Many people learned the skills they need to become competent and efficient home cooks from family members. Others used media to learn when they became responsible for feeding themselves and others.
Penny learned some basics from aunts and uncles. Still, her real training began in 1976 with the publication of La Technique: An Illustrated Guide to the Fundamental Techniques of Cooking by Jacques Pépin. We still have our well-used copy of the paperback edition of that book.
Wikipedia traced the beginning of the Jacques Pépin we know today. “In 1976, Pépin authored his cookbook La Technique, followed by La Méthode in 1979. The use of thousands of photographs, illustrating the techniques and methods required to achieve certain culinary results, provided a window into the art of cooking. The books are credited by chef Tom Colicchio and others as helping them to learn the craft of cooking.”
Inside the Book
There are forty-seven techniques covered in our copy of the book. They range from how to hold a knife to how to make stuffed eggs. In between are many of the chef's signature knife skills: olive rabbits, fluted mushrooms, and tomato roses. These are fun, and if you’ve watched his videos, you know that while these grab your attention, he offers so much more.
One of the first and long-lasting techniques Penny learned from this book is cooking "en papillote." Once you learn how to turn a sheet of parchment paper into a sealed container for a few vegetables, herbs, and a piece of protein, like salmon, you have a quick, healthy, and easy meal skill.
We both still cut citrus fruit a la Jacques! We celebrate when we succeed in removing the peel in one long strip. We enjoy the perfectly segmented fruit that results from his instructions. While we never indulge in creating orange baskets, we can produce perfect crosscuts of orange when we want them.
Sole Meunière could be a daunting task for a home cook, but the old black-and-white photos of the chef’s hands as he removes the side bones, flours the fillet, cooks, debones, dresses with butter, and serves the fish make it seem doable.
If you have an angler in your household, you can present them with the section on trout, where they will learn how to clean and bone the fish. Once prepped, the next techniques are for three ways to prepare the fish.
More Ways to Learn from Jacques Pépin
To this day, Penny has almost daily check-ins with this mentor via YouTube, where videos reinforce the techniques from the book within practical recipes aimed at home cooks.
The public television station KQED in San Francisco still presents episodes of his television series Today’s Gourmet.
Chef Pépin also partnered with Julia Child in the WGBH series Cooking In Concert, More Cooking in Concert, and Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home. It was always educational to listen to these two masters debate the fine details of a recipe or technique.
Penny has also benefited from the Culinary Certificate Program and Master's degrees in Gastronomy, which the chef helped to establish at Boston University. Since 1989, she has taken advantage of the public offering of in-person lectures and classes offered as part of this curriculum.
One thing we have learned, in addition to techniques, is that time spent with a food educator like Jacques Pépin has made us better food consumers, less wasteful, and helped put delicious food on our table.
Do you have a question or topic for Fresh & Local? Email [email protected] with your suggestion.