Great cooking favors the prepared hands.
Jacques PepinRead
Cooking is the art of adjustment.
Interpretation
Cooking requires flexibility and creativity to adapt to changing circumstances.
Jacques Pepin's quote emphasizes that cooking is not just a mechanical process but an artistic one that requires constant adjustment and adaptability. Just as an artist modifies their techniques to express their vision, a cook must make real-time decisions, alter recipes, and respond to the ingredients available, highlighting the importance of creativity and spontaneity in the culinary arts.
In practice
A chef reflecting on their culinary journey during a cooking class.
Great cooking favors the prepared hands.
The idea of old was to conform yourself to a style of cooking, it was not to create a style of cooking. Now the chef is so much into 'I want to sign that dish and say I am the one who made that dish.'
You have no choice as a professional chef: you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes part of yourself. I certainly don't cook the same way I did 40 years ago, but the technique remains. And that's what the student needs to learn: the technique.
My mother likes what I cook, but doesn't think it's French. My wife is Puerto Rican and Cuban, so I eat rice and beans. We have a place in Mexico, but people think I'm the quintessential French chef.
Probably a mistake, you know, that people make in America, to think that all great chefs are a male... I'm still the only male in the family who went into that business.
Children never lie...I remember my daughter standing in her crib the first time I gave her caviar. I put it on bread. She ate it and said, "Encore, Papa."
I decided at 40 I was wasting entire chunks of my brain and didn't want to blow my one chance on Earth. I'm glad I made that decision. Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. Sometimes, as with film, you can hybridize, but I think it's basically the space part of my brain wanting equal footing with the time part.
Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.
Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life - being a painter, a poet or a photographer
Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks pre-arranged, This is because they accept all offers made—which is something no ‘normal’ person would do.
To sing of Wars, of Captains, and of Kings/Of Cities founded, Common-wealths begun/For my mean Pen are too superior things.
Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.
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