Fat Guy

It seems that for most dishes there's conventional wisdom about whether or not to cook it covered. In some cases, I can immediately see where the conventional wisdom is supported by tangible improvements in results. For example, if you braise something without a cover on, it's not going to come out very well. It's not really braising if you don't have the cover on. Likewise, try cooking rice without the cover on. That's not going to happen for you. However, why do we cook pasta uncovered? What about tomato sauce? Most soups?

Oh yes, you definitely don't want to go to the Upper West Side Fairway at any time other than very early morning. Over the years, we've settled on Sunday morning before 9am as the best time to be in the store. It's almost civilized. Why, just last week, I rang for the elevator to the upstairs natural foods section and when the door opened there was nobody in it.

I've spent plenty of time "on the ground" in Europe, and have been to places in France that most French people never bother to go (Franche-Comte, etc.) to visit farms, cheesemakers, vineyards and the like. I can say with the utmost confidence that whatever is damaging French regional culinary traditions has absolutely nothing to do with Pierre Gagnaire, Olivier Roellinger, contemporary cuisine or fusion.

But what you said was: And nothing you quoted above says that. It's not a zero-sum game. There no reason why the introduction of kiwis has to mean that some traditional fruit has to be abandoned. And if that traditional fruit gets abandoned, it's not because of kiwis. It's because of a million other things, but it's not because of kiwis. Sure, if you want to expand the definition of fusion to include everything bad, then everything bad is fusion. But if McDonald's is fusion cuisine, or contemporary cuisine, then those are totally different definitions from the ones that are commonly understood. I'd like to see where Slow Food says it's officially opposed to Ferran Adria's work, or to Nobu. I doubt there's any such claim being made. And if there is, it's nutty.

I don't really think that's the mantra of Slow Food and the other traditionalist organizations, or if it is their mantra then it's misguided. Fusion is not the enemy. Fusion and new ingredients have done little to hurt traditional cuisine. There are plenty of people out there such that traditional and contemporary cuisine can coexist -- to position them as mutually exclusive is a fallacy. Rather, changes in eating habits and the decline of traditional cuisines have occurred for many reasons, ranging from the changing role of women to the rise of convenience foods to the decline of agriculture as a way of life. When people say globalization is harming traditional regional cuisines, they don't or shouldn't mean that Nobu is destroying Japanese or American regional cuisine. They are or should be talking about McDonald's and frozen TV dinners. Totally different things. And if they get those phenomena confused -- which they may sometimes do -- then they're missing the point. Then the movement just reduces to opposing change for its own sake, which is irrational, especially since those traditional recipes arose through fusion anyway (at least, all the ones that use tomatoes, corn, potatoes, peppers, etc.).

I wonder what kind of a markup or handling charge Fairway would need to implement in order to support a mail-order business. I bet it would be enough to defeat the price advantage that is one of Fairway's two main selling propositions. The other proposition -- the selection of products -- would still be intact, though.

I'm not a frequent consumer of dates so it's not an area of the store that I keep tabs on week-to-week, however I'll try to remember to look next Sunday morning. I did buy some of the Safawy dates from Saudi Arabia around last Passover, and I thought they were amazing. The little sign, as I recall, said they tasted like chocolate, and they did. And they were cheap. Less than the ones from California.

The thing is, they don't wear gloves. I've never been in a serious sushi restaurant -- or indeed in any restaurant with a sushi bar -- where the chefs wore gloves. The best they can hope for is to pull some gloves on if they get enough warning that an inspection is about to occur. Otherwise, they just get charged with the violation. I'm not completely sure of the relevant temperature regulations, but I'm pretty sure New York requires lower display-case holding temperatures than Japan. Also, the federal Food & Drug Administration requires that all fin fish to be served raw be at least flash frozen to kill parasites. This is not enforced in every state in every instance, however most sushi fish served here has at some point been frozen at least for a brief time.

Eventually, you'll probably have a post-2000 dish that's so good you'll be forced to retract that claim. In any event, it sounds to me like you're the one advocating a system that deprives us of choice. Fusion increases choices: more ingredients, a wider range of techniques, and therefore more permutations. Nobody has to stop making the recipes of the past. There are so many restaurants that innovation and tradition don't have to be mutually exclusive. If a chef wants to cook the recipes of the past, and cook them well, that's just great. But when that chef starts posturing against chefs who innovate, that's destructive. That limits choice.

Changes aren't always for the better. But anything excellent that exists now, but didn't exist since the beginning of time, was by definition the result of change. So it's illogical to say we shouldn't try to improve. That's the prison of culinary traditionalism: it refuses the possibility of change for the better. In the case of bread with salt, sure, we can throw up our arms and say it's all subjective, in matters of taste there's no dispute, and leave it at that. But then we don't have a lot left to talk about. What, then, gives us a basis for saying that Pain Poilane is better than Wonder? We need some sort of framework of agreed-upon standards in order to make sense of basic culinary distinctions. To me, bread without salt is as hard to justify as bread without flavor. But you don't have to take my word for it. It seems that in the relevant regions of Italy people are generally adopting bread with salt, relegating saltless bread to niche status.

I basically agree with that premise, and I think it's a bad thing. It seems that the top echelon of Italy's restaurant culture has, for now, largely abandoned progress in favor of tradition for tradition's sake. I think this is short-sighted and will either need to be corrected or will result in Italy falling behind the rest of the world. I hope Italian chefs will keep looking for ways to advance the country's cuisines, and not be discouraged by the barriers to innovation, which at this point include a lack of public support, a lack of sufficient exposure to the latest techniques and thinking, and a global marketing effort that emphasizes traditionalism and regionalism above all else. Eventually, though, I hope a group of chefs will find a way to work comfortably within the Italian milieu while being forward-thinking and creative, just as has happened in many other culinary cultures. I don't believe there's anything specific to Italian culture that necessarily prevents culinary progress, though there are a few self-erected obstacles. Progress is not incompatible with fresh, local ingredients, or with simplicity, or with any of the other fundamental elements of Italian regional cuisines. As to whether culinary progress in Italy has to be gradual, I don't know the history well enough to say. If it's true, though, I doubt it's an inevitable state of affairs. At least, plenty of other aspects of Italian culture have changed rapidly in the 20th Century.

When you're buying cherry or grape tomatoes by volume, as in a pint, you should pick the smallest tomatoes. The smaller they are, the greater total amount of tomato you get. If you pick the big ones, you lose. Plus, most of the time in my experience, the smaller ones are better eating.

Mark, can you point to a great cuisine that has been hurt, rather than helped, by fusion? We wouldn't even have the great cuisines of today were it not for fusion, because fusion is not a modern phenomenon: it is part and parcel of the history of cuisine. And it has historically improved cuisines. Look at Japanese cuisine. Do you think Japanese cuisine would be better off without the fusion dish of tempura, which is based on Portuguese techniques? Japan's encounter with the West has not destroyed Japanese cuisine. It has enhanced Japanese cuisine by giving Japanese chefs more ideas and ingredients to work with. Fusion doesn't mean homogenization. Fusion means everybody gets the same tools to work with.

Less than you. And I'm happy to defer to all your factual statements about what's going on in Tuscany, unless they're contradicted by others who've spent a lot of time there or by credible print sources. Now I get to ask you a question: what's your point? Do you think culinary tradition should be unchanging? Or do you agree with me that culinary evolution and innovation are great things?

What you said was: and I think my characterization of your comments was entirely accurate. So is it your position that bread made with and without salt tastes exactly the same? My position is that they taste different, and that bread with salt tastes better. For whatever reason -- shortage, or the old story of the bakers' protest against the tax on salt -- it seems that saltless bread was the traditional bread of Tuscany, or at least large parts thereof. I don't see why we need to try to obscure that history by making excuses about there being no such thing as Tuscany, or by saying you can go to a modern Tuscan bakery and get a lot of different breads. You can eat at McDonald's in Tuscany too, but that doesn't make it traditional. It seems to me that throughout Tuscany people have simply realized that, except perhaps in a few special cases where it's paired with very salty food, bread with salt tastes better. So the tradition was set aside in favor of something better. That's what we should do with traditions when better things come along, unless we're just masochists and want to suffer with saltless bread long after salt has become cheap and abundant.

I also purchased some excellent crostini crackers from Italy, from the Pan Ducale brand. In the past I've purchased similar-in-appearance crostini from the Castellana brand, which seems to be more widely available, and I haven't liked them all that much. But last week, I was at a friend's house and he had picked up some Pan Ducale garlic crostini from, I believe, the Balducci's in Scarsdale. I noticed this morning that Fairway has them too, so I purchased a bag. They're delicious. Here's the Pan Ducale website: http://www.panducale.it/ Here are the websites for Pamplie and Kate's, by the way: http://www.kateshomemadebutter.com/ http://www.beurre-de-pamplie.com/ENG/presentation.html

So, fortedei, we've established that ignorant foreigners writing books about Italy often say that Tuscan bread is traditionally saltless. And we have you saying that's not true: that Tuscan bread is traditionally diverse, like wine, with an array of salted and unsalted breads being paired with the right dish. I'd love to see some Italian sources to back up this claim, because it comes as a surprise to me. The reason I think it's relevant to get to the bottom of that issue is that it makes a point about tradition. If it turns out that, historically, bread in Tuscany -- or in specific areas of Tuscany -- was saltless, but that now saltless bread is only one of many choices, paired like wine with appropriate dishes, then what we have is another good example of tradition being cast aside in favor of superior innovation. If, however, Tuscan bread has always been diverse, then that's another matter. Not that I'm convinced that bread without salt is ever a good idea. Eating bread with salty food is no substitute for bringing out bread's flavor by incorporating salt into the dough. It's not like most breads are salty. The amount of salt is small. But it's a significant flavor enhancer, just as it is in most cooking. Maybe I've never had the best, brilliantly made saltless bread -- the one that convinces people that there's something to this sort of bread -- but as a theoretical matter it's hard to see how it could be better than the same bread made with a little salt.

This week, for my butter of the week, I went with a butter from the upstairs natural foods section: Kate's Homemade Butter from Old Orchard Beach, Maine. I have a soft spot for OOB, because one of my closest friends in college was from there. We visited a couple of times, had Hot Dog on a Stick and various other local delicacies, and generally enjoyed the kitsch of the place. So I was pretty excited to try Kate's butter. But it was disappointing: no better than the typical commercial American butter, no special character or anything like that. Far inferior to last week's Pamplie, which, in turn, is not the best butter I've had from Fairway.

Vinotas, in addition to President and Isigny St Mere here in New York City, we also have a few others. At Fairway you can get Pamplie AOC-designated Charentes-Poitou butter, both unsalted and with fleur de sel, you can get a couple of variations of Echire, you can get Beurre Barratte de Celles sur Belle, you can get the Sevre et Belle goat butter, and a couple of others whose names I can't remember. I think last time I was there I counted ten choices from France (as well as several from Italy, Ireland, Denmark and elsewhere). They're all from pasteurized milk, though.

As I understand it, from the 1920s through the 1950s, United Fruit and Standard Fruit were very aggressive about promoting banana use in the US. I don't know if bananas-on-cereal came directly from a marketing effort, or from some clever home economist who was caught up in the banana culture, but it was one of the ideas for banana use that gained traction, probably because it's such a good idea. When it comes to breakfast, people are creatures of habit. Many of the most adventurous eaters I know won't deviate from a specific breakfast plan. Especially back in the day, when bananas were one of the few good-quality fruits available year round in supermarkets in colder climates, bananas were something you could always have on hand. I'm sure plenty of people switched to berries and such during the month or two each year when those were available locally, but otherwise it was bananas all the way. The tradition has been handed down, and is now part of American culture.

So you're using saltless bread as, basically, a specialty item. But was it traditionally a specialty item, or was it traditionally the mainstay of the Tuscan bread bakery? There are lots of foods available in Tuscany today, sure, but is this rich array of salted breads traditional? Or have Tuscan bakeries slowly relegated saltless bread to the status of specialty item in response to the evolving palates of people who've tasted bread with salt and rejected saltless bread for most purposes?

Do you like it?

As many of you may recall, there was a time when Ray's pizza restaurants proliferated throughout the city, and controversy ensued. There were several news stories over a period of years -- from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s -- about which was the original, which was the best, and the various lawsuits over use of the name. Ray's was an iconic New York pizza phenomenon. For example, in 1994, the New York Times ran a story by Michael Kaufman that began: In 1991, John Tierney announced: In 1987, also in the Times, William Geist investigated the question of which was the original Ray's. Et cetera. There are still plenty of pizzerias named Ray's, but today nobody who is passionate about pizza in New York really pays attention to any of them. Still, to this day I often field questions from prospective tourists, or even from reporters or editors who should know better, about Ray's. To the average person coming to town, New York pizza is defined not by the original Patsy's, or the original Totonno's, or any of the new wave of serious pizzerias, but by the permutations of Ray's. During the relevant time period, I ate my weight in Ray's pizza. To me, Ray's pizza always meant the Ray's on the corner of 11th Street and Sixth Avenue (er, Avenue of the Americas). While this Ray's does not actually have the best claim to being the original, it was as best I could tell the most famous Ray's back in the day, and probably still is. And so, a few days back, I found myself walking through Greenwich Village and there, on the opposite corner, was Ray's: A bit worn down, and -- if memory serves -- about half the size it was in its heyday, Ray's was full of people eating pizza. I was on my way to a lunch date, but I just had to get a slice. It had been, I don't know, somewhere around 15 years since I'd last had a slice there. It took me back. It seems to me that little has changed about the Ray's slice over the years. It tasted exactly as I remembered it, with its thick covering of gooey, runny cheese, its sweet tomato sauce and it's soft, foldable crust. You know, I really enjoyed it. Were I not about to have lunch at a restaurant, I'd have had a second slice.

Lumiere is not exactly a unique restaurant name. And this Lumiere doesn't even sound like it's a restaurant. So, what would be the argument? That consumers are going to be confused and think they're going to be seeing films directed by Rob Feenie?

Goode Company, according to the menu on the restaurant's website, charges $13.95 per pound for brisket. I'm willing to wager that the sides, while way cheaper, aren't in Hill Country's league. Hill Country's sides are expensive, but superb.