San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
ON CARS AND CUISINE
French chef, expat Jacques Pépin laments the demise of cultural staples
While the French famously obsess about the dilution of their culture at home, it is not unfair to say that their great nation’s cultural sway appears to have dwindled in the larger world as well. To give two examples that touch me where I live, the primacy of French cuisine — once regarded as the world’s best — is finis. No longer is the cozy French bistro a staple of every American city.
And though little remarked upon, so, too, can be seen the declining fortune of the French automobile, a device whose invention traces to Nicolas-joseph Cugnot, who in 1769 went forth from the Void-vacon commune in northeastern France with the world’s first self-propelled vehicle, a steam-powered tricycle built like a wagon.
While still dominant in their home market, French cars claim only a small, if loyal, following in the United States. They haven’t been sold here since the early 1990s, despite their significant role in Stellantis, the name given to Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and the French carmaker PSA after their merger last year.
To explore these twin cultural sea changes, I recently set off with a friend for Madison, Conn., to visit and ruminate with one of America’s best-known French expatriates, Jacques Pépin. Arriving in the New World more than 60 years ago, Pépin, 86, has become one of French gastronomy’s most successful proponents in the United States: chef, cookbook author, TV personality, painter, philanthropist and, more recently, social media star. As a onetime serial owner of French automobiles, he seemed uniquely suited to answer the question: Are these once internationally heralded products of French culture — food and cars — due for a 21st-century renaissance?
Our transport to Connecticut, fittingly, would be a 1965 Peugeot 404, a model that Pépin once owned and remembers fondly. This one, a seven-seat “Familiale” station wagon bought new by a Canadian diplomat on assignment in Paris, wound up for reasons unknown in a barn in Medicine Hat, Alberta, where it sat untouched for more than 50 years. Fully roadworthy, with less than 25,000 miles on its kilometer-delineated odometer, it oozes the charm of French automobiles at their distinctive best, with creamy smooth mechanicals, seats as comfortable as any divan and legendary, Gallic ride comfort that improbably betters most modern cars, even on the roughest roads.
Our visit begins with a tour of Pépin’s home and outbuildings on his 4 wooded acres. Situated between a church and a synagogue, the compound houses two impressively outfitted kitchens, with dazzling arrays of neatly arranged cookware and saucepans. Two studios help extend Pépin’s brand indefinitely into the future, one with a kitchen used for filming the series and videos, and another for painting the oils, acrylics and mixedmedia works that are featured in his books and grace his coveted, handwritten menus.
Setting off in the 404 for lunch, we all arrive in nearby Branford at Le Petit Café, a French bistro. Chef Roy Ip, a Hong Kong native and former student of Pépin’s at the French Culinary Institute in New York, greets our party, having opened specially on this weekday afternoon for the mentor who 25 years ago helped broker the purchase of the 50-seat cafe. Over a groaning plate of amuse-bouches and loaves of freshly baked bread and butter — “If you have extraordinary bread, extraordinary butter, then there ought to be bread and butter” at every meal, the guest of honor vouchsafes, raising a glass of wine — we sidle up to the delicate topic at hand.
Though he drives a wellused Lexus SUV today, Pépin’s French car credentials are clearly in order. Tales of his early life in France, where his family was deeply involved in the restaurant business, are peppered with memories automotive. A seminal one concerns the Citroën Traction Avant, an inf luential sedan built from 1934 to 1957. Developing the car, which was revolutionary for its front-wheel drive and unitbody construction, bankrupted the company’s founder, André Citroen, leading to its takeover by Michelin, the tire maker.
The car’s mention recalls for Pépin a day during World War II when his family left Lyon in his uncle’s Traction Avant to stay at a farm for a while. “My father was gone in the Resistance,” he said. “That car I still remember as a kid, especially the smell. I always loved the Citroëns because of that.”
Afterward, his parents owned a Panhard, an idiosyncratic machine from a small but respected French manufacturer that would fall into the arms of Citroën in 1965, a decade before off beat Citroën itself would be swallowed — and, critics argued, homogenized — by Peugeot.
Like many Frenchmen after World War II and millions elsewhere, Pépin was smitten by Citroen’s postwar small car, the Deux Chevaux, which he said was the first car his mother had owned.
“Seventy miles to the gallon, or whatever,” he said. “It didn’t go too fast, but we loved it.”
Pépin’s distaste for excess — notwithstanding his early detours into rich, labor-intensive foods, such as when he cooked at New York City’s Le Pavillon, a onetime pinnacle of American haute cuisine — informed not just the simpler cooking he’d later champion but many of his vehicle choices when he first hit the American highway. In his memoir, he refers, for instance, to the Volkswagen Beetle that he used to thrash down the Long Island Expressway on his way to visit one of his friends, New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne, on Long Island’s East End. A Peugeot 404 would figure in his commute to work at the Howard Johnson test kitchen in Rego Park, Queens, where he worked for 10 years.
Later, a Renault 5 — an economy subcompact known as Lecar in America — joined Pépin’s family as the daily driver for his wife,
Gloria.
He remains, too, a solid supporter of what is perhaps France’s greatest automotive icon, the Citroën DS, which President Charles de Gaulle was riding in when 12 right-wing terrorists tried to assassinate him in 1962, firing 140 bullets at his car as it left central Paris for Orly Airport. The fusillade blew out the DS 19’s rear window and all its tires, yet, owing to its unique hydro-pneumatic suspension, de Gaulle’s driver was able to drive the tireless car and its occupants to safety.
“It saved his life,” Pépin marveled. “A great car.”
Though Pépin had been a personal chef to de Gaulle in the 1950s, he did not know him well, he said. “The cook in the kitchen was never interviewed by a magazine or radio, and television barely existed,” he said. “If someone came to the kitchen, it was to complain that something went wrong. The cook was really at the bottom of the social scale.”
While Ip, the chef, presents the table with a simple but delicious Salade Niçoise, followed by a finely wrought apple tart, Pépin turns his attention to the question of France’s diminished inf luence in the culinary and automotive worlds. He is, I am surprised to learn, in heated agreement — the ship has sailed.
“Certainly when I came to America, French food or ‘continental’ food was what any of the great restaurants were supposed to be, often with a misspelled French menu,” he said. But continued waves of immigration and jet travel that opened up the far corners of the world led to French food’s losing “its primary position.”
“People still like French food just like they like other foods,” he said, adding, “Americans matured and learned about a larger variety of options.”
In distilling his ref lections on cuisine and cars, the chef notes what he sees as a lamentable trend: the loss of variety, attributable to the motives of corporations.
“There is more food today in the supermarket than there has ever been before,” Pépin said. “But at the same time, there is more standardization. I try to
ACROSS
1. ‘70s-debut Honda
4. Merge sign sites
8. Inflationary issue (3,4)
9. “T”, on cop radio
10. Chevy and Corvair model
11. Tire valve issue (3,4)
12. Driver’s bad idea (3,3,3,4)
16. ‘60s-debut Toyota
18. Car ad “OBO” word
20. ‘11-’16 luxury Hyundai
21. Maranellomade exoticar
22. Post-’77 tire-size system (1,6)
23. Typical battery terminals shop where ordinary people shop, to get the best price. And I cannot go to the supermarket and find chicken backs and necks anymore.”
The same is true, he said, of the automobile industry, where the increasing use of a small pool of multinational suppliers, along with stricter regulations and corporations’ increased reluctance to take chances, has rendered cars ever more similar across brands.
“The special characteristics which made French cars different don’t really exist anymore, even in France,” he said. “They all follow the same aesthetic. Neither French food nor French cars have the same cachet they used to have.”
DOWN
1. Falk’s Peugeotdriving cop
2. Harley engine, often (1,4)
3. City truckers call Windy
4. City street feature, maybe (3,3,7)
5. Brake system disc
6. ‘90s Mitsubishi SUV