Fat Guy

← Funny. That is exactly what I was saying. ← Exactly what you were saying was:

Chris, I'd support most of that definition, but not the "want" component (as in, "and want it to be considered a separate cuisine"). It doesn't matter what people want. The proof is, as they say, in the pudding: the cuisine needs to be established by what's actually cooked and eaten. Googling for a fact-check of a tangential issue, I came across what to me seems a strong definition of Jewish cuisine in an unlikely place: About.com. But hey, this guy, Giora Shimoni, seems to have done some good thinking here. Anyway, he defines it thus:

That raises a question that came up over dinner tonight. Most of us who eat a lot of Chinese food, and who have long experience with the Empire Szechuans, no longer think the restaurants are particularly good. How much of this is due to a decline in the quality of cooking, and how much of it is due to us now having higher standards? It's still possible to get a good meal at Empire Szechuan, or at least at the Columbus Avenue shop, by the way. You just need to engage in very focused ordering. Empire Szechuan is one of the only places left that makes good cold noodles with sesame sauce. Also good is the hot variation, "hot noodle Szechuan style," as well as the tofu variation, "cold bean curd with hot sesame oil." Another of Docsconz's favorites, the dried sauteed string beans, is still a tasty dish. I also like two string bean variants: the "Empire ginger chicken," which is string beans with the addition of nice chunks of white meat chicken, and the "Empire ginger deluxe," which adds both chicken and shrimp. The spare ribs are quite good (ask for well done), as are the noodles Peking style. Empire Szechuan still makes an egg roll that's a cut above. One recent addition to the menu, in response to national tastes that favor it, is crab Rangoons. If you like crab Rangoons, I think you may find that Empire Szechuan's are exceptional for the genre. Peking duck is better at Empire Szechuan than at most places. And most of the dishes under "House Specialties" are worth trying, especially the "paradise chicken," which has nice pieces of white meat chicken stir-fried with watercress, red bell peppers and mushrooms, in a piquant sauce. Also, on the Japanese side of the menu, it's worth noting that Empire Szechuan Kyoto didn't just tack on a sushi bar. There's an entire Japanese menu, covering pretty much anything you'd find at a general-menu Japanese restaurant anywhere in the US. There are nine different Japanese salads and 13 different small Japanese appetizers. There's a sukiyaki and yosenabe section, and sections for noodle soups, teriyaki, tempura and katsu items. That's in addition to the sushi and sashimi. I don't order much from the Japanese menu, but see a lot of that food go by and some of it looks tasty.

I think you may find that a lot of eGullet Society members have come up with strategies for extracting good meals from seemingly mediocre restaurants. In addition, it's worth noting that the Chinese and other Asian food in much of North America -- in a lot of the places where it used to be uniformly terrible -- has gotten a lot better. Yes there's still a lot of undifferentiated crap out there -- that's true of every kind of restaurant pretty much. But a lot of the smaller cities now have good Chinese restaurants and the infrastructure (markets, purveyors, population) to support them. This reminds me of something I posted back in 2002, before most of you were probably members. It was called, "Farewell, Hunan K." +++ Hunan K was our neighborhood Chinese restaurant, though to call it a restaurant is an exaggeration. You've seen this sort of place: A storefront the width of a locksmith's shop, a couple of tables (rarely used) awkwardly wedged into the vestibule, a series of photographs of surreal-looking Chinese-American dishes posted above the counter, and three generations of family working hard, 12 or more hours a day, in the totally exposed kitchen. Hunan K was not a good Chinese restaurant, or even a mediocre Chinese restaurant. I would characterize it as a bad Chinese restaurant, though I don't mean that in a bad way. Having grown up with bad Chinese food, I find that certain perverse examples of it -- egg foo yung smothered in gelatinous brown gravy; day-glo red sweet-and-sour chicken -- bring me comfort. I'm gratified that Shanghai, Teochew, and other regional Chinese cuisines are now expressing themselves in America, but I'd be sorry to see the bad Chinese restaurant breed die out. Hunan K opened almost on the same day we moved to Carnegie Hill, though any resident of Carnegie Hill would be quick to point out that Hunan K is not in the neighborhood, being on Third Avenue and all. We visited Hunan K, perhaps on opening day, or at least thereabouts, and dismissed it as generic and unfortunate. Hunan K, it turns out, did not deserve such premature dismissal. Over time, we gradually made enemies with each of the six or seven other bad Chinese restaurants in the neighborhood. Eventually, each committed an unthinkable transgression either in cuisine or service, and we crossed it off the list. Eventually, Hunan K was the last bad Chinese restaurant standing. So we returned (I returned, actually, because I am the designated takeout-schlepper). Hunan K, it became apparent, was a deeper operation that I had originally assumed. Because while the emphasis was on bad Chinese food, all the makings of good Chinese food were present as well. The primary cook had trained at one or another impressive-sounding Asian hotel. Right next to the gigantic cans of goopy industrial sauces were all the fresh vegetables and meats one would need to create a wedding banquet. The bad Chinese food orientation was purely an expression of supply and demand. Eventually, as I became a regular customer, I started making special requests. These requests were fulfilled with aplomb, and further suggestions were proffered. Eventually, good Chinese food emerged from Hunan K, although I confess my orders typically juxtaposed the good and the bad. Hunan K was accommodating in the extreme. There were several dishes the chef and I concocted together to satisfy my wife's mostly vegetarian leanings, my favorite being mushroom and cabbage soup (pronounced "musroomcabbagesoup"). Amazingly, even when the head cook was not present (he took a day off every month or so), it was possible to get musroomcabbagesoup from the auxiliary cooks -- everybody knew all my special orders. The price arrived at for a quart of this elixir was an arbitrary $2.60, which never changed over the years. Hunan K delivered, of course, but I preferred to visit the restaurant and witness the ballet in the kitchen. The efficiency and economy of movement of this family, as the members cooked multiple large and small takeout orders with flawless coordination, was preternatural. I did on occasion have food delivered, though, and the delivery guy always came up the stairs laughing. "Ha ha ha ha, hello how are you sir. Ha ha ha ha ha. Ten ninety five. Ha ha ha ha ha. Thank you very much have nice day. Ha ha ha ha ha." We came to refer to him as the guy with the maniac laugh. Once I was walking on Park Avenue and the guy with the maniac laugh rode past me on his bicycle. As soon as I registered in his consciousness, he slammed on his brakes. "Ha ha ha ha ha. Hello sir! Ha ha ha ha." And then he observed with existential flair, "You on the street! Ha ha ha ha ha." Hunan K closed its doors forever sometime in the past two weeks. I headed there tonight to obtain musroomcabbagesoup. I had in my pocket exact change for two orders. But as I approached I failed to see the soft glow of the red and green neon light in the window, and more telling still I smelled nothing. Hunan K, it turns out, was at some point in the recent past shuttered by the marshals. A cryptic sign alluded to some sort of unsatisfied debt, and offered the name of the landlord. After more than a decade of Chinese food stability in my life, I am without bearings. Worse, I'm sure I'll never learn the fate of my friends. Farewell, Hunan K.

As a side note, for those of you who haven't heard the eG Radio interview with James Oseland and Pete Wells, there's a tiny bit of discussion of the book. The interview mostly focuses on food media in general, however.

This is something that has at once been responsible for the success of ethnic restaurants (like you, I'm just going to use the term ethnic for now because it's handy shorthand -- more later on that), and been a limiting factor. To paraphrase W., I've been referring to this in my outline as "the soft bigotry of low price expectations." In New York we're seeing this issue with the ever-struggling haute-Chinese movement. Restaurants like Mainland, Chinatown Brasserie and 66 come on the scene and try to sell more of a fine-dining Chinese cuisine at a higher price point, and they really struggle. Not even the professional restaurant reviewing community is really equipped to evaluate these places. Needless to say, Mainland and 66 have closed, and Chinatown Brasserie went through some sort of chef upheaval -- let's hope it hangs in. Anyway, I went off track here . . . This is me getting off track again: the problem is that mediocrity sells. These places like Grand Sichuan and Wu Liang Ye, to speak again of the New York area (the book is emphatically not just about New York), would go out of business pretty quickly if they only served the good dishes on their menus. The demand for the mediocre dishes is such that they have to make them. I guess they could choose to make them better, but there doesn't seem to be any incentive to do that because the people who order those dishes don't care and the cooks in the kitchen are just making that stuff because they have to, like the token chicken dish at a seafood restaurant -- it's just that in this context it's the token 3/4 of the menu. Okay, back to what you're talking about . . . Yes, definitely. This sort of strategy advice is really the crux of the book. The book is broken down into a section for each ethnic grouping, and there will be tips for getting the most out of that kind of restaurant in each section. Some tips will be from me, some will be from chefs, restaurateurs and other experts I've interviewed and will interview, and maybe some will be from eGullet Society members who have or will come up with great tips. After all, I'm not an Asian food expert. Far from it. I'm just a guy who eats a lot of Asian food. My expertise, if you can call it that, is in how to get the most out of restaurants. And it's not a restaurant guidebook or a cookbook: there are no recipes, no restaurant reviews. Everything in the book is calculated, in one way or another, to help enhance the customer experience. Sometimes that's overt, like a section of tips for "gaming the Chinese buffet." Other times it's more in the form of background: I hope that by understanding the history and culture of these restaurants a little better, people can identify with and operate within them better. If anybody has those answers, please say so. I'm not sure that level of detail is going to be covered in the book, but who knows: 60,000 words is a lot. Si. These hyphenated Chinese cuisines are an interesting phenomenon and will probably get a page. In a way, they're emblematic of the way ethnic cuisines develop when they leave their places of origin. This all ties into the notion of "authenticity," which is probably one of the next mini-essays I'll post on this topic. I thought I had come up with a great title for it: "The Tyranny of Authenticity." But Google says 997 people have already use that phrase. Still, I might use it, because it's so good. When I was in grade school we had a history/social-studies/whatever book called "China" and in it was an aphorism, I'm not sure if this is the exact quote, something like "China is a river, into which all other streams flow and are absorbed." The business culture of Chinese Americans is just incredibly resourceful. They make what sells, and sushi sells. One Chinese restaurant owner told me sushi is the restaurant's greatest profit center. Not bad, given how mediocre most Chinese-restaurant sushi is. I was at a seminar at the Japan Society awhile back, and the president of Kikkoman was one of the speakers. He was pretty concerned about the damage Chinese-restaurant sushi (as well as supermarket sushi and other mediocre sushi) is doing to the reputation of sushi. There was talk of a global standards organization, etc. I haven't decided whether to cover the history of the fortune cookie. It has been written about a lot, and I'm trying to do something a little different. But maybe, because it is quite interesting. There are a whole mess of online sources on this (for example) and the 1983 mock trial over the origin of the fortune cookie drew a lot of press. I don't know that fortune cookies originally contained fortunes as such. They usually contained aphorisms from Confucius and the like. It does seem that in the 1970s and 1980s there were a lot of fortune cookies out there that offered predictions: "X will happen in your life." But it seems they're back to aphorisms now. The English, also, has gotten much better, which has kind of ruined the fun.

And hey, if you all have any questions, suggestions, contacts (maybe you own an Asian restaurant in the Eastern US close enough for me to visit, maybe you're an Asian vegetable purveyor), tips and tricks for getting the most out of Asian restaurants (I may be able to quote you), expertise of any sort (you're an Asian-food historian and want to let me interview you), anything, please feel to bring that up.

I think there was a well-established American diner menu by the 1950s, perhaps even by the time of the Depression. I think the mass-media monoculture explanation applies more to the rise of McDonald's and fast food in the postwar era than it does to the American diner menu. But it's so tangential to the topic that I'll defer to whomever does the actual research. The point, however, is that this is cuisine defined not by region but by culture.

To say that Aunt May has a cuisine is to take the term to the other end of the absurdity spectrum. If everything everybody cooks is a cuisine then the term cuisine has no meaning. There are very few if any individuals in history who could seriously be argued to have had cuisines of their own -- Escoffier might work.

In 1981, when I was 12 years old, a restaurant called Empire Szechuan Columbus opened across the street from our apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side (Columbus refers to Columbus Avenue). It changed the course of my diet forever. This was Chinese food like I’d never before tasted: fresh, vibrant, spicy. My father, whose friend the US table tennis champion (and hustler) Marty Reisman was an investor in the restaurant, and I spent years working our way through just about every dish on the exhaustive menu. We even invented some dishes of our own, especially after my father had his heart attack and was placed on a low-fat, low-salt diet by his cardiologist and a lower-fat, lower-sodium diet by my mother. In those days, low-sodium soy sauce was a niche product that you couldn’t just find at the supermarket. My father would buy a bottle of it in Chinatown about once a year and the Empire Szechuan kitchen would store it for use in his dishes. Lobster Cantonese was prepared for him with egg-whites only, no pork. Another dish, which we named “Chicken with red spots,” used hot chilies to liven up otherwise bland chicken with snow peas. Outside the view of my parents, I continued to sample dishes from the less virtuous reaches of the menu. Though I’m Jewish and from New York City, I’m sure I ate more Chinese pork dumplings in the 1980s than any Chinese person -- or perhaps any village -- in China. I ate so many pork spare ribs that, even today, pigs shudder when I approach. What I ate the most of, however, was the Empire Szechuan egg roll, the finest specimen I’d ever tasted. Most days, on the way home from school after I got off the number 10 bus (or, later, the IRT subway), I’d stop by and, with the carefully collected loose change in my pocket, buy an egg roll. Mary, the diminutive co-owner (and wife of the chef), who took all the orders from behind the takeout counter/hostess station, knew not even to put my egg roll in a paper bag. She handed it to me, half-wrapped in a wax-paper sleeve, with a little plastic packet each of soy sauce and duck sauce. I’d bite off the top of the steaming egg roll, pour the soy sauce and duck sauce onto the exposed innards, and gleefully chomp the egg roll on my walk home -- I’d have it finished by the time I crossed the street and rode the elevator up to my apartment. If Mary was the heart of the institution, and her husband the chef its soul, the brain of Empire Szechuan Columbus was surely Mr. Chu. A former professor of mathematics from Taiwan, Mr. Chu was in charge of coordinating the restaurant’s urban-planning-scale takeout and delivery operation. Mr. Chu had the preternatural ability not only to plan each delivery man’s route so as to maximize profit by minimizing time and efficiently sequencing multiple drop-offs per trip, but also to make unfailingly accurate predictions of future orders and the resources needed to accommodate them. Graph theory, the branch of mathematics used to evaluate complex networks, was Mr. Chu’s specialty. That guy on Numb3rs has nothing on Mr. Chu. One night my father and I walked in on family meal (in the restaurant business, that’s what they call the staff dinner), and Mr. Chu beckoned us over. He held up a plate of thin, curved strips of gelatinous something -- maybe flesh, maybe a vegetable . . . or perhaps a dessert? It tasted like sweet, chewy bacon. “You like?” asked Mr. Chu. “What is it?” asked my father. “Pig ear!” exclaimed Mr. Chu. For the rest of my father’s life, we could always get a laugh out of one another by injecting the phrase “pig ear!” randomly and inappropriately into a conversation. We became part of the restaurant’s family. By the time I went to college, my farewell dinner was like a sendoff of one of Mr. Chu’s own children. He inquired after me while I was away, and always had a smile and a math anecdote for me when I visited home over breaks. He surely knew more about my love life than my own family, since it was possible to go on a date without my parents observing but, since I took every girlfriend I ever had (all two of them) to Empire Szechuan repeatedly, Mr. Chu knew them well. At my engagement party, held in the upstairs room of the restaurant (it was only up four steps, but we called it upstairs), we needed to limit the head count to the room’s capacity so we decided to make the event only for our peers -- no parents allowed. Mr. Chu delegated the takeout operation to Mary for the night and observed the event, all the while furiously scribbling notes in Chinese on a waiter’s order pad. Later that night, I caught my father and Mr. Chu huddled at a table by the window. Mr. Chu had transcribed and translated into Chinese every speech given at the engagement party and was, on the fly, translating them back into English in order to relay them to my father. “And then, best man says . . .” That was also the night that Mary, for the first time in my life, came out from behind the hostess station. Unbeknownst to me, she was only about four feet tall – all my life, I was stunned to learn, she had been sitting on a stool, making her look much taller (I had assumed she was standing). Empire Szechuan is still there, though today it’s called Empire Szechuan Kyoto thanks to the addition of, as is now common at Chinese restaurants, a sushi bar. Mary is still there too, as is her husband the chef, though Mr. Chu departed long ago to open his own restaurant. My mother still lives across the street, and now we bring our two-year-old son in for dinner. They spoil him rotten. It drives my wife crazy. I don’t mind. +++ The comedian Jackie Mason once asked: Jewish civilization is 6,000 years old, and Chinese civilization is 4,000 years old, so what did Jews eat for 2,000 years? He probably got the numbers wrong, and I probably got the quote wrong, and it’s probably the second-most hackneyed food writing metaphor (or whatever it is) after Proust's madeleines, but I certainly fit the stereotype of the American Jew for whom, growing up, Chinese food was a subset of Jewish cuisine. A couple of years ago, I wrote a book, “Turning the Tables: Restaurants from the Inside Out.” For the paperback printing, it was retitled, “Turning the Tables: The Insider’s Guide to Eating Out.” The basic mission of the book was to help readers get the most out of restaurants. As opposed to restaurant reviews, which tell consumers where to eat, my project was to tell them how to dine. One small section of the book dwelled on the matter of “guerilla sushi tactics,” in other words how someone from outside the Japanese culture and lacking a lot of sushi expertise can nonetheless get the insider’s, VIP, super-soigne experience at a sushi bar (first rule: sit at the sushi bar, not at a table in the dining room). When I went on tour in late 2005 to promote the book, I spoke to live audiences in about ten cities and gave countless television and radio interviews. That little section on sushi elicited more inquiries and feedback than any other part of the book, and in general I was inundated with questions about ethnic restaurants: not just Japanese but Chinese, Korean, Indian and Southeast Asian; Spanish, Mexican, Brazilian and Cuban. It’s a good book tour if you sell out the first printing, but it’s an even better book tour when you figure out the idea for the next book while you’re still on tour. I knew then what Turning the Tables part II would focus on: Asian and Latin restaurants. There were some delays and course corrections, however. First, I had another manuscript to finish (“The Fat Guy’s Manifatso,” which I believe is to be published before 2035). Then, my editor retired. Then, my new editor retired. The marketing team at HarperCollins thought the Asian-and-Latin book would be too big, so we decided to split it into two books, and Asian book followed by an option on a Latin book. We had a baby, and we both work at home, making me profoundly unproductive on the writing front. And finally, this year, I started working on the book. The working title is “Turning the Tables on Asian Restaurants: The Insider's Guide to Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean and Southeast Asian Dining.” (Edited to add: the final title for publication is "Asian Dining Rules.") Because I thought you all might find it interesting, and also as a means of keeping myself connected, I’m going to spend the next few months reporting here on bits and pieces, strands and utterances, various stuff that might go into the book or might not. I’ll report on some of the research I’ve already done, like trailing at Sun Luck Garden in Cleveland and at Tabla in New York City, or visiting the Asian Corners Market in Charlotte or chronicling the opening of three restaurants by the Mehtani Restaurant Group, in Morristown, New Jersey. And I’ll keep you posted on research going forward: I’ve got some fun stuff planned for summer. Maybe I’ll even get the book written.

If you're saying that the subcategories of Central and Eastern European cuisine include Russian cuisine, German cuisine, various other cuisines, and Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine, I agree with that: each of those cuisines derives some of what it is from common culinary elements of that geographic area, each is influenced by available ingredients, and each displays other influences (cultural, religious, ceremonial, migratory, trade-related, etc.). But if you're saying, for example, that there's no Russian cuisine, but rather that Russian cooking is a subcategory of Central and Eastern European cuisine, then I think that definition of cuisine is not particularly recognizable. I also think the Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine that settled into the US vernacular in the 20th Century -- and that's really the locus of the cuisine now, not Europe at all -- is not as formally imitative of East European cuisine as you're indicating. Just like any other cuisine that migrates, it adapts and becomes an amalgam. While European Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine was a cuisine of poverty, it developed in the US into a cuisine of abundance. Meat, meat and more meat, suddenly available in limitless supply, became the centerpiece. The dishes evolved. And there is now, and has been for quite some time, a relatively standardized repertoire of quite a lot of dishes shared by a culture of millions. So, if that's not a cuisine, then the word cuisine only means "regional cuisine as consumed in its region of origin, as determined by a snapshot of a fixed date in history." That seems an entirely too restrictive definition, one that doesn't square with the way the term is used in any context other than a few posts here.

If you open up any cookbook from any cuisine in the world and you subtract the pork dishes, shellfish dishes, dishes that mix meat and dairy, and a few other dishes, every recipe you're left with is kosher. But not necessarily Jewish.

Grapefruits are kosher. Are they Jewish?

Yes, that's the new paradigm in a nutshell: you walk in at 7pm without a reservation, order whatever you want (you could order one dish, many people do), and leave. It's not that the chicken costs half as much as at another restaurant, it's that it costs a little less and you can just order that plate and go. You can spend just as much on a meal at Momofuku as at a 3-4 star restaurant, but you can also spend $20-$30 and call it a night, or you can have a bowl of rice cakes with pork sausage. It's clear you don't enjoy eating that way, and assign no value to the options or the format, but there seems to be a generation of young foodies out there that wants that choice.

The Kitchen 22 story is interesting because the real original concept for that space can now be looked at in retrospect as a new paradigm precursor. Way back around 1990, before that space became Alva in around 1995, Charlie Palmer opened it as the Chefs and Cuisiniers Club, or "C&C Club" in the vernacular. The mission of the place was to be a late-night hangout for chefs. It never worked out (as Ruth Reichl wrote after the C&C Club closed and became Alva, "hangouts cannot be created; they have to happen.") Instead, Blue Ribbon became the de facto chef hangout of that era and C&C Club failed. When I see chefs' resumes the C&C Club seems to come up a lot -- I'd have to do a search to determine the full extent of it, but it does seem that a lot of the rising stars of that time passed through the C&C Club kitchen. The cuisine wasn't particularly haute -- it was more comfort-food oriented -- but part of the idea was that it was that sort of food, but being prepared up to serious professional chef standards (much as at Blue Ribbon). It's not connected so much to the haute-cuisine portion of the new paradigm phenomenon, but rather to the Bouley Burger haute-rustic part of it. Part of the reason I switched over to new paradigm as the designation, thanks to Nathan, is that it's a better descriptor of the phenomenon, but part of the reason is that "haute-cheap" was incomplete, because the new paradigm places tend to offer a mix and blurring of haute and rustic, and they're not necessarily cheap if you order a full meal of the most haute stuff.

I confess it's not my style either, primarily because I almost never cook anything from a cookbook in the first place (the main exceptions being classic sauces and most baking/pastry formulas). I use cookbooks for ideas, inspiration and entertainment. On the rare occasion I'm cooking something intricate enough to require a recipe, I almost always compare several cookbook and online sources and come up with a version that makes sense to me. Still, I'd be up for taking on a couple of "Cradle of Flavor" recipes.

He may not be mean spirited, but he is surely the crankiest of all major food writers.

Right. And my point is that I don't fully agree with that premise. ← I think what Sam is saying, and what I was saying, is that the traditional Ashkenazi dishes are viewed this way, not that they are or have to be this way. I think the perception issue has been factually established by industry research. The reality, that's a different story. I remember the book launch party for Mitchell Davis's book, "The Mensch Chef." (The subtitle of the book, by the way, is "Or Why Delicious Jewish Food Isn't an Oxymoron.") I think this was back around 2002. It was held at Cafe Boulud. Mitchell and Andrew Carmellini prepared all the food. It was amazing. As I was stuffing my face with the best renditions I'd ever had of about a dozen Ashkenazi Jewish classics, I thought that if everybody in the world could come to this party there would, overnight, be a transformation in perception of Jewish food. But I think there are two issues. The heaviness is one of them, and I think it's quite possible to make Jewish food that's not heavy. But the other problem is more integral to the cuisine: it's simply not a cuisine that emphasizes fresh produce, fresh fish, high-quality cuts of meat . . . all the things we can get now and that form the basis of the food that educated middle class food-aware Jewish people like to eat. So it's never going to be what most people like that eat on a regular basis. It's an occasional player on the food scene, enjoyed in certain limited contexts.

That's like saying "7. 42 items." The breakfast component of American cuisine is pretty extensive in and of itself. But just to add a few things to your list: mac and cheese, turkey club, Caesar salad, Cobb salad, chicken salad, tuna melt, Reuben, Monte Cristo, BLT, split pea soup, clam chowder, grilled cheese, fish and chips, chicken pot pie, apple pie, turkey with stuffing, hot open-face roast beef sandwich, hot fudge sundae, milkshake . . . we could go on like this for awhile. And it's not all just crummy diner food -- the restaurant Delmonico's alone contributed quite a few dishes to the American canon (Lobster Newberg, potatoes Delmonico, Delmonico steak, eggs Benedict, baked Alaska, etc.). The same list exercise can be done with Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine. Just pick up any of the scores of 300+ page Jewish cookbooks out there.

Nathan, it's not just five items. Go into any diner anywhere in America and you'll find a menu of dozens and dozens of the same items, with only minor regional additions and alterations. I don't think you get just to proclaim "There's no American cuisine." This is a subject that is studied at a serious level, the subject of entire academic conferences, and it's simply not that cut and dry. Sam, I'm not even sure what it means to say, "The America that made the hamburger into an 'American food' is the America of a mass-media induced monoculture." The hamburger remains a non-regional item, as does just about anything on the diner menu. You can certainly explain American cuisine in various ways, but I don't think you can't explain it as being tied to anything regional or local. If the claim is that "cuisine" equals "regional cuisine" then the regional aspect of the definition becomes tautological, and of course there's never going to be a cuisine under that definition that's anything other than regional, because that's the definition. But if non-regional cuisines exist, then I'm not sure why it's any harder to define Jewish cuisine than it is to define any other non-regional cuisine, like general-menu American cuisine or the contemporary pan-European cuisine of the French brasserie. If those are cuisines, what they're defined as is the list of dishes they include, as opposed to where they arose. You can look at that list of dishes and draw various conclusions about the purpose and development of the food, but the cuisine is the list and the culture behind the list. So if there is such a thing as a non-regional cuisine, Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine surely is that, though it's also tied to a regional cuisine.

I'm not sure you've really established that for American cuisine, nor am I sure it's true in general. I think it's safe to say that all regional cuisines are tied to location, but how is a hamburger tied to location? Any dish that enjoys popularity all over America can't possibly be tied to location because America is too big to be considered a location for these purposes. Even the larger European countries, like France, have cuisines that are difficult to peg to location. The regional cuisines of France, sure, but the national cuisine of France, not really.

But the religion is only part of the equation. Ashkenazi Jews -- again, for the past century hovering between 80 and 90 percent of the world Jewish population -- are also an ethnic group. I can tell you that for sure, because as an Ashkenazi Jew married to another Ashkenazi Jew we underwent extensive genetic testing and counseling at Mount Sinai Hospital's Center for Jewish Genetic Diseases when we decided to have a child. Judaism is a religion but you're born into it -- conversions are limited and not all that significant statistically. It's not like Christianity where you say "I accept . . ." and, poof, you're a Christian no matter whether you're racially Asian, black, or whatever. In the Jewish ethnicity, you've got the overwhelming majority of the population sharing an ethnic background, just like "Italians" or another small ethnic group (indeed, if you're Italian-American marrying another Italian-American you'll want to undergo similar genetic screening procedures if you decide to have a child). And the ethnic group of Ashkenazi Jews doesn't come from everywhere, it mostly comes from a limited number of European countries: Russia, Poland, Germany, Ukraine, etc. The cuisine very much has a geographical basis -- not a single country but certainly a region -- and it involves copies and adaptations of dishes from throughout that region, plus a few items (cholent, matzoh, charoset) that actually do stem from the religion as much as from regions. Now of course there are other Jews, particularly Sephardic Jews, and also some small communities (or former communities) in places like China, India, Egypt, wherever. So I think one has to speak of "Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine" rather than just "Jewish cuisine" because there's also a "Sephardic Jewish cuisine" and it's not right to steal the "Jewish cuisine" label from it. Although, these days, there seems to be a lot of convergence and cross-awareness, and many key items of Sephardic cuisine (which are in turn derived from other cuisines) are being adopted by Ashkenazim, not just in Israel but in the US as well.

I still don't see how it's possible to have the discussion without a standard for determining the uniqueness of dishes. What's the standard for determining, for example, whether the Russian svatovska juha (vegetable soup with semolina dumplings) is or isn't the same dish as the German/Austrian Grießnockerl in broth. There are semolina dumplings in many European cuisines, including the variety of gnocchi made from semolina. Are they all the same thing? I'm not sure the answer is all that important, because I think the way the cuisine needs to be defined isn't particularly dependent on the different-dish theory, however since it has come up I can't really see a basis for saying that all Jewish dishes are exact copies of some other dish. If you reduce all these dishes to their most formally accurate recipes, the differences are pretty clear. I actually think the project of defining Jewish cuisine has a lot of parallels to the project of defining American cuisine, because American cuisine is also largely derivative, with adaptation and evolution contributing to it, and too diverse to define all that well. Nonetheless, it's pretty easy to say hot dogs, hamburgers and fried chicken are American cuisine, even though you can certainly find those same items all over the world in various formats.

Rumor reported today by Gael Greene on her new blog, picked up by Eater, is that Alain Ducasse is going to take over the LCB space. Links: http://www.insatiable-critic.com/Article.a...of%20Crocodiles http://eater.com/archives/2007/05/ducasse_looking.php

We recently received a review copy of "The Art of the Dessert," by Ann Amernick. Ms. Amernick has been discussed on dozens of eG Forums topics, as you'll see if you punch "Amernick" into the search box. The publisher, Wiley, describes the book thus: If you're a Society member and would be interested in reviewing this book for the benefit of your fellow members, please PM me and, if you're the first to respond, we'll send you the book. Your part of the bargain will be to post a review on this topic within three weeks of receiving the book, review to include tests of at least two recipes. NOTE: Because this book is larger than a flat-rate envelope, we'll only ship it to a US address, via USPS media mail. [EDITED TO ADD: This book has been claimed, but keep an eye out for more offers like this, as we plan to make member-contributed reviews a regular feature.]