Are you cooking, Brother John?

It is a network that presents tv shows where being unrehearsed is a badge of honor rather than a shame for professionals. There is an institutional belief at PBS being didactic and educating/informing are the same thing. And seemingly for 6 months a year they schedule Yani concerts and baby boomer bands only to interrupt them to have people who make more money than I do beg me for money so they can continue to produce shows with low production values, delivered with smugness by people who make too much money. Yet every time I decide to hate at Public TV, they do something to stop to stanch the loathing. It is really hard to hate any institution that gives a forum to Jacques Pepin: Friend of JC (Julia Child) who houses over a half century of professional skills that he has drawn upon as an author, restaurateur, cooking instructor all delivered with a nearly unintelligible accent. If you haven't seen his show, I On-COUr-Aig you to do so. In the meantime Charles Seluzicki takes time out from writing about sausage to sing the praises of Mr. Pepin...

Kitchen technique, honed by rigorous early training and years of experience, settles, in the best scenario, into the unconscious, wordlessly wed to intuition. I flick on the TV and watch Jacques Pepin slice an eggplant. His recipe calls for rounds, one-half inch thick. He begins to slice. Perfect, perfect, oops. Does he stop? No. As he finishes the last slice, he begins talking about male and female eggplants. Lordy, I say to myself, he should know better. We meet his eyes as he speaks into the camera but his hands and knife move to the errant, overly thick piece which he perfectly divides. The program is a rerun. Still, the demonstration holds my attention. Like that other great Jacques- Jacques Tati- somehow there is always more embedded in the running steam of image and patter.

Often he chops onions, shallots, leeks. Nothing surprises us about his approach to onions and shallots except his enviable facility and speed. But I had not seen his leek technique demonstrated before. Instead of lopping off the top below the dark green of the leaves, he trims up the root a bit, leaving it intact, inverts the stalk and shaves away the dark green leaves along its length, preserving perhaps a third more tender interior of the vegetable. Then he sends the point of his knife through the base of the leek, runs it vertically through to the top, rinses it and chops. The technique is clearly directly evolved and adapted from the classic approach to mincing onion yet there is nothing initially familiar about it. Only repeated exposure reveals the obvious. I am mesmerized by Pepin's understanding of the structure of the leek, the eloquence of his knife work and his respect for the economies of the kitchen.

Watch him wield a simple vegtable peeler as he skins a cucumber and then instantly adapts it to creating long, mandoline thin, seedless strips of cucumber flesh in a single motion. Witness his facility as he approaches an apple with his paring knife. The skin falls away in a single unbroken strip and then he trims, cores and slices it. The little knife does not leave his hand until he finishes his task; its relationship with his hand, however, is a petite ballet of edge and point, the seamless articulations and interplay of the finger, the palm, the thumb.

The greatest cookbooks in the world cannot convey such knowledge. It has always been learned by demonstration, imitation and practice. Even with the wondrous flood of food programming, even in the instance of an articulate and witty guide such as Jacques Pepin, there is always more. We are left with a dual sense of both the subtleties of the simplest tasks in the kitchen and our need to surrender to their mastery with fearless abandon, reconstructing our failures and successes at each turn


Charles Seluzicki.