Passing it on
Jacques Pépin started cooking professionally at the age of thirteen as an apprentice in the kitchen of Le Grand Hôtel de l’Europe in his hometown of Bourg-en-Bresse, France. He had cut his teeth in his mother’s restaurant, Le Pélican, where his father produced the house wine and ran convivial games that attracted a lively clientele. There he stirred his first pots in the bosom of his family, admiring his mother’s love of food and his father’s gregarious presence. In his captivating memoir, The Apprentice (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), he describes his first years as a formal apprentice, toiling under a demanding mentor.
When I remember my children grumbling under the burden of a few Saturday chores, I think of thirteen-year-old Jacques, frightened of his boss, working long shifts until late at night, trying to avoid the next blow-up. He takes us through subsequent stints in several local kitchens where self-important chefs played nasty pranks on the apprentices and offered servings of verbal, emotional, even physical abuse.
He wrote of an early triumph when he was working at a summer resort in France and the chef could not appear. Young Jacques produced a banquet dinner with multiple courses for a large gathering single-handedly. A photo of broadly beaming Jacques presenting a great platter of fish was published in the local newspaper the next day. (As we are in the throes of closing our house in Maine, my copy of the book is buried deep in boxes somewhere so I am unable to quote the number of guests or details about the menu.)
Pépin moved to the United States in 1959 at the age of twenty-four to work in French restaurants in New York, including that which was featured in the 1964 World’s Fair that introduced French cuisine to modern America. He advanced to become a star chef in several restaurants until a serious car accident ended his restaurant career. He remade himself as a teacher, television figure, and author of many cookbooks.
I am a beneficiary of his work as a teacher. At the start of the pandemic, Pépin, with the help of the Jaques Pépin Foundation, began producing daily short videos from the kitchen in his home in Connecticut, demonstrating how to prepare simple, delightful meals on a stovetop next to his cutting board. The recipes ranged from a simple chicken thigh to a cheese spread made by putting all your leftover cheese into a food processor, adding some garlic, olive oil, and white wine, giving it a good buzz, and storing it in your refrigerator for future heart attacks. With a wink, he added a slice of plain American cheese, saying something like “anything goes.” I bet that was not a leftover but a special purchase to make a joke. Use it with pasta, stir it into soup, and best of all, spread it on a crispy, toasted slice of baguette. (He ends the episode with a crunchy bite.) We love cheese, but we have never had anything like Pépin’s array of leftover cheeses in our refrigerator. Those videos are easy to find on YouTube. I recommend them for their simple and creative dishes and for Pépin’s gentle, smiling, encouraging presentation.
December 18, 2025, will be Jacques Pépin’s ninetieth birthday. I admire the wide-reaching effects of his brilliant career and marvel at his endless joy as he shares the pleasures of good cooking with all of us.
Teaching with care
Wendy and I had dinner the other night at Cello, a small restaurant in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Ryan and Kim Boya are the chefs, general managers, and partners. They met working for the Nantucket Food and Wine Festival in 2017, and as their relationship developed, they dreamed of opening a restaurant in the Berkshires, and we are the lucky beneficiaries. We like to sit at the seven-seat bar because of the intimate view of Ryan pulling pieces of fish and meat out of a low refrigerator, working the stove, and assembling plates a few feet away.
It was fun watching him prepare his olive oil confit onion rings, fishing marinated circles of onion out of a jar and placing (not dropping) them into the fryolater. We have all seen line cooks lift a basket of onion rings out of the oil, give them a vigorous shake, and unceremoniously drop them under a heat lamp. Not Ryan. His came out as saucer-sized puffy masterpieces, and he handled them with care, placing them on a plate one at a time with a long pair of tweezers, and adding a spoonful of his roasted garlic alioli, elevating a familiar greasy-spoon dish to an art form.
I had a confit chicken leg with pea pureé, asparagus, watercress, and pickled green strawberries. Wonderful. Wendy had fried green tomatoes, a childhood favorite.
The restaurant has twenty-nine seats, twenty-two in the dining room and seven at the bar (they call it the kitchen table), and a staff of four. Ryan is at the stove, Kim is greeting guests and pouring drinks, Beth is taking orders and serving, and Anthony is washing dishes. Anthony’s dish station was only a few feet from Ryan, and it was clear that he aspires to learn to cook. Every few minutes, Ryan took a moment to show him a technique, describe a process, quietly feeding his interest. They seared cornbread on the flattop, put onion rings into the oil, and tossed salads without crushing them. It was a pleasure to watch those gentle moments, so different from Pépin’s childhood or the popular idea we have of the tension, pressure, and violence in busy professional kitchens. Watch an episode of The Bear (Hulu) to see Carmy and Richie shrieking at each other, the kitchen staff, even the customers. Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential is chock full of wild stories of macho posturing, injuries, and sexual escapades. Ryan could have been teaching Anthony to play the violin. We were surprised to learn that it was Anthony’s first day on the job. Maybe he is going places thanks to Ryan’s extra care.
I have written often about John Leek, my mentor in Oberlin, Ohio, who taught me to tune, releather a pitman chest, woodworking, wiring, and many of the myriad skills one needs to do any sort of work on pipe organs. In the November 2023 issue of The Diapason, pages 10–11, I wrote about Captain Paul Figuenick of the National Geographic ship ship Quest, teaching his third mate how to anchor the ship by placing a red circle on the large screen chart plotter to mark the area ten miles away, asking questions that helped his pupil give correct answers. “What are we doing?” “Anchoring.” “What will we need.” Aah! Picks up the radio. “Anchor crew to duty station.” As we neared the anchorage, “How fast are we going?” “Seven knots.” “How long will it take us to stop?”
Walden Moore served as director of music at Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven, Connecticut, for forty years. During his brilliant tenure, Walden nurtured a long stream of organ scholars who were also students at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, who gained valuable experience participating in an active music program. Many of those organists have gone on to their own flourishing careers in church music, taking with them the wisdom, devotion, and artistry Walden shared with them.
Over fifty years have passed since I entered the world of the pipe organ as a player and an organbuilder. Back then, nearly everyone I knew went to church every week. My hometown, Winchester, Massachusetts, with a population of around 22,000, had six churches with pipe organs—a large percentage of the townspeople heard a pipe organ every week. That is not the case today. From my seat at the Organ Clearing House, at least twice a week I hear from a church that is closing and wants to sell its organ. It is the responsibility of all of us in the trade to pass on whatever we can, whenever we can to anyone expressing interest. Developing new talent in the workshop and on the organ bench is the future of our instrument. Be sure not to miss your chance to pass it on.
Exciting new organs
Despite declining church attendance and financial uncertainty, there are plenty of signs that the pipe organ is alive and well in the United States. In January, Buzard Pipe Organ Builders of Champaign, Illinois, announced that they have broken ground for a new workshop building on the grounds of a decommissioned Air Force base in Rantoul, Illinois. Photos published on their Facebook page and in the March issue, page 4, show plans for a large facility with a generous erecting space. This must be an expression of their confidence in the future of our craft. Congratulations to my friends at Buzard for taking this exciting step.
Three years after the devastating fire that destroyed their workshop on June 15, 2021, Dobson Pipe Organ Builders opened their new workshop on their original site in the center of Lake City, Iowa, in September of 2024. A large organ that was being built for Saint James Church in Sydney, Australia, was destroyed in the fire. They started over in their temporary workshop, and the organ is installed in its home in Sydney. They are now working on a seventy-three rank, four-manual organ for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
Our friends at C. B. Fisk, Inc., of Gloucester, Massachusetts, are currently installing their Opus 158 and Opus 159 at Hong Kong Baptist College. Opus 158 is a three-manual instrument with thirty ranks, Opus 159 has three manuals (one is a coupling manual) and five ranks. The Noack Organ Company is working on a two-manual, eighteen-stop organ for Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Foley, Alabama, their Opus 170, and Opus 171, due for installation at Augsburg Lutheran Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 2026, will have two manuals and thirty-four stops. Paul Fritts & Company of Tacoma, Washington, is working on their Opus 54 for Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in New York, New York, which will have three manuals and sixty-three stops.
North of the border, Létourneau Organs of Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec, Canada, is busy with Opus 138 for Saint Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church in New Orleans, Louisiana. A portion of the organ has recently been installed, the rest is under construction and due to be installed later this year. When complete, there will be over seventy-five stops across seven divisions. Juget-Sinclair of Montréal has recently completed a three-manual organ with sixty-seven stops, Opus 55, for the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Richmond, Virginia, and is now working on a fifty-five-stop organ, Opus 56, for Saint Joseph Catholic Cathedral in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Casavant Frères, also of Saint-Hyacinth, Québec, has recently completed renovation of the chancel Kilgen organ at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, New York. Just after Easter, they started to remove the 114-rank Kilgen instrument in the rear gallery for a comprehensive rebuilding project, due for completion in 2027. It is especially thrilling to see that landmark organ receiving the attention it so richly deserves. It will be a challenging project. There is hardly a busier church building in the United States as the place is always packed with tourists, the organ is very high up in the massive building, and Fifth Avenue in New York is one of the busiest neighborhoods anywhere. Imagine parking a semi-trailer there where Rockefeller Center is the neighbor across the street.
A shining light
In this time of political division and social turbulence, it is exciting to review this far from complete list of the current work of North American organbuilders carrying on the centuries-old tradition of harnessing the wind to create monumental musical choruses. Of course, modern organbuilders are using modern materials. Arp Schnitger never dreamed of carbon fiber trackers, but I suppose he would have found them useful. Imagine the chore of cutting a set of forty-nine or fifty-six twenty-foot trackers for a vertical run in a large organ without a table saw with a carbide blade. Imagine the effort involved in building something like an ornate organ case with thirty-two-foot pedal towers in the eighteenth century. Imagine rolling and soldering the thirty-two-foot pipes that fill them and imagine lifting them precisely into place. The Organ Clearing House knows that it is tricky enough to handle things like that with modular steel scaffolding and an electric hoist on a trolley.
We were once considering salvaging a 32′ Double Open Wood Diapason from an abandoned church building on Central Park West in New York. The entrance to the building was right at the edge of the sidewalk, and we realized we would have to walk the largest pipes nearly all the way across the busy street before being able to turn so the pipe would be parallel with a parked truck, quite a spectacle. Pipes like that weigh most of a ton, and it takes quite a crew to carry one.
One of the favorite aspects of my job is visiting organbuilder’s workshops. Witnessing the modern version of the ancient craft is a thrill, a fulfilling reminder of the human value of building beautiful things. There is typically a large room for woodworking machinery like table saws, surface jointers, thickness planers, sanding belts, and drill presses. When you enter, you can immediately tell what variety of wood is being worked—white oak, mahogany, maple, birch, and poplar each have a distinct smell when sawdust is in the air. I also know white oak for the extra painful splinters it offers.
There is a room with clean tables for cutting and working leather, and another where special metal is cut into rectangles, circles, and pie shapes for making organ pipes. For me, that is a mystical craft that involves precise measuring, super-sharp cutting tools, and fine soldering. The rectangles are rolled to form the resonator of a pipe, the short side of the resonator is the pipe’s circumference, the long side is the length of the pipe. I have witnessed it many times, but it still amazes me to watch a craftsman solder the tiny pipes that are the highest notes of 2′, 1-1⁄3′, or 1′ pipes. Teeny tiny, don’t burn your fingers. An organ pipe maker understands π better than anyone.
Usually, the largest space in an organ shop is the erecting room, with a ceiling high enough to accommodate a free-standing organ. When an organ case is too tall for the erecting room, the bottom level of the organ is built up to the impost frame, then the impost can be set on the floor allowing the superstructure to be built with assurance that the whole thing will fit together properly in the church. It is a treat to watch the artisans at work, creating those monumental instruments.
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In the May 2025 issue of The Diapason, pages 10–11, I wrote that Wendy and I are preparing to sell our house in Maine, and I was busy packing up the workshop where I have been toiling for twenty-five years. A couple weeks ago, my friends of the Organ Clearing House crew came to Maine, loaded a truck, and brought my tools, machines, benches, and supplies to my new space in Adams, Massachusetts. I have spent most of last week unpacking and setting up, and I am thrilled with it. It is sunny, clean, and spacious. I have a lovely space for my office, a large kitchen, and a full bath. I probably won’t be bringing organ components in for restoration, but I am excited to have my machines and workbenches in a clean sunny space where I can do personal projects and remember the fun of working on so many
majestic instruments.
