Reviewed by Jessica MacMurray

Jacques Pépin’s new memoir is aptly titled, despite the fact that his apprenticeship, officially, takes up only 12 pages of The Apprentice. In addition to being a consummate food lover and one of America’s most respected chefs and cooking teachers, Pépin is a perpetual student.

He started learning early, cooking just-caught minnows over a streamside fire with his brothers, bottling wine with his father, working as a sous-chef in his mother’s restaurant. By 13, he’d quit school and become a chef’s apprentice at Le Grand Hotel de l’Europe in Lyon. Pépin’s vignettes are idyllic and charming, and his tales of life as a teenaged apprentice in some of France’s most famous restaurants continue the fairy tale — he is teased by the kitchen crew, awed by the chef and in love with the food.

Since then, he hasn’t left the kitchen. He has served as Charles de Gaulle’s personal chef, developed recipes for Howard Johnson’s commissary, cooked weeknight dinners with such culinary luminaries as Julia Child, James Beard and Craig Claiborne. Through it all, Pépin retains a sense of curiosity and a funny, honest voice that makes him a trustworthy, likeable narrator. He weaves the personal with the professional just enough to give the book dimension, but not enough for it to be a navel-gazer.

Above all, this book does what any good foodie book should: It makes you want to cook. Pépin includes recipes that range from Maman’s Cheese Soufflé to HoJo’s New England Clam Chowder to his Caribbean-American wife Gloria’s Pork Ribs and Beans.

To hear him tell it, Pépin’s story is just one man’s path through the culinary world. But his story parallels the evolution of professional cooking in the United States. It’s hard to separate Pépin from this evolution, given his influence on the process. But regardless of which came first, the HoJo’s chicken pot pie or the Eggs Jeannette, Pépin’s story is a microcosm of American cooking. He began with thorough, classical French culinary training, and built on that knowledge to create a career that is truly American in its mesh of classical foundations and personal expression, adaptation for convenience and constant reinvention.