Kitchens with Copper: Jacques Pépin

“We are all equal in the eyes of the stove.”

In March 2025, the Washington Post published a wonderful story by Tim Carman titled “What Jacques Pépin taught me about omelettes and life” (Washington Post, March 25, 2025). Jacques Pépin is an international treasure, and this article is a delight. What truly caught my eye was a photo of him seated before a wall of gorgeous cookware, including several copper pieces I immediately recognized. I would love to know what cookware Jacques has chosen for his kitchen, and I thought VFC readers might be interested as well. In this post, I’ll examine photos of his kitchen and do my best to identify, or at least characterize, as many of the copper pieces as I can.

That wall is very well known and frequently photographed—it’s part of Jacques’ second kitchen, purpose-built in a guesthouse as a more public space where he can host friends, conduct interviews, and record video segments. It really is a working kitchen: As I examined photos from different points in time, I noticed the arrangement of pans on the wall has changed. These aren’t just display pieces—he truly takes pans down off the wall to use them.

While the photo above is delightful, there are others that provide a better view of the wall of cookware. The best photo I have found of the entire wall at once is the one below, taken in 2013 for “Maintaining Pots and Pans” (New York Times, May 29, 2013).

Such variety! I see copper, cast iron, stainless steel, carbon steel, bare aluminum, anodized aluminum… We are fortunate to live in an age with so many choices in cookware, each with its performance and benefits. Over his lifetime, Jacques would have developed his own preferences, and it’s wonderful to see how many different types he now keeps on hand. (In one Facebook post, Jacques says, “I have been given pans, I have purchased pans, and most of my pans are at least 10 years old. There is not one company that I use exclusively.”)

I’d like to start my identification with a photo from December 2023, taken from Jacques’ Facebook page. While it’s not the entire collection, it’s a good place to start for my purposes because it provides an unobstructed view of the wall.

Working roughly from left to right and top to bottom across the photo, I’ve numbered the pans that I think I can identify.

1) Small copper sauté pan: The photo is a little dark in that upper left corner, but by cross-referencing with other photos I can see that the pan has a classic French handle with three copper rivets. This is a tinned saucepan, most likely vintage Mauviel. I’d need to see the stamp to estimate when it was made.

2) Oval fish pan: This pan has a cast iron handle, silvery rivets, a pouring lip. I immediately recognized Bourgeat, but if so, this pan should have a round stamp in the middle of the base. However, I have made a discovery: there was a Jacques Pépin for Bourgeat line produced in the early 1980s that did not carry the Bourgeat stamp! That’s what I think this is, along with several more on the wall sharing those same characteristics. (Read on for more about this special line of copper cookware.)

3) Two-handled sautoir: This pan has two steel rivets, cast iron handles, a pouring rim, and no stamp. I think this is another Jacques Pépin for Bourgeat piece. I would call this two-handled straight-sided piece a rondeau, but Bourgeat calls it a sautoir, which I have seen used interchangeably with sauté.

4) Medium Windsor: I don’t see a pouring lip on this one, so I don’t think it’s part of Jacques’ line. The baseplate is cast iron in the classic style, and the rivets are silvery, which suggest a stainless-lined piece. Here’s what’s curious: I found another photo of this pan that shows a reflection in the sidewall– a rippled look that suggests surface hammering, or martelage, which means that it’s tinned copper. To my knowledge, only one French maker uses silvery aluminum rivets on tinned copper pieces: Baumalu. I think this is one of Baumalu’s Windsors with the “raindrop” faux martelage. (Pan number 7 looks like a smaller version of the same.)

5) Large poêle ronde: The handle is cast iron in the classic French style with three silvery rivets, and the pan has a pouring lip but no stamp. This is another Jacques Pépin for Bourgeat piece. Note that Bourgeat calls this pan a poêle, or fry pan.

6) Medium aluminum sauté: This pan, and its two siblings to come, is giving me fits. It’s definitely aluminum and definitely French, but the shape of the handle baseplate is puzzling. It’s neither Mauviel nor Bourgeat. It resembles Tournus, but the handle shaft shape isn’t quite right (at least, not for Tournus in the 1950s). Another possibility is Metaux Ouvrés Vesoul, though that’s a long shot. Would Jacques have aluminum from the 1950s in his collection? It seems more likely that this piece is from a series that I just haven’t yet discovered or researched.

7) Small Windsor: This piece looks very similar to pan number 4 above, tentatively identified as tin-lined Baumalu based on the martelage and aluminum rivets.

8) Smaller sauteuse évasée: This pan has the classic cast iron handle design with three silvery rivets, the pouring lip, and no stamp on the base — another from Jacques’ Bourgeat line. I would call this a sauteuse bombée, but Bourgeat calls it a sauteuse évasée, which I thought was synonymous with a straight-sided Windsor… which this is not.

9) Medium sauté: The absence of a pouring lip is significant — I don’t think this could be Jacques Pépin for Bourgeat. It has a classic French handle in cast iron with three silvery rivets, so it’s almost certainly steel-lined, and my guess is that it’s Mauviel Cuprinox prior to the handle design change in 2009.

10 and 11) Medium sauteuse évasées: Both are likely from Jacques’ Bourgeat line and look identical.

12) Small saucepan: Almost cut out of the photo, but visible details — classic cast iron handle, three silvery rivets, a pouring lip, and no stamp — point to another Jacques Pépin for Bourgeat.

13) Two-handled pan: Similar to pan 3 but shorter and slightly flared. It’s a Jacques Pépin for Bourgeat pan, but not currently made; it most closely resembles a paella pan.

14) Mixing bowl: Likely a standard French-made mixing bowl of unlined copper, perfect for whipping egg whites. Identifying the maker is difficult, as these have been produced largely unchanged since the nineteenth century.

15) Hammered sauté: This pan has three copper rivets so it’s tin-lined. With that baseplate design and lovely hammered base, it’s likely vintage Havard.

16, 17, and 18) Aluminum sauté and fish pans: See my previous notes above — I can’t be sure of the maker, but the fish pan baseplate suggests 1980s–1990s Mauviel.

19) Two-handled round pan: Silvery rivets, likely steel or a steel-lined pan; three rivets with brass handles are brass suggest vintage Mauviel Cuprinox, maybe 1990s-early 2000s.

If my observations are correct, Jacques has no fewer than eight pieces from his Jacques Pépin for Bourgeat line on his kitchen wall. I had never heard of these pans, and I’d like to share what I’ve learned.

Let’s start with the hang tag that was included with these pans.

 

In case you have trouble reading the rather small print, here is what the hang tag says about the cookware.

Who am I to argue with the premier living ambassador of French cuisine? These are indeed all the desirable qualities of bimetal copper. It may be that Bourgeat subsequently adopted these specifications for its regular line, because these pieces are identical in construction to my beloved Bourgeat sauteuse bombées dating to the 1990s. Readers, if you come across a piece that looks a heck of a lot like Bourgeat but has no stamp, it could be part of this line from the 1980s.

Chances are decent that you might find one: according to an LA Times article from 1988, the line was extensive.

(Readers, it’s fait-tout, “do it all,” rather than sait-tout, “know it all.” And yes, I am aware of the irony, thank you very much.)

Bourgeat wasn’t Jacques Pépin’s only copper cookware collaboration. In 2017, Jacques worked with Mauviel for a line of 1.5mm bimetal copper stamped with his name and umbrella doodle. (As he says, “Pépin means umbrella in French, you know.”) Like the Bourgeat, these are steel-lined pieces with cast-iron handles, most with a pouring lip. The line offered individual pieces as well as 7- and 10-piece sets and was sold exclusively at the US kitchenware chain Sur La Table. The image at right shows the 7-piece set stamped with Jacques’ signature and umbrella; note that in Mauviel’s terminology, the straight-sided sauté (with no pouring lip) is a sautoir and the rounded évasée is a sauteuse.

The guesthouse kitchen features the magnificent cookware wall, but Jacques has a smaller set in the main family kitchen. Gedney Kitchens designed the room and their pride is justified.

Photos from Jacques’ art site show more copper in easy reach.

Here’s what I see.

• At least five Bourgeat pieces: an évasée, a sautoir, an oval fish pan, and two small saucepans (also seen in the guesthouse kitchen wall).
• The large saucepan hanging in the upper right corner is hammered and therefore tinned inside—a 2.5mm (or thicker) piece.

And that concludes my tour! A few observations:

This is the collection of a pragmatic person who nevertheless loves to match the pan to the task.  It’s not excessive or fussy; it’s a collection providing just the right pan — whether copper, stainless, carbon steel, cast iron, aluminum — for the job. While Jacques notes that “90% of all your recipes may be prepared with three basic pieces,” he does not confine himself thus, and I, for one, don’t either.

He uses the copper pans from his Bourgeat line frequently but I did not see one piece of his Mauviel line. Why one and not the other? I would venture to guess that it could be because the Bourgeat is 2.5mm while the Mauviel is 1.5mm. You know my preference for 2.5mm over 1.5mm; perhaps Jacques, as a classically trained French chef, is of the same mind.

Jacques turns 90 this November and he is a delight. His Instagram and Facebook are life-affirming. The Jacques Pepin Foundation teaches cooking to communities across the US. He is also an artist who only recently began to offer his works for sale; his house is filled with his paintings and glazed tiles. He is astonishingly generous with his time and energy. It has been a privilege to explore his copper collection, and I wish him and his family every good thing.