Raven at Edgar Allen Poe House.

On February 3rd at 3:30 PM PT, the Brothers Harbaugh will face their teams off in what I have chosen to term the “Super Browl.” Living in the Bay Area as I do, I know full well that it is incredibly ballsy of me to write up a Super Bowl menu that gives the appearance of favoring the Other Team, so give me a chance to explain myself.

I adore Coach Jim Harbaugh. Not only did the man coach Stanford, where my husband teaches, and play for the University of Michigan, which is my beloved alma mater, but my three-and-a-half-year-old son idolizes him for his hilariously entertaining Harbawls alone. I have also been lucky enough to meet Coach Harbaugh once, and the guy has a way more laid-back, gregarious personality than the laconic and sometimes amusingly impatient side he shows to the press.

Because of all of that and because of our zip code, the 49ers have my heart on Super Bowl Sunday.

All that said and duly acknowledged, you simply cannot deny the awesomeness that is the only professional football team to be named for a literary reference, in this case, Edgar Allan Poe’s gibbering raven. (Fun fact: today also happens to be the day that Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “The Raven,” was published in 1845. Some would argue “The Raven” is the most famous American poem.)

Edgar Allen Poe. Photo: Getty

So, if you happen to be a Ravens fan who has been wondering what appoepriate foods you should have on your table for Super Bowl Sunday, or if you want to effectively feast on the other team in effigy, as it were, I’ve dreamed up a meal for The Ravenous among you.

Now, you could go with foods taken directly out of Poe, like from his wonderfully suspenseful story “The Pit and the Pendulum”:

“I say to my horror; for I was consumed with intolerable thirst. This thirst it appeared to be the design of my persecutors to stimulate: for the food in the dish was meat pungently seasoned.”

Or get fancy with victuals from “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether”:

“…a small calf roasted whole, and set upon its knees, with an apple in its mouth, as is the English fashion of dressing a hare.”

You can also take Super Bowl decorating advice from Poe:

“The table was superbly set out. It was loaded with plate, and more than loaded with delicacies. The profusion was absolutely barbaric. There were meats enough to have feasted the Anakim. Never, in all my life, had I witnessed so lavish, so wasteful an expenditure of the good things of life…There seemed very little taste, however, in the arrangements; and my eyes, accustomed to quiet lights, were sadly offended by the prodigious glare of a multitude of wax candles, which, in silver candelabra, were deposited upon the table, and all about the room, wherever it was possible to find a place.”
–The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether

(I just have this feeling Sandra Lee would approve of that kind of tablescape, don’t you?)

You could also try to eat the foods from Poe’s era, but bread and molasses is less than football festive, so let’s bring on the Poe puns!

Edgar Allan Poe Super Bowl Menu

APPETIZERS

The Tell-Tale Artichoke Heart Spread

Ingredients:
• 1 14 oz. can artichoke hearts in water, drained
• 1 cup mayonnaise
• 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced or chopped
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• Dash of Tabasco sauce

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350° F.

Mash drained artichoke hearts. Mix all ingredients together and put into a glass or ceramic baking dish. Bake until brown on top, about 25-30 minutes.

Serve with Melba toast crackers, slices of French bread, or hide under the floorboards until you can no longer stand “the beating of his hideous heart!”

Recipe from my mother, Gretchen Vander Weide, who shares a birthday with Edgar Allan Poe.

Avocado Pit and the Pendulum Guacamole

Ingredients:
• 4 ripe avocados
• 2 cloves minced garlic
• 6 sliced scallions, white and pale green parts only
• 1 jalapeno, minced
• Juice from half a lemon
• Salt, to taste

Instructions:
Put all ingredients in a bowl and mash together with the back of a fork until well combined. Taste for seasoning, add more salt or lemon juice if needed.

Serve with tortilla chips or spread on the ropes that bind you for the rats to eat off and set you free.

MAINS

Annabel Leek Soup

Ingredients:
• 4 leeks
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 2 onions, finely chopped
• 1 quart good chicken stock
• salt and freshly ground pepper
• 7 cups milk
• 1 potato, cooked and mashed
• 1/4 pound cooked ham, chopped
• 1/2 cup light cream
• finely chopped parsley, to serve

Instructions:
Trim and wash the leeks, leaving some of the green. Slice thinly. Melt the butter in a large pan and sauté the leeks and onions until soft. Add stock and seasoning, bring to a boil and simmer for 15 minutes.

Mix the milk and mashed potato together and stir into the broth. Return to a boil and leave to thicken. Remove from the heat and stir in the ham and cream. Return to the heat but do not allow to boil. Serve sprinkled with parsley.

Potato-Leek Soup recipe from The Two Fat Ladies Full Throttle, Clarkson Potter, 1996

The Purloin of Lamb Letter

Ingredients:
• 4 lamb loin chops
• Salt
• Pepper

Instructions:
Preheat broiler.

Salt and pepper each side of the lamb chops and put on broiler pan. Broil for 3-5 minutes on each side. Keep it bloody.

DESSERT

The Masque of the Red Death By Chocolate Cake

Ingredients:
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, plus some for buttering the molds
• 4 squares (4 ounces) bittersweet chocolate, preferably Valrhona
• 2 eggs
• 2 egg yolks
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 teaspoons flour, plus more for dusting

Instructions:
In the top of a double boiler set over simmering water, heat the butter and chocolate together until the chocolate is almost completely melted. While that’s heating, beat together the eggs, yolks, and sugar with a whisk or electric beater until light and thick.

Beat together the melted chocolate and butter; it should be quite warm. Pour in the egg mixture, then quickly beat in the flour, just until combined.

Butter and lightly flour four 4-ounce molds, custard cubs, or ramekins. Tap out the excess flour, then butter and flour them again. Divide the batter among the molds. (At this point you can refrigerate the desserts until you are ready to eat, for up to several hours; bring them back to room temperature before baking.)

Preheat the oven to 450°. Bake the molds on a tray for 6 to 7 minutes; the center will still be quite soft, but the sides will be set.

Invert each mold onto a plate and let sit for about 10 seconds. Unmold by lifting up one corner of the mold; the cake will fall out onto the plate. Serve immediately.

Warm, Soft Chocolate Cake recipe from Jean-George: Cooking at Home with a Four-Star Chef by Jean-George Vongerichten

And if you don’t find chocolate to be the Black Cat’s meow, consider a few pints of “The Fall of the House of Usherbert” from Mitchell’s.

(I’d dearly love to suggest, “Murders in the Rhubarb Morgue” but it’s sadly out of season.)

Sherry Wine Cellar.

One thing that must be present at any Edgar Allan Poe Super Bowl feast is a prodigious amount of alcohol. For what to drink, nary a drop of Fino or Oloroso sherry will serve. No, you must get in a Cask of Amontillado, turn it into a Sherry Cobbler, and you shan’t be sober.

Nevermore.

Sherry Cobbler

Use a large wineglass.

Ingredients:
• 1 tsp powdered sugar
• 2 oz. club soda
• 3 oz Amontillado
• 1/2 tsp. Cointreau
• Orange slices
• Maraschino cherry

Instructions:
Dissolve sugar with a little of the club soda. Fill chilled glass three-quarters full with cracked or crushed ice. Add sherry and remaining soda, stirring gently. Garnish with fruit, serve with two straws.

Recipe from The Ultimate A-to-Z Bar Guide by Sharon Tyler Herbst.

Go 49ers!

Salted Caramel Chocolate Tart from Mayfield Bakery and Calafia Cake from Calafia Cafe

Since moving from San Francisco down the Peninsula few years ago, I have made it my mission to ferret out the tastiest, choicest victuals within a reasonable distance of my mouth. In the past, I’ve brought you my salivations on Howie’s Artisan Pizza, Evvia Estiatorio, Tootsie’s, and Shokolaat (since closed), but today we take a walk on the sweeter side.

This list was not undertaken lightly, and you can rest assured that during the course of research, a lot of thought and consideration went into my belly.

Top Five Desserts in Palo Alto/Menlo Park

1. Triple Coconut Cream Cake from Palo Alto Creamery: This coconut cake — doled out in mammoth pieces that look like plated glaciers — has been directly responsible for getting me through one-and-a-half pregnancies, and I am still not tired of it. The coconut buttercream frosting is completely snowed-over with drifts of shredded coconut, and between the sections of moist, sugar syrup-soaked white cake, you’ll unearth yellow strata of firm coconut custard. It’s a piece of cake a coconut fiend would dearly love to rub all over their body.

2. Calafia Cake from Calafia Cafe: Made to look like a Hostess cupcake with white “laces” drizzled in frosting across the top, Calafia’s single-serving cake has layers of moist chocolate cake encased in a pliable chocolate shell with a thick strip of cream running through the middle. It’s excellent way to console oneself in the wake of the Hostess bankruptcy.

3. Salted Caramel Chocolate Tart from Mayfield Bakery: This mini tart has liquid salted caramel pooling over a layer of firm chocolate, and the crust is a buttery, flakey wonder that fulfills the pastry chef requirement of being cuttable with the side of the fork. It generally serves one (unless you happen to be the generous sort with your mate/partner/kid/friend), and it’s an item I hope Mayfield keeps in their glass case for a long time to come.

4. The Occasional Macaron Shop Macarons from Tootsie’s: The easiest thing about these macarons is eating them. The most difficult thing about these macarons is trying to comprehend why their creator — a mysterious entity known only as the Occasional Macaron Shop on facebook — doesn’t open her own actual macaron shop to sell her delicate wares more widely. As it is, you can avail yourself of her lemon, pistachio, burnt caramel, and white chocolate-coconut macarons by visiting Tootsie’s at the Stanford Barn. (Through Tootsie’s, my husband has also placed special orders for the Occasional Macaron Shop’s amazing financiers for my last three birthdays and they are worth the year-long wait.)

5. Susie’s Nutty Cookie from Susie Cakes: In this final top dessert entrant, two meltingly tender peanut butter cookies are stuck together by a rich smear of peanut butter buttercream in the most colossal, delicious rendition of a homemade Nutter Butter you’ll ever set lips, teeth, and tongue on. This is a cookie to make even lactose-intolerant crave a tall, frosty glass of milk for a perfect pairing.

As an English major and culinary school grad, the idea of consommé both enchants and terrifies me. In stacks of novels, elegant ladies sup on consommé served in fragile bone china bowls before traipsing across polished floors to wilt onto fainting couches. And because the ideal consommé contains nothing other than exquisitely clear and sublimely seasoned liquid (possibly served with equally exquisite garnishes, like airy quenelles or tiny raviolini) it’s basically the most refined soup ever.

That’s my romantic ideal of consommé. And it’s one which jockeys impossibly with the complex reality handed to me in culinary school. There was so much emphasis on breaking (yet not breaking) the clarifying “raft,” the insistence on never allowing the stock to boil, and the overwhelming feeling that if you looked cross-eyed at your consommé you’d ruin it. As a result, during those nine sweaty months, I both longed for and dreaded making this genteel dish.

Enter Jacques Pépin Complete New Techniques, which, weighing in at close to six pounds, is a serious book for serious cooks. This hefty addition to my bookshelf (courtesy a review copy from my editor at KQED’s Bay Area Bites) is Jacques’ latest culinary tome. It’s an updated version of his 2001 Complete Techniques, which was itself a compilation of La Technique (1976) and La Methode (1979), and it’s admittedly one that filled me with skepticism. Being more of a hands-on person when it comes to learning, I didn’t think I could truly learn techniques from the pages of a book — even one from a culinary master such as Jacques Pépin.

The burnished amber liquid now resting in my refrigerator is proof that I am wrong.

First of all, the recipe and technique for consommé is found in the book’s “The Basics” section, which gave me the extra fillip I needed to attempt it. Having it there was as if Jacques was telling me, “See, it’s basic, you can make the elegant soup of your literary dreams, Stephanie, I believe in you!” Secondly, it really is a “throw everything in the pot, stir, bring to a boil and wait” sort of recipe, which was unexpected. It’s true that dealing with the raft — the flotsam that forms during the cooking process — is slightly tricky, but not nearly as painstaking as I thought it would be, especially since you ladle all the consommé through a dampened cheese cloth-lined sieve for additional straining.

As to how it tasted, well, it was delicate but not bland. Full of flavor, but not overpowering. It was all I dreamed of and more.

A few notes: the recipe called for “diced celery leaves,” but not knowing how to dice leaves, I went for a rough chop. Also, in their efforts to be helpful, more and more grocery stores are selling their celery already topped (without the leaves) and giving us only the hearts. I scrounged up just enough for this recipe, but be forewarned.

I’m was so bolstered by my consommé success that I actually considered diving into the book’s Presentation section and flicking out a few consommé-worthy garnishes with my paring knife, like the fluted mushrooms or carrot butterflies. However, I controlled myself and moved on to another technique-driven recipe: scrambled eggs.

Unlike my consommé foray, I know how to make scrambled eggs, and my usual way of making them is using a wooden spoon to scrape the beaten eggs and milk in a butter-slicked skillet over moderate heat. I will be honest and admit right off that I do like my way, which yields a significantly larger curd and a far less soft and creamy texture, but I still decided to try Jacques’ essentially French method.

The most surprising part of the technique was not using a whisk to keep the curd small, nor was it adding 1/4 cup raw beaten egg and the cream at the end, it was replacing my low-sided skillet with a saucepan. This has the effect of holding in the heat when the raw egg is added off the burner, which, in turn keeps the mixture creamy.

Between my creamy scrambled eggs with their sublimely small curd and pure consommé, tonight’s dinner made me feel a bit like Lady Mary Crawley, eldest daughter of the Earl of Grantham. (Point of order: Mrs. Patmore would never send scrambled eggs up to the Downton Abbey dinner table, and consommé was only ever an early course, not one half of the main. Horrors!)

I quite like Jacques’ technique of making scrambled eggs and can definitely see myself using it when I want a fancier breakfast, a soothing solitary dinner, or have a spare white truffle lying around. (No way I’d waste that sucker on my version of scrambled eggs.) But I’ll probably go back to breaking out my skillet and wooden spoon on the days I have my three-year-old tearing through the kitchen bellowing about trains and LEGO. That said, I’m making the consommé in bulk and freezing it for those emergency nights I need to dine like a Lady.

Thanks, Jacques.

It appears to be the year of Julia Child and her cats, and as a cat and Child-lover, I am frankly thrilled. Minette’s Feast: The Delicious Story of Julia Child and Her Cat, written by Susanna Reich and illustrated by Amy Bates, is the first of these two themed books from Abrams to hit our household, and it has already become a bedtime favorite with parents and child.

Julia and Paul Child did not have children, the discussion of which constitutes one of the more heartbreaking passages in My Life in France, but they did have cats. When Minette, their first cat, showed up on their doorstep, Julia noted, “Our domestic circle is complete.” Pulling from Julia and Paul’s letters as well as Julia’s biographies, Minette’s Feast tells the story of how Minette came to live and eat with the Childs in Paris.

Not only do Amy Bates’ Hopper-esque illustrations capture the personalities of both Julia and Minette, but they make me want to spend so much time on individual pages — absorbing every pinch of detail she’s squirreled away in each one — that Bug’s two-year-old patience is sorely tried. I want to take in the length of Minette’s whiskers, the shape and color of her eyes, every last morsel of food, and marvel over how Bates managed Julia’s distinctive face and unruly hair. For his part, Bug just wants to get to the page where Minette chases a Brussels sprout tied to her tail. Once there, he chortles long and hard like he never has for any other book.

Click on image for larger view

Not every bit of text rhymes or patterns out a beat, but the few cases it does are enchanting: “And day and night, she could smell the delicious smells of mayonnaise, hollandaise, cassoulets, cheese soufflés, and duck pâtés…” And then there’s my favorite repetition and internal rhyme, “But of course, mouse and bird were much preferred.” Sprinkled throughout the story are smidges of French words and expressions that are also contained in a glossary and pronunciation guide in the back of the book.

What I adore most about Minette’s Feast is how Reich recasts Julia Child’s famous culinary beginnings — her trips to the markets, her culinary experiments at home, and her tenure at Le Cordon Bleu — as merely a quest to get her tortoiseshell “poussiequette” to eat something other than mice.

A contributor to Bay Area Bites since its inception, Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic is a Bay Area food writer and editor. Her first book Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate is a humorous non-fiction narrative and exposé on the lives of picky eaters. It releases from Perigee Books July 3rd.

It is nothing new to say that Jacques Pépin has been a personal inspiration for me. I wish I could be more original, but there it is. Watching him with Julia Child in their WGBH show Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home in 2000 was one of my earlier impetuses to start cooking and trying more foods to roust me from the picky rut I’d been in for 27 years. Seven years later while working with him on his KQED show More Fast Food My Way, Jacques said something to me around which I built an entire chapter of my first book. Today, I was able to hand Jacques a galley copy of that book and sit down with him for an hour to talk about picky eating, foie gras, and Paula Deen.

I really wish I could write out Jacques’ voluptuous accent phonetically without it looking like I’m making fun of him. His cadence is just so enchanting, it makes you want to sit back with a glass of slow-sipping Calvados, close your eyes, and simply listen to all his stories.

Sadly, with no Calvados on hand and an interview to conduct, I jump right into our interview by asking Jacques to elaborate on something he wrote in the foreword of Essential Pépin: “The appetites of a young, middle-aged, and an older man are different…” Leaning back in the couch in KQED’s greenroom, Jacques notes that as you get older your metabolism changes, but also that, “as a young chef, you tend to add to the plate. To add, to add, to add! And as you get older, you start to clean up, clean up, clean up the plate! Until you are left with the essential thing: that tomato right there, that olive oil, at that temperature.” I wonder aloud if this a function of being a young chef, of trying to impress people. “It’s a function of life,” Jacques tells me and likens it to being a painter. “An artist is going to clean, a kind of a purification. You go through a process to get more to the essential of whatever you are working on.”

One could hypothesize that so-called picky children are like this. They start with the essentials, the simple foods, and later they will add more and more to that repertoire. When they are taking in so much information at once as they develop and grow, it makes sense that they would stick with foods that are comforting and familiar to them. Things they can count on. Some people, like me, might go into adulthood as a picky eater and, as I researched and detailed in my book, the reasons for why or how that happens are many. But concentrating on the picky children who seem to plague parents so much more today than they did back when my parents were raising me, I ask Jacques whether his daughter Claudine ever went through a picky stage.

“Sure, absolutely!” Jacques responds instantly. “Claudine loved string bean stew and all of a sudden, she hated string beans. And I said, ‘Fine, you don’t have to eat it.’ And certainly, she loved snails, because she was three years old and she loved garlic and the butter and all that too, until she was six or seven and then she’s at school and her friends said, ‘YUCK! You’re eating that?’ And that’s it — no more of them!” Jacques laughs and acknowledges that when kids reach a certain age, they want to conform to the other children around them.

Like my parents, Jacques’ approach to Claudine going off string beans and escargot was to shrug it off. It didn’t bother him, and he didn’t get upset about it. Additionally, when it turned out that Claudine favored more unusual vegetables — artichokes and Brussels sprouts — Jacques didn’t make a big deal about that, either. “It’s not like I went on my knees and said, ‘Oh, my god!’ No, we didn’t even mention it. It doesn’t even exist. It’s there, you eat it. It comes, it goes.”

I mention my feeling that today’s parents are way more worried about picky eaters than in the past and, along with this, they expect their children to have accomplished palates at such a young age. Jacques’ response is that America is a country of extremes. We go from 15-hour dishes to 15-second microwave dinners, and that there was a time where food wasn’t really discussed at the table. It was there and you ate it. However, now we have the opposite situation where we’re discussing and analyzing everything and expecting our kids to do the same. “The kid is not meant to do that. No, the kid is just meant to enjoy the food, eat it, and that’s it,” Jacques pronounces.

When Claudine was a child, Jacques use to take her to New York. Just the two of them. They would stay in a hotel and go to a movie, and after the movie, they would eat at restaurants like Brasserie or Lutèce. However, Claudine was used to all those fancy restaurants by the time she was six or seven, and on one visit, Jacques — imitating Claudine’s long-suffering tones — says she asked, “Can we go to Burger King?” Jacques laughs and says his response was, “Okay, fine!”

There you go, just like Julia Child proudly admitted her affinity for McDonald’s fries, Jacques Pépin, the celebrated chef who cooked for the likes of Charles de Gaulle and who chefs today admire and revere, had no problem taking his daughter to Burger King.

“The food follows your mood, follows the season, follows the ingredient. And don’t talk too much, analyze it too much, just enjoy it.” Laughing as he cites people’s reaction to freaking out over putting butter on bread, Jacques explains, “I say, ‘Look, if you don’t want to eat butter, don’t eat it. Because if you eat it, you aren’t going to digest it the right way. Your gastric juices are going to come back and you’re going to have sourness. Don’t eat it if it disturbs you. You have to be happy. You have to be happy when you cook and certainly you have to be happy when you eat.”

As our conversation naturally turned from eating with kids to cooking with kids, Jacques told me that last week his eight-year-old granddaughter Shorey said to Claudine, “Mom, I think want to cook with Jacques.” Claudine’s response was, “Well, that’s fine, darling, but I don’t think you should call your grandfather Jacques.” Shorey started crying and said, “I didn’t mean him, I want to cook with Jacques Torres!” As Jacques pronounces this famous chocolatier’s name, his voice chokes with appreciative mirth.

I didn’t intend to get into food politics, but after Jacques tells me his publishers thought skinning a rabbit on the DVD accompaniment to Essential Pepin was too traumatizing (adding that if he killed and skinned a rabbit on stage, “I would probably be assassinated more than if I killed my wife!”), Jacques himself brings up the California foie gras ban.

“They have no idea what they are talking about. And the worst is that they are righteous,” Jacques announces. Stating that no one would pass a law banning the large industrial chicken farms that abuse their poultry with beak trimming and other atrocities, Jacques details that the way foie gras-destined ducks are treated is actually a “natural process” that both the Ancient Egyptians and Romans practiced long before the French came along.

Way back then it was discovered that when a duck or goose was killed at migration time, the liver was twice as large as normal. Additionally, it was noted that after migration, the liver shrank down again. Jacques explains this is the liver’s reaction to the overeating that is necessary for sustained migration. The Egyptians and Romans learned they could overfeed the ducks outside of migration and achieve this same affect. “But if you’ve been on a farm,” Jacques explains, “the first day the duck is a little surprised when they put the [gavage] in and give him the mush…but after one day, they come to get it.” Jacques continues that the animal does not suffer, and that, in fact, there can’t be any trauma whatsoever, because if the animal is traumatized, it actually compromises the quality of the liver.

That discussion emboldens me to get his opinion on another hot button food topic: Paula Deen. Reminding him that Anthony Bourdain once called Paula Deen “the worst, most dangerous person to America,” I ask Jacques whether Deen’s recent diabetes diagnosis was really any of the public’s business. “No, it’s not right. That’s the way she cooks — just like many other people in the South, like me occasionally — and this is a condition people get. Who knows, if she lived in Provence and cooked the Mediterranean way that she wouldn’t have the same condition anyway? We are cooks, we aren’t doctors.” As to whether or not Deen and others have any responsibility to their viewers, Jacques explained, “I have 700 recipes and of those, some are classic French recipes and are plenty rich. I have no choice what people are going to cook. I have no choice in how much people are going to drink.” Jacques chuckles that people freak out when he tells him he and his wife Gloria drink two bottles over dinner. “Well yes,” he details, “I start cooking at 4:00 in the afternoon and I open a bottle of white wine and by the time we eat at 7:00, we’ve finished that bottle of white wine and we open a bottle of red wine.” Jacques concludes this by saying he’s recently decided to exclusively buy magnums of wine. “So when my doctor asks, I will say, ‘Oh, I only drink one bottle.’”

A contributor to Bay Area Bites since its inception, Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic is a Bay Area food writer and editor. Her first book Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate is a humorous non-fiction narrative and exposé on the lives of picky eaters. It releases from Perigee Books July 3rd.

Always the perfectionist in and out of the kitchen, Jacques didn’t go easy on himself when putting this book together. In his introduction, Jacques admits that he could have simply sent off all 700+ recipes to be published with no additional changes, however, he instead decided to reconsider each one and “adjust, correct, and retest [them] for a modern kitchen to make them usable, friendly, and current for today’s cook, while retaining the spirit and flavor of the originals.” Essential Pépin is essentially Jacques, and the recipes reflect his life in food from the fanciest French dishes to the homiest American comfort foods to his personalized approach to “fast food” cooking.

I don’t know what Jacques’ original recipe was for Onion Soup Lyonnaise-Style, but this one did me just fine on a pre-Autumnal evening. As I swim my way through a practically tangible haze of slowly simmering onions and browning mountain cheese, I will say that I wish Jacques had been a little more specific about what port is “sweet port.” To me, all port — ruby, tawny, vintage — is fairly sweet. It’s not like sherry where one is clearly sweet and one is clearly dry. I went with ruby for this recipe, but might try tawny another time just to experience a taste comparison. Also, I didn’t use canned stock. What with all the scary news about what is going on with canned foods these days, I buy cartons of stock not cans. Of course, that’s an even better excuse to make your own stock, which is Jacques’ primary suggestion.

Onion Soup Lyonnaise-Style

Serves 6 to 8

15-20 slices baguette, 1/4 inch thick
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 medium onions, thinly sliced (about 4 cups)
8 cups homemade chicken stock or low-salt canned chicken broth
1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 cups grated Gruyère or Emmenthaler cheese
2 large egg yolks
1/2 cup sweet port

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Arrange the bread slices on a cookie sheet and bake for 8 to 10 minutes, until browned. Remove from the oven and set aside. (Leave the oven on.) Melt the butter in a large saucepan. Add the onions and sauté for 15 minutes, or until dark brown.

Add the stock, salt, and pepper. Bring to a boil and cook for 20 minutes. Push the soup through a food mill.

Arrange one third of the toasted bread in the bottom of an ovenproof soup tureen or large casserole. Sprinkle with some of the cheese, then add the remaining bread and more cheese, saving enough to sprinkle over the top of the soup. Fill the tureen with the hot soup, sprinkle the reserved cheese on top, and place on a cookie sheet. Bake for approximately 35 minutes, or until a golden crust forms on top.

At serving time, bring the soup to the table. Combine the yolks with the port in a deep soup plate and whip with a fork. With a ladle, make a hole in the top of the gratinée, pour in the wine mixture, and fold into the soup with the ladle. Stir everything together and serve.

I also tried one of Jacques’ pita pizzas — the one with red onion, tomatoes, Herbes de Provence, chives, and Gruyère cheese — and it’s definitely something I’m going to try out on my toddler. In fact, my husband was so taken with the pizza that I had to make another one right after we scarfed down the first one. I was out of tomatoes, so my second rendition was done up with slices of red onion, Herbes de Provence, chives, Gruyère, and a handful olive oil-dressed watercress I tossed on the pizza after it came out of the oven.

If I recall from my work on More Fast Food My Way, Jacques’ pita pizzas are part of his “fast food” oeuvre, and clearly the onion soup smacks of his classical French background, so I decided to round out my Essential Pépin sojourn with his roast chicken recipe, a classic American entry.

My experience with this recipe was somewhat rocky. While I loved Jacques’ tip about not covering the finished chicken with foil (because the steaming that ensues makes the chicken taste reheated), I did struggle mightily to keep the stubborn bird on its side during part of the roasting process. I ended up lacerating one of the drumsticks during the balancing act, but since the drumsticks go to my toddler, it wasn’t a huge loss.

As my husband and I stood over the warm chicken, tearing off crispy skin and strips of juicy breast meat with our fingers, he mumbled through a mouthful, “Best roast chicken you’ve ever made.” I then whisked some Grey Poupon into the pan of unstrained juices, warmed it slightly, and poured it off into a bowl. We continued feasting, this time dipping our fingerfuls of chicken into the sauce. In this book, there’s Jacques the Chef.

I leafed through the rest of the book, scanning other recipes, and suddenly realized I wasn’t even reading the recipes because I completely enthralled by the illustrations. In this cookbook, there’s no glossy photography showing rivulets of garnet juices running down a slice of steak, no crooked fingers of steam rising from hot-from-the-oven rolls, there’s just a gratin pan here, a curly head of Boston lettuce there, an occasional plump chicken pecking in the dirt — all lovingly rendered in watercolor by the chef himself. In this book, there’s Jacques the Artist.

Early in the book is a 3-page “General Information About Eggs” section, which is seeded with smidges of new-to-me information. Here Jacques shares a great tip about freezing individual egg whites in ice cub trays and how raw unbroken egg yolks should be covered with cold water for optimal refrigerator storage. However, the egg tip I find most fascinating is the idea that it’s not it’s necessary to bring eggs to room temperature before whipping up their whites. The master chef’s opposing opinion is that the texture of egg whites is “tighter, smoother, and better if the egg whites are cold, even though the volume after beating is slightly less.” Tucked among the 700 recipes are other snippets of advice, like how to make your own proof box for baking and ways to improvise your own fish smoker out of an old pot or roaster and a screen.

The next recipe I’m most looking forward to trying is the Grilled Squid on Watercress. Grilled squid is a dish I always order (sometimes in multiples) if I see it on a restaurant menu, but I’ve never had sufficient courage to try at home. With Jacques by my side, guiding me through each step, I think I’ll finally be able to attempt it. In this book, there’s Jacques the Teacher.

Packaged with the book is a 3-hour DVD of Jacques’ techniques, which really deserves its own review. The very first technique Jacques demonstrates is the proper way of tying your apron to insulate yourself against burns, and attaching your towel to your apron for attractiveness and ease of retrieval. Genius. There are other worthy techniques, of course, and some are difficult — making butter roses and gilding them with paprika for color — and some are easy, like peeling broccoli stems for cooking.

Also not to be missed is KQED’s 26-episode TV show, Essential Pépin, which starts airing on October 15th. KQED’s specially designed website will feature 2-4 printable recipes from each episode along with delectable photographs of the finished dishes. The website also enables you to watch full episodes online a week before they air on TV.