Jacques Pépin shares stories from his life and his new book in his Connecticut kitchen

When Jacques Pépin was a child, he went out to play with friends. They found a stray chicken, flown from a nearby coop. Being hungry boys during wartime in France, they leaped at the rare chance to eat meat. They caught the chicken, killed it, encased it in river clay, set it over a fire and ran to play. When they were done playing, a feast was waiting for them.

That story — of the first time the gourmet cooked a chicken with no adult supervision — is one of many charming tales Pépin tells in his new book, “Jacques Pépin Art of the Chicken: A Master Chef’s Paintings, Stories and Recipes of the Humble Bird” (Harvest / Harper Collins, 228 pp., $30).

The book is not so much a story of Pépin’s life, but of all the hens he’s loved before: the ones in his oven, on his stove, the eggs he makes into omelets, the chickens in the paintings he has been creating for decades.

“For over 50 years, when people came to the house for dinner, I wrote the menu and people signed on the other side and I illustrated them. I have 12 books of these menus, which represent my whole life of cooking,” Pépin, 86, said. “My daughter who is in her 50s, Claudine, came a few weeks ago and said ‘What did I eat for my 7th birthday?’ We found what menu it was.”

“After a while I realized that I was doing a lot of illustrations of chicken. I started doing more chickens in paintings,” he said.

The book has 109 paintings of vibrantly plumed critters, many fancifully rendered in the shape of vegetables, one depicted as a chef with a knife and fork. Of course it has chicken recipes, told in such an easygoing style that it often takes a minute to realize you’re in the middle of reading a recipe.

“If you go to France and talk to another professional chef, that’s probably the way you find the recipes. Someone says ‘I like what you did. What did you do?’ He’d say ‘I did this, this, this’ without specific quantity and instruction and so forth,” Pépin said in an interview at his home in Madison. “I don’t think I ever read a recipe before I came to America.”

Pépin is the recipient of 24 James Beard Foundation Awards. Since 1967, Pépin has written or co-written 30 books about his life in the kitchen. He has starred in dozens of TV series and specials, including a segment of “American Masters” devoted to his career.

Pépin has lived in Madison since 1976. His wife of 54 years, Gloria, died in 2020. He carries on in the home they made together, in a kitchen lined with dozens of hanging pots and pans, wall tiles painted by Pépin. While he works in the kitchen, Pépin’s little black dog Gustav snoozes on a chair near one of Pépin’s Emmys.

Pépin’s daughter Claudine Pépin and son-in-law Rollie Wesen are frequent visitors to the Madison homestead. Both are acclaimed chefs. With Pépin, they also are co-founders of the Jacques Pépin Foundation, which provides cooking instruction to members of underserved communities.

Another frequent visitor is Tom Hopkins, who has photographed and videotaped Pépin for 40 years and who wrote the book’s introduction. Pépin spends days cooking, promoting his book, planning another book and posting hundreds of Hopkins’ videos on Facebook for his 1.6 million followers. He is also executive culinary director of Oceania Cruise Lines.

In an interview, Pépin talked chickens, eggs, painting and other passions. The responses have been edited for length.

Q: Do you believe chicken, more than any other food, reflects world culture?

A: Probably. Chicken is served in a truck stop, in a cafeteria, in a fancy three-star restaurant that puts truffles under the skin. I could probably write a book with 10,000 recipes of chicken from all parts of the world. I remember in West Africa, in the little village there, people survive with chicken. There are three, four chickens in a family, mostly for the eggs. At some point the chicken gets too old and they cook it. It becomes life-sustaining. Chicken may be the most democratic of all foods.

Q: As a democratic food, is there any other food that comes close?

A: As a cooked dish, pizza is an international thing. I’ve seen some kind of pizza from Africa to China. But as an ingredient itself, it is chicken.

Q: In what way have you seen chicken used throughout the world?

A: I remember being in China and eating chicken feet. Certainly in France, the offal is used in elegant ways, the liver, the kidney. Here we tend to have the breast and nothing else. The rest of the chicken disappears. For me, the skin of the chicken makes one of the best cracklings, better than bacon. When I did my apprenticeship, the chicken fat was very precious. We used it to saute potatoes, many things that we may do with oil or butter.

Q: Do you still always use every part of the chicken?

A: Depending on where I buy it. In the supermarket, I don’t have the choice of eating the feet and all that. I also have a neighbor down the road who raises chickens and ducks. Occasionally, I may buy a chicken from her.

Q: And this tendency goes beyond your training, all the way to childhood?

A: Yes. My mother used to cut the neck of the chicken. We had to pluck it. Then she cut the neck very close to the body and close to the head, the neck was that long, she would pull the neck out of the skin. She used that skin to stuff and make a sausage. The neck was always our first choice when we roasted chicken. My wife and I would fight for the neck.

Q: When you wake up in the morning do you know what you are going to cook for dinner that night? Do you wake up in a chickeny mood?

A: Probably less now since my wife passed away. For 54 years, we sat down for dinner at night and shared a bottle of wine. Now it’s different.

Q: Your book isn’t just about chicken. It’s also about eggs. Are eggs a democratic food, too?

A: The egg is international, too. The egg is a hidden ingredient in hundreds of dishes, souffle, many things people don’t know there is eggs in this. Also the fact that you can keep an egg for three weeks to a month. In different parts of the world I have been, South America, they can be in a corner, not refrigerated or anything. And the protein in eggs are as good or better than in meat. Eggs are very important, even more than the chicken.

Q: Your recipes are told in a narrative style, rather than the format most Americans are used to. How does this reflect your years of experience?

A: When you learn to cook, the idea is to conform. You work in a place, and this is the way it is done in that place, regardless of whether your sense of taste or aesthetic coincide with it. It may not coincide at all. Then you learn somewhere else, you do it another way. After eight or 10 years, you have absorbed an enormous amount of different points of view. Then you become the chef somewhere and you can do it according to your own sense of taste and aesthetic. You have to show who you are. This is the way.

Q: You have a new book coming next year. What is it about?

A: It’s about economy in the kitchen, using everything that you have around. In the ‘80s I had a column in the New York Times called The Purposeful Cook. It’s the same idea. Almost no people are economical. They throw out food. It gets spoiled. You won’t find anything in my refrigerator. I use everything. My wife called it “fridge soup.” I opened the refrigerator and I used a carrot, a piece of this, a piece of that, some wilted lettuce.

Jacques Pépin will sell and sign books on Dec. 8 from 6 to 8 p.m. at J. McLaughlin, 704 Boston Post Road in Madison.

Susan Dunne can be reached at sdunne@courant.com .