Fat Guy

There's a good article by David Shaw (no relation) in today's LA Times, which includes much speculation about the workability of a US Michelin guide. He doesn't seem to be aware of the forthcoming New York guide, though -- I wonder what that means. http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo...-headlines-food

Thanks, Robert.

The recipes in the home baking book are, as far as I know, all from the professional baking book that the CIA has already published. All the volume measures in this particular book were probably derived from the metric weights in the first place. Publishing companies as enterprises fundamentally care about selling books, but the industry is also a highbrow one -- especially a publisher like Wiley that handles authors like Paula Wolfert, various Nobel Prize winners, etc. Most editors will err on the side of doing something that makes the company overall more respectable, more of a leader in the field, more prestigious and highbrow -- even if that action doesn't directly sell more books. Likewise, educational institutions like the CIA should be thinking in terms of enhancing their stature in the community. I can't imagine including metric weights would hurt sales, and I can imagine it making the book extra respectable. Inertia doesn't tell the whole story. What I see and hear in my interaction with cookbook publishers is more of a patronizing, almost contemptuous attitude towards the fat, lazy, stupid audience of mommies who couldn't possibly handle using a kitchen scale or advancing their knowledge in any way beyond simply learning more recipes and tips-and-tricks. And that's just not the case. Here on eGullet where we cater to a decent sized audience of advanced amateur cooks, we see very few cookbooks that meet the needs of our members. Many of us find the average home cookbook to be overly simplified, yet we don't have the skills, equipment, or understanding to cook from professional texts -- not to mention it's a pain to scale down the banquet quantities and scaling doesn't always work right when you're dealing with baking powder and such. Any book that expands itself to include our audience is likely to sell a few extra copies.

That's a good example of the skills theory of Chinese restaurants: that a really good Chinese kitchen will generally do a good job with the old-style Chinese-restaurant dishes too. The thing is, most eGullet types wouldn't think to order such dishes at really good Chinese restaurants. That sometimes turns out to be a mistake. One of the biggest discoveries of our dining partnership was when Jason wanted to order kung pao chicken at Grand Sichuan. I tried to talk him out of it, but he wanted kung pao chicken. So I grudgingly let him order it, and the rest was history. Not exactly an answer, but in my experience the best dish in New York in this genre is Wu Liang Ye's tangerine prawns. I imagine they'd do pretty well with the orange beef and chicken as well, but I haven't actually done any sampling.

So, my only issue here is that the name "Mischief" doesn't incorporate any sort of eGullet reference. Like our previous drink was the "Flaming Orange Gully," where "Gully" is our little mascot, the dancing Keith Haring meets Hopi Indian meets Fredlet meets Dave the Cook guy who appears to have swallowed a computer mouse. Gully's Mischief? Mischief Gullet?

Don't think of it as a flip. Think of it as a push and a jerk. You just want to push so the egg mass to slide away from you towards the far side of the pan such that it starts to climb the side, at which point you want to jerk and tilt the pan so that the leading edge of the eggs keeps climbing and then falls back on the main mass of eggs. Language just isn't great for some things.

I though the end results of all the recipes were terrific, and all the instructors and CIA students who participated in the demos and hands-on sessions were all very professional and patient. Like Rachel, though, I was disappointed to learn that the CIA is going with volume-only measures in its home baking book. To me, it seems almost a moral obligation for an institution like the CIA to be pushing home cooks towards weight measures for baking and pastry. While I understand the marketing downside of not including volume measures, what possible objection could there be to including both? Any competent typesetter can put the metric weights in small type in the margins so they don't bother anybody. The most interesting part of the day, though, was the transportation situation. In most any assemblage of food writers, editors, etc., the ratio of women to men is pretty steep. But this event was off the charts: I was the only guy among something like 15 attendees. This was particularly evocative of pornography on the transportation front, because Wiley's marketing department arranged for limo service from Midtown to the CIA and I got to ride in a stretch with 4 babes.

I think you just found your signature line, Bux! Edited to add for Sam Kinsey: "As full of myself as I always sound, I'm really here to be enlightened." Edited to add for Steve Klc: "As full of myself as I may sound at times, I'm really here to enlighten you."

Also a note about Le Bec Fin, from the original example: Le Bec Fin would have been typical in many ways 20 years ago, but today it is one of only a handful of restaurants in the US that operate in that style. And that's not to say such restaurants are plentiful in France. Today, in any given large US city other than New York, there might be one surviving restaurant in the style of Le Bec Fin. In New York, where there are a few more than that, we're right now seeing a rash of closings: La Cote Basque, Lutece, and La Caravelle, all in the space of a few months. Theses highly publicized closings, however, divert attention from a more fundamental lack of openings: nobody has launched a restaurant like Le Bec Fin or La Cote Basque in ages, in the US or in France. And check out the average age of the customers.

To expand the discussion outwards from the axis of French and American classic and modern cuisines, we can also look at some of the other cuisines that are popular in the US. For example, if you walk into most Italian-American "red sauce" restaurants, Chinese-American take-out joints, Japanese sushi-bars, or Tex-Mex-style taquerias, you'll find -- at least per region -- a high level of menu conformity and shorthand code. Today most any idiot in the US knows exactly what moo shu pork and miso soup are when not too long ago such food would have been considered the most exotic thing in the world -- not only would it have needed to be explained at length, but even then nobody would have eaten it. Do European tourists know what any of this stuff is when they see it on US menus? In my experience, they need a ton of hand-holding when dining off their beaten track.

A few points: - France is not some culinary backwater where everybody is eating dishes from a 1960s-era American high-school French-language textbook. Try going to France and dining out with that glossary as your guide and see how far you get on most menus. The dishes just aren't there at the high end, and they're increasingly disappearing everywhere. - French restaurants used to be judged on how well they executed certain classic dishes. That is no longer the case. - When in the US, Europeans ask plenty of questions about American menus that Americans wouldn't ask. - French restaurants in the US that serve traditional French cuisine typically use traditional French menu langauge or efficient translations thereof: canard a l'orange = orange duck. In both countries, such restaurants have radically declined in number over the past couple of decades. - French restaurants in the US and France that serve modern cuisine don't have a code vocabulary available, except to the extent that if they say "canard a l'orange" on their menus you can be sure only that you won't be getting canard a l'orange. - The US has far more diversity of restaurant types than France, where most restaurants are French. - A non-French restaurant in France needs to do plenty of explaining.

Many thanks for the report. If you're really interested in getting to know Nobu better, the best strategy is to sit at the sushi bar, order omakase, and engage your sushi chef in a dialog about the food. The servers at Nobu tend to be unimpressive, but the sushi bar allows a convenient mechanism for cutting them out of the picture. And at the sushi bar, of course, you can watch much of your food -- as well as everybody else's food -- being assembled.

Two minor observations about that comment: 1) the L.A. menu example is either an exaggerrated hypothetical one or an atypically ridiculous specimen; and 2) it's not as though you can go into many top French restaurants these days and order blanquette de veau.

Let's give Mark a quick eGullet reading list tailored for the lover of language. Maybe we can grow this into a mini-index of our favorite eGullet language discussions. My top pick: Overused Restaurant Reviewer Words & Metaphors

Welcome, Mark.

It is? Says who? The US standards for mozzarella (not that the USDA has any authority in classifying Italian cheeses, nind you) may be found here (warning: pdf). Relevant information is: Mozzarella cheese: 52% - 60% moisture and > 45% milkfat Low-moisture Mozzarella cheese: 45% - 52% moisture and >45% milkfat Part-skim Mozzarella cheese: 52% - 60% moisture and 30% - 45% milkfat Low-moisture Part-skim Mozzarella cheese: 45% - 52% moisture and and 30% - 45% milkfat I agree that scamorza is corresponds to what we would call "low-moisture mozzarella," although scamorza is in general much better quality than what is found as low-moisture mozzarella. That there was already a word for that type of cheese suggests to me, Italophile that I am, that there is "no such thing" as low-moisture mozzarella. The full federal regulations, which are the law with regard to cheesemaking nomenclature in the US, can be found in the Code of Federal Regulations Title 21, Chapter I, Part 133. Specifically, scroll down to: 133.155 Mozzarella cheese and scamorza cheese. 133.156 Low-moisture mozzarella and scamorza cheese. 133.157 Part-skim mozzarella and scamorza cheese. 133.158 Low-moisture part-skim mozzarella and scamorza cheese.

At a place like French Laundry or Per Se, where the baseline standard is so high, you shouldn't even want a VIP meal until you've made your way through the normal menus. The items offered on the menus represent the foundation of the chef's cuisine.

In the fine-dining category, America had the standard French vocabulary for about as long as France had it -- maybe longer. But today neither country has a standard vocabulary to offer. You simply can't go into high-end restaurants in France today and order the old Escoffier dishes, where two or three words often told the whole story. Wherever cuisine is the creative expression of an individual chef, the choice is between detailed description and surprise -- there is little available in the way of shorthand code.

In US cheesemaking nomenclature, mozzarella and scamorza are synonymous.

If you're talking federal standards, you can have the driest example of full-moisture (52-60 percent moisture) and the wettest example of low-moisture (45-52 percent moisture) and they can be 1 percentage point of moisture apart -- virtually indistinguishable. But in normal pizza-cheese language I think low-moisture is usually close to 45 percent and regular is usually in the high 50s -- and that makes a really big difference. The photo isn't enough to go on, but impressionistically what I see is a fairly wet, glossy-looking cheese that has the flexibility, softness, and open texture I'd expect of full-moisture mozzarella.

It was not unknown for me to eat my packed lunch, the school lunch, a lunch out, and a couple of candy bars on any given day of high school.

Theoretically you can have the various permutations, but those Totonno's photos don't depict what looks like low-moisture mozzarella. A good rule of thumb is that it's low moisture if you can run it over a grater without clogging it.

jmax, I think that's the right thing to do. I'd rather not see eGullet develop into a reservations-swap service, especially if it encourages people to lie about their identities in order to get into restaurants. A lengthy treatment of Per Se in today's New York Magazine: http://nymetro.com/nymetro/food/industry/features/n_10410/ Most of this information has been printed several times already, but there are a few interesting tidbits, particularly the VIP comments towards the end.

Thanks, guys!

Unless the study tracked what kids actually eat, the conceptual leap from "NSLP provides" to "students consume" is not justified. If students are eating an NSLP lunch minus the salad plus two candy bars, that totally changes the picture. Meals from home can vary wildly in quality. I'm sure what most kids bring from home is complete crap, and I'm sure when most kids eat off-campus they're eating McDonald's and bad pizza. But at least bringing lunch from home or getting it off-campus allows kids and parents who aren't clueless, and who care about quality, to give their kids an alternative to government school-cafeteria food.