Good morning!
(Applause)
Good morning, everyone!
(Audience) Good morning!
Claudine and I are delighted to be with you this morning
to be the first one.
I left home when I was 13 to go to apprenticeship,
that was in 1949.
Actually, home was the restaurant where my mother was the chef,
I was already in that business.
In fact, there was 12 restaurants through the years in my family
and 12 of them owned by women,
I'm the first male to enter that business in my family.
I went into apprenticeship from Lyon, where my mother had her little restaurant
to Bourg-en-Bresse, where I was born a few miles away.
Prior to that, when we were about 8-9 years old,
my mother had that little restaurant
so, my brother and I, before going to school,
would walk with my mother to the market,
the St. Antoine market along the Saône river,
and she would walk the market one way, about 1/2 a mile, and buy on her way back.
Buying a case of mushrooms which was getting dark,
maybe for a third of the price or less.
We carried, of course, we didn't have a car at the time.
She'd get home and start doing her vegetables, peeling for the day.
She did not have a refrigerator at that time.
She had an ice box, that is a block of ice into a little cabinet,
so she'd have chicken of the day, meat,
fish, usually, whiting or mackerel or skate -- inexpensive fish,
and that she has to use it that day.
And the day after, we start all over again.
Everything was organic, everything was local.
The word organic did not really exist,
chemical fertilizers did not exist either,
or fungicides, insecticides, pesticides, all that stuff did not exist,
so everything was, local and organic.
I went into apprenticeship, I was 13 years old and, at that time,
it was very structured, well, still is to certain extend,
you got to be there on time, you got to be clean,
you have to be willing,
it's discipline, it's structure, that's the way a kitchen can work.
We learn through a type of osmosis.
The chef never really explained anything, he'd just say, "Do that".
And if you say, "Why?", and he'd say, "Because I just told you".
That was about the end of the apprenticeship.
Probably, just as good for someone 13-14 years old.
So, we worked, repeating, and repeating, and repeating those techniques ad nauseam,
we were not allowed to go to the stove for a year.
So, during that year, I plucked a lot of chicken,
eviscerated a lot of chicken, scaled fish, chopped parsley,
all of that type of things, and then the chef called me --
My name was "you" at the time,
then by the time I went to the stove they called me Jacques, so I got the name.
He said, "You start tomorrow".
"I start tomorrow?" I didn't know how to do it,
but when I went to the stove, I knew how to do it.
It was through that type of osmosis, things that you show,
I've got a book called, "La technique", that I published in 1975
so, it's 40-year old, and I don't cook the way I did 40 years ago.
But the way I did an egg white, or sharpen a knife, or bone out a chicken,
to [inaudible]... it is that kind of permanence, that kind of continuity
that you'll learn in the kitchen.
To be first a craftman.
And very often it's very difficult to explain in words
something that you can show --
It's easier to show --
than to explain in words --
You can do that to chocolate as well --
You'd do that at exactly the right temperature --
and we used to --
put the butter in a little container and that on top,
and now you can charge 20 bucks for it --
(Laughter)
Put that in water that's cold --
(Applause)
Thank you, Titine.
For me, first you have to be a craftsman.
You have to be a craftsman, and it's that repeat, and repeat, and repeat,
that is very important.
Just like --
you spend a 1-2 years in a studio in art school
and learn the law of perspective -- it is perfectly fine,
and you learn how to mix yellow and blue to make green,
what to do with your sand, with your spatula, with the brush --
then you can come out and do one painting after another.
So that makes you a chef? Not really.
But you're by then, a good craftsman, and that's very important.
You have to first know your trade,
whether you are a shoemaker, or a cabinet maker, like my father,
first, you know your trade.
So, those things that we boned out I learned as a child --
Then, I learned this from... I don't remember where I learn that but
when you learn something you learn it a certain way
and after a while, you don't remember where it comes from,
and you do it your way, eventually.
To do a type of lollipop like that as we used to do that you --
So, those techniques, as I said, first make you a craftsman,
and if you are a good craftsman then you can run a restaurant.
There are about 20,000 restaurants in New York
and 100 are well known, maybe 200, maybe 300, maybe 400 even,
but what happen to the 19,500 is that they are run by artisans,
people who know how to work properly,
and this is the only way if you become, in my opinion, a good craftsman,
if you have that type of knowledge then you can express yourself.
This is half of yourself, the other half has to do with talent.
If you happen to have talent like, if you have taste, a bit of a vision,
if you have a little bit of creativity,
then you can express yourself,
you now have the means to express yourself,
if you've gone through those techniques.
You have to repeat those techniques, as I said, long enough
so you can afford to forget it after.
Here we are, half of this, now the filet --
(Claudine) If you have any questions you should shout them out,
it's a good opportunity.
There's going to be a test.
(Laughter)
(Jacques) This way --
There's my carcass.
Now, [inaudible] filet, you remove it here --
This one here --
So, you free your hand by learning those techniques
and as I said, you can think in term of texture and other things
because, as I said, you free your hand by repeating and repeating.
Now, this is one part of yourself,
half of yourself is there, it's the craftsman,
and the other part of yourself
will depend on whether you have talent or not,
and even if you have a little bit of talent, not too much,
you can still run a little restaurant by being a good technician.
If you have a lot of talent, then you can take it further,
but not all the chefs are René Redzepi, or David Chang, or José Andrés --
Here we are --
(Applause)
(Jacques) At that point you really don't want to cut the bone
because the skin will shrink all over the place so, we break it.
And you know, the interesting part, if you carve in the dining room,
or if you do a quail or a pheasant or a goose,
the morphology is the same.
If you cut a chicken in pieces to do a skew,
you cut exactly in the sample place, at the shoulder joint, at the hip joint.
Okay.
Now, you have to be very proud of what you're doing
but you also have to be humble to a certain extend
because there's always someone
who can think with more creativity than you,
or who can think harder than you do.