Editors’ Note: This week, CT Mirror is publishing our Best of 2024 series. This story, originally published on Oct. 6, 2024, was chosen because it is part of our “Crossing Connecticut” series. We experimented with venturing slightly beyond our public policy focus in 2023, publishing stories that capture different vignettes of life in Connecticut. Based on positive reader feedback to the first “Crossing Connecticut” stories last year, we doubled down on this concept in 2024, with everyone from our managing editor to our interns getting in on the feature fun.
This story is a look at the impact of chef Jacques Pépin on the state’s food community.
Jacques Pépin picks chanterelles every summer in the backyard of his Connecticut home. They pop from the ground, wavy golden goblets waiting for him in the shade.
Those chanterelles, prized by chefs the world over for their nutty, peppery flavor, are one of many ingredients Pépin has found in the landscape around the Madison home he’s lived in for four decades. The world-renowned chef has fished the rivers and dug for clams on the beaches. He drinks wine from a local vineyard and makes his impeccable omelets with eggs he buys from a neighbor down the road, flecked with herbs from his garden. On occasion, he’ll pick up a freshly slaughtered chicken or duck from her, too.
This all paints an aspirational picture of seasonal eating in the coastal Connecticut landscape. But to Pépin, ingredients themselves aren’t precious. Eating doesn’t have to be picture-perfect. You’re just as likely to see him shopping at the Big Y, picking up a lonely box of bruised white mushrooms and a pre-cut chicken breast.
“When I came to America in 1959, 1960, there was one salad in the supermarket, that was iceberg — that’s it,” Pépin recalled from his kitchen in Madison. “There was no leek, no shallot, there was basically no fish.”
Pépin is 88 now, and he’s spent more than half of his life in the U.S.
He grew up in war-torn France, at a time when his mother, also a professional cook, concocted desserts with crushed eggshells.
“That’s why I’m a very miserly cook, you know. Taking from my mother, who could cook a dish with basically nothing.”
Pépin left school and home at age 13 to become an apprentice in a kitchen that followed the strict brigade system created by Auguste Escoffier. It’s a French hierarchical model of culinary professionalism that was exported to restaurants across the globe.
Pépin worked his way from station to station, mastering everything from butchery to sauces. For many years he was unable to afford to eat in the restaurants where he labored.
From there, his life reads a bit like a French Forrest Gump: he cooked for three French presidents. A chance decision to check out America brought Pépin to what would unexpectedly become his adopted home. He was offered a job in the Kennedy White House but instead decided to work for the Howard Johnson’s hotel empire, where he was charged with making recipes at a mass scale. It was, for Pépin, an intriguing new challenge, and he’s quick to remind those surprised by his choice that back then a White House cook was an unknown figure behind the kitchen door, rather than a powerful celebrity.
Almost as soon as he arrived in the U.S., Pépin enrolled in Columbia University to learn English. Over more than a decade of study, he completed a bachelor’s and master’s degree there, despite having never finished high school in France.
During that time, he started renting a house with some friends in the Catskills and learned to ski, and he quickly got good enough to become a weekend ski instructor. On the slopes, he met his wife Gloria. He partied with Craig Claiborne and James Beard. He became friends with Julia Child and a cooking host on U.S. television.
This is how most Americans came to know Pépin, on the airwaves with Child. They were an entertaining duo who had the rapport and occasional disagreements indicative of a real friendship. Even before they met, Pépin admired Child’s book, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” for the careful and intuitive way it codified technique into a volume that most anyone could follow.
Actually, Pépin was jealous and wished he’d written such a book. Since then, he’s authored more than 30, many of them self-illustrated, covering everything from “The Art of Chicken” to “Happy Cooking.” His 1976 “La Technique” was a landmark volume, with no recipes, just the skills that are taught in a professional kitchen or school. “La Technique” offered the opportunity for a home cook, long before The Food Network or YouTube existed, to close the knowledge gap.
Over the years, Pépin’s books have gotten distinctly less French, drawing on America’s rich foodways and its many immigrant cuisines. “Cooking My Way” includes recipes like black bean soup, a grits soufflé and arroz con pollo.
“I’m probably the quintessential American chef now, rather than French chef,” Pépin said.
Small decisions
Most anyone can relate to Pépin’s theory of how one’s life comes to take shape: “You do some small decisions, which you think are small. Like I say, ‘I’m going to go to America for a year.’” That small decision led him to jobs, friendships, his spouse, TV fame, dozens of books. “I came here, and it’s 60 years later.”
Pépin came to Connecticut after he survived a brutal car accident in 1974. He and his wife had an apartment in New York City, and decided to sell their second home in the Catskills, where their weekends had centered around skiing, a sport Pépin could no longer enjoy. They took a look at some towns within striking distance of New York City. Madison was on the itinerary — they had a few acquaintances there, and it was on the coast.
They found a lot to like. At the time, Madison was a short commute to the train in New Haven, and the property they found was four acres, suitable for a garden and a boules court (a French game similar to bocci, which Pépin adores). Et voila! They decided to call Madison home. It’s a decision Pépin calls “purely arbitrary,” and yet, that’s how a life is made.
That chance decision has had a big impact on Connecticut’s food community.
“He means so much to the culinary world worldwide, but for the state of Connecticut, I don’t think it can fully be measured how many chefs have a story about Jacques,” said Scott Dolch, president of the Connecticut Restaurant Association — whether it’s the story of a teen starstruck by seeing Pépin at an event in Connecticut who went on to become a professional chef, or a chef who had the chance to cook alongside Pépin at a local event, or an aspiring chef who received free training in Hartford thanks to fundraising efforts by Pépin.
In 2022, the Connecticut Restaurant Association honored Pépin with its lifetime achievement award, a suggestion Dolch said was brought to him by chef and restaurateur Dan Meiser.
“To this day, if Jacques is in the room, pick your star-powered chef — those guys are the ones who are like, ‘Holy shit, there’s Jacques Pépin,’” said Meiser of Oyster Club in Mystic. “You look at his impact on the food world in the U.S. in particular, and you can make an argument without question that of all the chefs with us today, he has had the greatest impact on shaping the conversation.”
That conversation centers on sustainability, seasonality, frugality and technique. And it’s a conversation that draws in not just professional chefs but a growing number of home cooks, game to learn how to stuff sausage or bake their own sourdough bread.
Meiser first met Pépin as a cooking student at the now-defunct French Culinary Institute in New York. There, Pépin taught alongside French chefs André Soltner and Alain Sailhac. “It was like going to basketball camp and having Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson as your coaches.”
Pépin became an ardent supporter of Meiser when he opened Oyster Club, where chef Rene Touponce was a 2023 James Beard Award finalist for Best Chef Northeast (and in 2024, a James Beard Award finalist for Outstanding Chef at Port of Call, its sister restaurant). Meiser grew up with the same experience of foraging and hunting as Pépin, albeit in Pennsylvania and Connecticut rather than France. Like many who get to know Pépin, the two were soon enjoying many great meals together, often with hunted or foraged ingredients.
And they played boules.
“He’s so competitive, and his game is so good, it’s humbling. I’ve been an athlete my whole life, and he absolutely rules the roost on the boules court.”
Meiser’s story isn’t singular. Across the state, Connecticut chefs who have crossed paths with Pépin find themselves, for decades after, basking in the warmth of his company — and losing to him at boules.
“He’s so kind, so gentle, so thoughtful,” Meiser said. “I have never been around someone else of his elevated status who doesn’t have one single drop of arrogance.”
Chef Michel Nischan, the co-founder of Wholesome Wave, which helps low-income Americans buy nutritious food, first met Pépin when he was working for a hotel, in his case a Marriott. Nischan moved to Connecticut with his young family, looking for a place he could commute into New York for work. Nischan says this trend, of chefs coming to Connecticut for access to one of the great food cities in the world, has helped create the perfect conditions for a restaurant scene that’s starting to gain national recognition in its own right.
Nischan came to Connecticut because it seemed like a good place to raise a family but said, “With Jacques leading the way, there’s a culinary community here as well.”
The great equalizer
A quick tour of Pépin’s kitchen reveals a tin of his signature brand of payusnaya caviar, a kind of pressed caviar paste, in the freezer. There’s also a jar of Jif in the cupboard. As for the eggs Pepin gets from down the road, Meiser sees them through Pépin’s eyes.
“He can make a custard, an omelet, a baked egg dish,” Meiser said. “He looks forward to a simple tomato sandwich at the end of August. In late April, I’ll bet he’s having dreams of asparagus popping up in May.”
Pépin isn’t just drawn to meeting chefs at the state’s top restaurants, Meiser said. “He appreciates people, whether it’s a fry cook at McDonald’s or a saucier. He respects people who have dedicated their lives to food.”
Eight years ago, Pépin and his son-in-law launched the Jacques Pépin Foundation, with the goal of helping a wider swath of people find careers in food.
“I thought, maybe people who have been a bit disenfranchised with life, like people who come out of jail, homeless people, former drug addicts, people like this,” Pépin recalled.
Pépin knew from experience that cooking could be a great equalizer. His foundation raises funds to put people through training programs. When they finish, they might start out working at the bottom rung of a restaurant, as he did, but “if that person likes this, they stay in that restaurant, and maybe five years later, they are the chef there. That’s how it works, and they redo their life. So it’s been very gratifying.”
Pépin doesn’t turn 90 until December of 2025. But he has big plans for the interim. Ninety ticketed dinners will be held across the country beginning this month, where other esteemed chefs will cook and raise funds for the foundation, an effort called 90 for 90. The first four will be held in New York, with the kickoff at Gramercy Tavern.
Dinners like these have formed some of Pépin’s greatest memories. He keeps books of menus that he illustrates from virtually every dinner he’s put on for more than 50 years, a sort of long-running set of diaries. He’s even published a book of illustrated templates that people can use to keep their own memories of special meals.
Pépin is putting out another book soon, a combination of his artwork and recipes. His daughter helps him make Facebook videos of cooking lessons.
“My daughter Claudine, four years ago, said, ‘Why don’t you do a small show for Facebook, like three minutes, four minutes, five.’ I said, OK. So we did some” — some meaning over 300 videos. “We have almost 2 million people on Facebook. I would never have done that — I don’t even go on Facebook. My daughter takes care of that.”
Since Pépin’s wife died in 2020, the community they built in Connecticut keeps him company. So does his dog, Gaston, an 11-year-old black mini poodle, whom he treats with disarming tenderness.
But without Gloria, life here isn’t the same. For more than five decades, the two would sit down for dinner each night and share a bottle of wine.
“So now I sit down by myself. It’s different.”
