We return to the works of Jacques Pépin this time. As
mentioned before, Pépin has been really innovative in making French cuisine and
French tastes more accessible to American cooks, and really, to home cooks in
general. Classic French cuisine was largely derived from the cooking of
professional chefs, primarily via the works of Auguste Escoffier. Although he
is a classically trained chef, Pépin has been extremely successful in adapting
French (or French-influenced) cooking for weeknights—as much as I love JC, her
books lean more toward the spend-a-weekend-afternoon-making-dinner end of
the spectrum rather than to fast-dinner-thrown-together-after-a-long-day end.
Pépin is particularly skilled with chicken, in my opinion,
and so I’m showcasing his method of cooking chicken thighs this time. We’re
really talking more about a technique rather than a recipe on this one. Once
you’ve cooked them, you can serve them plain (my tendency), or make a deglazing
sauce (Pépin’s approach), but they lend themselves to other applications as
well. I’ve been known to dunk them in Buffalo sauce and serve them with celery
sticks and blue cheese dressing, and was quite pleased with the results.
