel eyes is he's concerned because he's already sized up my skills at the stove. So I have to tell you I'm nervous as hell. It's like getting basketball lessons from LeBron James. I don't know what to tell you. No. This is not brand surgery.

You know, it's all right. Are you sure? Are you sure? Yes. I'm only halfway decent at scrambled eggs, at best, halfway decent. But a pat is going to walk me through something a little harder, making a crepe. I've got eggs, I've got milk, I've got butter, I've got flour. All right, so first, why don't you put a piece of butter to melt, like a couple of tablespoon in the skillet that you are going to make the crepe in?

Let's see the skillets. skillet, right? It's a non-stick skillet. Okay, good. And a tablespoon of butter? Well, a good tablespoon and a half, I would say. All right, it heats on. I don't think you have the right amount here. Shut the way, throw it at the end of the night. All right, it's melting like it should. All right. All right. Now put your flour in the bowl with the eggs, a dash of salt paper, and like half of the milk. Okay, how much flour? So you have half a cup of flour, I think.

How many eggs? One egg. Okay. Good. A little dash of salt. And any kind of salt? Cauture salt's okay? Yeah, it's fine.

And that's a bigger dash of sugar. Three-quarter of a cup of milk. So just put about, measure your milk, and put about half of it in the flour. Just half of it? Yes, just half of it. All right. Three quarter of a cup of milk, voila,

and just put half of it in the flour. About, yes. Mix it with a whisk, right? Well, let's see that whisk. This is a mini-wisk. Wow. It should come together very smooth. Okay, I think it's fantastic.

Yeah, I think it's smooth, yes, right. Right. If you put all the milk, if you put all the milk to start with and you have lump. So now you can put the rest of the milk in it. Okay. Is your butter melted? Oh yes. In fact, you'll be glad to know it's burned. Yeah, so anyway. Let's do that again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Throw it out, right. Ooh. Oh, yeah, you don't have to wash it. I've not felt this much pressure in some time. In some time, okay, more butter. All right, okay. How high is the heat? Very high.

All right, now you can put it in your batter. Pour the butter in the batter. Yeah, yeah. Stir it well. With my pathetic whisk. Now, now you're ready to make the crepe. How much more butter do I put back in the pan? You don't put any more butter, that's it.

That's it, okay. Okay, now you spread it out fast. Fast, move it, move it. So that's to spread it out fast because otherwise he's going to take. Okay, so now... I spread out the batter, but the skillet isn't covered all the way, so I add in more batter to cover it, but then the first bit of batter starts to burn.

What happens is that as soon that that batter touched the pan, it's solidified. So if you don't spread it fast, then it's solidified and it's thicker. So you have to spread it fast. Oh, you have to be more assertive. Grab it with your hand now. Grab it with my hands, the crept. Okay, well, now it's telling us.

So that one is for the dog usually. Okay, so after that humbling moment, I pour another measure of batter in the pan. All right. Now? Okay, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Oh, all right.

It's a lot of apprenticeship. Looks good, look good though. Come so? Yeah, that's good. Yeah, you should do, with the batter that you have, you should have done six crepes. When I was an apprentice, I had six pan, pouring it in one.

Six of them going in once? Yeah, six at the same time. So, you know, you really have to be sacronized. You flip one, you turn the other. You flip one, you turn the other, you pull the barrel in the third pan, and so forth. So, Chuck, what is your earliest memory of making creps? I mean, this seems to be something that is one of the first things in your training,

now, as an apprentice? Not only that, way before that, during the war, we didn't have too much to eat. And my mother would do crepe with flour, basically flour and water. And sometimes we had a leftover bread. She would soak the bread, a piece of bread, and put it on top of that batter. And that thing would really stuff you up. Wasn't particularly good, but it was stuff you up, and she put some type of syrup on top of it. We didn't have much sugar.

So she used the bits, big bits, you know, and she would cut it, cook it with water, and reduce that to do a syrup to replace the sugar. You know, so that probably first memory of crepe. The crepe have always been part of the, you know, part of my family, whether very inexpensive type of crepe or very elegant, you know, done in restaurants in one or the other. But, I mean, the basic crepe is easy to do. Jacques, tell me this. What was your first memory in the kitchen? You often, when you make a dish in your shows and your videos over the years, you smile and you say, you know, my mother would be very proud of me. It's a very touching moment. It's clearly something resonant with you. When did you start cooking? Well, probably age six, seven. My mother, I had two brothers, an older one, a younger one. And my mother at a restaurant from about the age, six, seven.

my mother, I had two brothers, an older one, a younger one, and my mother at a restaurant from about the age five, six, that I was. So actually in France, I can count 12 restaurants, 12 of them own and operated by women. My aunt, cousin, too, I was the first male to go into that business. My father was a cabinet maker by trade. But during the war, we helped in the kitchen, whether to feed. the chicken or to peel the potato or to help or in the cellar with my father. So from age five, six, yes, we were in the kitchen. Actually, I left home when I was 13, 1949. I left home to go

into apprenticeship. I was 13 years old. And as I said, I had been in the kitchen for a while already. So, yes, that was part of the... When people hear the word apprenticeship, I think they have no idea how difficult it is. What is it like? Well, it was very structured. It was kind of formal, but, you know, that's the way it was. I mean, we work from 8 o'clock in the morning till 10 at night with a cut of 2 to 5 in the afternoon. And then we had the bed. We slept upstairs. Now we were seven days a week because at the end of the month, I had four days off, one day per week, even though there is more than four weeks in a month. So at that point, I would take the bus to go back to my house to go back to my mother because we live about 45 mile from Lyon to taking

my towel, I had three towel, my jacket, pants, the sheet of my bed, all of that to bring that to my mother to wash and bring it back because they didn't do that for you. In addition to that, we were not paid. I wasn't paid for two years. The third years, I started getting a little bit of money, third year of apprenticeship, you know. But I mean, I don't want to make it sound that it was We're very happy. I had three or four apprentices. We had a bowl. You know, that's the way life was.

So you cannot look at it in the context of now. You know, it's another world. And you came to America and you came on the scene and along with Julia Child introduced French cooking to Americans. How have you seen the food scene change over the years? It's got to be radical. It would take an hour to talk about that. I mean, I came here in 1959. I remember going to the...

I live on 50th between 1st, Second Avenue in New York. And there was a little supermarket next door. I forget the name of it. Anyway, it was my first supermarket. And I thought it was great to have everything under the same roof. In France, I had to go to the fishmonger, then the meat and the vegetable, all different stores. I thought it was great, but in the market,

there was a lot of package, package, package. There was only one salad. That was iceberg. There was no shallot, no leak. And I remember say, where are the mushroom? They say, aisle five. That was canned mushroom. There's no way you had any fresh mushroom. You get to a specialty store. So the supermarket have never been as beautiful as they are today. So this is another world. It's totally, totally different. Yeah. What changed everything? What do you think was the moment when the whole food scene changed? Many, many things. I mean, certainly women liberation in the 60s, organic gardening, women liberation. After the war, American GI and all that going back to Europe, in vacation, going back to Italy,

France, looking for food. All of that changed, you know, the plane itself. I mean, for me, the first time, I came on a student boat, first time I took a plane was, I was going at Columbia University at the time. So they had a charter plane. First time I went back to France and it was still the propeller and all that. That was 1963, whatever. And at that time, the people were starting going to Europe with those chartered, and you get exposed to food, to market there, you come back. And, you know, all of that was the beginning of big change in America.

But certainly the food now, I don't think there is any place in the world where you have the type of variety, you know, because of the ethnicity that we have in America, like 24,000 restaurants in New York, I mean, this is unmatched anywhere in the world, the type. In fact, when I came to America, I worked at the pavilion. All the great restaurants were French restaurants, or so-called French restaurant, continental restaurant, where most of the stuff totally misspelled, but anyway,

there was no great Chinese restaurant, no great Chinese restaurant, no great Italian restaurant, no great Japanese restaurant, supposedly all the great fancy restaurant were French. And look at it now, you know, there is some French restaurant now. I mean, Danielle, per se, but there is extraordinary from Chinese to Japanese to Thai and so forth. So the thing has changed incredibly. There was no wine when I came to this country. There was no great bread, wine, cheese, charcutry, you know, that type of thing did not exist.

It was very, very different. What role did Julia child play in that revolution? Well, she did. I mean, I met Julia in 1960. So it was before she did any television, before she had any book. In fact, I met her because when I came to the U.S., I worked at the pavilion, and then I met Craig Leborn, who started at the New York Times at the Food Critics, with Pierre Frannie, with the executive chef at the pavilion.

He introduced me to Helen McColley. Helen Bacolet was the full editor of McColle, how's beautiful. So she became my surrogate mother. I mean, you know, don't do this, do that, do whatever. She lived next to me in New York. And one day she said, oh, I have a manuscript.

I want you to look at that. It was a manuscript of mastering the art of French cooking that she, that, you know, the editor sent to different people to review. And she said, oh, the woman, he lives in Boston. She's coming next to it here. Do you want to cook? Or I say, yeah, absolutely. that was Julia. She said, you know, she's a very tall woman with a terrible voice. Okay,

and I remember that I met Julia, 1960, and we mostly spoke French because she just spent over two years in France. Her French was better than the English at the time. So, so that's how I met her. And then eventually she started doing her show in 64, I believe, 63 or 4. And the mastering the other French cooking came a couple of years later. No, she was very influential in the sense that she was very natural. She was very matter of fact, you know. And PBS, I mean, I have done show for PBS for 35 years. And, you know, I love PBS.

So, yeah. Now, a lot of the shows on television are no longer just what used to be called stand and stir. Oh, yeah. They're competitions. They're game shows, in a sense, with food. You like those? No. No. I mean, I don't, I don't even watch my show, so I don't really watch cooking show on television. What has cooking been like for you and your family during the pandemic?

Well, frankly, I have done over 200 shows of the Facebook show that I do during the pandemic. So it has been quite rewarding in many ways. But for me, I have many friends here, and cooking is always associated with being together with friends. It's a lifestyle. You know, when my daughter was two years old, a year and a half, two years, I hold her in my arm, and I'm doing something. And I say, okay, Melange, so mix it. So she would mix it, so she, quote, made it because she was, so she was going to eat it. She made it. So my granddaughter, I have a stool next to me, not now. She's taller than me, but when she was four, five, six years old, she said, okay, give me a bowl, give me a bowl, give me a bag, okay, do you give me the salad? Do you think that's where a salad is clean? Do you want to wash it?

wash the salad. Okay. So she goes. Then I take her to the garden. I say, get some parsley. She said, no, that's not parsley. That's sharp. Test it. See, it tastes that potty. That's sharp. Then I take her to the market. I said, okay, I need pear. Make sure they are ripe or tomato. You think those tomatoes are ripe. Did you smell them? Did you touch them? So did you come back? That's the whole canvas of communication that I have with the kid, you know. And that brings some other conversation. And more importantly, not the cooking together, but the sitting done and the enjoying of the food together. You know, there is no place like the table. The table is a great equalizer for everybody around the table, you know, especially in our time of polarization, you know.

Jacques, I've heard you say that, you know, you're often asked things like, what's your favorite food? You say you can't beat good bread and butter. Oh, yes. But is there a, thankfully, you know, nobody's sentencing you to the gallows. but what would be your last meal? What is the thing that you would want to know that you have a taste of? Well, I'm going to have from caviar to champagne to hot dog, to ham and egg, to squab. I mean, the most important thing is that it's going to be very, very, very, very long. Maybe a few months. That's a good meal.

Jacques, thank you so much, and you'd be well. All right. All the very, all the very best. I like great day. Happy cooking. Okay. Jacques Papin, the author of dozens of cookbooks, most recently Jacques Papin, quick and simple, which came out last year. Now, a cookbook that a lot of foodies have been talking about during the pandemic is called

Cooking Solo. It's by the food writer Clancy Miller. Miller trained as a pastry chef in Paris, and she recently launched a new magazine called For the Culture, which is all about black women in the world. the food and wine field. One of her big fans is our staff writer Helen Rosner. I'm so excited to talk with Clancy Miller, the writer and editor and cookbook author, whose 2016 book, Cooking Solo, The Joy of Cooking for Yourself, is one of those books that, for me, changed the way that I cook. It changed the way that I think about cooking as an act of care, not just to other people, but to myself.

It was a real philosophical awakening. And over the last year and a half, it's been especially apt as the world has moved through various lockdowns, restaurant closures, reopens, grocery availability and scarcities. I think the way that everybody has cooked has changed a little bit. And Clancy's book has been one of my guideposts. It's been a hell of a summer. It has been. It started off so nice. And now it's just like, ha ha, the world is ending.

It's not. It's not. But it's, yeah, this is a heavy, heavy week. A lot of the lessons in the book, both on a sort of practical culinary basis, but also the bigger philosophy that you express, this idea that joy does not have to be shared, right? Joy can be just you and, you know, your beautiful piece of fish or your beautiful. or your beautiful salad or whatever it is, has felt very urgent, I think. I know for so many people who spent time alone over the last year and a half, it feels like a really important philosophy

to hold on to. I think so, yes. It's something that I have believed for a really long time that you as a person are just as worthy of, a generous gesture or a delicious meal as a loved one or anyone you would invite into your home. And I do not think that is a laborious exercise. I think it really can be joyful. I think it can be creative. It can also be very simple. It doesn't have to be an elaborate, you know, feast. But yeah, this summer, first of all, it's been random. The weather, it's like heat wave, rain, heat wave raining. So I generally don't feel like cooking a lot. I make, I make salads a lot. I make like fatouche is my inspirational thing right now. I love making fatush. That's one of my favorites,

the classic Middle Eastern salad with crispy pita bread. And how do you make your dressing? I use lots of lime juice and dried mint. So I've been playing around with different dressings. I sometimes will do just like a lemon garlic, olive oil situation, and I'll add sumac. If I feel like I'm working with extremely flavorful ingredients, I'll just kind of salt it and do lemon juice. One of the things I enjoyed about making cooking solo was figuring out how can you do desserts for one. So I don't know, you can saute some fruit and how. have like a scoop of ice cream or you know what I mean like you can have you can poach some pears I I live with my husband I rarely cook just for myself but when I do it is interesting to have

to build up that activation energy to actually put the effort in just for me and it feels really I don't want to say indulgent because I think that's sort of contrary to what you have been trying to express in your book and in your work since then It's not an indulgence. It's just a simple act of care. But it's this degree of effort that, you know, there's like a bit of a hurdle where it's like, well, you know, slice the apple a little bit nicely. Put it on a real plate. Don't just eat it out of a Ziploc bag or whatever it might be. It feels a little bit more special, which when the world feels like it's falling apart is a sort of gentle corrective. Yeah. I should also say that this book came from a very specific. place for me. I kind of the kernel for the book came from when I was in culinary school, studying pastry, in Paris, and kind of using the city as my homework or my larger classroom. And so everything was really fun for me in terms of A, it was my first time living alone.

B, I had never been to culinary school. C, I was encouraged to actually go out. and look at food and just like be with food in many different ways. So for me, in that that was my first time cooking for myself, it every day felt like an adventure. I think one of the reasons why like I see it as a joyful act is because when I first started cooking for myself, it truly was a joyful act. I'd love to kind of sort of set the scene of, um, of, So you've made your salad, you've made your beautiful piece of fish. What about the act of dining alone? Because cooking alone is one thing.

And I think you can keep yourself occupied, you know, by doing the actual work of cooking. But then you have to sit down and eat. And it's just you. So how do you dine alone? Does that get wrapped in ritual or flowers on the table? Or does that work? I do love flowers on the table. I love getting bouquets of flowers.

I also am a huge fan of candelabras. I collect them. So I like a pretty table. I'm working on a book right now, so sometimes my table gets overloaded with junk, but I like to properly clear it off, sit down, relax. Sometimes I will watch television.

I won't lie. And I don't think that's a bad thing. We're only human. Clancy, thank you so much for giving us this time today and for being so flexible. I really appreciate it. You're welcome. You're welcome. It's my pleasure. This is a nice, a nice thing to look forward to that's not work. It's technically work. It's just the fun kind. Helen Rosner talking with Clancy Miller, author of Cooking Solo. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come.

I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. And before we go, let's have a little fun. We launched a new quiz recently at New Yorker.com, and it comes out every weekday morning. It's kind of addictive, and I promise it won't do anything bad to you. So our Puzzles and Games editor, Liz Mainz Ammanzade, is here to describe the New Yorker's name drop. So, Liz, how do you play? The goal of name drop is to guess the identity of a notable person using as few clues as possible. If you guess correctly after just one clue, you'll score a six. and if you guys have your two clues, you'll score five and so on.

And the clues get easier as you go. So you can do this alone online, but I wanted a friend to do this with. So I've got a little competition now. Staff writer Nomi Frye is here. Nomi, you ready to play? David, I was born ready. I feel like I'm dead in the water here. No.

All right. Liz, you got a starter pistol or something? I don't. Maybe they can edit in an air horn or something. Okay. And the idea is you're going to read out all the clues and we're not going to bark an answer along the way? That's right. So that way people who are listening can play through the full quiz. All right, fair enough.

But we should say, I got it, but we then remain silent. All right. Let's play Name Drop. All right. Round one. This is for six points. When I was a teenager, I played Cleo Hewitt on season four of the TV show Fame. This is, Nomi's going to get this one faster. Go ahead, keep going. TV critic. Well, I don't have it yet. Yeah.

Okay, for five points. We are a nation with no geographic boundaries bound together through our beliefs. I intone these words at the beginning of my fourth studio album, released in 1989. Oh, I got it. David? No, I'm not there yet. Okay, for four. I sat next to my frequent collaborators, Jimmy Jam and Terry.

Louis at a ceremony honoring me as an MTV icon. Alia, a presenter, remarked that my name was synonymous with great dancing. Okay. After the presidential debate in which Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton a nasty woman, Spotify streams of a song from my 1986 album Control rose by 250%. Okay. I'm so tempted to use Google at this point, but I really feel that's wrong. All right, for two. I'm the youngest of 10 children in an accomplished family of musicians.

I severed professional ties with my father, Joe, who had been my manager, after my second album, Dream Street. Uh-huh. Okay, and the final clue. I think I know it. My 10 number one singles include, Miss You Much, That's the Way Love Goes, Together Again, and All for You. Is this Miley Cyrus, maybe? Nomi, what'd you get? It's Janet Jackson.

That's right. It's Janet Jackson? It's Janet Jackson. Oh, God. I did not remember she was on season four of fame. I have to admit. I have never seen that show. Did you watch it, Nomi?

I watched it. I was, I think you're too young, Liz. I watched it when I, this was, I think it was like 1983, maybe. This is my problem. I'm too young, too. I don't remember any of this. That's right. You have another round to catch up.

Should we do it? More boomer questions, please. This one is maybe less generationally biased. Okay, this is round two for six points. I once said that my favorite place to work was the back of my Model A Ford, which I'd converted into a mobile studio. Nope. No.

All right, for five. I occupy the final place setting in the dinner party, the installation by Judy Chicago, who described my work as pivotal in the development of an authentically female iconography. Oh. I feel like I should know this. Yeah, me too. Oh, no. My early work was exhibited by the photographer Alfred Stiglitz, whom I later married and who took hundreds of photographic portraits of me. Oh, now I know this.

Yeah. Okay, so you're both writing it down for four. All right, for three. From the 1930s until shortly before my death in 1986, I spent many of my summers on a property known as the Ghost Ranch near the village of Abakue, New Mexico. Clue two, my painting Jimsonweed White Flower Number One sold for more than $44 million in 2014,

making it the most expensive painting by a female artist. And the final clue, my namesake museum in Santa Fe has in its collection many of my modernist paintings of oversized flowers, animal skulls, and southwestern landscapes. Is it Georgia O'Keefe? It's Georgia O'Keefe. It is Georgia O'Keefe. And you both got that one, I think, on the third clue. Well, who's counting? Who's really counting, Liz?

You know, it's really not winning and losing. It's winning and losing, isn't it? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, you've changed your tune a little, David. Nevertheless, Nomi, Liz, thank you. You're both fired. And I appreciate it. Next time comes some easier ones.

It's really a fun game. And Liz, thank you for you and your colleagues for inventing it. It's great fun, and it's up every day, every weekday at New York.com. Liz, Nomi, thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. You can play it in New Yorker. com slash name drop.

And you can play name drop with us on the air. Liz and I will read you the clues and we'll see how you do. There might even be a prize in there somewhere. So write us at New Yorker Radio at WNYC.org and just make your subject line name drop. And give us a phone number where we can reach you. Again, New Yorker Radio at WNYC.org. Hope to talk with you soon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC.

NYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. And we had additional help from Harrison Keithline. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.