Professional chef Jacques Pépin has cooked in kitchens all over the world. How did he build a home — and a legacy — in Connecticut?
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Laura Tillman to discuss her article, “How chef Jacques Pépin found, and shaped, CT’s food community,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. You can read her story here.
WSHU: How did you get into this story? This is a fascinating story.
LT: Yeah, before I moved to Connecticut, I was living in Mexico City, and I actually wrote a lot about the chefs in Mexico. So when I moved here, I had read a New York Times article about Connecticut looking for its new slogan, and kind of trying to find its identity. In the story, they quote chef Jacques Pépin, who lives in Madison and who’s lived here for decades. And I just sort of stored that away in my brain that, as it turns out, this famous chef is living in this small town in Connecticut.
So when I started at the Mirror, I covered Human Services, and in general, our coverage is, you know, a little more on the hard news side, but we do have this series called Crossing Connecticut that gives us a chance to write about just kind of interesting people and places across the state that fall outside of our usual coverage. So I naturally just thought back to Jacques Pépin and thought, you know, maybe this is my chance to go interview him. And he is getting older. He’s 88 so I just felt, you know, lucky to have had the chance to go to his home and spend a couple of hours with him there.
WSHU: Now, how did he end up in Connecticut? I mean, this is a famous chef. How did Jacques Pépin end up in Connecticut?
LT: Yeah, so he had, you know, a career where he was in New York City, working a lot, but he and his wife had a weekend house in the Catskills because they both love to ski. They actually met each other when Pépin, of one of his many talents, was a weekend ski instructor at a resort in the Catskills, and so they would go there. And then he got in a really bad car accident in the mid-70s.
WSHU: That was about 50 years ago, 1975.
LT: Yes, and so living in this place just didn’t make sense for them anymore because their lives revolved around skiing there. So they decided to look for another place to commute to New York City, where they also had an apartment. And they found this property in Madison, where they had a couple of acquaintances. Jacques Pépin is really into this game called boules, a French version of bocce ball, the Italian game. And so, you know, he found a good property where he could have his boules court, he could have a garden. And they renovated this, this home over the years, and now it’s, you know, it’s his home, where he spends his time when he’s not traveling.
WSHU: Now, Jacques Pépin is famous for creating the Howard Johnson restaurant. Well, it no longer exists. Do we still have Howard Johnson’s? I haven’t seen one in a long time.
LT: I don’t know. I’ve been out of the U.S. for 10 years.
WSHU: I’m not totally sure. But it was almost everywhere when I first came to this country. How did he affect food and the food community in Connecticut?
LT: Yeah, I think he’s known as a generous, unpretentious person, and so he’s kind of touched the lives of people and food here in ways large and small, from, you know, a chef like Dan Meiser, who has this restaurant called Oyster Club in Mystic and has a restaurant group out there where the chef has won or was nominated for a James Beard Award. He has supported those restaurants since they started and is just kind of lending them the support of one of the greatest names in food. I think that means a lot in that kind of context. But he also has this foundation where he raises money to get people culinary training, people from disadvantaged backgrounds where getting that training and getting a professional job inside of a kitchen could change their lives. So some of that money has gone to training chefs in Connecticut.
He also has just kind of created a group of friends and colleagues in that community, people who might have moved to Connecticut because they had jobs in top restaurants in New York City but, over time, have kind of made, made their lives or founded restaurants in Connecticut. So I think that there’s just kind of like a subtle way that he has impacted a lot of people’s lives, and just having someone of his stature here has meant a lot to people who are maybe considering a career in food or already, you know, have a restaurant, and he’s come by, and he’s supported them were, you know, spread praise about them in some way.
WSHU: He’s one of the first celebrity chefs, you know, back in the 60s and 70s with Julia Child, right?
LT: Yeah, I highly recommend looking up some old videos of the two of them, because that was fun to do when I was looking at this. But yeah, he was, you know, it’s almost hard to imagine that we are living in a time now when there are so many people, whether they have a YouTube channel or whether they’re on the Food Network or in magazines that we’re in this kind of peak era of celebrity chefs, but when he was on television, chefs were really not celebrities at all. They were people behind that swinging door of a restaurant kitchen who very few people you know knew their names.
So I think someone like him, you know, being one of the first chefs on American television, who was coming into people’s homes, and he kind of shares that lack of pretentiousness with Julia Child, that the two of them, they’re in they’re trying to introduce Americans to cooking French food, but in a way that didn’t feel intimidating and scary, where it was like, you too at home can make a beautiful omelet, or beef burrito or whatever it is. So I think that that’s very much the feeling that I got when I was around him, just being with someone who doesn’t have any of the arrogance of a celebrity. He’s just a very down-to-earth kind of guy.
WSHU: Tell us about spending some time in his kitchen in Madison.
LT: Yeah, he has this beautiful wall of pots and pans that are just an entire wall of, I don’t know, maybe 40 different pots and pans that are hanging. And he has, you know, some beautiful touches. He’s actually an artist, and he painted a lot of the tiles and things in his kitchen. That’s one detail that somehow didn’t make it into the story. But he will go to the high school and fire these pieces in their kiln of his own artwork and put them, you know, in his kitchen and around his home. But he’s also, like, going back to that lack of pretension, like you’ll find things in his cupboards or his fridge that you wouldn’t expect, like he had a bottle of A1 steak sauce, and he had a jar of Jiffy peanut butter that I, you know, wouldn’t kind of expect someone like him to have in there.
But he also had his caviar, his own brand of caviar that he collaborated with a brand on. And he also gets, you know, fresh eggs from the woman down the road. And he, you know, does bring beautiful ingredients to his kitchen as well. One of the special things I thought about was he told me that he forages for chanterelle mushrooms in his own backyard and that he had, is this something just picked a pound and a half of them the previous week. And not knowing that much about mushrooms, I asked like, is this something that you cultivated on your own property? And it’s like, no, they grow wild. They grow where they want to. So it just kind of made me look at Connecticut a little bit differently when you hear that someone has a pound and a half of chanterelle mushrooms growing in their backyard, just by happenstance. And it definitely made me start looking up some foraging clubs and stuff like that to think about what wild food there might be in the landscape here.
WSHU: Jacques Pépin moved to Connecticut with his wife, who died a few years ago. How has he coped since then? He’s 88 years old.
LT: I asked him about it, and he just said very simply, you know, for over 50 years, they had always shared a bottle of wine every night at dinner. And now he sits down by himself, and it’s different. He also said that he cooks more often for one, and a lot of the time, the things he makes himself are very simple, also being older and just having a slower metabolism that, you know, he might have for lunch a tomato and he would make a tomato salad out of it, something very simple, but probably in a hand, the hands of a chef of his stature, is beautiful, beautifully made. But I think that he has a lot of family and friends around him in Madison, from the photographer who’s photographed, you know, all these cookbooks for him over the years, his daughter comes through, and his, you know, grandchild, and he has all these chefs that come over and make meals with him, or play boules with him.
And then this year, there’s this event called 90 for 90, where 90 different dinners are going to be held all over the country in his honor to raise money for his foundation, all leading up to his actual 90th birthday, which is December 2025, so he’s definitely, you know, he’s out and about. He has, I think, a very full life. But anyone who you know has had a long-term relationship with someone they really love, I think, could relate to the fact that there’s, you know, it’s different now that she’s gone for sure.
WSHU: And he’s happy that he made Connecticut home.
LT: Yeah, he seems, you know, like he’s made a beautiful life for himself here.