First, We Eat is a biweekly observation and celebration of food, cooking and food’s place in our lives.
In an online interview with broadcaster Lee C. Camp in March 2025, chef and author Jacques Pépin said food is the great equalizer that unites people.
Food is at the heart of Pépin’s life and has filtered into his avocation as a painter as well, with chickens serving as a favourite subject. He has painted hundreds of whimsical watercolours of chickens — chickens with leek legs, eggplant bellies, nasturtium-leaf bellies, artichoke bodies. They’re utterly charming and featured in his latest book, an autobiography titled Art of the Chicken: A Master Chef’s Paintings, Stories, and Recipes of the Humble Bird.
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Pépin has been a legendary figure in North America’s culinary history for seven decades, as a chef, writer, educator and TV personality. He began his professional apprenticeship at 13 after years of informal apprenticeship in his mother’s small-town, bare-bones bistro, Le Pelican, in Bourg-en-Bresse in eastern France. He ended up cooking for three French heads of state, including Charles de Gaulle, before he was 25. In 1959, he came to America and was hired at Le Pavilion, New York City’s French culinary temple.
Pépin famously declined the job of White House chef for President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Instead, he went into R&D at Howard Johnson’s highway pit-stop restaurant chain, where he learned the importance of methodology and kitchen science as he developed large-scale recipes for the company’s line cooks in over 1,000 restaurants.
He put that knowledge to use at Le Potagerie, a soup-kitchen prix fixe cafeteria in Manhattan from 1970-75, Pépin’s only self-owned restaurant. He went on to consult for numerous prestigious restaurants. In 1974, Pépin survived a near-fatal car accident that ended his restaurant career.
Pépin’s first books, La Téchnique and La Méthode, were published in 1976 and 1979 and made his talented hands famous, appearing in hundreds of photographs of how to execute kitchen skills. He hit TV airwaves on PBS in 1982 and created countless cookbooks to keep pace with his burgeoning career as a TV chef.
I met Pépin in Calgary in 1986. I’d completed my apprenticeship and was working as an assistant to visiting chefs at a Calgary cooking school. Pépin was touring North American culinary shops for thirty weeks of the year, giving classes crammed with tricks of the trade and practical advice. His latest book at the time, A French Chef Cooks at Home, was an approachable take on la vie française. My dog-eared copy has scribbled notes beside peasant dishes that were new to me at the time but have since become favourites, among them cassoulet, tarte Tatin and soufflé.
Beyond being a master technician, Pépin fit the “charming French demi-god” model to the eyebrow. Oh, my goodness, I fell in love while I peeled carrots and made pastry. His inscription in my well-thumbed copy of French Chef reads, “Thanks so much! I couldn’t have done it without you!” Of course he could have managed. He’s a superman.
Relying on the affective memory — the memory of the senses — is how Pépin learned to cook and how he rekindles his recollections of childhood. Nowadays, walking in the Connecticut woods with his dog, the scent of trees and fungus remind him of foraging with his father. This visceral approach to memory has informed how he interacts with his granddaughter, Storey, taking her to the garden to smell tarragon or parsley, sitting together at the counter to make a salad.
Over the years he made Emmy-Award-winning TV cooking shows — with Julia Child, his daughter Claudine and with Storey. He also became a respected dean and educator at the French Culinary Institute and, with Child, is one of the co-founders of what has become a master’s program in gastronomy at Boston University.
Now 91, Pépin is still painting, still writing. Still cooking. He’s still visible on YouTube: a notable clip was recorded in 2022 when he appeared on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show as PR for his Chicken book. The consummate TV star, he was unflappable as he made a French omelet: while whisking, stirring and folding, he showed Fallon and the show’s drummer, Questlove, how to make omelets, too. But they simply couldn’t keep up with the master and their finished omelets looked pretty sad. His was perfect, of course.
While painting, Pépin says, the work takes hold and he rarely knows where it’s going. Like life. Ain’t it so. Salut, Chef.
First, we eat, then, perhaps, we paint.
Chicken Pot Pie
In his decade-long tenure as director of R&D at Howard Johnson, Pépin learned about American cooking. Not much is more North American than chicken pot pie. Here’s a scaled-down version. Serves 6-8.
- 1 chicken, poached or roasted
- 1 pastry recipe of your choice
- 4 tbsp. butter
- 4 cloves garlic
- 1 onion
- 4 carrots, diced
- 4 stalks celery, minced
- salt and Aleppo chili flakes to taste
- 3 tbsp. all-purpose flour
- ½ c. white wine
- bay leaf
- ½ tsp. dried thyme
- 4 c. chicken stock, heated
- ½ c. + 2 tbsp. whipping cream, divided
- 1 c. peas
- 1 egg yolk
- a handful of parsley, minced
Preheat oven to 375°F. Remove meat from chicken carcass, then chop and chill meat. Reserve bones for stock.
Roll pastry to 3/8” thickness, in size that corresponds to your baking dish with a 1” overlap all around, fluting pastry edges to match the dish’s dimensions. Cut several slashes in the pastry, then cover and chill.
Melt butter in a heavy-bottomed pan. Add garlic, onion, carrots, celery, salt and chili flakes. Sauté over medium-high heat, then reduce heat, cover snugly and sweat until tender. Add flour, mix well and cook for several minutes until it acquires a sandy texture.
Stir in wine and herbs, mix well, and slowly add stock, mixing with each addition. Bring to a boil, whisking thoroughly. Add ½ c. cream and peas; adjust seasoning. Stir in chicken meat and simmer until hot.
Transfer to casserole and cover with pastry. Whisk reserved cream with yolk, then brush over pastry. Bake for 30-45 minutes, until golden brown. Let rest before serving.