‘La Technique’ by Jacques Pépin Turns 50 Years Old

Jacques Pépin’s daughter, Claudine, was 9 or 10 when her father asked her for help with the book he was working on. Would she bring him the white cooler?

“I opened it and there was a beautiful, snow-white, dead baby lamb,” Ms. Pépin recalled.

If you’d like to see what her father did to that lamb, look at the photographs on pages 321 through 327 of Mr. Pépin’s cookbook “Complete Techniques,” which was reissued this year in a 50th anniversary edition. Those are Mr. Pépin’s hands paring away its fleece, severing its knee joint and packing its shoulder full of mushrooms, herbs and bread crumbs.

The cutting board on which its kidneys, lungs and heart are laid out is also his.

And the kitchen where the pictures were taken, along with more than a thousand others in the book? That’s Mr. Pépin’s, too.

It’s the same kitchen in Madison, Conn., where Mr. Pépin sat one recent afternoon to talk about the making of “La Technique” and “La Methode,” his two groundbreaking, intensively illustrated, step-by-step instructional books that were later folded into “Complete Techniques.” He is 90, back home after a stay in the hospital in the spring, and doing fairly well, all things considered.

The anniversary edition marks the first appearance, in 1976, of “La Technique.” In the cookbook arena, it proved to be a long-distance athlete. It stayed in print, he has written, for 22 years before it lapsed. Black Dog & Leventhal eventually picked up the rights along with those for “La Methode,” which came out in 1979. With their hundreds of illustrated procedures, they were combined as “Complete Techniques” in 2001. That book has gone through several changes of title and layout, but has never gone out of print. In an email, J.P. Leventhal, the retired founder of Black Dog & Leventhal, estimated that it had sold “well into the six figures.”

Before “Complete Techniques” arrived, prices for used copies of “La Technique” and “La Methode” were “extraordinary,” said Matt Sartwell, the managing partner of the Manhattan bookshop Kitchen Arts & Letters. “People were paying hundreds of dollars for beat-up paperbacks.” At a benefit auction last year for the Jacques Pépin Foundation, two first editions of “La Technique” sold for $23,000 each.

The longevity of these books may seem pretty unlikely the first time you flip through one of them. In the course of more than 700 pages, “Complete Techniques” manages to impart only 160 recipes, many of which aren’t all that helpful if you just want to, you know, cook dinner. Much attention is devoted to carving butterflies out of carrots, swans out of apples, and other decorative bric-a-brac that was already on the way out in 1976.

If you are given to dreaming about a more glamorous life, nothing about the books will encourage those fantasies. The number of photographs is mind-boggling, but not one of them shows a bucket-list travel destination or a TV chef just chillin’ with a mason-jar cocktail. Instead, the pictures zoom in on what Mr. Pépin is doing with his knives and fingers — “just pages and pages of hands working,” said Megan J. Elias, director of Food Studies Programs at Boston University.

Dr. Elias contrasts “La Technique” with another classic book published the same year, “The Taste of Country Cooking,” Edna Lewis’s account of the food she grew up eating in a Virginia town founded by people who had once been enslaved. Ms. Lewis’s tone was reminiscent and lyrical.

“This is not that at all,” Dr. Elias said. “This is: ‘Get your hands into the squab, pull out the organs and keep doing it until you get it right.’”

Often in a literal sense, “La Technique and “La Methode” are about the guts of the cook’s craft. They have less in common with standard cookbooks than with, say, Haynes auto-repair manuals. They were part of a genre that flourished in the 1970s, including “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” “The Joy of Sex” and “The Whole Earth Catalog,” books built on the premise that life could be more fulfilling and independent if you learned to do some basic things on your own, from giving yourself a breast exam to building a geodesic dome.

Mr. Pépin was well qualified as a spokesman for the D.I.Y. approach. He did most of the carpentry in his own kitchen, assembled its countertop from broken marble slabs he picked up at a discount, and painted radishes and fish on its decorative tiles.

When it came to “La Technique,” though, he underestimated the scope of the project. “I said I need probably 300 pictures,” he recalled. “And it grew to 1,500.”

There was no overhead mirror in Mr. Pépin’s kitchen. To get many of the shots the photographer, Léon Perer, perched on a ladder above the cutting board. Mr. Perer’s maneuvers were complicated by symptoms of rickets and by leg injuries he had sustained in the Algerian War. Mr. Pépin had mobility problems of his own. He was still recovering from a car accident in 1974 that broke his pelvis, back, both hips, one arm and a leg.

A family friend was roped in to help. So was Mr. Pépin’s wife, Gloria, who died in 2020, and his editor, Ann Bramson, who used to wrangle Pastis, the family Rottweiler. All this slicing, chopping and cooking consumed almost an entire year.

“Five days a week at least,” Claudine Pépin said. “Eight to 10 hours.”

“More like 10 to 12,” her father said.

“It was a lot. It drove Mom crazy.”

As soon as the 170 procedures in “La Technique” were finished, Mr. Pépin started work on a second batch, which grew into “La Methode.”

“He is the most disciplined person I know,” Ms. Bramson said. “There is never ‘enough is enough.’”

His doggedness is one reason the books found an audience. They are wizards’ manuals, unlocking all sorts of arcane knowledge that was almost completely out of reach to Americans in the late 1970s, unless they had worked in Europe. Mr. Pépin started as an apprentice in French kitchens before he turned 14, watching the moves of more experienced cooks. When he translated that teaching method to the printed page, he added explanations, which his mentors rarely gave him.

The form of the books was as important as their content. Instead of long blocks of text, the techniques were broken down into brief, precise steps and, crucially, photos that made it as clear as possible what you were supposed to do at every key moment. If you had trouble reading or focusing, as many people drawn to kitchens do, finally there was a book for you.

When the chef Tom Colicchio was a teenager in the 1970s, a library copy of “La Technique” his father brought home opened a door into cooking that his “ADHD brain,” as he once put it, had not been able to unlock. Chris Cosentino, a California-based chef with dyslexia and ADHD, has said that most cookbooks he consulted in culinary school defeated him until he found that book and “La Methode.”

When Mr. Pépin taught cooking classes in the 1960s and ’70s, he said, “there would be maybe two guys in a class of 30.” The books, with their operator’s manual approach, bridged the gender gap. It didn’t hurt that they were fearless about splitting a rack of lamb by inserting a skewer into the spinal cord and other topics that weren’t taught in home economics.

“There was still a little bit of food being a woman’s terrain,” Ms. Bramson said. “And suddenly this spoke to a lot of young men who really had a passion for food but hadn’t been spoken to in as direct a fashion.”

Groundbreaking as the books were, it’s not clear that they still speak as directly to cooks. Their photography can seem stilted and inefficient in the age of YouTube. Some techniques now look fussy or dated, too.

“It’s such a throwback,” said Sara Moulton, the cookbook author and TV host. “There’s so much aspic in here. Really? Why?”

Ms. Moulton owns 12 of Mr. Pépin’s books, including “La Technique,” but said she doesn’t use it these days. For a certain stripe of cook, though, Mr. Pépin’s teachings still have the force of scripture.

“When it comes to basic and classical technique, there’s nobody else,” said the chef Brian Dunsmoor. At his restaurant Dunsmoor, in Los Angeles, almost all electrical kitchen tools are banned. For his hands-on style of cuisine, “La Technique” — he has two copies — is an essential reference point.

“Whenever I’m in doubt, I look at this book,” he said. “Every time I go through it, I pick out other little things.”

The new edition of “Complete Techniques” keeps those little things intact. The copy hasn’t been revised in decades. And while Mr. Pépin’s later books would embrace food processors and microwaves, he said he wouldn’t change any of the old-school procedures in “La Technique” and “La Methode,” tasks his hands have practiced so many times he can perform them with his eyes closed.

“Those techniques are almost part of your own makeup. You don’t think about it,” he said. “I wouldn’t know how to do it differently, in a sense.”

Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.