There’s the Wrong Way and Jacques Pépin’s Way

MADISON, Conn.

WHEN Jacques Pépin slices a baguette, there is a distinct sound that seems to be imbued with six decades of experience in the kitchen.

The knife goes through, and you hear a little schloomp.

By contrast, many amateur cooks keep their knives far too dull, he said, and have a habit of crunching the blade downward on the crust, like a handheld cider press, which only squishes the white interior of a baguette into a fluff-less layer.

“Instead of going down and forward, people press down like this,” Mr. Pépin said, standing at his kitchen counter last week. “That way, you have to reinflate each piece with a little pump.” Then he demonstrated a faulty technique that I recognized, with silent embarrassment, as my own.

I had traveled to Mr. Pépin’s house in this Connecticut town, just east of New Haven, to talk about all the little details that go into the precision and majesty of that little schloomp. In other words, our topic was technique.

This month marks the arrival of “Essential Pépin” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40), a cookbook that gathers together hit recipes from the arc of his career, from his childhood deprivation in France during World War II and his teenage apprenticeship in an array of French restaurants to his eventual ascent to fame as one of the first chefs who went on television to teach Americans to cook.