Chef Jacques Pépin on his 29th cookbook, simpler recipes and chicken skin

Jacques Pépin’s newest cookbook is also his smallest. Just 113 pages and a scant 13.9 ounces, it’s a mini compared with his others, but it’s mighty — a collection of some of his best recipes for cooking the most favored fowl of the French, with a few dozen vegetable sides.

Exclusive to Sur La Table, Poulets & Legumes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $20) is part of the 48-piece Jacques Pépin collection of tableware and accessories that launches this month. The book includes Pépin’s handpainted images of chicken and vegetables, which also are on ceramic pasta bowls and coffee mugs, aprons with chickens, and rectangular baking dishes, perfect for vegetable gratins or Provencal stuffed tomatoes.

I caught up with him last week on the phone from his home in Madison, Conn., still jet-lagged from the MAD symposium in Copenhagen, the cutting-edge culinary conference founded by René Redzepi, and before hopping on the plane again to cook fried eggplant fans and sign books at Sur La Table stores nationwide.

You’re from France’s most famous area for chicken, Bourg-en-Bresse in the eastern part of the country, where the prized, AOC-protected poulets de Bresse come from. How did this inform your relationship to chickens and eating chicken when you were young?

Actually, chickens were very expensive when I was a kid. We didn’t have meat more than twice a week. We had stew or my mother did some vegetables with lardon or pancetta with it. Chicken was special occasion, for holiday or on Sunday.

Was there a way your mother prepared chicken that you still make today?

Chicken jardinière, which is kind of a stew. That would be one of my favorites. That’s featured in the book. Chicken cooked in wine along with vegetables that change depending on the season. It couldn’t be simpler.

I trained as a professional chef, but my heart and passion still go back to my family. We had 12 restaurants owned by 12 women. I was the first man to go into cooking.

Is it hard to find good chickens in the States?

In my regular supermarket, I have four different type of chickens: regular chicken, chickens without antibiotic, free-range chicken, and then you have organic chicken, and unfortunately the price is not the same, but it’s not that far away. People don’t realize the quality of chicken available now.

Your recipe for roast chicken is remarkably straightforward. You don’t truss, you don’t brine, and you don’t salt and pepper the bird and leave it in the fridge for 24 hours.

I have done all of this and I never saw that much difference. Even putting a whole lemon inside frankly doesn’t give much taste to the chicken. Salt and pepper and you cook it. Or you slip something under the skin, wild truffle or something. Now that will make a difference.

What’s the key to a good roast chicken?

To start with, cook it at a high temperature. You also have to have the proper piece of equipment, aluminum or whatever, so there’s a proper heat transfer so the juices crystallize on the bottom of the pan. If it’s a thin, stainless-steel pan, it [the glaze] gets burned, and when you do the process of deglazing to release solidified juice, it tastes burned or bitter. So you have to have a good piece of equipment.

Assuming I’ve got the right pan, I’ve salted and peppered my bird, and it’s in a super-hot oven to roast, are there any additional tricks or tips to achieving a perfect roast chicken?

I slide my knife about a half-inch into the art [joint] between the thigh and drumstick and the same at the shoulder [joint]. Just to open it up a little bit so it cooks more evenly.

Sometimes I’ll just buy chicken thighs. Best way to cook them?

If I know I’m going to do a chicken in a stew, I may use the thigh. Certainly contrary to what I used to do, I’ll remove the skin. If I roast one, one recipe we do often is chicken thigh, and alongside of flesh, I’ll cut along the bone to expose the bone a little bit to cook a little bit faster.

Otherwise, I won’t turn it over and it’ll cook 20 minutes on the skin-side only. Covering it creates steam — it cooks the top and you have a very crisp skin. If I do a stew, if you brown the meat properly, then whole skin softens and fat comes out of skin. And if I do a type of stew, I remove the skin, I put salt on it and into the oven until it’s crisp and I’ll put it in salad or part of that dish.

I’m never tossing out my chicken skin again. That’s one thing I’ve always noticed about your cooking. You don’t waste anything.

I’m very miserly in the kitchen. I was raised that way. It’s part of our culture. It’s part of a tradition. It’s very French. I don’t try to be French, but I don’t try not to be French.

I love the recipe for Peking-style chicken in your book. The idea of steaming a chicken so the skin tightens so it can crisp up sounds amazing.

To tell you the truth, I stole the recipe from the Chinese. I steam the chicken for a few minutes and after that, I put it in a hot oven. I always do that with turkey. I cut between shoulder wing and, after, the thigh. And I steam for four or five minutes — and [the] advantage is all fat is in there and all fat is in the water that is left there.

Put the turkey in the oven; brush with vinegar and Tabasco and often apple cider or something like that. I have a nice, beautiful and crisp skin and cook it on top of carrot and potatoes and I don’t have to worry about any fat coming out. You can steam it the day before.

Your way of cooking and explaining your recipes — whether on your show or in a cookbook like this one — is very approachable. You manage to make what may sound intimidating very easy.

I think maybe I’m still very Cartesian in that way. I like to get to the essence of something and make it simpler. I’ve cooked fish always in court bouillon, but now I don’t do a court bouillon — it’s useless. I just drop it in water and we’re going to serve something else on top. Even now I put it in a hot oven with a dash of salt on top just so it’s still rare. So I’m doing a sauce with fresh tomato and fresh tarragon on top.

Even after all these years and I look at recipes that I made not that long ago, and I always like to simplify or make it easier. I’d even argue with Julia [Child] about it. I’d say, ‘We don’t need to do that.’

I’ve been reading Michelin-star chef Yannick Alleno’s book, Sauces, which is all about the history of sauces in French cuisine. What about sauces today? Are they still as critical to pulling together a dish as before?

Certainly much less important in French cooking than it used to be. We used to poach a fillet of sole for 12 to 15 minutes and that’s the way it was. The sauce and the reduction was a big part of a meal. Now it’s the fish itself and sauce is relatively unimportant.

With all of us Instagramming our every meal, every dish we make, are we getting too far away from this idea of the food itself and what it’s all about?

Of course we’re getting too far away from it. We always go to extreme; even the cooking shows The Chew and Top Chef — they don’t even taste the food; they look at it and it stops there.

For me, taste is certainly more important than presentation. The first and most important thing is taste. If it looks good, that’s OK, but it’s not the most important. Sometimes we do too much with decoration and presentation and so forth. I think all food critics should be blindfolded.

This is your 29th cookbook. What’s next?

I’m doing a book with my granddaughter that’s coming out at the end of 2017. I’ll be doing a show with her, too, seven to eight minutes long.

Your last meal is going to be chicken. How’s it going to be prepared?

If someone tells me I’m going to [the] guillotine, I probably won’t have much of an appetite.

This story was originally published September 12, 2016 at 3:47 PM with the headline "Chef Jacques Pépin on his 29th cookbook, simpler recipes and chicken skin."