While the French are known for their obsession with diluting their culture at home, it’s not unfair to say that their great nation’s cultural influence seems to have waned in the larger world as well. To give two examples that touch me where I live, the supremacy of French cuisine – once considered the best in the world – is finis. The cozy French bistro is no longer a staple of every American city.
And although little noticeable, one can also see the declining fortunes of the French automobile, a device whose the invention is traced to Nicolas-Joseph Cugnotwho in 1769 set out from the commune of Void-Vacon in northeastern France with the world’s first self-propelled vehicle, a steam-powered tricycle made like a cart.
While still dominant in their home market, French cars have only a small, if loyal, following in the United States. They have not been sold here since the early 1990s, despite their significant role in Stellantis, the name given to Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and French carmaker PSA after their merger last year.
To explore these twin cultural shifts, I recently set out with a friend for Madison, Connecticut to visit and reflect with one of America’s most famous French expatriates, Jacques Pepin. Arriving in the New World more than 60 years ago, Mr. Pepin, 86, has become one of the most successful proponents of French gastronomy in the United States: chef, cookbook author, television personality, artist, philanthropist and more recently a social media star. As a one-time serial owner of French cars, he seemed uniquely suited to answer the question: Should these once internationally heralded products of French culture — food and cars — undergo a 21st-century renaissance?
Our transportation to Connecticut, fittingly, will be a 1965 Peugeot 404, a model Mr. Pepin once owned and remembers fondly. This one, a seven-seat “Familiale” station wagon bought new by a Canadian diplomat on assignment in Paris, ended up for unknown reasons in a barn in Medicine Hat, Alberta, where it sat untouched for more than 50 years. Completely roadworthy, with less than 25,000 miles on its odometer, it exudes French car charm at its distinctive best, with creamy smooth mechanicals, sofa-comfortable seats and legendary, Gallic ride comfort , which incredibly improves most modern cars, even on the roughest roads.
Our visit begins with a tour of Mr. Pepin’s home and outbuildings four wooded acres. Located between a church and a synagogue, the complex has two impressively equipped kitchens with dazzling arrays of neatly arranged crockery and pots. Two studios help extend Mr. Pepin’s brand indefinitely into the future, one with a kitchen used to film the series and videos, and the other for painting oil, acrylic, and mixed media pieces that are featured in his books and decorate his coveted, handwritten menus.
Departing the 404 for lunch, we all arrive in nearby Branford on Le Petit Café, a French bistro. Chef Roy Yip, born in Hong Kong and a former student of Mr. Pepin in French Culinary Institute in New York, greets our party by specially opening this weekday afternoon for the mentor who 25 years ago helped broker the purchase of the 50-seat cafe. Over a groaning plate of amuse-bouche and loaves of freshly baked bread and butter—”If you have extraordinary bread, extraordinary butter, then there must be bread and butter” at every meal, the guest of honor honors, raising a glass of wine—we proceed to the delicate subject.
Although today he drives a well-used Lexus SUV, Mr. Pepin’s French credentials are clearly in order. Accounts of his early life in France, where his family was deeply involved in the restaurant business, are peppered with memories of cars. The main one concerns the Citroën Traction Avant, an influential sedan produced from 1934 to 1957. Development of the car, which was revolutionary in its front-wheel drive and body construction, bankrupted the company’s founder, André Citroën, leading to the takeover from Michelin, the tire manufacturer.
The mention of the car reminded Mr. Pepin of a day during World War II when his family left Lyon in his uncle’s Traction Avant to stay on a farm for a while. “My father was missing in the Resistance,” he says. “I still remember that car as a kid, especially the smell. I have always loved Citroën because of that.”
His parents then own a Panhard, a unique machine from a small but respected French manufacturer that will find its way into the arms of Citroen in 1965a decade before the quirky Citroën itself was swallowed up – and, critics say, homogenized – by Peugeot.
Like many French people after World War II and millions elsewhere, Mr. Pepin was smitten by the post-war Citroen small car, Deux Chevauxwhich he says is the first car his mother ever owned.
“Seventy miles per gallon or whatever,” he says. “It didn’t go too fast, but we enjoyed it.”
Mr. Pépin’s aversion to excess — notwithstanding his early detours to rich, labor-intensive foods, such as when he cooked at Le Pavillon in New York, once the pinnacle of American haute cuisine — informed not only the simpler cooking he would later champion, but also many of his vehicle choices when he first hit the American highway. In his memoir, he mentions, for example, the Volkswagen Beetle he used to hurtle down the Long Island Freeway when he went to visit one of his friends, New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne, in Long Island’s East End. The Peugeot 404 will feature in his commute to work at Howard Johnson’s test kitchen in Rego Park, Queens, where he worked for 10 years.
Later, the Renault 5 — an economy subcompact known as the LeCar in America — joined Mr. Pepin’s family as his wife Gloria’s daily driver.
He also remains a staunch supporter of what is arguably France’s greatest automotive icon, the Citroën DS in which President Charles de Gaulle was riding when 12 right-wing terrorists attempted to kill him in 1962, firing 140 bullets into his car as he left central Paris for Orly Airport. The gunfire blows out the DS 19’s rear window and all of its tires, but thanks to its unique hydropneumatic suspension, de Gaulle’s driver manages to get the tireless car and its passengers to safety.
“It saved his life,” Mr. Pepin marveled. “Great car.”
Although Mr. Pepin was de Gaulle’s personal chef in the 1950s, he did not know him well, he said. “The chef in the kitchen was never interviewed by a magazine or the radio, and television was almost non-existent,” he says. “If anyone came into the kitchen, it was to complain that something had gone wrong. The cook was really at the bottom of the social scale.
That changed in the early 1960s with the advent of the nouvelle cuisine, Mr. Pepin believes. But not before turning down an invitation to cook for the Kennedy White House. (The Kennedys were regular guests at Le Pavillon.) His friend Rene Verdon took the job by sending Mr. Pepin a photo of himself with President John F. Kennedy.
“Suddenly we became geniuses. But,” he says with a laugh, “you can’t take it too seriously.”
Befriended by a Hall of Fame list of American gastronomes, including Mr. Claiborne, Pierre Franey and Julia Child, Mr. Pepin eventually became a star without the White House association, although his extraordinary accomplishments were almost cut short in The 1970s when he crashed a Ford station wagon while trying to avoid a deer on a back road in upstate New York.
If he hadn’t been driving such a big car, Mr. Pepin believes, ”I probably would have been dead.” His injuries forced him to close his Manhattan soup restaurant, La Potagerie, which served 150 gallons of soup a day, turning over its 102 seats every 18 minutes.
As Chef Yip brings to the table a simple but delicious salade Niçoise, followed by a delicately prepared apple cake, Mr. Pepin turns his attention to the question of France’s waning influence in the culinary and automotive worlds. I am surprised to learn that he heartily agrees—the ship has sailed.
“Of course, when I came to America, French food or ‘continental’ food was what every great restaurant was supposed to be, often with a misspelled French menu,” he says. But the continuing waves of immigration and air travel that opened up the far corners of the world saw French food lose its “core position”.
“People still like French food, just like they like other foods,” he says, adding, “Americans have matured and learned about a greater variety of options.”
Mr. Pepin, who calls himself an optimist, is quick to add that he doesn’t see this as a bad thing. He vividly remembers how culinary bleak America was when he arrived, drawn by a youthful enthusiasm for jazz. At first he marveled at the idea of the supermarket.
“But when I came in, no leeks, no shallots, no other herbs, one lettuce that was an iceberg,” he says. “Now look at America. Excellent wine, bread, cheese. A completely different world.”
Indeed, Mr. Pepin, whose wife was Puerto Rican and Cuban, no longer even sees himself as a “French chef.” His more than 30 cookbooks, he says, “include recipes for black bean soup with sliced banana and cilantro on top.” He also has a recipe for Southern Fried Chicken. “So in a way I consider myself a classic American chef,” he says. “Things are changing.”
During a leisurely afternoon with Mr. Pepin, it becomes clear that while the changing world doesn’t worry him much, he does have regrets, his biggest regret being the loss of loved ones. His father died young in 1965, and his defining sadness, the loss of his wife, Gloria, in December 2020 to cancer weighed heavily.
“The hardest thing is not sharing dinner at night. And that bottle of wine. He was silent for a long moment.
Distilling his musings on cuisine and cars, the chef notes what he sees as an unfortunate trend: the loss of diversity due to corporate motives.
“There’s more food in supermarkets today than there’s ever been before,” says Mr Pepin. “But at the same time, there is more standardization. I try to shop where regular people shop to get the best price. And I can no longer go to the supermarket and find chicken backs and necks.
The same is true, he says, of the auto industry, where the growing use of a small pool of multinational suppliers, along with tighter regulations and increased corporate risk aversion, has made cars increasingly similar between brands.
“The special features that make French cars different no longer exist, even in France,” he says. “They all follow the same aesthetic. Neither French food nor French cars are the same color as they used to be.”
Mr. Pepin remains philosophical. He mourns the loss of distinctively French cars, but apparently isn’t losing sleep over it. So is French food.
As long as “people come together” and cook quality products, he has hope, as “eating together is probably what civilization means.”