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A Cookbook for the Ages

Are you looking for a good cookbook to buy for Christmas or Hanukkah or just to get you through until Christmas or Hanukkah?

I have a recommendation, one for the ages, and those ages include a grandfather who is in his very early 80s and a granddaughter who is barely a teenager. Jacques Pépin, the pride of Madison and much of the world, wrote a cookbook for, and with, his granddaughter, Shorey. It is called A Grandfather’s Lessons: In the Kitchen with Shorey.

I met Jacques and his wife, Gloria, for the first time at a party at Flying Point, the Stony Creek home of my friend Francine Farkas Sears. Bowled over by actually talking to Jacques Pépin, I mentioned how much I loved the shows with Claudine, his daughter. I told him I loved how she pretended that she didn’t know how to cook. With a twinkle in his eye, he laughed and said, “She really doesn’t know how to cook.”

Perhaps she couldn’t back then, a couple of decades ago, but she does now. She cooks for and with her husband, Rollie, a chef and professor at Johnson and Wales in Providence and for their daughter, Jacques’s granddaughter, Shorey. And now, for the ages, Jacques is cooking with his teenage granddaughter. The book is a real keeper. Both Jacques and Shorey write and cook together for this lovely book, which is illustrated by photographs by North Madison’s Tom Hopkins.

It should be on everyone’s wish list this holiday season.

Did I mention that the recipes are terrific?

Here is just one.

Sausage, Potatoes, Onions, and Mushrooms en Papillote

From A Grandfather’s Lessons by Jacques Pépin (Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2017)

Yield: Serves 4

4 mildly hot Italian sausages (about 1 pound)

1 10-ounce piece kielbasa, preferably Polish, cut into 4 pieces

8 small Yukon Gold potatoes, (about 10 ounces), washed

2 carrots (about 8 ounces), peeled and cut into 3 pieces

4 large pearl onions (about 6 ounces), peeled

8 baby portobello (brown cremini) mushrooms (about 6 ounces), cleaned

8 large garlic cloves, unpeeled

2 fresh thyme sprigs

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

3 tablespoons olive oil

3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

Dijon-style mustard, for serving (optional)

Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Cut a piece of nonstick aluminum foil, 32 inches long by 12 inches wide, and place on a baking sheet so half of it expands beyond the pan.

Place the sausages, vegetables, garlic, thyme, salt, and pepper on the foil n the baking sheet and drizzle with the oil. Fold the extended foil over the ingredients and secure the three open sides of the foil by rolling the edges over on themselves twice. Do not wrap the foil tightly around the ingredients; they should be loose inside.

Place the papillote in the oven and cook for 1 hour. Remove from the oven and let rest for 10 minutes.

Carefully open the foil; the food will be steaming hot. Scrape the ingredients and juices onto a large platter, sprinkle with parsley, and serve immediately, with mustard, if desired.