Jacques Pépin’s New Cookbook Celebrates His Twin Passions: Cooking and Painting
Jacques Pépin, with his beloved toy poodle, Gaston, includes dishes he makes at home in his new cookbook, The Art of Jacques Pepin. “I want to share the food through the art of teaching how best to make those recipes,” he says. Photo by Tom Hopkins
Jacques Pépin’s New Cookbook Celebrates His Twin Passions: Cooking and Painting
Recipes reflect the way the chef, award-winning TV host, and BU faculty member cooks now—simply, with economy
Jacques Pépin, chef, award-winning TV host, and longtime BU faculty member, is celebrating two milestones this year. Pepin (Hon.’11) turns 90 on December 18 and in the lead-up to his birthday, he’s spent the past year crisscrossing the country and cooking 90 dinners with 90 of the nation’s best chefs, all to benefit the Jacques Pépin Foundation, which enriches lives and communities through culinary education.
He’s also released a new cookbook, The Art of Jacques Pepin: Favorite Recipes and Paintings from My Life in the Kitchen (Harvest, 2025), which contains 99 of his favorite recipes, all tailored to reflect the way he cooks now—simply and economically, using “whatever I happen to have on hand,” he says. The recipes, arranged in five categories—soups and salads; eggs, pasta and vegetables; fish and shellfish; poultry and meat; and desserts—are accompanied by many of his vibrant landscape paintings and black-and-white drawings of ingredients—an artichoke, a can of sardines, a sprig of parsley.
Pépin, who cofounded Boston University’s certificate program in the culinary arts and master’s degree program in gastronomy with his late friend Julia Child (Hon.’76), spoke with Bostonia from his home in Madison, Conn. He had just returned from a whirlwind visit to the Napa Valley, where he’d taken part in 8 of the 90 Chefs/90 Dinners events, including one with Thomas Keller, the acclaimed chef and owner of the Michelin-starred restaurant The French Laundry in Yountville, Calif. Pépin talked about the cookbook and one recipe in particular, Bread and Onion Soup, as well as how he plans to celebrate his big day.
Q&A
with Jacques Pépin
Bostonia: You’ve written more than 30 cookbooks. Why did you want to write another now, and what makes this one different from previous ones?
Pépin: Writing cookbooks has always been part of my life. This cookbook incorporates more of my art than I’ve ever had in any previous cookbook, so that was rewarding for me. Your metabolism changes as you get older and my cooking has become simpler. As a young chef, I added more to the plate. Now, at my age, you can take away from the plate and be left with something more essential and with less embellishment. It’s simple cooking.
Bostonia: The recipes you’ve included are straightforward, things that any cook, regardless of level of experience, should be able to prepare.
Pépin: Yes. But that has been my focus for a long time.
Bostonia: The recipe for Bread and Onion Soup strikes me as a good example of the ethos behind the new cookbook: cooking simply, with what you have on hand.
Pépin: I love everything about this dish. I like the simplicity of it—it’s the type of food that my mother would make with leftover bread. You have some leftover bread, a couple of onions, and some Gruyère cheese, and that’s it. And you can use store-bought stock if you don’t have any homemade stock. It’s a pretty straightforward recipe. The leftover bread may be a bit dry, but it doesn’t matter because it’s going to be covered with the stock.
Recipe from The Art of Jacques Pépin cookbook
I always cook with economy. I was raised in France during the Second World War, and my mother was a very miserly cook. And I am too. I don’t like to waste anything.
Paintings by Jacques Pépin
Bostonia: And this isn’t a recipe that requires a lot of fancy technique, either. There’s some slicing and grating, but that’s really it. Do you have recommendations for the best way to slice an onion?
Well, you want to do it faster so you won’t cry. If you don’t want to slice the onion with a knife, you can use a slicer or a food processor—whatever you have. As for the bread, you can even tear it into chunks.
Paintings by Jacques Pépin
Bostonia: You are an accomplished artist and your work has been exhibited in well-known galleries. Do you paint every day?
I’m painting now as I’m talking to you! In many ways I get involved in a painting the same way I get involved in a recipe… Both make me happy. In cooking, you touch, you adjust, you touch, you adjust again for taste. In a sense, it’s the same with painting.
Bostonia: You’ve spent the year leading up to your birthday traveling the country to participate in dinners with prominent chefs and raising funds to support your foundation. How do you plan to celebrate on your actual birthday?
I’ll be here in Madison, at the Madison Beach Hotel. We have about 180 people registered for a big dinner, and the proceeds will support the foundation. We’re going to drink a lot of wine.
This interview has been edited for length and for clarity.