- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

- And I'm Claudine Pepin.

- No matter what your background, it's fun to explore other culinary traditions.

- Our family is French, American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban.

- I think it's important to try foods from your family's roots.

- Well, you've taught me about French and American cuisine and mom has taught me something about her family's cooking.

- I think it's time we make something from your mother's Caribbean heritage.

- Next on "Jacques Pepin's Kitchen: - Cooking with Claudine."

For us, cooking is a family affair.

And it's not only French or of course American.

Claudine was born in New York.

But her mother, my wife Gloria, mother was born in Puerto Rico.

So we have some Caribbean cooking here.

- And my grandfather was born in Cuba.

- That's it.

- So.

- From your mother's side?

- From my mother's side, yeah.

- Right, we were all born in the same place where I come from.

But in any case, I love black beans.

And you do too.

- Definitely.

- So I'm going to show you to make black beans soup today.

See, those are black beans, what they call black bean or black turtle beans.

They are grown in this country all over the place.

And you can cook them this way or you can soak them a couple of hours or you can soak them overnight.

Those we soaked for like eight hours.

I mean, they were soaked overnight.

And you see they expand a little bit too and they even crack up and you see some of the white one cracking open.

In fact, you really don't want them to soak much more than that because you start seeing bubble on top and they start getting fermenting, you know?

So you don't want this.

And if you are in a hurry and you don't want to soak them, then you don't soak them.

Very often at home, I don't soak beans and it's perfectly fine.

So what we do, we drain them out like this.

And I have three quarter of water here.

Usually cold water, you know?

Put them directly into three quarter of cold water.

- Why cold?

- Because it tend to toughen the beans if you start them in boiling water.

So we have a pound of beans, three quarter of water.

And in this, we're going to put half a cup of brown rice here.

- Into the beans.

- Yeah, you won't even know that there is brown rice.

It's used for the thickening agent and all that and it'd great.

- Oh wow.

- But in addition to that, we're going to put some of that stuff in it.

And this is pancetta.

It is actually the same thing that we have here, dry salted cured pork, you know?

And if you buy this one, what you want to go, you want to try to get the leanest one.

Like this one is quite lean.

You see that?

There is almost no fat.

- Yeah.

- And we have half a pound here for our pound of beans.

We are doing a lot of soup today here.

- Oh, but this freezes really well.

- That's the whole point, you know?

In soup like that, you don't wanna cook just half a cup or whatever because it takes you an hour, an hour and a half, two hours of cooking.

So you may as well do a lot, divide it into container and freeze it.

So this is what I would've in there now, you know, the rice, the beans, the pancetta.

We can put the salt later and we bring that to a boil.

- Okay.

- And we cook it.

It's going to take like 15, 20 minutes to come to a boil.

And then, you want to lower the heat and you wanna boil it gently, gently covered for one hour.

And after an hour, we add that type of stuff.

Onion, do you wanna work here?

I mean, you're looking at me working.

- I'm just watching.

- Okay, you wanna cut some onion?

- Okay.

Just costly, you know?

- Okay.

- Yes, any old one we'll find.

About a quarter of a cup of garlic, crush here.

- A quarter of a cup?

- Yes, a quarter of a cup.

- Wow!

- That's four tablespoon of garlic, but we just crush it like this, you see?

About seven, eight clove, I have more than enough here.

- As long as we all eat it, it's okay.

- Yes, well, your mother like garlic too.

- Oh yeah.

- So here we have all of our onion and I have a little, a can, a 14-ounce can of tomato or fresh tomato.

We have those onion.

- When I do this in Boston, it's very therapeutic to do this all day.

- Oh yeah?

- And I have this on the stove.

- Oh yes.

- And it smells great.

And my friends love it.

- And we put a tablespoon of chili powder in there.

You wanna put about a tablespoon of salt in there and a tablespoon of the Herbes de Provence, you know?

Although they of the Provence, a mixture of different herb, mostly margarine, thyme, - Lavender.

- oregano, and even lavender flowers, yes.

So you put all of this and after the soup has been cooking for one hour.

Ours has not been cooking for an hour, but basically it's going to reduce.

Then, that's when you add this, you know?

Anyway, you cover it, bring it to a boil again and cook it another hour and a quarter, hour and a half.

You'll see when the beans are really tender.

And sometime they cook longer, sometime not as long.

And this is what we have here.

Along the way, especially at the end, be sure to use a wood spatula like that flat at the bottom to scrape the bottom.

Because it may have a tendency to scorch, you know, it's getting pretty thick.

And at that point, you can serve it all chunky the way it is like this which I know you like.

But if you want, we can emulsify it a little bit.

So what you do.

- Let's use this.

I love this.

- What you do, you can use this, yes.

And you just turn it a little bit or you can take like two cup of that, put that in your food processor and add it back to your soup.

That looks good.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

So you can see that now, this is going to be a bit creamier - Hmm.

- It smells so good.

- W*?

But we're going to serve this with banana as the garnish as we do at home.

- Oh, cool.

- And you wanna bring me those plates?

- Yep.

- In the back here.

One banana for two or three would be great, you know?

There we are.

I'll cut the banana.

- Okay.

- And you can cut a piece of lemon and put a bit of lemon on top of it.

So you know, you put that in your plate when you're ready to serve it.

- How do you want - Eat that slice of banana.

- the lemon cut?

Just cut it in half.

We need a little bit of lemon juice.

- Of lemon juice?

- Yes.

- Oh, okay.

And put your hand underneath.

All right, that's it.

That's just enough so that you take the discolor, to prevent them from getting discolored, you know?

You wanna put a bit of black pepper on top?

- Okay.

- And that's it.

- Oh, this is so good.

- Well, you know what?

We want to finish the soup also.

I forgot almost with olive oil, vinegar, and Tabasco.

So that this is added at the end.

And you can add that after you defrost it or you can add it now and freeze the whole thing, you know, when I told you to freeze half of your soup.

So in this about two tablespoon of olive oil, two tablespoon of vinegar, you can add a bit more if you want, and some Tabasco.

That finish up the soup.

- But it's really also very good just the way it is.

- Yes, it's always good the way it is.

You can do it without the pancetta.

You can do it without the rice.

Even sometime, I put potato in it.

- Mm.

- Here, you want to taste it?

- Of course.

- I know you're going to like it.

- Mm, this is comfort food.

This is great.

- Yes, okay.

And then you serve, I mean, you know the type of soup that you have on a cold day here.

You wanna stir it, maybe to bring some of those banana to the top.

- Okay, I need a clean spoon.

- Come in with a knife like this.

- Oh, okay.

Your banana there, you know?

Here we are.

And maybe a little piece of cilantro on top, the finishing touch.

You put the finishing touch and we put this over there.

And this is a whole meal in itself.

- My mom's way of cooking in a lot of ways kind of fits in with my lifestyle, and in particular, my budget.

It just seems to work out that way.

- You know, with our Caribbean-influenced dinner, I think we're gonna do fish in the main course, right?

- Oh, that sounds good.

- Fish and rice.

- Yes.

- What else?

I mean your grandmother would be happy.

- Yes, definitely.

- Grandma would be happy.

We're going to start by doing a fish, a cod we're going to use with all kind of different vegetable.

You know what I want to start, I wanna start putting a bit of oil here.

In fact, enough, we have a three tablespoon of oil and we are going to do those vegetable in it, you know?

All of this.

- Mm-hmm.

- So why don't you cut that in to pieces?

- Just dice?

- Dice, yes.

You can cut the end of it here.

- I was going to.

- This I cut in half, take the seed out if there is any.

Oh, this one has almost no seed, look at that.

Just a little bit of that.

And we're going to saute this.

So we cut that into dice and we're going to cook the fish directly in the vegetable, you know?

- Oh, that sounds good.

- Just to flavor the vegetable, we call that cod a l'Espagnole, you know?

Spanish style, you do that in Spain or in the Basque area.

- Or in Brazil.

- In Brazil too.

- Yes, that's right.

- Cod is big.

- Yeah, okay you put it in there too.

The fresh cod cut, you know?

In France, the fresh cod we call morue.

- Oh.

- Yeah.

And the salted cut we call morue salee.

- Mm-hmm.

- But sometimes, the fresh cod, we call it by another name, we call it cabillaud.

- I've never heard that.

- You never heard cabillaud?

- We just slice it here.

- Can I just make the noise?

- Can just make the noise, yeah.

No, no, I told you to put your finger in.

- I can't, this is a little tiny thing.

And I can't hold it.

- Well.

Oh see, look at that.

You're doing very well.

Okay, that's good.

- Okay.

- So you see, it goes pretty fast.

In a minute, we're going to put this in there.

And now you can bring the fish here.

I'm gonna put some paper and some salt.

- Okay.

- And look at that large piece of cod here.

Now with the yellow thing on side, there is a lot of different type of cod.

This is the most common and this is the lingcod, you know?

- Mm, I like cod.

- And what we are going to do is to cut a piece and remove the skin.

You see the way I move my knife here in a jigsaw fashion?

- Mm-hmm.

- This way.

Okay, you wanna try it on this side?

- Okay.

- Okay, try it with a larger knife, it's easier.

So what you do, you grab it this way.

The knife is not this way, it's not flat.

It's about three quarter of the way, okay?

That's it, keep going.

- I'm going, I'm going.

- Just down, a bit more down because you're taking some fish away.

A bit more down, that's it.

Hey, you're doing pretty good.

Okay, that's the first time you skin a fish?

- Mm-hmm.

- What are you getting?

- What was at the end?

Now you're getting into the fish.

- Oh.

- You have the end here.

You're getting into the fish.

It's okay, well you did good.

- Thank you.

- You did good.

Okay, now the fish we're going to cut it about that size, it's about a good inch and a half thick, you know?

And it depend how thick it is.

But the time of cooking is going to depend on this.

So you can put this one on the side.

- There's no bones or anything in it, it's all?

- It's all clean.

So let's cut tomato, cut tomato in half, just press the seed out of the tomato, get the center here again.

And very often for Christmas and all this, we do fish, that type of fish because it's part of the tradition - Yeah.

- of my wife's culture, you know?

So we add this to it.

- And it's good too.

- Look at that beautiful color here.

Okay, and in top of that, we're going to put the fish to cook directly in there.

Cook like 7, 8, 10 minutes there.

And we're going to flavor it with this.

You know what those are?

- Saffron.

- This is the real saffron, the pistol of saffron.

It takes 45,000 flowers to do a pound of pistil.

There is three stigma of pistil in each flower.

- Wow.

- So that cost a fortune.

It is the real Spanish saffron, you know?

- And it's so good.

- Sometime when it's too expensive and all this, you put, that's your grandmother would put that.

- Yep, achete.

- Achete or annatto, you know, which get the food all reddish and all.

It don't have much taste.

Or then, you can put a little bit of turmeric that make it yellow or this one is actually the pistil of safflower and what they call Mexican saffron.

You know, you lie it on top.

This really doesn't have any taste at all, but it's fine, you color it.

So any wine, of course, the saffron for me is the best by far, you know?

Did I put salt on top of it here?

- I don't think so.

- Okay.

- You want some pepper?

So a little bit of pepper.

And this now, we let it cook.

You see it start already cooking.

- Wow.

- You see the way it looks.

A thick piece in the vegetable and we are going to cover it.

And while it's cooking, 8, 10 minutes, let's do the rice here and we're going to do a rice with cumin.

You know, you like the cumin.

- I love cumin.

- You have cumin powder here and we're going to do a little bit of chopped onion.

Okay, I'll chop the onion.

- Okay.

- What are you going to do during that time?

- Hmm, watch?

- Watch.

Okay, I put a little bit of oil in there.

And you know, you onion don't have to be cut that thin.

It really doesn't matter that much because it's going to cook long enough with the rice.

This is a cup and a half.

So you put a cup and a half.

Cup and a half of this, three cup of liquid.

You know, 2-2-1.

Okay, we put a cumino in it.

You want to stir this?

- Okay.

- Put a little bit of- - Salt?

- Of salt in it.

You want to stir that.

Yeah, I can smell in this cumin.

- Pepper?

- A little bit of pepper.

And that's basically all you do.

You want to stir your rice with the onion so that it get a little bit coated with the oil.

And then, we add chicken stock, three cup chicken stock here.

You wanna bring it to a boil.

- Looks good.

- You covered it.

This is going fast so I'm going to reduce that too.

Reduce these too, reduce that.

And while this is cooking, I'm gonna show you another dish that I'm going to do for you.

- Okay.

- A dish.

You know where I saw that dish first?

- No.

- In the Caribbean when in Guadeloupe with your mother last year - No, I wasn't there.

- No, you were.

It was just our vacation, it wasn't you.

And I really loved it.

Use the long cucumber.

Although the other cucumber are fine, regular cucumber, those are pickling cucumber.

So again, so you cut the end of it and now with this one strip to do, okay?

- Okay.

- You know how to do that I hope.

- Well, I know how to do it better when you're not watching.

- See, you use too much of the end of this.

Get a little more in the middle of the vegetable peeler.

That's it, and it's good.

You hold, and like that on top, so your finger are not higher than the thing.

- No.

- So you can pivot it.

You know, you make it pilot like this.

And this, you know, we cut it into big piece like this, like one inch.

That's fine.

- Okay.

- So I'll cut it again this way.

This is an interesting recipe.

People usually do not cook cucumber, you know?

And that's quite good.

So we put the cucumber in there, tomato.

Go ahead, add the scallion.

Go ahead, the onion.

I have sliced garlic.

- I love sliced garlic.

Especially when I don't have to slice it.

- Okay, salt and pepper.

Well, I think you can be a bit more generous with the salt, you know?

- Okay.

- Okay.

And we saute a little bit like this.

This going to render a great deal of juice.

Come to a bowl and you want to cook that for 20 minutes until it's really tender.

And this is what I have here.

So if you want to bring me that, gonna serve it on.

See that nice stew, you know?

- Mm-hmm.

- I don't think you ever- - I don't think I've, no.

- tasted it?

Because you weren't there when we did it.

Yeah, just taste.

In fact, I give you, - It's gonna be really hot.

- a little piece of the cucumber.

- No, it's not that hot.

It's been done for a while.

- Okay.

- So the cucumber is very tender but it's quite nice.

- Oh, wow!

- It's good, yeah?

- Mm-hmm.

And it's really Caribbean style.

- Hmm, it's great.

- And maybe I pour the whole thing in there like this.

Get that stew.

- Oh, wow!

- A vegetable, you have cilantro on top, just put a spring of it.

- Okay.

- That's it?

- That's it.

- That looks a little sad.

- Well, you can be generous.

I mean, just put a bunch like that on top.

- Okay, that's nicer.

- And this cucumber stew would be a delicious side dish.

And during that time, let's check our fish now, been cooking a few minutes.

- Ooh!

- You see?

Because the cod is going to break down into large flake, you know?

Cook like this.

Oh, so it will cook again one or two more minute.

One minute more, during that time, I'm going to show you the rice.

I have a rice which is cooked here.

- Okay, you want me to get the bowl?

- Yes.

See the rice is cooked there and you see with a fork, you want to egrainer we call, you know?

To separate the grain like this.

Boy, this one burned a little bit in the bottom.

- Mm.

- Okay, that's fine.

And you can maybe also put a spring of something on top.

- Okay.

- And bring the plate for the fish.

I think the fish is ready now.

- Oh, look at the color of the fish on the bottom!

Well, the color of the fish on the bottom is going to be the color of the saffron, you know?

- Oh, wow!

- This is beautiful.

Look at this.

You see the way it's separating to flakes, you know?

- Mm-hmm.

- Look at the color of this.

- Oh, it smells so wonderful.

- Yeah, how long did it take us to cook it?

I mean, we cooked it here in 5, 6, 7 minutes.

- About 7 minutes?

Fish more than anything else, but I've shown you, what's important is freshness, you know?

Fresh fish is very important.

- Look at what I did.

- Oh, you did that pretty good, Claudine.

And then, this is our cod a l'Espagnole with rice and cumin.

- I love like big wholesome kind of foods.

My mother's chicken and rice is something that I love to make for guests.

In fact, every one of my friends has had my mother's Puerto Rican style, Arroz con Pollo, at least four times.

(jazz playful music) - We're going to finish our Caribbean feast with a broiled banana which is typical there, a little bit of rum and a little bit of raisins on top of it.

- Mm.

- So, let's do it.

See, all you have to do is to cut the end of the banana, take the skin out of it.

- Okay.

- And you wanna put that gratin dish here and you need about a quarter of a cup of lemon juice in it.

So you want to do some lemon juice?

- Here I go!

- During that time, I do the banana.

We need about one and a half, one and a half lemon, that's it.

That's a handy machine.

- This is great.

It has a measure here.

- Oh good, alright, so you have no excuse.

- None.

- Okay.

So the four banana and if your banana, those are nice and ripe and I can smell them.

If you feel that they are not quite ripe enough, you can put a little more sugar on top of it.

We're putting like a quarter of a cup of brown sugar on top of it.

And it could be light brown sugar or dark brown sugar.

Dark brown sugar, a little stronger in taste.

Okay, that's more than enough, Claudine.

- Yeah, well.

- Okay, you ready?

- Yes.

- You're making me wait.

- Oh, I'm sorry.

- Okay, good.

- Is it strained?

- Yeah.

- Okay, we wanna put that here.

Maybe that's a bit too much, a quarter of a cup here.

That'd be about this and that's it.

So you put that under the broiler, not too far.

On the top of the broiler, about three inches.

- What about the rum?

- For about four, five minutes, we put that when it comes back.

- Oh.

- You wanna put that in there?

- Okay.

- Okay.

And then, we can do maybe a little strip.

We use a lot of lemon juice, a little strip of decoration on top.

We can do cutting strip of lemon.

- Hmm, oh, this is beautiful.

- Oh, you have the one or this one has been cooling off.

Should look warm, you can put it right here.

I put this here, we can decorate with that strip of lemon.

Here, I did one for you.

- Okay.

- And a little bit of raisin.

You could soak your raisin in rum if you want.

But in that case, they are pretty soft and they're going to be very good this way.

A little bit of rum, like a tablespoon of rum.

If you don't want to put the rum, it's perfectly fine.

And here it is.

Our broiled banana with rum and raisins.

Well, I hope that that meal remind you of your roots, you know?

- Well, half of them anyway.

- Half?

Well, maybe a quarter, I don't know.

I mean, the black bean soup, the cod a l'Espagnole with the saffron on top, the rice with cumin.

- Yeah.

- Broiled banana.

I mean, this is really Caribbean, right?

- Bananas everywhere.

- Yeah, definitely.

- Yes.

I love it, you see, when I married your mother, I didn't really knew those taste and they kind of grown on me and you learn how to like it.

And even as I told you, the cucumber stew, we learn how to do that last year.

I learned it when I was at Guadeloupe and seeing a Creole woman cooking and that was terrific.

And we are doing it.

I think you're going to enjoy it.

- Oh, I'm sure I will.

And thank you for teaching me how to make it.

- I think with that, we're going to drink a Gewurztraminer.

- Oh.

- The kind of spicy and crisp, those are very low in alcohol.

This is a Gewurztraminer from California.

Very low in alcohol around 11, 11 and a half percent.

And it would go well with that type of food.

But we start with, in the Spanish style, we're going to start with a sherry and this is an Amontillado and this is the medium dry sherry.

The fino is much drier.

I don't think you would like it as much.

- Okay.

- I think you would enjoy this one more.

And we are going to add that for aperitif.

I really enjoy cooking with you today, Claudine.

- Thank you.

- Cooking your Caribbean heritage.

I hope you will enjoy cooking with your family too.

Get in the kitchen, cook with friend, cook with family.

You will enjoy it.

Claudine and I really enjoy cooking for you.

Happy cooking!

- Happy cooking.

(jazz playful music)