Fat Guy

The writer isn't responsible for the headline, and it's surely meant to be tongue-in-cheek. It's also clearly limited by context. The author makes no claims of historical fealty on behalf of her family's recipe -- she places everything quite clearly in the personal, adaptive, migratory context. Anyway, tomatoes come from the new world. Anybody who wants to climb up on an authenticity soapbox about Italian tomato recipes will quickly fall off.

Into the space on the basement level, or the street level?

It's only February, but I think this may very well turn out to be the best piece of food writing to appear in the New York Times in 2007. I can't for the life of me understand the objections to anything about this piece, be it content, presentation or anything else. It's as close to perfect as a personal essay gets.

You'll find some shapes and sizes of copper cookware at Dehellerin that you won't find in the New York stores. I was actually just discussing this issue with some friends the other day. But most of those shapes and sizes are only relevant to professional kitchens where, counter-intuitively, they need extra-small saucepots and tiny skillets and things of that nature. For the standard pieces of cookware that a home cook is likely to use, there's nothing at Dehellerin that you can't just pick up here. Also, as an owner of Mauviel stainless lined copper, I'll say that I think it's great but if I had it to do over I'd get Falk because of the brushed finish, which is just easier to maintain. There's much eG Forums discussion about the best ways to buy Falk in the US, just search for posts about Falk by slkinsey and you'll get the info.

The ones I use are the cheap pine variety, unfinished, never more than about 50 cents, I wash them in the dishwasher, and I replace them every few years -- I'd guess an average of every five years. Maybe I should get some heirloom-quality beech, olive or bamboo ones.

When you think about descriptions of really good soup stock, you often hear it described as "sweet." So in a way it makes sense that sugar could act as a stock enhancer. I don't think we're talking about food police here. We're talking about people who eat plenty of foie gras and fatty foods, not to mention sugary desserts, at fine-dining restaurants.

My perspective appears narrower and narrower, though it may be that the use of sweeteners in Southern cooking, which in many ways is looked upon as low class by Northern elites, is part of the explanation for the sentiment. What I should say is that there seems to be a foodie subcultural trend that runs through New York, London, Paris that says it's verboten to add white sugar to your savory dishes -- that it's cheating, that if you do it you're not a "purist."

Isn't there a gentleman named Jonathan Frost who has some sort of culinary business in Paris? Not that it seems likely ever to happen, but throughout the past decade there have been reports that Alice Waters might open a restaurant in Paris, for example, in 1998: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...755C0A96E958260

Has this seperation happened in the US yet? I see many Americans abroad, eating fried egg, crispy bacon, and pancakes with syrup all on the same breakfast plate. Is this just the people I get to see or is this a common thing? ← That's a common American breakfast, however there are sweet components of breakfast all over Europe: fruit preserves, pastries, etc. None of the divisions really make any sense. That's not exactly what I was talking about, however. My question isn't about sweet food as such. It's about the use of sugar in small, mostly unnoticeable quantities, as a flavor enhancer or to balance savory food's bitterness, acidity or other unsweet characteristics. It's such a simple fix, yet many gourmets (as Maher's apropos quote indicates) look down on this.

There are elements of most every restaurant above the level of a McDonald's that are reactive, improvisational, accidental. You look at the history of a place like Eleven Madison Park, where everything from the room to the chef (they lost their first chef before they even opened!) to the cuisine has influenced the restaurant in unpredictable ways to create something totally different from what anybody planned, and you can see that reality. The question is can the restaurant run with it and become something great, or does it collapse when the need to change arises. David Bouley is long on record as wanting to create a multifaceted culinary complex in TriBeCa. Different versions of the plan were reported on extensively in the late 1990s. One example, from the New York Times: Needless to say, though the outline of the original plan can be recognized in what David Bouley finally ended up building, his plan has been altered many times. Ambitions had to be scaled back, accommodations had to be made for space, finances have perhaps been tight. Perhaps the happy accident is that the cooking demonstration area, to be profitable, had to do double duty as a restaurant, so it was built a certain way. Or maybe David Bouley wanted it this way all along. I really don't know, and am only mildly curious -- either way it wouldn't affect my opinion of the place at all.

Right, the Asian cuisines have no self-consciousness about this. They'll use sugar to create sweetness wherever it's needed. But it seems that Western gourmets will bend over backwards to create sweetness in any way other than by adding sugar. It's nutty.

Maybe, maybe not. If so, I'm happy for that seeming accident, and I think it contributes to the good vibe at Upstairs. Whether it really is an accident, or just seems that way, doesn't make it any less or more brilliant. It has been for awhile now that many new homes have been built with the kitchen as the spiritual center of the living space. Every restaurant I've seen with an "open" kitchen has failed to capture this centrality, except Upstairs. At Upstairs, the rangetop is facing the dining room. The cooking occurs right on the pass, not on an island suite separated from the dining room by a pass and a chasm. The chef is totally in the room, the diners are in the action not just watching it -- the human molecules are spaced closely enough that everything happening in the kitchen conducts itself all the way to the far corner of the room. That the space is used for cooking classes is surely one reason they built the kitchen to be this aggressively visible, but the restaurant doesn't feel at all like eating in a cooking school -- I imagine the cooking classes don't feel like cooking classes either. It's all much more like an informal restaurant in a chef's home. All these strands of influence are both decidedly modern and essentially timeless. That there's a sushi bar -- the Asian equivalent of the open kitchen -- as part of the Upstairs composition is no coincidence.

In pastry cookery, sugar is a given. Making a fruit tart, or sorbet? The fruit isn't particularly sweet today? Add more sugar to compensate. The fruit is particularly sweet? Add less sugar. No problem. Pastry professionals even use a specialized tool, the refractometer, to measure sugar so they can add sugar accordingly. Yet, there seems to be a taboo among gourmets that says it's not okay to use sugar -- white, granulated, refined sugar -- in savory cooking. Why? A little white sugar can go a long way towards improving a soup, a tomato sauce and many other dishes. It can bring dishes into balance when they're too bitter or acidic. Just a tablespoon can noticeably improve the flavor profile of a whole pot of chicken soup. My late father-in-law, who was one of the best soup cooks I've ever encountered, often added a bit of sugar to his soups. They were excellent without it, but even better with. Yet I can remember cringing the first time I saw him add sugar to a soup -- it went against every gourmet instinct I had. Why? Is it because manufacturers of packaged foods use sugar and equivalent sweeteners with reckless abandon? In the US, is it a reaction to the stereotype that American food is too sweet?

Chef Jay, can you say more about what makes a Gray Kunz spoon a better cook's tool than a regular spoon?

Rendered beef fat (and rendered bovine fat --sheep, horse -- in general) is known as tallow. It's not currently a very popular ingredient, but it was commonplace in the days before the health lobbyists pressured food corporations to replace animal fats with the trans fats they're now lobbying to ban. Tallow is probably the best medium for making fries -- the old McDonald's formula, when the fries were excellent, consisted mostly of tallow (93% tallow and 7% cottonseed oil according to various online sources). Tallow was also often seen on food product labels, and under the old labeling system could just be part of the "animal and/or vegetable fats" description -- I believe Oreos were made this way for about a zillion years prior to the switch to vegetable fat that ruined them; Fig Newtons too. Tallow is no longer used very much in candle-making, but it is still a common ingredient in bar soap.

In the age of the $8 silicone "spoonula," an item I certainly like a lot, I fear the humble unfinished wooden spoon may be forgotten. Unfinished wooden spoons are essentially free -- if you buy one at the dollar store, you're overpaying (in other words, you should be able to get a two- or three-pack for a dollar). You can use them for so many cooking tasks -- everything from scrambling eggs and stirring sauces to tossing salads and scooping rice -- and they're even compatible with delicate non-stick coatings. May we take a collective moment to salute this incredibly versatile and inexpensive piece of kitchen equipment?

Reviews = Bruni's pieces every Wednesday Criticism = Bruni's occasional pieces Unabomber = Chodorow's new blog

Perspective and representation are two different things. But of course, the perspective is fictional anyway.

I should add, the distinction is really between reviews and criticism, not between reviewers and critics. You don't get barred from writing criticism just because you write reviews.

It's a very simple distinction. One doesn't have to read more than a paragraph, no less shelves of books, to understand the basic contention that "reviews are for people who are deciding whether to go to the movie; criticism is for people who have already seen the movie." The thing is, it's not a relevant distinction for this conversation. Bruni does both. For example, his "critic's notebook" pieces are criticism in the more formal academic sense of the term and his weekly reviews are more along the lines of reviews, sometimes laced with criticism. Big deal. What does it have to do with anything? How does it change the job? The literature on the question of what constitutes art is a different kind of literature. The review/criticism distinction, though not particularly meaningful or relevant here, is well established. The question of defining art is not settled, and more importantly most of that literature has been put forth by people who are utterly ignorant about cuisine and it was written at a time when people like Ferran Adria didn't exist. More important than the pretentious literature defining art to exclude various arts is the historical reality that the definition of art has always expanded to include new art despite massive opposition every single time. The notion that cuisine is not art is laughable and will be viewed as such over time. This is well understood in Spain, where whole conferences are held based on the correct assumption that Ferran Adria is an artist.

the Times refers to its art reviewers as "critics" as well. yet everyone in art knows the difference. ← By "today" what do you mean? Forever?

That's the job of the Zagat survey. Real critics need to be able to say, for example, that a very popular restaurant (or film, or performance, or work of art, or book) is actually terrible.

Frank Bruni's designation, used repeatedly in the Times, is "restaurant critic." "Frank Bruni was named restaurant critic for The New York Times in April 2004." (From his NYT bio page) "Your hosts are Frank Bruni, restaurant critic for The Times . . ." (From the Diner's Journal blog) "Frank Bruni, the restaurant critic of The New York Times" (From a Times article earlier this month)

I'm definitely in the camp that says this is pretty much a non event. Rich egomaniacs purchase vanity advertorials in newspapers all the time, and most of the time nobody cares.

Or all of them. There has never yet been an organized campaign by the top people in the New York restaurant industry to bring down a critic, but it could happen. It wouldn't actually result in a critic being removed -- the Times would never (and should never) let industry lobbying cause the ouster of a critic -- however if done right it could significantly damage a critic's credibility.