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The hands of Jacques Pépin
Manual dexterity in craft is a minor, even irrelevant point, and perhaps because of this, it is a treacherous pleasure. When rightly employed, technique can make of itself a kind of pretty ornamentation: a design of control and motion. And underneath that kind of showmanship it can facilitate reaching the upper registers of craft, otherwise achieved only with time and deliberation better spent elsewhere. And, naturally, in excess (as with competition Benihana chefs — any of your Yngwie Malmsteens), it is loud, garish, indulgent.
In the spectrum of televised chefs, there are those faster and more precise than Jacques Pépin, more capable and more elegant; but the quality of his technique is the purest and most generous. His knife does not, as the saying goes, seem an extension of his arm, but rather it seems as a trowel to an master bricklayer — motions and gestures hardened by practice and then pared away by time to their most basic, primitive gesture. There is no flourish, no flashy quickness: only strokes so sure they look abrupt.
And this unaffected, almost peasant knife skill pervades his whole manner of handling food. The way he reaches into frying oil, arranges food in bowls and plates, dips his ladle, peels fruit, all these motions have in their essence a single gesture: the meeting of two hands: his right and left hand gradually coming together until the food is portioned, prepared, placed. It has unity and rustic beauty: all the operations of the kitchen reduced to a basic, roughly hewn geometry, and then distributed to all necessities.
RELATED An excerpt from Pépin’s late-career PBS show “Fast Food My Way”, which, despite a kind of dilution evident from its name, still stands to demonstrate his prodigious hands.
Remarks: 1 of 1
Remark · zbs · 15 July 2007
Poor Yngwie never seems to get mentioned for any other reason than to be abused for being such an incorrigible showoff.