For those who know him only from his television cooking shows and annual demonstrations at the Aspen Food & Wine Classic, Jacques Pepin seems to be Mr. Smooth. As he explains in his French accent how to sauté or chop, he exudes a friendly but sophisticated presence. Women seem to love him, and men want to BE him.

It's easy to assume that America's best-known - and probably best-loved - chef has lived a charmed life, that is, until you start flipping through the pages of his captivating new memoir, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen. The volume, which joins a growing trend of memoirs based around food (see page D32), opens with the 6-year-old Jacques being sent off alone to live with a farm family for the summer because food was scarce during World War II. He recounts how he cries himself to sleep but also learns that "food could be much more than sustenance."

The conflict ends for him with a bite of a chocolate bar tossed by a soldier from a tank as the Allies liberate his birthplace, Bourg-en-Bresse. That's when his apprenticeship begins as his beloved mother decides to open a restaurant. It's impossible to imagine any suburban American kids working as hard as Pepin and his brothers before and after school - peeling potatoes, feeding chickens, walking to the market to haul back produce, and foraging for mushrooms.

At the "old" age of 13, Pepin left home to work in a hotel where initially he was allowed only to feed the alley dogs. The tales of the practical jokes, violent encounters, gross occurrences and personality conflicts will remind the devoted culinary memoir aficionado that Anthony Bourdain was not the first to have these kitchen adventures, simply the first to write them down in a best-selling fashion.

In the quick-reading chapters that follow, Pepin moves to Paris, cooks for Jean-Paul Sartre, fends off a groping Jean Genet and works in catacomb-like kitchens under tyrannical bosses, including the evil Chef Crampette, who - Pepin relates - had "a face that would have looked more at home on an old, ill-natured bulldog . . . He had only one mood: ugly; one facial expression, a scowl; and one posture, head down, lest he be forced to acknowledge a pleasantry."

Pepin is allowed to name-drop because this is the life he lived, but the celebrities are incidental to the narrative. In the military, he cooks for Gen. Charles de Gaulle. When he moves to America, he turns down an offer to be John Kennedy's White House chef so he could work as a corporate chef for Howard Johnson's restaurants. A shared love of food and wine brings Pepin together with the seminal figures of the '60s American cooking renaissance: Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, Pierre Franey and James Beard.

Throughout, the reader is appetized by lots and lots of food, from the offal his mother turned into supper to the fine fowl he cooked for heads of state and the mushrooms he collected in the woods of Connecticut, all lovingly and accurately described. It's hard not to get hungry as you read Pepin's description of the best roast chicken in the world. It's not a cookbook, but each chapter ends with a favorite recipe. It's cuisine bourgeoise, the cooking of the regular folks, not the haute cuisine of four-star restaurants.

What makes The Apprentice more than a menu is Pepin's gift for storytelling, and his willingness to share earthy, self-deprecating and sometimes painful anecdotes about himself and his family, including his wife, Gloria, and his daughter, Claudine. We learn, for instance, that the only reason he became the teacher, author and television star we know today is that a nearly fatal car crash left him unable to work as a restaurant chef.

Another pleasure is that the text reads very much like Pepin talks. His moderate Gallic accent can almost be heard in lines like: "First there was Julia's height; she all but had a foot on me. Then there's the voice, that trilled warble as instantly recognizable as the speaker herself." The fact that he has a French name, a French accent, and cooks a lot of French dishes is inconsequential. Pepin never was "The French Chef," a moniker given to Julia Child. By the time you finish reading this remarkable coming-of-age tale, you come to realize that Jacques Pepin is the embodiment of the American dream.

John Lehndorff is the dining critic for the Rocky Mountain News. Contact him at lehndorffj@Rocky MountainNews.com or (303)892-5103.