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I would argue for Iranian cuisine, which since the days of Darius and Xerxes has seduced foreign visitors/rivals/conquerors. While today's Persian cookery dates reliably only from the Sassanids, there are arguments to be made for continuity from the days before the Medes and Persians knocked off the Babylonians. Certainly few national cuisines can claim anything like a similarly broad influence.

On the only occasion that I've managed to have clementines for baking with, I made a gratin with clementines and an OJ/sparkling wine sabayon in a standard short crust. It was good. I have a fifteen-year-old bottomless football player in the house. My last five-pound box of clementines lasted less than six hours.

Mark Kurlansky's "Salt: A world history" has a chapter devoted to Avery Island and McIlhenny. I'd never have guessed that the marriage of an investment banker and a salt miner's heiress would have resulted in a hot sauce. IIRC McIlhenny bought the pepper seeds from a transient. After the Civil War the bottom had dropped out of the salt market, and they needed to do something else by way of generating an income.

In all fairness to the MidWest, I think the availability of ingredients, and the influence of multiple cultures, was not quite the same there. The point I was striving for in my sleep-deprived state was that Acadian food was utterly transformed by the move to Louisiana. Acadian cooking, in l'Acadie, was also very plain meat & potatoes food; unless you couldn't afford meat and therefore ate fish, which were free for the taking. There are many Acadians "of a certain age" back home who won't eat fish, because when they were growing up that was poor people's food. It was the impact of multicultural, geographically favoured Louisiana that awoke their dormant "eating well" genes, I think. IIRC, most of the Acadians were of Norman, Picard, and Breton ancestry. I know little of these influences, except the obvious transference of the Norman apple culture to Nova Scotia. Can anyone of greater knowledge point out survivals of these influences on modern Cajun cooking? Oh, and Smithy...forget Evangeline. For a great read, I recommend "Pelagie," by Antonine Maillet. Maillet is an Acadian writer from New Brunswick, and was the first Canadian to win the Prix Goncourt for the best novel in the French language. "Pelagie" tells the story of a determined matriarch bringing her clan back home from Louisiana in the years following the Expulsion. It is available in English, and is a damned fine yarn. Amazon seems to have only the French version, unfortunately...Alibris has several copies here.

Researchers in the US and UK have discovered by trying the experiment that you can inject commercially-made mayonnaise with live cultures of listerium or salmonella, and they will die. The mayo is acidic enough to kill them on contact. I still wouldn't leave it on the dash of my car or anything, but a half-hour is pretty safe. Homemade mayo requires a little more caution, of course. As far as specific times, well...there I'm out of my depth.

I don't drink a lot of Starbucks espresso thingies, because quite frankly I find them vile. As for their drip coffee, I drink quite a a bit of it because that's what we serve and it's free for employees. I've always found a lingering, almost chemical bitterness from Starbuck's coffee, regardless of the roast or the blend. I don't know of any reason for that, but it's there. My guts are bitching at me, too, since we've switched; and I'm drinking less coffee overall. And Bloviatrix, both here in Edmonton and back in Halifax there are companies roasting and selling fair-trade coffees at prices well below Starbucks. Better product, too.

The rule of thumb I was taught at school was pretty straightforward. Check how the bottle was closed; if it has a stopper it will keep pretty well, if it has a traditional cork it should be consumed at your earliest convenience. Of course both of those descriptions are pretty vague...

Damn, that would take some serious self-confidence. Not many people would have the stones to cook for one of those chefs, never mind all of them!

Nothing to contribute as far as utensils...but man! what a cool site. Gonna lose an evening there, sometime real soon...

It's all good. I have a small mortar and pestle (a treasured christmas gift) which I use for most things. I have a coffee whizzer thingie that I use for some spices and/or mixes, because I find that things like cinnamon or methi seeds are difficult to grind adequately in my little mortar. And I like pepper grinders for suitably-sized spices, like coriander (though I guess I could use my mortar to bust up larger spices, like allspice, so that they'd fit the pepper grinder...never thought of that before). Use what you've got, is my advice, and if you find yourself longing for one of the others, go buy it. They're all cheap and plentiful; so there's no reason to not have it if you think you'd use it.

The comparison of Cajun with Acadian cuisine is rather instructive. In Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, the staple starch was potatoes, rather than rice. Soups and stews were a mainstay, often made thick and sticky with grated potatoes; an obvious forerunner to many of the filling rice dishes of Louisiana. "Rappie Pie," for example, is a dish still made by Acadians; chicken or beef or pork slow-cooked in a big ol' casserole dish filled with grated potatoes. You start by frying some salt pork in it, and a bit of onion (and in the old days, perhaps, some salted herbs if you had 'em). Pork, and especially salt pork, was a big favourite. Went into everything, including desserts (take a pastry square, put a piece of crisp-fried salt pork in the bottom, cover with apples, fold up the corners to make a smaller square...when almost done, pour hot maple syrup into the middle...return to oven until it's all bubbled over and sticky...mmmmmmm). Chickens and beef were seldom eaten when young and tender, they were slaughtered after they'd been used up as chicken/milk producers; hence long/slow cooking was a given. Pork was salted down or turned into sausage. Fish was plentiful, and was used heavily in a variety of dishes. Lobster was so common, in some times and places, that it was used as fertilizer for the garden. Seasoning was simple and straightforward; usually just locally-grown herbs salted down for preservation. It was all about filling a stomach frugally but unequivocally. Now take that background, and transfer it to Louisiana where anything and everything can be grown; and where there were a world of new influences to be assimilated...

Hear, hear. Personally I find Japanese to be the least interesting of the major Asian cuisines, so Tokyo would be out for me. As a travel-envious forty-year-old who's not been out of Canada, I find all the arguments interesting if distinctly hypothetical.

I'm ambivalent about Starbucks. On the upside, they pay their staff better than similar chains, and give benefits. They also pay their coffee growers well above market rates, almost-but-not-quite what the fair trade people pay. These are good things. On the downside, their prices are insanely high and their product is, quite frankly, poor-to-mediocre. At my day job we've just recently switched from a local distributor to a "proudly brewing Starbucks" format at our in-house coffee bar. Our traffic has plummetted, though with the increase in prices we're coming out somewhat ahead in $ at the actual coffee bar. I'm down about 200 cookie sales/week, though, on the resultant reduced foot traffic at the bakery counter. I drink a lot of it, because it's free for staff, but I sure don't enjoy my cup of coffee very much anymore.

I used to shop a lot at save-on-meats when I lived in Vancouver, twenty years ago. The quality was acceptable, and their prices were simply amazing. I used to buy chicken necks and backs (for soup) for 8 cents/lb, IIRC; and they had lamb "stew" (aka trimmings) for, I dunno, about 80 cents/lb. And for an offal-eater like me, that place was heaven. All the stuff I liked, and as cheap as any old-school granny could ask.

Sonuvagun. Here I've been cooking and eating those suckers for years, and nobody ever bothered to tell me they were inedible. Go figure. (I skip the ones that've had candles in them, not being partial to the flavour of wax, but to each his own.)

There are a few herbs and spices that scholars debate, but I don't recall which exact ones they were. A popular Roman spice, sylphium, is known to be extinct; it is thought that the last plant known was served to Nero. In later years the Romans discovered the Indian spice asafoetida (hing) which was a close substitute, and is available to this day (warning: there is a reason the name of the spice includes the word "foetid"...) And as for your original question...McDonald's. McDonald's floors me. Maybe it's different elsewhere, but up here they're ghastly horrible; far and away the worst of the fast food chains. How do they keep on selling like they do? It's beyond me.

OK, this is slightly off topic, but I'm gonna ask anyway. A co-worker loaned me one of his vast collection of cookbooks. It's called the "New Orleans Restaurant Cookbook," it was published in 1967 and revised in 1976. It was written by someone named Deirdre Stanforth. While the recipes look good, I really enjoyed the introductory section giving the "biography" of each restaurant. Those in the cookbook are Antoine's, Arnaud's, Brennan's, Galatoire's, Corinne Dunbar's, the Caribbean Room at the Pontchartrain, Commander's, Masson's, Le Ruth's, and Lagniappe. Now I know that Commander's Palace and Galatoire's are still around, but how about the others? Flourishing, fading, gone?

I'm pretty loyal to Assams, generally, and don't really get too far afield into specialized estate teas. At my night job, though, we've recently gotten into seriously specialized custom blends. In fact, our beverage menu has eight pages of teas. Oy! Drove the servers crazy, at first, trying to figure out which was which.

Nice to see a restaurant from the Forgotten Coast make the list. Unfortunately it's opened since I left, so I won't get to eat there for some time.

I would say that 5-6 layers is probably superfluous. At my night job we make 4" tarts using only three layers, and they're certainly sturdy enough to handle and plate. Mind you, the fillings are not liquid, so your mileage may vary. As for cutting we use an xacto knife, and the bottom of a particular-sized can is our guide. It's not elegant, but it's effective and pretty fast, since you can cut through half-a-box of phyllo in one stack.

That's still a popular catchphrase. Now, of course, they can also watch hockey...oh, wait...

Guy Fawkes Day is still celebrated, in attenuated form, in some parts of Newfoundland (it is referred to as "Bonfire Day"). Celebratory comestibles are random, ranging from hot dogs to fresh fish to frozen McCain cakes (dunno why). Copious quantities of alcohol will be consumed, regardless of the food, but this is a given whenever Newfoundlanders congregate to celebrate.

I'll throw in a plug for an East Coast product...Blue Star beer from Newfoundland. The other main indigenous brew, Black Horse, was in my day a decent if uninteresting brew. Blue Star, on the other hand, was reprehensible (and gave me the trots, as well). Many brands varied from one province to the other, so that "Pilsener" in Saskatchewan was acceptable, while the same in Alberta was notoriously something that only a pensioner with a limited budget and atrophied taste buds could look forward to. One of the worst summers of my life involved being in Calgary during a beer strike (was that 1985, or 1986?). All we had to drink was Colt 45 and Old Milwaukee, both of which tasted like a long-dead muskrat.

Now that I have my "awake, post-coffee, less facetious" head on, I should add that I consider eGullet to be one of the finest Professional Development tools any newly-minted cook could ask for. Where else could I find such an amazing group of great cooks (professional and home) to crib from? And the daily count of belly-laughs is certainly therapeutic to my overworked soul.

I tripped across eGullet late last year. I was listening to an amusing CBC Radio program called The Vinyl Cafe, hosted by journalist/educator/humourist Stuart MacLean. He spoke of a recent visit to Vancouver, and how blown away he'd been by his visit to Vij's, and by Vikram himself. Well, as a paid Googlista, I of course mounted up my favourite search engine and found that about 40% of the first few pages of results came from this..."eGullet" place. That I did not join at the time seems incomprehensible to me, and I can only attribute this to my absorption with my finals. A few weeks later (January) I realized that I'd misplaced David Leite's pasteis de nata recipe and went looking for it on his website. There, I spotted a link to eGullet and thought, "Hey, I meant to go back and look at that place some more!" The rest, as they say, is history. That, Daddy-A, has got to be the eGullet credo in a nutshell. I love it. I want the T-shirt. (Sorry, Fat Guy, I'm 100% behind the lofty aims of our collective Society mission statement, but credit where credit is due, y'know?)