One of the Most Important Cookbooks of the 20th Century Is Celebrating 50 Years. What Made Its French Author So Special in American Kitchens?
With instructions and images explaining how to carve vegetables and deconstruct a lamb, “La Technique” by Jacques Pépin became a how-to guide and an inspiration for countless cooks and food lovers
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In 1974, Jacques Pépin struck a deer on his drive home, causing his car to flip off the road and into a ravine. Pépin—who in his late 30s was already a successful chef and restaurateur, though not yet well known outside culinary circles—broke more than a dozen bones and narrowly escaped having to amputate his arm.
Pépin, who is now 90 years old, mostly recovered from the accident. But his career as a chef, which formally began when he apprenticed in the kitchen of the Grand Hôtel de l'Europe at age 13, was over. “I knew that I couldn’t really go back into the kitchen 12 hours a day behind the stove,” Pépin told Lee Camp on a 2025 episode of the “No Small Endeavor” podcast. “So, I decided to start writing about food.”
Along with penning recipes and columns, Pépin started teaching cooking classes around the U.S., where he had emigrated from France in 1959. He found that many students lacked a definitive technique for what he considered the basics of cooking, like peeling a carrot, poaching an egg or deboning a chicken.
This return to the fundamentals inspired what became a defining work of Pépin’s life, a book that kickstarted the next phase of his career along with the journeys of countless professional chefs and home cooks. The title? La Technique.
This year, Pépin’s meticulous manual for culinary procedures turns 50 years old. Considered seminal for its focus on the mechanics of culinary methods rather than on recipes, La Technique retains a special place in the shelves, hearts and hands of many people working in the food industry today.
“This was really a game changer because it was the first time I had seen a book with step-by-step pictures,” Bridget Lancaster, a co-host of “America’s Test Kitchen,” told the Splendid Table’s Sally Swift in 2018. Lancaster picked up a copy of La Technique at a yard sale in addition to appreciating Pépin’s public access cooking show, “Everyday Cooking.” “Instead of just saying ‘carve a chicken,’ there it was step-by-step so I could see what was going on,” Lancaster says.
Fun fact: Book honor
La Technique was named to the New York Times Style Magazine’s 2024 list of the 25 most influential cookbooks from the last 100 years.
Creating these detailed guides—which allowed readers to practice not how to make a specific dish but how to cook—was no easy task. According to interviews by the New York Times’ Pete Wells, Pépin and his daughter, Claudine, still can’t agree as to whether he spent 10 or 12 hours a day working on La Technique.
Photographer Léon Perer stood on a ladder to snap images as Pépin practiced each skill in his home kitchen, recording skinned lamb, sizzling omelets and Pépin’s working hands. Pépin expected to need a few hundred photographs for the book, but in the end published more than 1,500.
“His doggedness is one reason the books found an audience,” writes Wells. “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.”
As La Technique spread to kitchens across the country and around the world, Pépin continued to preach the practices of French cooking on television shows, including “Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home” alongside Julia Child. In 1996, he continued the spirit of accessibility in the kitchen by bringing his daughter on set to film a series called “Jacques Pépin's Kitchen: Cooking with Claudine.”
“What my father wanted from me was to ask the questions that hopefully somebody at home would have,” Claudine Pépin said in a 2017 PBS documentary.
It was shows like this, on top of La Technique, that earned Pépin his reputation for bringing the precision of French cooking into everyday kitchens. And some of the curious cooks who picked up his book have grown into today’s most influential chefs.
“I would work through the book,” Tom Colicchio, the award-winning chef and head judge of the cooking competition TV series “Top Chef,” said during the PBS documentary, recalling La Technique as a catalyst for his career, when, as a teenager with ADHD, he found the focus on method over recipe revelatory. “I would go out and buy celery, because it was really inexpensive, and I would practice knife skills.”
Colicchio also gives a humorous nod to the more nostalgic, less practical chapters in La Technique, which include instructions on how to make a rabbit sculpture out of an olive. While these whimsical flourishes might not find themselves on the plates of many modern restaurants, they seem to have retained a place in Pépin’s heart.
“In the words of Voltaire, ‘Imagine how tiresome it would be to have to eat three times a day if God had not made it a pleasure as well as a necessity,’” wrote Pépin in a 2015 essay for the Times.
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