russ parsons

i'd quarrel with the statement that most of the food writers at magazines went to culinary school. i can't think of more than a handful. granted, the field is a lot more competitive than it was when i started, and if you don't have a solid grasp of fundamentals, there's no way you can compete. but I'd go with HKDave on this one. i don't see much point in going to a restaurant school to learn to write for home cooks (and, with the exception of art culinaire, that's who you will be writing for).

hmmm, not only do i pull back the top of the husk to expose the tip of the ear, i'll punch one of the kernels with a thumbnail to make sure it's juicy. i figure if i'm passing on an ear because it's no good, that's not one that should be sold anyway. edit to clarify: it's only the tip of the husk, not the whole strip. and nine times out of 10, if it looks good enough to go to the second test, i end up buying it.

once again, someone has made the point i was trying to make, but much more gracefully and with kindness. i've been writing about food for a long time now, about 25 years, full-time 20 years. and every story that i write i learn half a dozen new things. i don't know anyone who has been in the business who wouldn't say the same thing (if they're being honest). as fun as it is to belittle the great unwashed, inevitably, you will find that in a dismaying number of cases you are them, too. after that happens, oh, 100 times or so, you learn a little grace and humility.

there are other perils in translation. "french fry" was published in japanese and polish (???!!!). the japanese publisher sent me some copies of the book. since i don't read japanese, i kept them around as a curiosity. one night at dinner i showed the book to a japanese friend and she started laughing hilariously. i understand that "how to read a french fry" would be hard to translate into another language, but really "rational cooking the macho way"???

great experiment, and great documentation! personally, i like quail and pigeon medium-rare, closer to duck than to chicken. i wonder if that would make a difference? there is obviously plenty of room for exploration by serious cooks.

hey, as far as burt reynolds movies go, it was right up there!

amen.

more likely bad vacation planning on teh part of the editor.

see folks, writing about food is harder than it looks! [edited not to be so flip about a sad situation] there is a strain in modern newspaper editing that holds that readers want to know what regular people just like them think. this may have something to do with the fact that you don't have to pay regular people as much as you do specialists. the way it usually plays out, it also betrays a tragically low regard for the readers (if those are regular people, my god!). the first time i ran into this was about 25 years ago at a paper in texas, when the publisher started writing movie reviews after our designated critic panned what the publisher thought was the greatest movie of all time: smoky and the bandit II (i'm not making this up). it rarely works any better than that. see, i think "regular people" are a whole helluva lot smarter than that, and i think that they want to get even smarter. and so they really do want to read things by people that educates them or that gives them an alternative point of view to what they may already know. but then again, that's why i'm a columnist and not a publisher.

let's get the facts straight. it was the writer's editor who reportedly knew nothing about star anise, according to the gulleteer. fat guy is right. at small papers like indianapolis, people get pulled in to do lots of different kinds of stories. it's unfortunate, but true. when i was starting food writing, back in the stone tablet days, i was the food editor, restaurant critic, popular music critic and general assignment feature writer at the albuquerque tribune. and i'm sure i made my share of faux pas. and while i'm at it, can we turn down the outrage a little? there's more to life than getting all jumped up over other people's shortcomings. after all, nobody went after you for misspelling foie gras, right?

nope, butter is a fat. it may flow (that means it's fluid), but liquid means water-based, which means (to bring this back to cooking) that it can't get above 212 degrees, and therefore provides a gentle cooking medium. and let me repeat once again, i wasn't reacting to the review, which was a complete pos, but more to some of the reactions to the review. of course, if somebody hadn't brought up butter-poached lobster in white chocolate chai emulsion, i probably never would have jumped in to begin with. dude, that sounds like something you'd get at a demented starbucks.

you know, there's something about this thread that really bothers me (bet you couldn't have guessed, huh?). and again, not making any excuses for what was obviously a really lame review. real sophistication is not about knowing the latest ingredients and techniques, but knowing what tastes good. i have in-laws in indianapolis and i've eaten well there. not fancy, certainly, but well. and maybe it's just me, but i'd rather have a well-prepared succotash any day than butter-poached lobster with white chocolate chai foam. (sorry for picking on you).

uhm, i hate to be in the position of defending this hack again, but i have to point out that butter-poaching is, actually, a term that makes no sense. It is a contradiction. a delicious one, to be sure, but how many people had ever heard the term before thomas keller invented it? it's really more like low-heat frying or a quick-confit. poaching implies cooking in liquid and, as we all know, butter ain't one. and while i'm at it, i think it'll be interesting to see how many of us are still tossing around the words "foam" and "emulsion" (in the sense of a sauce) in five years. my prediction is that they'll be the "stacks" of this decade. when they're done extremely well they're amazing. when they're not (as happens most often), they are nothing more than a silly cliche. the jessica simpsons of food.

not to defend the original critic, but i don't think not being familiar with white chocolate chai emulsion on a lobster tail, however it is cooked, is something to be sneered at.

for the most part, i agree with john on this one. wine writing was very much an old boys club until parker. for whatever reason, american consumers embraced his palate and very quickly he became very powerful (much to the chagrin of Europeans, Americans still buy the lion's share of great wines). much that has been written about parker has been silly, and worse (hugh johnson, whose writing on wine i grew up worshipping, compared him to bush). as john points out, parker's perceived lack of appreciate for finesse, i read as a barely disguised swipe at what is perceived as a boorish American middle class wine buying public. furthermore, as has been badly punned before, this is all just sour grapes. if any of his critics had parker's influence, how would they behave differently? furthermore, though the "parker palate" is much discussed, i think that is really only a caricature. sure, he likes a style of wine that I don't much care for. but he likes other styles of wine as well. several times, well into multi-bottle wine dinners, i have seen someone ridicule parker, then to prove their point pick up one of his books and begin to read the descriptions of the wines we are drinking. this usually ends rather shame-facedly as they are forced to admit that, yes, the descriptions are fairly accurate. i think the part that irks me the most about the parker-bashing is that so much of it comes from winemakers and wineshop owners, who decry parker's influence and taste, and then are quick to post his scores and tasting notes as shelf-talkers when it benefits them commercially. this is not to say that parker is the be-all and end-all of wine writing. personally, i don't much follow him. i prefer to drink wines that i find on my own, taste for myself and know that i enjoy. but to attack him as wine's great satan is simply ridiculous.

hmmm, i have to admit that i'm puzzled by that description. i've been brining 10 years and never had a texture like that. what brining does is change the charge of the protein so that it retains water during cooking, not change the texture. the only time i've had a similar texture has been from store-bought brined meat, which almost always contains phosphate. now THAT is some nasty stuff (texturally speaking, of course).

i feel the same way--which i'm afraid means that most of the zins grown in california don't work for me. to me, a great zin has some grace to it. i remember tasting one from hartford court (i don't have my notes, but i believe it was dina's vineyard) that was absolutely beautiful. and about 14%. i also find that zinfandel, probably more than any other grape, reflects the age of the vines. this one came from 100-year-old vines in some lady's front yard. on the other hand, i remember tasting one of the first turley's. i was at one of those walk-around tastings and larry stuck a glass at me and said "here, taste this." then the said "how much alcohol do you think?" i knew it was a bomb, so i guessed 15%. "Nope, 17%," he said. "doesn't taste like it, does it?" actually, it did.

first, with all due respect to Hal, I really disagree with his stance on brining. like any other cooking technique, it can be done well or it can be done badly. i would include in bad practices: 1) adding sugar; 2) not making sure the protein was sufficiently dry before cooking. When I brine a turkey, I give it at least 12 hours of air drying in the refrigerator before roasting. i have never had a problem with skin that was not crisp. and sorry, blaming a poor costco roast chicken on brining seems to me to be overlooking several much more likely problems. as for your questions about pre-salting, you salt over the skin, not much to the inside cavity. long enough is usually 18 to 24 hours (at least overnight). and as with brining, drying is necessary to avoid rubbery skin. the benefit of salting is that you can dry and salt at the same time: salt the chicken, put it on a plate and stick it in the refrigerator; turn it once or twice, but you'll want to make sure the breast stays up most of the time (nobody's going to judge you on how crisp the back skin is). this refrigerator drying can disturb the delicate. i was doing it at a friend's house and they insisted on hanging an aluminum foil "privacy curtain" in front of the chicken. so be it.

and definitely do pepper them liberally at the same time! (she was built for speed with the tools you need to make a new fool every day)

i agree, to an extent. there are two kinds of peaches: the first really great ones you get each summer and then all the rest. The first really great ones ... well, why cook those at all? but after a while, you want to play. i like a little cinnamon, i also like a little orange liqueur (not together), and i also like a little cardamom. the operative word in all of those is "little". it's a PEACH dessert, not a peach DESSERT.

absolutely, without a doubt. make no mistake. let there be no question (is that sufficiently positive?)

not specific to providence, but most restaurants don't show their best on mondays and saturdays, for the reasons you've mentioned.

i was eating dinner with an italian friend in trieste. it was boiling, probably 95 degrees with no ac. i asked for ice water. he was appalled; his mother had told him that ice water was so cold it ... i don't remember what, but it was something bad physiologically. i drank my ice water happily and he looked on jealously. finally, he ordered one for himself, took two sips and went ghostly pale and started grabbing his chest. i thought he was having a heart attack, but after about 5 minutes, he returned to normal. power of suggestion? quite probably, but the reaction was undoubtedly real.

there are also two kinds of rice stuffings--those that are cooked before being added to the tomatoes and those that are cooked in the tomatoes. the latter, obviously, are trickier and require getting the right mix of liquid and rice. but the flavor is really good--the rice picks up a lot of tomato.

i have to confess that i never measure. i know what it looks like (normal salting for a chicken, actually) and i just sprinkle away. i've never had a problem with under- or over-salting. certainly not at the 1/4 teaspoon level.