The Chef Who Saved My Life

I only met Jacques Pépin once, during one of the worst weeks of my life. Over a simple meal, he showed me a way forward. It was time to say thanks.
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Here is the story of The Day Jacques Pépin Saved My Life. That’s how I tell it, anyway —at parties, over dinner, on those occasions when a friend finds himself drowning in his own life and I’m cast as an unlikely dispenser of wisdom. That’s when I try to assure him that salvation can come in the most unlikely of guises: in the guise, say, of Jacques Pépin, who, when I, too, was lost and deep in dark waters, came along and showed me the way to back to the light.


It had been a bad breakup. We had lived together for three years, a first for both of us, which may have fueled our fever to stick to it long after it was clear we had probably been a mistake from the beginning. By then, our needs and dependencies had locked as neatly as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, a perverse compatibility that eventually turned to reinforcing and confirming the worst suspicions of each about the other. There followed, finally, a kind of plummeting death-lock in which she and I could do nothing but cleave together and grimly wait for the ground to arrive. When it did come, it was complete with screaming, sobbing, drinking, all the flourishes that make you think, even in the midst of it, not without a certain amount of grim pride, "Good god. So, this is what this looks like."

It had left me, when I had finally wrested myself away from the apartment we shared in Brooklyn, living in the windowless, though carpeted, basement of an old friend’s house in Cobble Hill. Mornings, I lay in the complete darkness, listening to the shuffling and creaking of he and his wife and his two children preparing for the day. There had been a time when I’d still felt close to that domestic future, but now the truth of my life had been revealed, like the corners of a nightclub when the lights snap on: I was no man. I wasn’t moving toward anything. I was a troll in the cellar.

Of all the fallout, physical, psychological, and emotional, that my spasmodic lurch out of the house and into the world had engendered, one effect was most worrisome: I had lost my appetite. Believe me when I tell you that this never happens—not when I’m sick, not when I’m sad, not when I’m busy. I do not understand when people “forget to eat.” As a friend likes to remind me, I once ate a meal of rognons à la moutarde, kidneys in mustard sauce, spent all night on the bathroom floor, shivering, sweating, and expelling, and then woke up proclaiming the dish “excellent” and wanting more. I do not forget to eat.

Now, though, my stomach was wound so tight that there seemed to be no room for food. Whatever I put in my mouth felt like dry newspaper; I was unable to swallow.

Just by way of topping things off, I was broke. Which is why, though I felt incapable of forming a coherent thought, much less writing one, I accepted an assignment from a sympathetic friend at this magazine. It was a short sidebar, to be included in a package about home cooking: Ask Jacques Pépin, one of the world’s first celebrity chefs, for his tips on designing a home kitchen. 400 words. Even in my profoundly stunted state, it was the kind of thing I couldn’t screw up too completely.

I’m embarrassed now to admit that I was only dimly aware then of who Pépin was... I suppose that the editorial statute of limitations has expired and I can admit: I did not overly prepare for this interview.

I'm embarrassed now to admit that I was only dimly aware then of who Pépin was. I knew he belonged to the pioneering generation of food personalities that predated the current celebrity-chef revolution. I associated his name with Julia Child's. (Their TV show Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home was, in fact, one of the great culinary vaudeville acts of all time.) I suppose that the editorial statute of limitations has expired and I can admit: I did not overly prepare for this interview.

However I did manage to set an alarm for that hot, late spring morning, shower, and haul myself out of the basement. My friend's four-year-old son, Caleb, was on the couch, eating cereal, one hand working the spoon while the other was tangled in his thatch of sandy hair.

"Do you want to play?" he asked.

"Sorry. I have to go to work," I told him.

"Why?"

"Because that's what grown-ups do sometimes."

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He looked at me. "You're not a grown-up," he said, attempting to work it out. "I mean, you're not a kid…" He trailed off. I understood completely.

An hour later, I emerged from the subway and stood blinking in the hot sun at Grand Street and Broadway. Across the street, on the corner, sat the International Culinary Center. Pépin had been a dean at the school since 1988, when it was still called the French Culinary Institute. I hadn't eaten, and I felt shaky and weak. With ten minutes to kill, I went looking for something to stabilize my stomach. At a bodega, I scanned the refrigerator case for anything I could choke down. Blindly, I settled on some kind of protein drink. Undoubtedly, there are worse bottoms to hit, but this, in retrospect, was mine—what I can only hope will remain the worst meal of my life. White, chalky, it was like swallowing wallpaper paste. I gagged as much down as I could before throwing the rest away. Then, I crossed the street and went upstairs.

I knew enough about Pépin's stature to feel sheepish about taking up his time for such a small story. I expected to spend a quick twenty minutes, ask my questions and get out of there. An assistant led me to the cluttered office where Pépin waited. He was wearing chef's whites, having just given a demo to students in one of the downstairs kitchens, and his gray but thick hair was swept dashingly upward from his forehead. He extended a hand to shake, one of the most extraordinary hands I'd ever seen: angular and bony, with an exceptionally long middle finger, thick pads at the tip of each digit, and a thumb that protruded at an odd angle upwards. It seemed at once wrecked by years of kitchen work and oddly delicate; the hand of a workman and an artist. Later, I would come to know the kind of elemental alchemy Pépin's hands were capable of: transforming a liquid mass of eggs into an omelet with a few sharp pulls of a fork, trussing a roast with lightning-fast knots as elaborate and tight as a sailor's, deftly dismantling a whole chicken with whatever implement happens to be at hand—a knife, a spoon, for all I know the daily newspaper. For now, I shook hastily and muttered an apology for taking up his time.

"No, no. Don't be ridiculous," he said. His accent was almost comically French, despite nearly five decades in the United States.

So I settled in, between the filing cabinets and teetering stacks of paper, and we talked about the finer points of kitchen design: how he, at his Madison, Connecticut, home, had a wall made of reclaimed barnwood on which most of the pots, pans, and other implements he used hung within easy reach. How one should, of course, have a gas stove but opt for the consistency of an electric oven, preferably placed high on the wall, to avoid excessive bending. How, contrariwise, a side-by-side fridge and freezer is a waste of space and the freezer as bottom drawer is preferable. How most gadgets are useless and fail the Closet Test—i.e. that anything you stick in one will never be used. How there should be good light, good music, and a good view, if possible, and a place for your guests to perch to drink wine and watch you work.

These were all simple, concrete, tactile tips based on a fundamental view of eating as a central part of life and the effort of cooking as an integral part of the pleasure itself. What I noticed most, though, was how completely Pépin was granting me his attention, how present and engaged he was, despite the banality of my questions. It was a simple thing, but weirdly magical, allowing the rest of the world to fade away as we chatted. Twenty minutes passed quickly, then forty, then an hour. I was surprised to find my shoulders starting to relax.

It was now approaching noon and finally I got up to leave. "Would you like something to eat?" Pépin's assistant asked. I assumed this was just a courtesy and prepared to beg off. I couldn't imagine sitting downstairs, in the student-manned restaurant L'Ecole, by myself, trying vainly to eat.

"Will you join me?" I asked Pépin, sending the courtesy back.

He looked at me as though I might have hearing problems.

"Of course," he said. "It's lunchtime!"

Pépin with Julia Child and Padma Lakshmi

We took the long way downstairs, so that Pépin could walk me through ICC's facilities. Every time we entered a kitchen classroom, the young men and women in their starchy whites and toques would stiffen over their cutting boards and mixers, stealing glances at Pépin. He did his best to put them at ease, laying a hand on a shoulder and offering bits of advice. "Yes, chef," they murmured. In the stairwell, a breathless young man stopped us to gush about an egg demo Pépin had led the day before, in particular a technique in which the chef deep-fried an egg by cracking it into hot oil and gently herding it into shape with a pair of spoons. "I'll never be able to do that, Chef" the student said. "You will," Pépin told him. "You will."

At L'Ecole, we were ushered to a seat and given menus. Pépin ordered: a list of newish items on the menu that he wanted to check up on, and a bottle of Sancerre. Conversation came easily. We talked about his arrival in New York, in 1959, a time when it was possible to land in town and, within weeks, know everybody who mattered in the food world. Pépin had done just that, quickly meeting such legendary figures as James Beard; Pierre Franey, chef at Le Pavillon; New York Times restaurant critic Craig Claiborne; and, of course, Julia Child whose Mastering the Art of French Cooking was still a pile of type-written pages.

The food came and I took a few tentative sips of consommé. "What do you think?" Pépin asked. This was not a test, but genuine curiosity. I said it was good but could use some salt. He reached over and took a spoonful. "I think you are right," he said.

I was pleased, but I had not told the whole truth. Yes, from a technical standpoint, I thought the soup needed more salt. But I also thought it was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten. I was aware, as more food arrived, that I had started breathing for what seemed like the first time in weeks. And I was ravenous. I grabbed hunks of bread and slathered them with paté, wolfed down delicate, pink lamb chops, gnawing the bones. If Pépin noticed, he didn't say. We reached over to each others' plates to take tastes, ordered another bottle. Alain Sailhac, the longtime chef at Le Cirque and another dean at the school, with his silver hair and bushy eyebrows, passed through the dining room and sat for a glass. He and Pépin swapped stories of coming up in France's old brigade system: the yelling, the smack of a pan hurled across the room, the chore of pressing ingredients through a massive sieve in the back of the Plaza Athénée in the days before food processors. Pépin showed the bulbous tips of his fingers, still inured to heat after a summer spent in Aix-les-Bains as the grillardin for a chef who prohibited the use of utensils to flip his steaks, chickens and chops_._

At a time when I had forgotten the possibility of pleasure, Pépin had effortlessly, instinctively brought me back to life. Without knowing it, he had extended a hand to a drowning man.

I sat in a state of wonder. At a time when I had forgotten the possibility of pleasure, Pépin had effortlessly, instinctively brought me back to life. Without knowing it, he had extended a hand to a drowning man. For dessert we had crème brûlée and an apple tart, coffee, and one more glass of wine. And then I was shaking that hand again, the other clasped warmly atop mine. And then I was out on the street, dazed and floating.

That night, my newly ex-girlfriend was out of town, so I was able to go back to my house. I bought a six-pack of Tecate in cans, a half-pound of prosciutto di parma, sliced thin, and a loaf of bread. I sat in my backyard, in the dark, drinking the beer, listening to a Mets game on the radio and breathing the warm, humid air. I had swum back to myself.


Things continued to happen. I made it through that summer, slowly rejoining life. I had another relationship, a better one, though it also ended. Not as badly, but badly enough. I did well professionally; I wrote a couple of books. Just after New Year's, 2011, I got on a train and moved to New Orleans where, eventually, I bought a house with the woman I intend to spend the rest of my life with. We built a big, open kitchen that is the center of the house, with space for stools at the counter, a thick, green stand of birds of paradise outside the French doors, and a freezer stacked underneath the fridge. Last August, I became a father.

Along the way, I've cooked an awful lot from Pépin's cookbooks: squab with lettuce, roast leg of lamb, leafy salads with mustardy vinaigrette and boiled potatoes, poulet à l'estragon—chicken simmered in white wine and tarragon, served beneath a velvet blanket of cream and egg yolk sauce. (This was the first dish Pépin had ever been allowed to prepare alone at the stove—for late night arrivals at Le Grand Hôtel de l'Europe in Lyon—and some version of it appears throughout his cookbooks since.)

I've roasted dozens of chickens according to his method, which, among an infinite number of competing philosophies, I believe to be the only truly foolproof one. (Cast iron pan; 425 degrees; 20 minutes laid on one side, leg down; 20 minutes on the other; breast up for 20 minutes, or until the juices run clear.) I've turned countless times to one or another iteration of La Technique, Pépin's revolutionary series of illustrated cooking lessons, to learn what to do with, say, a bundle of leeks, a membranous pile of sweetbreads, a few pounds of frogs legs dropped off by a New Orleans neighbor**.** (Shaken in a paper bag with flour and black pepper—I add cayenne in a nod to Louisiana—then flash-sautéed in frothing butter.) I am hardly alone in my dependence on these books; Tom Colicchio taught himself to cook by reading La Technique.

I learned quite a bit more about Pépin the man, too, starting with his lovely 2003 memoir, The Apprentice: My Life In The Kitchen. His has been a life too varied and rich to be quickly summarized: from apprenticeships in the provinces, to the kitchens of Paris, to the palace itself, where he served three prime ministers, including Charles de Gaulle. He made the fateful passage to New York, where he landed in the kitchen of the legendary Le Pavillon restaurant. He met Craig and Jim and Julia. And he fell in love with America. There was plenty to dislike about how we ate in those days of canned vegetables and condensed soups, but Pépin fell for Oreos and Jell-O, for Maine lobster, fried chicken, sweet summer corn, and Reuben sandwiches—for the country's democratic, open-hearted approach to food. His accent may be Pepé Le Pew's but his heart is pure Capra.

He turned down a chance to be John F. Kennedy's White House chef, in favor of going to work for Howard Johnson, the man and the restaurant chain. Cooking for presidents and visiting dignitaries was something he had done before. Serving good food—with real milk, real seafood, real vegetables—to ordinary Americans? That turned him on. He wrote a Master's thesis, at Columbia, on Voltaire. He endured a devastating car accident in the Catskills, after which he was not expected to walk again, much less cook. He became a teacher, giving two and three classes per day across the country, and then conquered television. He settled finally in Connecticut where, in my favorite of his cookbooks, Chez Jacques: Traditions and Rituals of a Cook, he can be seen living what can only be described as the good life: gathering mushrooms in the spring and fall, catching fish and frogs in his pond, painting watercolors when the spirit takes hold, standing at the kitchen counter eating roast chicken with knife and fingers.

I can think of no better summary than an interview conducted by the photographer Melanie Dunea for her book My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals. His answer to the question of what his final meal would be begins:

The menu for my last meal would be eclectic, relaxed, informal, and would go on for a very, very long time—years!...I cannot conceive of anything better than the greatest baguette, deep golden, nutty, and crunchy, with a block of the sublime butter of Brittany and Bélon oysters. I would consume tons of the best beluga caviar with my wife, dispose of the best boiled ham and the most excellent Iberíco ham, and would eat eggs cooked in butter, scrambled, mollet-style or sunny-side up, with the ham.

And the list continues: fingerling potatoes cooked in goose fat, pâté of pheasant with black truffles, a lobster roll, a hot dog, apricots, cherries, white and wine peaches, "I would pile homemade apricot jam onto thin, buttery crêpes, hot from the pan and accompany them with a Bollinger Brut 1996 champagne."

Who would be your dining companions? Dunea asks.

My family, a few close friends, and my dog, Paco, would stay until the end, while many other good friends would come by and have a few drinks, eat, and leave

Who would prepare the meal?

We would cook, drink, and eat together until the end—weeks or months later—when I would die from the péché de gourmandise (sin of gluttony)!

The Last Supper he was describing, in other words, had begun years ago. It had in fact been the entirety of his life.

Meanwhile, through the years, I told the story of my own meal with Jacques. Often. It's a good story—heavy but not too heavy, semi-confessional, a dash of celebrity, a happy ending. One evening, occasioned by a shared plate of prosciutto at The Tasting Kitchen, a restaurant in Venice Beach, I told it to an especially sharp friend. When I was done, he looked at me for a long time. You should write about that, he told me. Sure, I plan to, I said.

Then he said, "Don't make it an obituary."


Another steamy day. Back on the corner of Grand and Broadway. I was about to go inside and take up more of Jacques Pépin's time.

Another year or so had gone by since that Venice Beach meal, but I had thought often about what my friend had said: "Don't make it an obituary." It had made me instantly ashamed. In the back of my head, I knew, I had always thought of it as just that: a story to tell in tribute someday, when it would be a feather in my cap—if an earnest, heartfelt one—but of little use to Jacques Pépin.

It amazed me, the more I thought about it, that it had never occurred to me to simply reach out and say thank you. Why? Well, a lot of time had passed. Pépin is famous and, like many people, I harbor the irrational superstition that part of becoming famous is a kind of cognitive retardation that prevents one from remembering anybody who is not also famous.

And there was no easy definition for what Pépin had become for me. He was not my father, certainly, nor a friend, nor even a mentor. "Role models" were for college essays, not grown men. Any of those relationships would have been recognizable, with its own protocol for behavior and for expressing gratitude. But Pépin and I had met only glancingly, at a moment that had obviously meant vastly more to me than it had to him, itself something hard to admit. I had learned, over time, that I was not alone. Many other men had had similar experiences—even equally surreal ones. Not enough of them had ever said thanks.

So I called Pépin's office and asked to meet. I was invited to watch him give a demo at the ICC and then have dinner. As it happened, it was the same egg demo that the student had gushed about in the stairwell six years earlier—the equivalent of a free-throw clinic taught by Michael Jordan. About twenty students were gathered in the small auditorium when Pépin entered, looking more or less the same as I remembered.

The demo began. "I am Jacques Pépin, I am one of the deans here," said Pépin. "If you ever see me when I am around and want to talk about food, please do."

As he talked, one hand idly scraped at a block of yellow butter on the counter in front of him, pulling up long, flat strips. A twist, a flourish with the fingers, and he had transformed them into a rose, which he dropped into cold water. He wore the barest smile of a master magician.

Indeed, the show had just begun: For the next 45 minutes, Pépin spun gold out of the base elements of yolk and albumen. He created perfect poached eggs, summoned two omelets—one the traditional fluffy French kind, the other the hard, American diner version; there was a time and place for each, he said. He made a mayonnaise, intentionally broke the emulsion and then brought it, Lazarus-like, back to life. The money shot, true to the admiring student's promise, came when he cracked an egg into hot oil, using a pair of spoons to shepherd the spreading white until it was a perfect fried orb. This was an almost primitive magic, a mastery of the physical world—though rooted in a plain-spoken stream of scientific fact.

When it was over, Pépin patiently answered questions at the front of the room. He signed books. Slowly the room emptied until it was just Pépin, me, and a few assistants cleaning up. He took me by the arm: "Let's have dinner."

To answer my first question: I did look familiar, though he couldn't remember exactly why we had met. "It was silly," I said. "A waste of your time."

"We had lunch didn't we?" he said. "So I was not suffering."

We sat at a table at L'Ecole, a few feet from where our first meal together had been. A woman approached the table, one of a stream throughout the evening, to say hello and thanks for a cooking lesson she had attended years before. Pépin ordered some wine and bread—requesting the hard heel of the loaf—the _croûton—_which, to his chagrin, he had noticed being thrown out the day before.

"This is my favorite part," he said, cradling a handful of crumbs in his hand and shaking them ruminatively, like dice, before funneling them into his mouth.

We ordered charcuterie and homemade cavatelli with rock shrimp and two whole Fourchu lobsters—a special variety found only in the cold waters around an island in Nova Scotia. The ICC was housing a pondful of them somewhere in Bushwick.

We talked about the state of modern chefdom. He was clear-eyed but uncranky. The undercooking of everything, especially vegetables, drove him crazy. So did excessive culinary piety: "I've been in restaurants where they bring over a carrot and say ‘This carrot was born the ninth of September. His name is Jean-Marie…' Just give me the goddamned carrot!'" Young chefs, he said, had become overly concerned with self-expression. Nouvelle cuisine had been about many things: fresher ingredients, new techniques, a sensitivity to place and season, healthier preparations, creativity, innovation. Out of all those mandates, chefs sometimes seemed to have only heard the final two. "That's how you wind up with a slice of rock salt in a bowl of raspberry ice cream," he said.

He sighed. "But we tend to do that. This is America. We go totally from one end of the spectrum to the other end." In the end, the job was still and would always be the same. "We are the mashed potato makers," he said. "We are here to please people."

I was stalling. Twice I opened my mouth to tell my story and twice I was surprised to find my heart beating wildly. The lobsters came and Pépin used two hands to pry open the shell with a resounding crack. He pressed the leggy bottom of the body to his mouth and inhaled a blast of brine. I took a deep breath.

"So, the reason I came here today," I began, "I wanted to tell you a story about the last time we met and… for reasons…there's no reason you should have known this, but it was a difficult time in my life, I was at a real low point. I was in a terrible state of anxiety and unhappiness and…I had stopped eating. And, well, it was just such a lovely day that it really turned me around." This was inadequate in the extreme, but apparently my tremble did a better job of conveying the depth of my feeling.

Pépin put down his lobster. He dipped his napkin in his water glass and used it to wash his fingers.

"Well, thank you very much," he said, finally. "But I just happened to be there. I was…what is it, from Aristotle? I was just the medium."

"I never said thank you," I said.

"But it was not me, it was you," he said. "You did it."

At that moment, another woman came over to shake Pépin's hand, giving me a chance to collect myself. As simple and obvious as Pépin's assessment seemed, it confused me. I felt both giddy and queasy.

When the woman left, Pépin sat back and took a thoughtful sip of wine.

"I think I know what you are talking about," he said. "After my years in Paris in the 1950s, reading Camus and Sartre, I am a bit of an existentialist at heart." (He had, in fact, served Sartre at La Rotonde, the Paris brasserie.) "I think that the point is that you do things in life where you are moving…often without realizing it."

He knew what it was like to meet somebody who changed your life. For him, it had been Claiborne, the first food critic at the Times—the inventor, really, of modern restaurant criticism—and a guru of the nascent food scene of the 1960s. Weekends at Claiborne's house in the Hamptons were long parties filled with food and drink, in which guests came and went and ate and cooked. To a buttoned-down Frenchman, it was a revelation.

Jacques Pepin (center) with Howard Johnson VP Pierre Franey (left) after a picnic.

The LIFE Images Collection/Getty

"In France you would invite someone for the weekend or for dinner, it was an ordeal, as much for them as for you. You would organize what you were going to do and what you were going to eat, for breakfast, lunch, dinner," he said chopping at the air like a military bandleader. "I came to Craig and we went to the market. He poached eggs and kept them in a bowl of ice water; you woke up and had one, whenever you wanted. Fine. At lunch, there's some ham, you stuff a sandwich. And then in the afternoon we started cooking, maybe have a cocktail, maybe finish up at one or two in the morning, halfway drunk. But it was such a free, casual way, an open way of seeing people, of receiving people, which for me had always been very structured. It changed my life. It made me stay in America. I…" He searched for the words. "I came out of my carapace."

He had told Claiborne thank you, but under unhappy circumstances. The critic's last days were marked by dementia and alcoholism; their last dinner had been at Le Cirque with Ed Giobbi, the artist, gourmand and reputed inventor of pasta primavera. Claiborne, wheelchair bound, had been cranky and displeased.

"Craig was great," Pépin said, tenderly. "But he could be a bitch."

Claiborne's sense of generosity and conviviality, Pépin believed, had come from his upbringing in Mississippi—another argument for the notion that Southerners have always made the best New Yorkers. It occurred to me that whatever strain of his philosophy had been passed along to me through Pépin had circuitously sent me to live in the South myself, where I had come out of my carapace. For the first time, I felt my experience might be a link in a chain.

We turned to our lobsters and ate, silent for a few minutes, except for the cracking of shells and sucking of flesh.

I realized that, rudely, I hadn't asked what the past six years had been like for him. Not much, he said: A couple of shoulder and hip surgeries, another cookbook. A grandchild. His mother, close to 100, was still alive in Lyon. His poodle, Paco, loved him ever more each day. He and his wife Gloria had now been married for nearly 50 years. "When you get older you hope that things slow down a bit but continue the same," he said. "If things continue the same, it is a great miracle." (This March, he survived and recovered from a minor stroke.)

Pépin folded the corner of his napkin contemplatively. "I go back to Lyon. Or, I look at my daughter. I see paintings that I did in 1962… Sometimes, I look and I say, It's not me," he said.  "I would love to be able to taste the food I did forty years ago. It would be quite fascinating. The painting is still on the wall. I can see it. But the beauty of food in many ways is that it's so evanescent. It comes and it disappears. And all you have is your memory."

Suddenly I was seized with the urge to spill more: "I've tried, Jacques," I wanted to say. "Honestly I've tried. To live with an open heart. To give more than take. To work joyfully. To be awake to the world always. To live up to our lunch. But, it's hard. And I fail all the time."

What I said instead, was, "I've tried. Over and over. But…I just can't debone a chicken."

"Ah, well," he patted my arm. "That's probably okay too."

And now our time was up. Pépin would go upstairs and change into street clothes. He would spend the night at the Yale Club, as he did when he found himself in Manhattan late. In the morning, he would get on the train, back to the house in Madison. And I would go my way, too.

"Perhaps we'll catch up in another six years?" I said, as we shook hands again.

"Sooner, I hope," he said, ushering me toward the door. He pressed two packages, wrapped in brown paper, into my hands. I did not fully register what they were until I was alone, on the street, and Jacques Pépin had disappeared: two warm, long loaves of bread, for the walk ahead.


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