World-renowned Chef Jacques Pepin

(WTNH) -- World-renowned Chef Jacques Pepin talks with Ann Nyberg about his love of cooking and how it all began when he was a boy.

Nearly 77, Pepin's career includes a stint as chef for French President Charles de Gaulle. He's the author of nearly three dozen cookbooks. He's also had a long time friendship with the late cooking matron, Julia Child.

Pepin first came to America at a time when there was no cooking television network, even so he landed in a small group of the very famous when it came to chefs.

"I arrived here at the end of 1959 and worked at the Pavillon in New York, and actually I met Julia, 6 months, 7 months later. Ihad a friend of mine called Helen McCaulley. Well, at first Craig Claiborne had just started at the New York Times. He became the greatest food critic at the New York Time, and Craig came to the Pavillon to do a piece on Pierre Franey and one on me and so forth," Pepin said.

"And through him I met Helen McCalley who was the food editor of McCall House Beautiful, a very feisty Canadian lady, and she kind of became my surrogate mother. She was never married, never had children, telling me don't wear those stupid socks, you were in France don't do this, don't do that, go back to school, do this. (laughs) Anyway, and she was very good friends with James Beard. She spoke with James Beard every day for an hour on the telephone and it was through Helen that I met James Beard a few weeks later."

McCalley showed Pepin a cook book manuscript by Julia Child.

"In the beginning of the 1960s Helen told me 'oh, I want to show you that manuscript. Look, it's French cooking and all that.' I look, I say gee, that's pretty good. She said 'well, it's a woman who wrote that, she's from Pasadena, California. She's coming to New York next week. Let's cook for her.' I said sure. She says 'she's a really big woman with a terrible voice,' and that was Julia, of course. I met Julia there and we became friends for years."

For more on Jacques visit www.kqed.org/food/jacquespepin/ or at www.facebook.com/ChefJacquesPepin