balmagowry

I'm inclined to agree with this - especially given that the co-workers were on home ground, so to speak. Much, of course, depends on the manner of the refusal! As long as they were polite about letting on that something about the dish's foreignness violated some cultural norm for them, it seems reasonable to me. (Thread Convergence - this is starting to dovetail nicely with the Table Manners thread.) I can think of some dishes that I'd be squeamish about trying even though they might seem perfectly normal to my hosts - bugs/insects, for instance, simply aren't my thing. No objection to them in theory, but after too many close encounters of the cockroach kind during a New York childhood, I have a visceral response to eating anything remotely like them. A visceral response I would try to control in polite company, but I hope I could manage a courteous "no, thank you, not for me" without giving offense, if offered such a dish. (I spose if necessary one could claim some sort of obscure religious taboo - though I have to admit that would sound a bit thick in connection with the combination of chocolate and cheese. "Thou shalt not..." never mind.) Calls to mind a scene in one of the James Clavell novels - Shogun? yes, I think so - in which the Japanese look on with ill-concealed nausea as their English guest eats European-style, great haunches of rare meat and so on. Also a scene from one of the O'Brian novels in which the heroes, honor-bound to participate in a victory feast, face an awkward moment on realizing that the stew consists of the defeated enemy himself. Also my father's experience on beginning his service in the navy and smelling lard for the first time. I suspect a lot of people go through something like it if they've been raised kosher but have turned away from kashruth as adults - or if they haven't turned away and find themselves confronted by a non-kosher meal at the table of an unwitting host. The world is full of cultural incongruities, and it isn't always possible to measure up to one's own open-minded ideals. I like to think I'll try anything once... but when you get right down to it there are a few things that give me pause. So on the other side of the coin, I can only hope that I can offer as much tolerance and understanding to other people's cultural taboos as I need for my own. Funny how that golden rule just keeps rearing its head....

St. Nectaire may very possibly be my favorite cheese of all - to the extent that it's possible even to have a favorite. Actually, might be more accurate to call it two of my favorite cheeses, since the same piece of cheese has an entirely different character once ripened and warm. Yes, most cheeses do, but most are decidedly better one way or the other, whereas with St. Nectaire it's a really tough choice between slightly under-ripe and slightly over-. Apparently, though, I've been very lucky in my St. Nectaire experiences. A couple of years ago, after recommending it enthusiastically to someone whose palate for cheese is quite sophisticated (and whose knowledge is much greater than mine), I was shocked to hear that he was not at all impressed with it. On investigation it turns out that there is a mass-produced form - mainly for export, I suspect - which is considerably inferior to the incredibly, mellowly beautiful-flavored St. Nectaire fermier which was the only one I knew. Bleu, can you tell us any more about this? EDIT to add: Hey, how come nobody mentioned Reblochon? Second only to St. Nectaire, and an awfully close second at that.

It does sound odd. Mudpuppie, I think it's your duty to fall on your sword - try it, for the sake of the Gullet! Get a picture. Report. We need to know! Otherwise... it's so weird that we may just have to try making it ourselves.

I think it's a question of timing and balance. There are times when little kids need to explore every question in depth, and there are times (especially if they're out in public and are at all shy) when what they really need is just to know what they're expected to do. Each of those has its place and its value. Seems to me that starting from the rules and elaborating from there is not necessarily a bad idea. I know that when I was little there was a period of a year or so when I had real difficulty accepting grey areas in anything. And I was shy, and often had reason to be grateful that I didn't have to stop and think about how to behave. Oooh, here's an analogy: it's like technique, coordination and interpretation. Teach 'em to play scales first; when they can do that without having to think about every finger movement, that's when they can start playing - and playing with - music. It's lovely to be conversant with Shakespeare, and it's also lovely to understand the ways in which language and usage have changed since his time - and to accept that a Shakespeare can occasionally bend or break those rules if so moved. But the Shakespeare who wrote "the most unkindest cut of all" and "damn'd be him Who first cries 'Hold, enough!'" is not the best primer in which to learn the rudiments of grammar. Or to put it more originally, gotta walk before you run. Sure, but remember the history of that turn of phrase - it comes from a time when only those who were gently bred could afford to be gently reared. Time was, manners were a pretty reliable indicator of class. They were also that much more artificial - whereas now, aside from knowing which fork is which, they are almost interchangeable with thoughtfulness and courtesy. 'Twas not ever thus. Which of course is one of the reasons for my query about elbows! Thanks for the reminder - I've spent a fair bit of time in France, and my parents and grandparents all lived in Europe at various times, so no wonder we're lax in that area! It occurs to me that that is not our only "foreign" habit by a long chalk - but for some reason I hadn't considered it from a cultural standpoint.

Bleu, I know this probably isn't what you wanted to hear, but an hour's careful consideration of this subject has not affected my initial reaction, which was: NOTHING! Don't do anything! A good lamb chop, especially one that is little and cute, should IMO be done as simply as possible. Grilled or broiled, crusty outside and seriously juicily pink inside, I can't imagine anything more delicious. (I realize you want to do something interesting; I just hate to think of being too interesting with this particular cut of meat. ) Of course, lamb and rosemary are the best of friends; I rarely make a leg of lamb or a lamb stew that doesn't involve fresh rosemary. But for little chops like that I think I'd rather have an accompaniment perfumed with rosemary - like a risotto, perhaps, or sliced potatoes. (My mother used to slice potatoes, lay them in overlapping rows in a shallow pan, sprinkle fresh thyme or rosemary, drizzle OO, and bung 'em into a hot oven until they were beautifully brown; the slices just thick enough that they stayed soft underneath/inside. Simple, delicious, harmonized with almost any kind of meat....) Of course, I know I'm eccentric: I loathe mint jelly. (Oh no - guess cornichons aren't my only sin after all. ) I do like mint in the old-fashioned English preparation, the one that (racks memory, it's been a long time) uses vinegar and is not sweet - but I also know that if it were me I wouldn't be bothering with it for lamb chops. Peas... peas is nice... I loves peas....

Fair enough, but I bet you do it politely and explain the reason. Anyone who could respond churlishly to that almost deserves a little anaphylactic shock of his very own. I guess that's what I meant earlier, about common-sense exceptions handled courteously. After all, hard and fast rules are all very well in their place (and one of their places is in early table manners training ), but real life produces a lot of unexpected exceptions; so I should think that in table manners, as in any other context, the overriding lesson is the underlying concept: showing respect and courtesy to others.

Much depends on the nature of the restaurant, the reason for the music, and the attitude of the staff. If the music is part of a carefully-planned and -designed atmosphere, and I happen to be severely distressed by it, then clearly I shouldn't be in that restaurant to begin with, no matter how mouthwatering the foie gras (though OTOH if they serve foie gras chances are they're pretty careful about alienating the kind of customers who can afford to order it! ). If, OTOH, I'm already there peacefully enjoying my meal, and suddenly one of the waiters turns it on full blast for his own amusement, then I think I'm justified in raising a little hell; politely at first, but decreasingly so as necessary to match the tone in which my requests are met. After all, at this point I'm virtually a captive audience. If I don't get satisfaction after a courteous request - well, then, just be glad you're not anywhere near my table. A not-entirely-parallel instance comes to mind. A few years ago after emergency abdominal surgery I was kept in intensive care for a day or so. At one point one of the innumerable IVs (in my family we pronounce this "fours" - and these were anything but petit) to which I was connected ran out of whatever poison it was supposed to be pumping into me, and promptly began beeping in a peculiarly horrid register. Usually I'm pretty good at locating the snooze button on these things, but on this occasion I was still too weak and too entangled in wires to be able to reach anything but the call button. Of which I therefore made increasingly frantic use. After an eternity or so (no, really, I clocked it), in came the nurse, and when I told her what the problem was she looked at me as if I had just sprouted a couple of extra heads. "I'll come in later and take care of it," she said. "But it's driving me crazy NOW," I replied. Ensued one hell of an argument, her stance in which was to try to explain to me that I was being unreasonable and that it couldn't possibly bother me because it didn't bother HER, in fact she could hardly hear it. Finally, after acceding to my pleas with a very ill grace, she flounced to the door, pausing there to deliver this Parthian shot: "WELL! All I can say is, you must have VERY sensitive ears!" To which I replied, "Yes, I do, and if you don't mind I would like to keep them that way." (In fairness be it noted: other than that the staff there was wonderful. And my doctor was not amused by this incident: I suspect that nurse got an earful about it afterward, and can only hope her subsequent patients benefited.) I bring this up not so much because of any obvious similarity in the two situations, but because it underlines another factor in the overall problem: This guy who was hard of hearing may well have been so as a result of listening to loud music! And who knows, perhaps the same applied to my recalcitrant nurse (who still should have conceded that such things are subjective, but at least it would help to explain why she thought I was off my nut); undoubtedly it also applies to a lot of other people who listen to extremely loud music because it's the only thing they can still (still!) hear. Somewhere Out There is a statistic whose details I disremember, but whose gist was that during the past [x] years the Navy has been virtually unable to recruit candidates for the post of sonar operator, because the young men who came in were unable to hear the necessary frequencies. Why? Need I say? I think not. The point being that the noise levels which may seem normal to many people can be literally acutely painful to those of us whose hearing is more or less intact. Which is often the reason that this particular controversy can wax so acrimonious. Speaking of wax - here is one possible solution for a really captive audience. I do not, however, think one should have to resort to it when one is paying for the meal.... Oh, and BTW - if you need to blast someone à la houseboat and are concerned about the consequences, always remember the words of George Santayana:

I'd like to add my appreciation and congratulations for the great job you clearly are all doing with your kids - the more so for the way you (and they) apparently feel about it. (Plus an extra little glob of delight at Maggie for naming her daughter Honor - how lovely.) Good manners and training are laudable in themselves; good manners coupled with intelligence and an understanding of their purpose and importance - well, these days that's little short of a miracle. If I had any of my own (kids, I mean, not manners), which ain't in the cards, I hope I'd do the same - in accordance with the way I too was brought up. Virtually all the rules you cite, with occasional common-sense exceptions as long as they were always handled courteously. (AND curtsying when shaking hands with a grown-up - that habit was so thoroughly drilled into me that it took me a while to break it once I reached the height, if not necessarily the dignity, of a grown-up myself.) There's just one classic rule that sets me wondering, and that's the one about not putting elbows on the table. I was taught it, of course (Mabel, Mabel, sweet and able...), and it was enforced along with the others when I was a child; but as I grew up my parents and I all imperceptibly relaxed about it, and now it seems normal to put them there sometimes. Not during the act of eating, and not sprawling all over the place, but between courses or perhaps even between mouthfuls, especially while listening closely (and politely!) to what someone across the table is saying. I guess the reason this one gets my attention more than most is that putting one's elbows on the table does not strike me as an inherently offensive or embarrassing act - not like speaking with one's mouth full or belching loudly or any of these: Anyway, I wonder whether the elbows rule didn't start out as an artificial simplification of "don't sprawl all over the table." Spose I should have looked it up in Miss Manners and/or Margaret Visser before bothering this august assembly with it, especially since I'll just have to go off and do that now anyway - but... well... you know how it is....

As usual, I remain dazzled with your research skills and general brilliance, balmagowry! Research? Oy, dahlink, that was mostly the result of some heavily exaggerated googling, is all - even the eGullet thread, I'm embarrassed to say. At any rate, we're getting a little forrarder. Got the Waldorf cookbook yesterday, and there's certainly no RVC in the TOC, though I can't swear there isn't in the text. It's not in the index, though. What's curious is the conflicting versions of how and when the story got started, and of how the Waldorf reacted; this is the stuff I haven't got in order yet, and I have a sneaking feeling that when that happens there will be some sort of a pattern to it. We shall see. Any time, kiddo. Heh heh. Comes with the territory.

It was so good that I went around to a friends place and made it again. Since I don't often repeat recipes, this is unusual. Recipe, please? or recipe source? I love that. As the old saying goes, everything old is nouvelle again.

In a desultory way I have continued researching this since I last weighed in here - can't help itl these "grass roots" recipes with no clearly identifiable source just scream out for investigation - and it really does appear that this was the original coloring/texturing agent. Will post more on the subject once I get my notes organized - meanwhile, the discussion on this thread may be of interest. Apparently we had a Red Velvet Cake Czar on eGullet, as recently as last year!

How do you cook her? For me - yes, soup, any soup. I'll second the vote for quick packaged ramen - I tart it up with frozen peas, bits of ham or chicken ("deli ends," though I liked it better back when they called it "doggie bag"), scallions, dry sherry - whatever else is around and might work, or needs to be used up. Speaking of which - Cream of Refrigerator Soup! Pasta Carbonara. Or pasta with my quick & dirty sauce made from last season's frozen tomatoes (a convenience food for the ages!), with onions, OO, capers, olives, wine, bits of whatever, and served with a lot of parmesan and butter. And I could live (sometimes do, when Himself is away) on bread and cheese. We have a little market nearby that sells the really good Portuguese bread from that bakery in Brooklyn whose name I disremember; this stuff is so good and fresh that I can make an entire meal of it, unaccompanied except perhaps by a glass of cold milk. When I've been really efficient and done a Costco run at the appropriate moment there will also be one of those tremendous hunks of Finlandia Muenster to hack at. Heaven. And if the bread isn't quite fresh any more, why then, toast it - with butter or cheese.

The good news is that I have joined the ranks of the confit-initiated, at last. The infuriating news is that at exactly the wrong moment I started having one of my stupid sinus-inflammation things, so I can't report reliably on the results. Sigh. Anyway - it's a simple batch; looks wonderful and seems to smell wonderful too. Seven onions, usual mix of butter and EVOO, some thyme, some Tellicherry pepper, and a few crumbs of the Last of the Special Bay Leaves, for luck; delicious on first tasting; waiting for my sinuses to subside before I experiment with correcting seasoning. I think it can afford to cook a tiny bit longer, and I've deliberately stopped it at this point so I'll have a little more scope to play with flavors (at the moment my fantasies are teetering precariously between sherry and balsamic) if I want to. I think I may be suffering from some kind of Involuntary Slow Food Syndrome this week; the yogurt took 48 hours and the confit took almost 24.... Yes, we know what happened with the yogurt and have discussed it on the appropriate thread. As for the onions - started them in the crock pot on high; kept them on high, stirring periodically, until they gave up their liquid; then set 'em to low and left 'em until they looked pretty much like the devastatingly beautiful pictures I've seen here. Left 'em going all night and most of the next day. Every once in a while I'd go visit them on the pretext of stirring them, but really so I could shove my face right into the pot and inhale that beautiful oniony steam. If I could have stayed there all day maybe I wouldn't be having sinus trouble now - that's about as therapeutic an experience as these nasal passages have ever had! With the blessing I shall be back in sniffing order tomorrow so that I can play with my new toy in the afternoon and consume some of it in the evening. Will report - of course.

One other subtle giveaway would be their snopes listing.... OTOH, why should we allow ourselves to be daunted by anything so inconsequential as a slight soupçon of nonexistence? If it doesn't exist yet, why, who better to remedy that minor omission than... eGullet? Excelsior! I say we make that Meat Shake!

Hmmmm... kinky. Meanwhile, as promised re sea-pie etymology: Littré has no entry for cipaille. Q.E.D., I think. Hey, Adam - how was your 16th-century chicken pie? Query: which d'you spose came first - the 500-year-old chicken or the 1000-year-old egg?

And it needn't stop there! Armchair pastry. Armchair baking. Armchair cheese-making. Armchair winemaking. Have we stumbled on something here, or what? Hmmmm. Maybe for those disciplines which are complex enough to require a team or a staff we should be thinking on a larger scale. Couch catering, anyone?

Oh dear - two nations divided by a common language, again. :sigh: Yus, something like that - I don't remember exactly either. The thrill for us was separate from the "Lady" aspect: it was the discovery that "digh" was the common source of "dough," "duff," "dog," "dick," and "dowdy." Imagine my excitement as a pudding etymologist! (Imagine my subsequent contempt for the recent PC ruling against the use of the name "Spotted Dick"!) Have not made a castle pie, as such - as for sea-pie sources, I do have Amelia Simmons, but hers was not the only one. Having once grasped the principle, there is a lot to be learned about sea-pies from a study of raised pies in general. We didn't bother in the sense of trying to recreate it, because what we were doing was not so much re-enactment as adaptation. Our goal was to create recipes which would be feasible (if still a bit insane) for the modern cook, while adhering as faithfully as possible to the flavors and textures and principles of the dishes from the period. We did put some energy into studying the flour issue, but ultimately concluded that, though it might be possible to approximate the old flours, it would be inexact science at best, and it wouldn't exactly make the recipe less daunting for the home cook! Remember that for our purposes we didn't have to go back any farther than the early 19th century, so our mandate really didn't cover that kind of evolution. Remember also that we were writing for a somewhat peculiar audience; we hoped that culinary historians would be interested (as indeed they have been), but culinary historians are not always cooks - and certainly there was no guarantee that the teeming hordes of O'Brian fans would have any special ability in the kitchen. Without writing down to the least common denominator, we decided it was fair to gloss over a few of the fine points. As it was, anyone ambitious enough to cook from the book would have to go pretty far afield for the more esoteric ingredients - it didn't seem fair to saddle them with artisanal flour as well. (We also reasoned that anyone who knew enough to ask the question would probably have his own standards - and sources - where flour was concerned!)

Bleu, you give me hope. If they don't have to have that horrid sweetness to them, I may yet learn to love cornichons after all. Hmmmm. If I grow my own and pickle 'em the way I like 'em - who shall say me nay?

Hey, it's hardly common knowledge, even for this crowd! I'm sorry, one of these days I will get around to doing a bio thread, and the first thing in it will be my standard disclaimer that I don't mean to be coy or obscure, but even before I came to the vast plaza that is eGullet I already had some difficulty keeping track of which things I had discussed with whom. (Not to mention that you never know who has read a thread, and I hate to get all redundant about me me me me me.) So anyway (yo, anyone who's tired of hearing about this, skip this graf and I'll get back on track in the next, OK?), the blithely unexplained mention of sea-pie ties back into The Book What I Wrote with my mother, which is Lobscouse & Spotted Dog, based on the novels of Patrick O'Brian, in which many raised pies (and many of those, sea-pies) and suet puddings are consumed. So we put a fair bit of effort into researching the genre, and we ended up building an awful lot of these pies, both for recipe testing and for subsequent personal appearances. (Early on we started doing theme decorations on the lids, in tribute to the venues - I'll hunt up some of the cooler ones, and try to scan & post them soon. How often, after all, does one get to create a scale representation of a ship in pastry? ) We wondered about that ourselves - and I'm not sure I can absolutely prove this, but I think it extremely unlikely. For one thing, there's the logical meaning of the name, which is not (as most people - including us - initially assume) a pie of seafood or even necessarily a pie to be eaten at sea, but a pie constructed like a ship, each layer representing a deck. There's some marvelous silly dialogue about this in O'Brian, which we played to the hilt with our own sea-pies. Early on we took to making a different filling for each deck; this is not a defining characteristic, but it was fun and it made for a great-looking cross-section. For another, if cipaille had come first, it would almost have had to originate in France, rather than Canada, whereas the cipaille is consistently and exclusively Canadian. Sorry, I don't have dates at my fingertips, but IIRC the earliest English references to sea-pies do predate the French presence in Canada. One place you'll often encounter sea-pie references is in the context of whaling. Doesn't Melville mention them? I would say (or perhaps this is something I actually remember from the dim recesses of research!) that that suggests a natural convergence in the 18th century or so - northeast US, Newfoundland, etc. Might be interesting to investigate whether there's any Newfie tradition of sea-pie. Lastly - has anyone looked up the etymology of cipaille? If I hadn't been too lazy and disorganized to trot upstairs and haul out my Littré again before starting this post, that might already have provided the definitive answer. (I will go up & look, shortly - promise.) If the word ain't there at all, as of 1873, then it's a done deal; if it is - well, we'll cross that bridge when we see what it says. So BTW the Hannah Glasse reference is also a bit of a red herring. Actually, we did later base a recipe - loosely - on her Cheshire Pork Pie. That one's not in the book, because we did it to celebrate the publication of the 19th novel - by which time our book had already been out for a year or so. It's on the web, though; it is also the subject of this adventure. [EDIT to correct link]

Remarkable longevity, those 16th-century chickens, you know - bred for it, I understand, the goal being a bird that would last almost as long as its rye coffin. And it takes a tough crust to make a tender... no, I can't say it, I just can't. But talk about having "legs"!

And perhaps just a touch more, ahem, authority, too. Authority? But of course. I am just a modest plodder. Er... which I only meant it was nice to have specific corroboration from so eminent a lexicographer as Littré. Yes, I wasn't sure either about the relative value of the earthenware. Much depends, I suspect, not only on the site but on the sophistication of the manufacture. Somehow I think of pottery as a more challenging profession than baking, though I quite realize that this may be simply because I have experience in one and not the other. Still, the making of decent earthenware vessels required somewhat specialized skill and equipment, whereas almost any farmer's wife could build a pie. (Oh! BTW another bit I forgot to mention earlier - baking a pie also required specialized equipment, as relatively few people had their own ovens. But that was what neighborhood bake shops were for.) I would bet that rye flour made a sturdier crust - though I can certainly vouch for wheat flour coffins traveling remarkably well. One of the things we used to do, when we gave a lecture followed by a tasting, was to bring along a sea-pie and hold it aloft in mid-lecture by way of illustration - it's always fun to see people open their eyes wide in wonder at a monstrous pie being flourished in the air without benefit of any kind of dish to keep it from falling apart - then whack it in half to show the pattern of the decks inside (to further oohs and ahs). I don't think we ever, even on the longest trip, had any trouble with structural integrity. (Once in the course of a lecture tour we had to carry a sea-pie from San Francisco - where we had spent a full day building it - to San Diego, aboard some little puddle-jumper airline; we jury-rigged a custom box, fearfully and wonderfully made, and carried it on with us. Some tense moments with the airplane's staff as I struggled to fit the thing under the seat while simultaneously trying to explain why it could not under any circumstances be checked as luggage; fortunately I got the trick of it just in time and found that my measurements had not been wrong after all. But just imagine trying to do such a thing in a post-9/11 world!) We never made a pie with a rye coffin, because the source recipes from the late 18th/early 19th centuries didn't call for it. Haven't ever looked into why. I do know, though, that the wheat-flour crust, while heavy, is decently palatable; more so, I bet, than it would have been with rye, which needs special treatment to do justice to its flavor. So the trend may just be a by-product of the shift toward edible crusts (by that time, after all, the repertoire certainly did also include pies with crusts which were not only delicate but sweet, so obviously crust was no longer considered exclusively as a vessel for filling). It was relatively nutritious - why waste it? Getting back to the traveling rye of the 16th, I'm sure that price and durability both played a part - for some reason, though, the anti-microbial thing seems to me less likely, if only because people weren't exactly thinking along those lines then. No, no - didn't mean to suggest any such heresy - and yet it's hard for me to stomach the possibility that there's no connection at all. BTW it's quite possible that I am misremembering the origins of dighe - must hie me back to that there OED and retrace my steps. One lovely thing about it, though, I do unequivocally remember: it was the root not only of "dough" but also of the second syllable in "lady"; the making of bread being, apparently, the special province of the lady of the house.

Thank you very much! (I have to admit it was one of my favorite bits of research ever - the deeper we went the more interesting and surprising it got.) As for the siege of Paris, while I'm rather too fond of my own cats to contemplate a dish of Chat with equanimity - not that desperate yet! - I have somewhat different feelings about the infamous entrecôte tonnelier, as witness this thread....

Yup - and I'm not 100% sure it was the Mahler that did it - or rather, that it would have worked as well as it did if he hadn't had backup at the ready. There's something about my uncle - you can just tell by looking at him that he never goes anywhere without the complete Ring Cycle. That oughta be enough to scare away a whole FLEET of houseboats....

And perhaps just a touch more, ahem, authority, too. Hang on a sec - I can add something to this. Or perhaps what I should really say is that you have added a piece to a larger puzzle, bringing both terrine and pie full circle, and also tying together the elements of paste and pastry, pâte and pâté. I am sure you already know, as some others here perhaps may not, that in former times the crust of a raised pie, though strictly speaking it was edible, was not actually intended to be consumed. No less a person than your own dear Meg Dods supplies the key to that conundrum when she says "A raised pie is a larder in itself." In the days before refrigeration one of the many virtues of a pie was that it constituted a way of preserving otherwise perishable meats for many weeks. But a tortuous path of experimentation was required before the pie method came into play. The story actually begins with potting, as in potted meat or potted shrimp. Some clever person figured out that he could put by his meat in an earthen pot - i.e. the equivalent of a terrine - and fill it with melted fat to cover (Thread Convergence Alert! can you say confit?), put a close-fitting lid over that, and it would keep for a remarkably long time. There is, however, one grave disadvantage to this method: what if you don't own very many clay pots? What if you have only ONE? Why then, you're shit out of luck the next time you want to use it, because there it is in the larder keeping your meat potted. Solution: stop using clay pots for preserving meat. Create a disposable pot out of some other durable, solid (and preferably cheap) material, and keep the precious pot for day-to-day use. And thus was born the pastry coffin. Coffin, as in coffer, meaning "box" or "case." A coffin is raised from hot-water paste, made of lard, butter, flour and boiling water, and it's not unlike the pseudo Play-Doh that you make out of flour and water: as the mixture congeals it gets firmer and firmer - fired in the oven it becomes hard as a rock. (BTW if anyone is interested I have lots and lots of pictures of this process, having made more of these damn things than I can count - alas, they predate my acquisition of a digital camera, so I'll have to scan them before I can post them.) So "pie" not only could be "terrine" - in a very real sense it is "terrine," because the pot made out of paste literally replaces the ditto made out of earth AKA terre. And all the variations discussed earlier obviously flow from thence. It seems to me that this gives us a far tighter circle of etymology and evolution than we have any right to demand! Oh - and another thing. The mention of "pighe" meaning an earthen pot reminds me that "dighe," in some form of OE, was the word for "dough." Further investigation is warranted, methinks.

OK, so Pitt was a bad choice. Picked him out of thin air because I was looking for some epitome of the universally popular. Should have known this crowd would have better taste. Damn - and that was almost my only tidbit of knowledge about popular culture! OK, you two, fine. Full disclosure you want, full disclosure you got. But prepare to be shocked. See, it's even worse than you thought - it isn't just that I don't like cornichons with terrine. I don't like them, period. I Just Don't. It isn't the acidity, nor is it pickles in general. Yet it may not be entirely unrelated to pickles in general either. To my palate the pickle of pickles, the ultimate pickle, the Pickle Supreme, is that prime exemplar of the kosher dill variety which hovers trembling between New and Half-Sour. (A full sour I will eat and even enjoy, but it vouldn't be mine foist cherce.) All others, to me, are simply too... sweet. So that may be the answer. What do I not like about cornichons? Merely that they are not quarter-sour kosher dills. There, my sisters, now you know the worst of me. Please believe me, I am more to be pitied than censured. Do not cast me off. Ah, and speaking of Casting Off ( how's that for a smooth segue! )... ...yes, I do love that schtick. I do wish, though, that they'd had the smarts to set him up to show which hand he uses to carry the yarn. ("Merely adding corroborative detail to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative...") Then we could all argue over American style vs. European vs. Elizabeth Zimmermann Ambidextrous, and the whole thing would just be so much more... piquant. Oh shit, now how did I land back in the pickles all of a sudden?