Claudine Pepin talks about cooking with her famous dad, cooking for her family, and her new cookbook
Hey, moms and dads, what's on the weekend eats agenda for your young ones? If U.N.-worthy negotiations and plain pasta with butter are in store, you could change the paradigm, starting with “Kids Cook French (Les Enfants Cuisinent a la Française).”
The slim collection of 30 recipes is the first solo cookbook from Claudine Pepin. The very girl we watched grow up via her famous father's cooking shows is now 49, an accomplished wine educator, a chef's wife and the mother of an 11-year-old daughter.
The dishes represent the kind of simple, wholesome food she thinks children and grown-ups will enjoy together; the focus is not so much on expecting kids to turn out boeuf bourguignon on their own. Each page of text is mirrored in French on a facing page. That idea was the publisher's (and the start of a series of international culinary books for Quarry), but it took several tries before the author found a translator who daughter and father both say provided the words of a native Frenchman.
One can see Jacques Pepin's influence between the covers, most charmingly in many of the book's illustrations. Yet Claudine's view of the ways children should interact with food is more liberal than the one under which she was raised, and she makes her case in “Kids Cook French” in an understated, positive way.
I spoke with Pepin by phone from her home in Rhode Island recently. Edited excerpts follow.
BB: Was there stuff you wouldn't eat when you were young?
CP: Oatmeal. Couldn't stand it; now I like it. My mother's line was, ‘If you don't eat it, I'll put it on your head.'
BB: Did she ever make good on that threat?
CP: I did! Or so I'm told: When I was still in a high chair — at 1½ or 2 — I put oatmeal on my head.
BB: Sum up the difference between your experience at the table and your daughter's.
CP: I grew up eating head cheese and tripe. I tell her that she doesn't have to. We have talked at length, in general, about raising kids and how you feed them. You don't applaud a kid because he ate a Brussels sprout.
The rule in our house is, the veg on your plate is a must, the meat is a “some,” and the rest is negotiable. The clean-plate club is not for us.
BB: Your dad disagrees?
CP: Yes. To him, the idea of wasting anything is bad. I'd rather have Shorey leaving two bites of food. It drives him crazy.
When he grew up, there was little food. You ate out of respect. I get that. I guarantee it was a whole lot less than what you are served these days.
BB: Describe a typical weeknight meal for your family.
CP: At night, my husband is at work 90 percent of the time, so Shorey and I eat together. I'll cook, she sets the table and clears the dishes. We eat a fair amount of fish. We'll have a protein and one or two vegetables and something else, like macaroni and cheese.
BB: Not from a box!
CP: Yes, I have Annie's mac and cheese in a box. We have it every three or four months. Kids like it. Heck, I like it.
BB: What is your daughter's palate like?
CP: Shorey eats just about anything. That said, she doesn't like sweet potatoes. And asparagus makes her shudder — yet I've seen her eat it when we're out somewhere and it's put on her plate. That has to do with respect, for the food and for those who made it.
What Shorey has learned to do is season food. She's getting very good at it.
BB: That's unusual, and a really good thing.
CP: She knows the way kosher salt feels in her hand, and that means she can take the appropriate amount and sprinkle it in. If I have lamb or fish out that has to be seasoned, it's practice for her.
She likes to go through the spice cabinet and smell ... and she has made her own signature spice blend, to use on meat that we're going to grill. I think it has a little too much cumin in it, but that's just me.
BB: What's your advice for developing a child's palate?
CP: You say, “Two nights a week, we sit together as a family.” Take one or two new things and incorporate them into what you're eating, but don't make a huge deal of it. It's just what you're having.
Help the child create a list, and then ask him to choose a food from that list. And take them out to real restaurants; have them choose from the real menu — not a kids' menu. I have found that it's a good idea for a child to order two first courses, so it's not so much food.
CP: You haven't asked me what I like best about “Kids Cook French.”
BB: Have at it.
CP: It's something I realized after it was published. My book will always be next to my father's on the shelf at the Library of Congress.