I’ll never forget the time I met Jacques Pépin. It was 1989 and I was a student at Manhattan’s French Culinary Institute where he was Dean of Special Programs. The full-time, six-month program I was enrolled in focused on the basics of French cuisine; cooking techniques which can be applied just about any cuisine.

Flambéing, sautéing, poaching, broiling, grilling, braising, baking—you name it, we learned it! We even used gelatin sheets to make fish consommé as clear as a glass of filtered water.

During daily lessons, we were also instructed in a variety of precise ways to cut vegetables: julienne, batonet, chiffonade, brunoise and, the most tedious of them all, turning, or uniformly cutting vegetables into an oblong barrel shape.

**French Culinary Institute Graduation Day.**

When I met Pépin he was in his early 50s, a well-established French-born American chef, author and television personality. At the time, he was the host of the PBS series Everyday Cooking with Jacques Pépin, and later in his career he would go on to cook with his dear friend Julia Child on another television show, Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home.

During my time at the French Culinary Institute, Pépin was rarely in the classroom, but I remember one day he came into the kitchen and began walking around each cooking station to see what the students were up to. When he arrived at my group of three, we were in the middle of preparing tomatoes to add to the coq au vin. Pépin was appalled at what we were doing, cutting a straight slice off the entire end of the tomato.

“Let me show you the correct way,” he said, as he began removing the core by cutting a tiny circle around the stem with a small paring knife. The most important thing, he told us, was to waste as little of the vegetable as possible.

What did we know? Members of the ready-meal revolution in the US, brought up on Campbell’s Chicken, Soup, Rice-R-Roni and frozen vegetables?

Until we learned better, that is.

Pépin’s lesson has stuck with me for 33 years, and I became a cook who wastes as little as possible, trying to make use of every part of an ingredient—using leftover chicken bones to make stock, for example, or turning potato skins into crispy chips.

Pépin is still going strong at 86, with daily three to four minute-long videos posted on YouTube, part of his Jacques Pépin Cooking At Home series. The videos are fun to watch and provide home cooks with simple, beautifully-presented and delicious recipes, along with cooking tips and heartwarming anecdotes from a lifetime of cooking.

I’ve prepared Pépin’s baked sausage en papillote dish (video below) a few times, and it couldn’t be easier or tastier. Even the cleanup is simple! But most important to the success of the dish is to use an assortment of good quality sausages. I always go to my local butcher, Hudson and Charles, that sells housemade sausages of all kinds; andouille being a favorite as it adds a hint of smokiness to the dish. You can also adjust the vegetables—once I included sliced zucchini and sweet potatoes, both excellent additions.

I’ve paired the dish with a dry Finger Lakes Riesling, the 2019 Boundary Breaks 239, a wine that made the Wine Spectator Top 100 of 2021. For me, the combination of sausages and Riesling is like milk and cookies: as good as it gets.

As Pépin says at the end of each episode, “Happy Cooking!”