Pépin, Jacques: The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen

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Jacques Pépin isn't like the rest of us. When he encounters some thousands of snails slime-trailing their way around the wet terraces of his vacation bungalow, Pépin doesn't just register their appearance as a curiosity and move on, as we might. He thinks "Dinner!" and runs around excitedly collecting the creatures in a wastepaper basket. When a friend complains that his boat's outboard motor regularly hits something hard in a particular shallow channel, Pépin investigates and once again finds a free lunch--the obstruction is a shoal of mussels from which he happily gathers a feast.

These stories hint at the most striking revelation of Pépin's autobiography, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen: the man is obsessed with food. This ought not come as a surprise, I suppose. Pépin is, after all, a renowned professional chef. But not every professional is so taken with the subject of his expertise. Love of food and its preparation--foraging or fishing for it, prying it from the walls of a vacation resort, simmering it on his own stovetop or stirring up consommés in thousand-gallon vats--pervade Pépin's life.

In straightforward, readable prose, The Apprentice tells the story of Pépin's life in food, from his childhood in war-rationed France--where his father, a member of the Resistance, smuggled the occasional banana to his wife and sons; to his apprenticeship in the kitchens of his mother's restaurants and under a series of respected French chefs; to his increasingly successful career in America. Throughout, one marvels at the author's apparently flawless memory for cooking. Remarkably, Pépin describes in detail dishes he made decades earlier, their ingredients and preparation, how the meal was received. These sections of the book do not make for the most scintillating reading for those of us who are not food aficionados, but they are impressive even so. For those who are inclined to take to the stove, Pépin includes more than twenty recipes in the book.