- Hi, I'm Jacques Pépin.

- And I'm Claudine Pépin.

- Today we'll cook food that brings back memories.

I'll teach you the food of my mother, things I grew up with.

- Things I grew up with too.

Being in France in the summer, sitting around the kitchen table in those funny chairs, some of my greatest childhood memories are from eating in the kitchen at Mamie's house.

- This type of cooking is simple, unpretentious, and very flavorful.

- Can you teach me how to make Mamie's famous apple tarts?

- Of course.

It's easy.

Join us for a tribute to grand-mère.

- Next on Jacques "Pépin's Kitchen".

- "Cooking with Claudine".

(jazz music) Today we're going to do a "Tribute To Grandmother".

Actually, to your grand-mère.

- To your mother.

- To my mother, yes, your grand-mère.

- Yeah.

- Sometimes there are dishes which never taste as good as what you can remember when you were a child.

I know some of the dishes you like the best from my mother.

Some from your mother.

- Some from, yep.

- Hopefully some from me?

- A couple.

- A couple, okay.

So we're going to start trying to recreate the taste of what my mother does at home, very simple food.

When she had the small restaurant in Léon, and she was famous for apple tart.

Everyone is famous for an apple tart in France.

But this is very unusual as you're going to see.

The dough is made with flour, vegetable shortening, and she put baking powder in it.

- Oh wow.

- A teaspoon of baking powder, a little dash of sugar, of salt rather, and a bigger dash of sugar.

And we're going to make that together.

So you crush it in there.

We want to homogenize all together and after we're going to put warm milk in it.

It's not commercial, but that makes a very interesting dough.

You see what you want to do here is gather that together.

I use my hand here.

Okay, that's good.

I'm going to give you the milk.

About a quarter of a cup of milk here.

I'll gather it together for you, you know?

Okay.

And then, you can of course roll it with flour, but to avoid putting more flour on top of it, we can do it right onto the plastic wrap here.

And I'll take a little bit of extra flour to clean up my hand.

- Do you want a rolling pin?

- [Jacques] Yeah, we want a rolling pin to do it.

So, if we do it in the plastic wrap like this, you can practically extend it by hand.

Oh, here we are.

You go ahead, you press it.

Well, what you can do also at the beginning is just press it like this and extend it.

- Oh.

- [Jacques] You don't work it out too much.

Doing that and doing a little bit in that.

See, this is thin enough here, so this is a bit bigger.

Do it here.

That's pretty good.

And you know, my mother never did the tatin, the dough very, very thin.

It was relatively thick and it goes up a little bit because of the baking powder here.

So let's see, let's take this to measure, whether the size, what do you think?

It has to come around.

- Mm.

- Maybe a little more in that corner here.

So, let's remove this one.

You want me to put it in there or you want to put it in there?

- I wanna put it in there.

- Okay, you know what?

Sometime you use that as a spatula, is great to pick up things.

And you can cook this directly in there on the cooking sheet or use this one or the other.

Okay, you lift it up and you put it upside down, preferably the plastic on top.

Yeah, that's good.

Great.

- Okay.

- No, no, use the plastic now to lift it up like that and press it in the corner.

You go around, without stretching the dough, you want to bring the dough around and press it like this.

That's pretty good.

- Hey, I have a pretty good teacher.

- Okay.

We can remove your plastic.

And you see in the part where you don't have too much dough, you can add a little bit.

Here.

It's okay.

That's it here.

And we could do a border a little bit bigger like this by pressing it.

I press it with my thumb, to make it a bit rounder around.

All you have to do, you carry it with this, you go this way.

Doesn't matter if you go totally from the end because then you do it this way to be sure that those two ends are done.

So you clean it up around.

And what we want to do, we do apple on top of this, both happen to be Granny Smith.

We of course use any type of apple around.

By convention, my mother would use more of the soft apple in the style of the McIntosh, Rome beauty, Macaroon, Stayman, all of those are relatively acidic and soft apple.

Okay.

- Should I put this back on here?

- Yep.

And now you see what I did here?

Again, use your thumb as a pivot here to remove this.

Remember that your thumb is in there, so you don't go through with the knife.

And I'm going to peel this this way.

Why don't you peel the other one with the vegetable peeler?

Or you want use a knife too?

- I want to use a knife.

- Vegetable peeler is a bit easier maybe.

See you move slowly here, you're doing pretty good.

And move actually the apple into the knife like this, yeah?

So we cut that into quarter like this.

You're doing very good, Tin Tin.

- Thanks.

- So, you continue doing this.

I'm going to start arranging the apple very simply around like this.

Okay.

All right.

- [Claudine] So you don't need this?

- I'll eat that piece.

- Okay.

- Okay, sprinkle some sugar on top of it.

About two, three tablespoon of sugar.

- [Claudine] Do you need a- - [Jacques] Three tablespoon of sugar, so you take it this way.

- [Claudine] Okay.

- Other way, we'll be here the whole day.

Oh, and two tablespoon of butter.

Two tablespoon of butter is that much and you cut it into pieces on top.

Looks good, huh?

- [Claudine] Mm-hm.

- If you do the apple ahead, of course you would want to put a little bit of lemon juice to prevent them from discolor.

And you always put it on a tray like this because if the sugar fall on it, it caramelize, or if something happen, you don't mess up your oven and it's easier to put it in the oven and take it out.

I would cook 400 degree for a good hour.

So you're going to do that?

- Mm-hm.

- Okay, and I have another one which is cooked here, which has been cooling off.

After that amount of time, what we have here, see what it looks like, Claudine?

So you know those little thing, bring a little bowl for me like that.

Put this one here.

You put that on top.

You leave that up and then you can slide this onto it.

Now, remember that there is a bottom and it's nice and brown, and there is a metal bottom.

But very often we would leave that at home just this way.

- Yeah.

- Especially if you put it on a silver tray, because you cut it on your silver tray and you mess up the bottom, you know?

So, let's get a slice of this and this.

Whoops.

And you know what?

- What?

- Sometime at that point, we would put a glaze on top.

- After it's cooked?

- One of the best glaze, yes, it's an apricot, like this.

And you take an apricot glaze like this and you mix it maybe with a little bit of calvados or stuff like that, and just put it on top and glaze it like that.

- [Claudine] Or just hot water?

- Just hot water is fine.

Calvados is better.

Because calvados with apple, you see it give a nice finish.

But I'm going to leave that other side just like this because this is the way your grandmother does it.

And I tell you the dough is very, very soft and flaky like here.

Taste that one.

- Mm.

Oh it's great.

- [Jacques] So this is mini apple pie.

There is no cooking for me without onion.

Onion.

This is the truffle of the poor people.

And look at the variety that we have here.

Pearl onion.

We used to have one type.

You have yellow pearl onion, you have the white one, you have the red pearl onion and the bigger one.

Actually when I was an apprentice, I hated to peel bags of those to put with the condition.

And then look at those.

Now those are the cipollini onion coming from Italy and they are quite known now and very sweet.

You have your green onions, scallion.

And look at those here, you have shallot.

Give me the shallot.

See, conventionally, the shallot that we have in France is much more oval, like a football.

But those are round.

But you can see they are shallot inside, they are divided into the three things.

Those are good.

And then of course we have garlic here.

Garlic is part of the same family again, the allium.

And look at those red, beautiful red onion.

Those are fresh onion out of the ground.

Beautiful and glistening.

And of course you have now all kind of spicy onion like Maui onion, Vidalia.

And this is your regular yellow onion, the most common, and it's still very good.

That's what we're using today in the recipe.

(jazz music) - We have to have onion soup.

Mamie always makes onion soup.

- That's right.

- Especially on New Year's.

- Exactly.

I'm gonna show you how she makes onion soup very easily.

A little bit of oil and then sliced onion.

About a pound of onion.

You want try to slice it on this side here?

- Okay.

- With the cheese grater.

- You take it.

(knife chopping) - Yeah, you can use that cheese grater for a lot of things.

This is a simple, simple soup.

Did it work?

- Yeah.

- Kind of crush it.

- It goes faster with... Yeah.

- Goes faster with the food processor.

- It goes faster with you.

- Or with the knife.

So why don't you try?

Yes, again, put your finger the right way.

That's good.

You're doing great.

(knife chopping) Okay.

And we have about... Yeah you know the music.

(knife chopping) Three quarter of a pound of onion here.

And what my mother does particularly, she brown them.

She really brown them and very dark.

See the way we do onion soup in Leon, sometimes people do it only with water, sometimes we do it with chicken stock.

But that has to cook at least a good 10 minutes until it's nice and brown, which is what I have right here.

And you can see how dark it is here.

And this is what we want.

- [Claudine] It smells right.

- [Jacques] The dark onions.

It smells right?

- [Claudine] Yeah.

- Smells the right smell.

And into this now we put chicken stock.

This one is warm already.

It's about a quarter of chicken stock, four cup that I have here.

And basically the chicken stock, you have to, of course taste it to know whether there is salt and pepper.

I think mine was lightly salted.

I put a bit more salt, freshly ground pepper.

All it does now is to come back to a boil.

And you have a kind of home simple onion soup with crouton.

Why don't you get some of the crouton here, Claudine.

- [Claudine] All right.

- Always used crouton, my mother's house, she never throw bread out and she buy bread every day.

- Sometimes twice a day when we're there.

- Twice a day when we're there, yeah.

So we have the crouton.

You can put that right on top of it here.

- Okay.

- Or let's put the crouton in the bottom of the soup pairing here.

That's it.

And we wanna grate Swiss cheese on top like this, directly in there.

Put about, well three quarter of a cup is good.

I know, I know you're sneaking things behind my back.

Okay, Swiss cheese goes right on top of it.

And when you're ready to go to the table, that's when she bring the soup boiling hot and pour that directly into the soup bowl.

That is really homemade simple type of... - I'm gonna put some chives on top.

- You can't mess with this.

Yes, why don't you put some chives on top of this?

That's it.

And now what we have to do, we have to go and work for the main course.

Okay?

- [Claudine] Sounds good.

- [Jacques] That's terrific.

So let's do chicken now.

We wanted to do chicken.

We always do chicken at home.

And we're going to do a Chicken Ragu Jeannette.

Jeannette is my mother's name.

And we're going to cut the chicken.

I wanted to show you how to remove the leg.

You see when people cut the leg, first they leave the chicken here.

Take it up.

So you use the weight of the chicken, all you do is to cut with your knife all around the skin.

That's it.

Until you get to the back here that little oyster, till you cut the little oyster.

Now you bring the chicken back up, grab the knee, crack it up and cut through that sinew here.

You hold it and you pull it out.

- Wow.

- Here is the leg of the chicken.

Okay, here we go.

I cut this.

Use your towel to remove the skin.

In that case here we're removing the skin and must have the visible fat.

I have two more there and we're going to saute that with a little bit of oil.

So here it is.

Okay, we want to remove all of that visible fat here.

You want to cut around.

(oil crackling) Okay, put this one there.

Okay, now that you've done this, (oil crackling) this has to cook, so what you want Claudine, you want this to brown around nicely.

And what we are going to put in there is what we call lardon.

And what we have here are a little bit of salt pork.

It's called corn belly, it's called sweet pickle, it's called cured pork, dry salt, cured pork.

Any of those amount to the same thing.

It is basically unsmoked bacon, the piece.

And you see that piece that I get here it the best because it's very, very lean and that's what you want 'cause sometime it's very, very fatty and you want it as lean as possible.

This is close to what the Italian called pancetta.

- Oh, okay.

- [Jacques] Okay, so we cut it into the little lardons like this.

What I want to get is to blanch the lardon.

That is you put the lardon into boiling water.

Can you give me that?

So you mix it.

And you want to blanch them.

That remove a great deal of the salt.

- Oh.

- Taste of it.

And it's good to blanch the lardon.

And we blanch them for like a minute, minute and a half.

Let's see those here.

Those are browning?

- Starting.

- [Jacques] Okay.

(chicken crackling) Yeah.

(chicken crackling) You want brown them six, seven minutes.

You know more than what I have here.

And my lardon basically enough here.

See the way they are nice and thin, huh?

- [Claudine] Yeah.

- And you want to put this and cook that with your chicken and blanch them and render the fat, make them very crispy and very flavorful.

This actually will flavor the chicken a great deal.

- [Claudine] Oh, okay.

- So let's cook in this.

And during that time, let's move on to the rest of the recipe here.

We're going to flavor that with onion, again with green onion, scallion with garlic.

And of course we are putting, you know what that is?

- Bay leaves.

- [Jacques] Bay leaves and- - [Claudine] Mamie has those in gardens.

- Yeah, we have them in the garden in France, and what we do, I brought some back from France the last time and I put them in the microwave oven at home just to dry them a little bit out and they are really terrific.

Or you want to cut the onion?

- No, I cut the onion.

- Okay.

- By the time you're finished with that, maybe I'll be finished with the onion.

- [Jacques] Okay.

I think you're doing much better with your knife skill.

(Claudine chuckles) You are.

Okay.

All right.

(onions sizzling) This of course should brown a little more than it is.

The lardon should be crisp.

- And what about the garlic?

- [Jacques] Besides the onion, well we need the garlic also.

You crack it a little bit like this so it doesn't shoot out.

But then after, you have to pound it to crush it.

Put your hand there, we'll chop it, both of us.

- [Claudine] I like this.

This is a good job.

I can do this.

- Okay.

And you know it's not very fine but it's fine here.

Okay, we put that in there.

Getting there, the time, the belly, of course it looks good like a real stew like we do at home.

- Mm.

- And what you want to put in this, it's a little bit of flour.

We call that singer or singe and that gives some creaminess and some texture to the skin.

I put two teaspoon of flour here just to give a bit of lier what we call that, either a bit of thickening, a bit of creaminess to the sauce, and you kind of mix that.

You kind of mix that with all of the mixture in there, before you add any type of liquid.

And when this is well incorporated, you could cook that for a couple of minutes more.

Then we add white wine and water.

- Okay.

- Do you wanna get me the white wine?

- [Claudine] I got it.

- Both of them.

I want a cup and a half of this.

Okay, that's about it.

Yes.

Fine.

And about half a cup of wine or something.

And this is a dry white wine.

Chardonnay of course is good.

Sauvignon Blanc would be good too.

No, a little more.

Okay, that's fine.

That's fine now.

Okay.

Now Claudine, did we put any salt in there?

- I don't think so.

- You don't think so?

All right.

(meat sizzling) Put a bit of salt, pepper.

Here is the potato that we put in there.

Notice what I did here.

I just pick up a little bit of the eye or the black spot on top of it and I left the skin.

As you know, your grandmother would never leave the skin in there.

- No.

- Why did I leave the skin in there?

- Because I like it.

- Because you like the skin in there.

So this is a mixture.

Okay, and that kind of complete the dish because with the potato it make it really complete.

But you want to brown your chicken a little more than what I did, then we want to cover it.

Bring it to a boil.

When it boil, you want to lower the heat to let it boil now very slowly and cook it for about 30 minutes.

And with that of course we are going to do a salad and a salad again with crouton.

Why do we use crouton in the soup?

We use a lot of bread.

Why is it?

Because- - We never waste bread.

- Because we have it left over, we never waste it.

So we're going to do a salad friseé here.

And friseé means curly in French and what they call friseé in the market is this now.

And it's really good.

We have them very large in France and very, very inexpensive.

This is the same thing actually than your curly endive which is much less.

But of course the curly endives are much more green and not that much white in the center.

But one of the other could be used.

So this one has been washed.

I can see you washed it.

And you know what, if you wanna re-spin it a little bit, it would be good.

- Okay.

- Because I think that I still see a little bit of water in it and I don't really want to dilute my dressing.

That's it.

(spinner whirring) Okay.

That's it.

- Yep.

- You want to get the bowl now.

You can do the dressing.

Remember sometime you do it with with the fork.

You know, the fork at the end, rubbing the garlic in it.

- Yeah.

I'm not too good at that.

- [Jacques] And that's really the way that your grandmother does it.

And then cracked paper, a lot of cracked paper.

- Mustard.

- Mustard.

Okay, you want me to stir?

- [Claudine] Yes.

- [Jacques] Alright.

Okay.

That's it.

About three times the oil for the amount of vinegar.

Let me taste this.

Ooh, that's very good.

(both chuckle) Put the salad in there like this and that we can toss it ahead a little bit.

Do you have the other one of it?

I'm going to toss it because I know you don't like to toss the salad.

- [Claudine] No, I always put it everywhere.

- Yes, but you can toss that salad even a little bit ahead because it's pretty tough for the green.

- You wanna put the- - Yes, put the crouton right on top of it.

Yes, that's nice.

That would be our first course, right?

We always start with a salad and let's see if the chicken is ready now.

- Okay.

- Now the chicken here of course is not totally cooked.

It's boiling nicely but I have another one that is going to be here.

This, it reduced quite a lot as you can see.

- Do you wanna put some Tabasco in here?

- Oh yeah, that's a good idea.

Not too much.

Not too much.

Okay, so we have four nice leg of chicken here with the potato.

You see and in that case here, for example, since we remove the skin, you remove the skin, you remove all the visible fat and basically we put white wine around water, we have the potato.

It's relatively not as caloric as people may think when they see a stew like this.

The sauce is just nice and thick enough now.

Okay, here it is.

You want to put maybe a little bit of parley on top of this?

- You wanna chop it or?

- Oh, just very coarsely three four piece like that of parsley, just to put it very coarsely.

Looks good this way now.

- [Claudine] Yeah.

- Looks very country.

- [Claudine] Yes.

- Flat parsley.

And this is the Chicken Ragu Jeannette with the Friseé with Crouton.

So this is the taste of my youth.

When I was a kid, we eat that type of food all the time with your grandmother.

- Well this is of my taste too.

- [Jacques] Yes.

- I love this.

And we made it together so now it's part of our taste.

- That's a good identity.

And I think with our taste and with our menu tonight, I think we're going to have a little Côtes du Rhne.

- Sounds good.

- [Jacques] Because basically that's what we drank in Leon, either the Bourgeois Côtes du Rhne or the light wine from upper Rhône Valley.

They're going to go very well with that simple, simple but tasty meal that remind me of home, and my mother used to cook for me, now I cook for Claudine.

I hope you're going to cook for your kid and all sit together at the table and enjoy it.

You'll have a great time.

Happy cooking.

- Happy cooking.

(jazz music)