Jacques Pépin - Essential Pepin Desserts

Editors Note: Essential Pepin Desserts contains selected recipes from Essential Pepin, which was originally published in October 2011. The larger volume contains videos demonstrating essential cooking techniques and more than 700 recipes. The introduction that follows is also excerpted from Essential Pepin.

In my sixty years as a cook as a professional chef, a husband, a father, a grandfather, an author of many cookbooks, and a cooking teacherI have created thousands of recipes, each memorable and worthy in its own way. In Essential Pepin, for the first time, I have taken stock, reflected back over my life in the kitchen, and assembled the best in one place: the recipes I love the most.

Essential Pepin is a new bookeverything has been rethought and updatedbut it is familiar as well: its like meeting up with an old friend, because it goes back to the beginning of my culinary writing. It is essentially the way I have cooked as a young man, as a mature man, and, now, as an older man. It demonstrates the ways I have changed through my many books, my many moods, my many styles, from elaborate classic French cooking to fast food done my way. It shows how I have changed and learned. Like any working chef, I have always experimented with different foods and different methods. The recipes that I have created through these years are the diary of my life. I am, have been, and always will be a cook: my culinary identity defines me.

When I decided to put this book together, I believed it would be a cinch to do, an easy matter of assembling and reorganizing recipes. It turns out to have been a huge endeavor, bigger by far than writing a cookbook from scratch. Each period of my past exemplifies widely different styles and methods, from the cooking times for fish and vegetables to the amount and types of fat used, to the presentation, as well as procedures and techniques. As a result, I had a real conundrum: either leave the recipes as they were, to represent exactly a moment in time, or adjust, correct, and retest the recipes for a modern kitchen to make them usable, friendly, and current for todays cook while retaining the spirit and flavor of the originals. I chose the second option, with a few reservations. Through all the adjustments, I have tried to keep the intrinsic quality of the recipes as they were conceived. The appetites of a young, a middle-aged, and an older man are different, but a certain continuity remains. In that context, this book represents me more today than at any other time in my life.

As I look back on my gustatory voyage, I find continuity in my cooking and recipes: a desire to simplify techniques and methods, a striving for simplicity, a search for the best ingredients, and an emphasis on taste rather than presentation or originality. But while trends change, basic techniques do not, whether its boning a chicken, cooking an omelet, or making a chocolate goblet. Since visualizing the intricacies of some of these procedures is difficult, I taped videos to accompany this book, demonstrating techniques that are essential for the novice as well as the seasoned cooktechniques I acquired during my arduous years as an apprentice. They are meant to stimulate you and get you involved in the basics, and they will help you not only with this book, but with any cookbook you have in your home.

As I read through these recipes, they bring back vivid and sweet memories. I taste, smell, and feel the ingredients, and I see friends and family members. I recapture many joyful moments through all these many years, and I know that these food memories will stay with me for the rest of my life. One thing that will never change: the greatest meals are the ones shared and enjoyed with loved ones.