Top 22 Jacques Pepin Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Jacques Pepin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

This is what a family is all about - one another, sitti

This is what a family is all about – one another, sitting around the table at night. And it’s very, very important, I think, for the kid to spend time not only around the table eating with their parents, but in the kitchen.
Jacques Pepin
One of the biggest problems with young chefs is too much addition to the plate. You put cilantro and then tarragon and then olive oil and then walnut oil or whatever. It’s too much.
Jacques Pepin
When I pair food and wine, I start with the food. If I have a beautiful roasted bird, I might choose a Cabernet or Pinot Noir, or maybe a Syrah, depending on the sauce and what is in my cellar.
Jacques Pepin
Just because I am a chef doesn’t mean I don’t rely on fast recipes. Indeed, we all have moments when, pressed for time, we’ll use a can of tuna and a tomato for a first course. It’s a question of choosing the right recipes for the rest of the menu.
Jacques Pepin
I have an immigrant story. Most people come here for economic reasons, or religious reasons, or racial reasons, or gender reasons, or one of those things. I had a good job in Paris, but America was, and still is, the golden fleece. And I’ve done very well!
Jacques Pepin
You can’t escape the taste of the food you had as a child. In times of stress, what do you dream about? Your mother’s clam chowder. It’s security, comfort. It brings you home.
Jacques Pepin
Great cooking favors the prepared hands.
Jacques Pepin
Thirty, 40 years ago, more than that now, even, the cook was certainly at the bottom of the social scale. And any mother would’ve wanted their child to marry a doctor, a lawyer, an architect, not a cook. Now, we are genius, it’s different.
Jacques Pepin
All the great chefs I know – Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten – they are technicians first.
Jacques Pepin
Basically, I go to the local farmer’s market and decide to what to cook then, depending on what I find. Either my wife or I cook, and we usually finish a bottle or two of wine by the time we are done cooking and eating.
Jacques Pepin
When I was a child, we always had wine on the table, no matter how simple the meal. The wine had no special identity; it was just ‘the wine,’ from the cellar cask. The rules were general: white with the first course, red with the main course.
Jacques Pepin
Probably a mistake, you know, that people make in America, to think that all great chefs are a male… I’m still the only male in the family who went into that business.
Jacques Pepin
I am a glutton. I’ll eat whatever is there. Pizza. I love hot dogs anywhere. I’ve got nothing against any of that. If I feel like eating, I eat. I don’t feel guilty about it at all.
Jacques Pepin
This June, I’ll travel once again to the Food and Wine Magazine Classic in Aspen, Colorado. For many years, my dear friend Julia Child and I have teamed up to teach classes together at the event; for the past seven years, my daughter, Claudine, has been my cooking partner on stage.
Jacques Pepin
If you have extraordinary bread and extraordinary butter, it’s hard to beat bread and butter.
Jacques Pepin
I say: If you don’t know how to cook, I’m sure you have at least one friend who knows how to cook. Well, call that friend and say, ‘Can I come next time and can I bring some food and can I come an hour or two hours ahead and watch you and help you?’
Jacques Pepin
When I wrote ‘Fast Food My Way’ in 2004, I hoped that my friends would prepare my recipes. Now, more people cook from that book than any other I’ve written in the past 30 years.
Jacques Pepin
I taped my first series for PBS in 1982 at WJCT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida. The show, called ‘Everyday Cooking with Jacques Pepin,’ was about saving time and money in the kitchen – and it was a celebration of simple and unpretentious food.
Jacques Pepin
I tell a student that the most important class you can take is technique. A great chef is first a great technician. ‘If you are a jeweler, or a surgeon or a cook, you have to know the trade in your hand. You have to learn the process. You learn it through endless repetition until it belongs to you.
Jacques Pepin
You know, my parents had a restaurant. And I left home, actually, in 1949, when I was 13 years old, to go into apprenticeship. And actually when I left home, home was a restaurant – like I said, my mother was a chef. So I can’t remember any time in my life, from age 5, 6, that I wasn’t in a kitchen.
Jacques Pepin
Most people who came here came for economic reasons or sometimes for religious or political reasons. I didn’t have any of this. I came here, I liked it, I stayed. So I’m a pure American – even more than people who are born here – because I did it by choice as an adult.
Jacques Pepin
The idea of old was to conform yourself to a style of cooking, it was not to create a style of cooking. Now the chef is so much into ‘I want to sign that dish and say I am the one who made that dish.’
Jacques Pepin