The Apprentice

Pepin, Jacques. The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen. New York: Houghton Mifflin 2003. Print.

First Sentences:

My mother made it sound like a great adventure.

Description:

Although I know next to nothing about food and its preparation, I still can appreciate quality writing and interesting, real-life stories from someone at the very top of this profession. Therefore, I highly recommend Jacques Pepin's autobiography, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen for a glimpse into the world of kitchens, training, restaurants, and innovation by a renowned chef.

Pepin's mother opened a simple restaurant, Le Pelican, in rural France with a few recipes, no business experience, and certainly no restaurant training. Here Pepin and his brother Roland learned how to cook, clean, wait tables, and all other roles necessary to a professional enterprise. And where he learned to love cooking and restaurante, although his brother hated that life.

Pepin left school at 13 for Paris, boldly getting a position at Le Grand Hotel de l'Europe. More on-the-job training, growth, and then moving on to other restaurants. He climbs from being a gopher called "P'tit" [Kid] to tending a stove, an honor recognized when the chef finally drops the nickname and calls him by his real name, "Jacques." He moves up to be the commis [chef assistant] and finally head chef. Pepin brings readers into each kitchen and their head chefs, carefully describing the environment of a first-class restaurant and the tasks necessary to produce the highest quality food. 

There are humorous stories as well, as when the very young Pepin was sent by the head chef to several restaurants to pick up their "machine a dessosser les poulets [chicken-boning machine] from another restaurant. Each location had an excuse for not having that machine and sent him along to another location, over and over until Pepin returned sadly empty-handed to his chef. Only then did he realize there was no such machine and he had passed an initiation into the restaurant family. In another story, Pepin's love of juicy pears is tested as he sneaks one of the chef's "des poires avocat" [avocado pears], biting into the leathery skin and hard seed of an avocado for the first time.

Later, Pepin travels to New York and contrasts the restaurant standards and chefs with those from France. His experiences lead him in the 1960s to, of all places, Howard Johnson's restaurants to help them upgrade the quality of their food and make it consistent in all their one thousand restaurants, a unique concept at the time. Instead of cooking for only a few restaurant patrons, Pepin now learned how to prepare clam chowder, a HoJo specialty, in stockpots of 500 or 1000 gallons.

Story after story are simply told as if Pepin is sitting next to you recalling his life. He has a charming writing style that fully reveal the picture he is painting:

Then there was [the chef's] look, a look that will recur in my nightmares as long as I live, not so much a look of anger as one of disdain, a gaze that lasted but a fraction of a second, yet made it clear that your pathetic little error was far beneath the level of his contempt. 

From cooking for Charles de Gaulle to working with Julia Child and every other great chef, from writing the classic book on the exacting techniques of preparing and cooking to traveling the world conducting cooking workshops and television shows, Pepin shows he is a giant in the kitchen and the world of cooking. Highly recommended for lovers of food, kitchen life,and fine writing.

Happy reading. 

Fred

(See more recommended books)
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