Jacques Pépin, in Search of Lost Cars and Cuisine

While the French famously obsess about the dilution of their culture at home, it is not unfair to say that their great nation’s cultural sway appears to have dwindled in the larger world as well. To give two examples that touch me where I live, the primacy of French cuisine — once regarded as the world’s best — is finis. No longer is the cozy French bistro a staple of every American city.

And though little remarked upon, so, too, can…