Chef Jacques Pepin visits in "Food for Thought" symposium

Posted 04/13/01

The celebrated chef and television host Jacques Pépin will serve up a helping of culinary history as part of a Dartmouth College symposium titled "Food for Thought" on Monday, April 16, beginning at 3:30 p.m. in Room 1 of the Rockefeller Center.

Sponsored by the European Studies Institute at Dartmouth, the symposium is part of the Institute's year-long examination of the question "Is a European Culture Possible?" In addition to Pépin's presentation on "European Cuisine: Then and Now," the symposium will include cooking demonstrations, commentary from anthropologists and from food historians and critics.

"The creation of the European Union (EU) has created a situation in which the old nation states of Europe find themselves on the brink of an identity crisis," said Lawrence Kritzman, Director of the European Studies Institute. "The colloquium will address the role of food and the EU. How does the agricultural policy of the European community affect national culinary traditions and what impact does it have on issues such as genetically altered food, bio-ethics and mad cow disease?"

Born near Lyon, France, Pépin was the personal chef to three French heads of state, including Charles de Gaulle, from 1956 to 1958. In 1959 he moved to the United States, where he worked as a chef and earned his master's degree in French literature. In the 1970s he authored two step-by-step books on French culinary technique, La Téchnique and La Méthode. These works, and others that followed, earned Pépin a place in the James Beard Foundation's Cookbook Hall of Fame in 1996.

Pépin has hosted several public television cooking shows, including Jacques Pépin's Kitchen: Encore with Claudine, which in May 1999 was named Best National TV Cooking Show at the James Beard Awards in May 1999. His other public television series include the acclaimed Jacques Pépin's Cooking Techniques and three successful seasons of Today's Gourmet with Jacques Pépin and Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home.

Other presentations in the symposium include "Rethinking the European Culinary Canon" by Amy Trubek of the New England Culinary Institute, "Exploding Myths of Origin with Mad Cows and Frankenfish" by culinary writer Betty Fussell, "Macrowaves on Stormy Restaurant Seas" by Albert Sonnenfeld of the USC American Food and Wine Institute, and "The Evolution of Cuisine in Europe" by Gérard Faucher, Restaurant Faucher-Paris.

All sessions are free and open to the public. For more information, contact the European Studies Institute at (603) 646-2912.