It’s just not really a French omelet, that’s all.

A proper French omelet is all about (you guessed it) technique. He grabbed a selection of backyard eggs provided by a neighbor and cracked three on his cutting board, not against the rim of the mixing bowl. (This, he said, prevents any bacteria on the surface of the shells from getting into the bowl.)

He dropped clumps of salt and pepper and chopped chives and tarragon into the bowl with the three eggs, and then, using a fork, he began to beat the eggs with notable brio. “People tend to turn it like a wet mop,” he said. “You have to break the whites so that there aren’t long strings of the white showing.”

He had agitated the eggs so fiercely that there was now a flotilla of bubbles on their surface.

That mixture went into a buttered nonstick pan; the heat was turned all the way up. What followed was a kind of Tilt-A-Whirl shaking and spinning and scraping of the pan, with Mr. Pépin keeping the eggs constantly in motion. He’d shake the pan like a tambourine, then stop and very quickly scrape off the papery edges of egg that would slosh up the sides, then shake again.

“I move this as much as I can, as fast as I can, so it’s the smallest curd possible,” he said. “I don’t let it brown on the top. Because browning will indicate that it has toughened the albumen.”

There was barely a second when the eggs sat idle in the pan, and that was the point. The omelet, when finished, was meant to have a consistent tenderness, inside and out.

He finished with a flourish that involved shifting the eggs to one side of the pan, tilting the pan up and using a fork to roll the still slightly wet mix into an oblong shape. His description of this, in “Essential Pépin,” sounds much easier than it looks: “Roll the omelet by folding over one side and then the opposite side, and invert it onto a plate.”

Alas, in the kitchen, there’s a lot more nuance to it than that. Even though I’d watched the whole thing up close, I knew I could not do what he had just done. But I knew I could master the next step.

“What you have to do now,” he said, “is eat that omelet with some salad.”