russ parsons

I like Marcelle Bienvenue's writing a lot. And not just because she probably has the best hometown byline in the country! Can you imagine a better name for a food writer in Louisiana?

In fairness to David, that is a column--an expression of opinion--and not a strictly factual piece. We had talked about that exact line and he did struggle with it. The problem is, to print the methods they say they use to detect cheating would be to enable people to find ways to get around them.

Hmm, I did notice DeLoach end-stacked at trader joe's last night. I'm not sure what they had: I remember Pinot Gris, I think Merlot and maybe something else not Cab or Zin. Prices were $6.99 to $9.99, as I recall.

I don't think you'll see much supermarket advertising in the New York Times to begin with. The market there is too fragmented with too many small players who can't afford the space. In Los Angeles, there are really only three major chains in a 5-county region of more than 8 million people. This creates a different sort of market. I have a very strong feeling that if a grocery chain came to the New York Times and said they would sign a year-long contract at the going rate for a full-page ad in the A section, you'd have about a dozen ad execs getting whiplash trying to hand their pens over first. I don't know what that breakdown is. The last "through-the-book" study I know about was done more than 10 years ago. At that point, I think we were about 60-40 for women. There certainly are no hard-and-fast divisions between what men read and what women read. I think it's probably on the percentage of 55-45 at most. That said, I think men tend to be marginally more interested in reading about wine, dining out, gadgets, things you can order by mail and wacky kitchen experiments. Which is not to say that a significant number of women aren't interested in reading about those things. I think women are marginally more interested in reading about food as it relates to personal stories, practical cooking (as opposed to show-off, special occasion), and, to a certain extent, short-cut cooking since unfortunately, they are the ones who usually have to make dinner when they get home from work (not in my house, though).

Nope, don't do 'em. I wouldn't say never. If someone is a personal friend and you're not a restaurant critic and they understand that by you attending, you're promising you'll never write about them, then I might go. If "business folks" means the money-making side of the paper, sure, that's their role. They're the ones who have to go out and get the shit beat out of them when we write something nasty, I don't see why we should begrudge them a meal every once in a while. If by "business folks" you mean the business section and the people who cover the restaurant industry as a business, I think that would be very dicey.

No negative comments? Hoo boy, you haven't been talking to LA restaurateurs. We certainly have no policy like that and our restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila, is very, very tough (and, I think, very, very accurate). The only thing close to that is that in our weekly Counter Intelligence review, we almost never slam a place. The theory is that these are neighborhood restaurants and if they are really horrible, there are enough good places that we just don't write about them. That is not to say that we're uncritical. I think one of the best things a restaurant critic can do is let people know how to have a good meal at a restaurant that might not be uniformly wonderful. (You'll do best if you stick with these types of dishes; avoid those types of dishes.) That said, I think one of the talents of a really good critic is knowing when to break out the stick and when to use the carrot. Restaurant scenes are cyclical and applying the hammer to new restaurants when the scene is in a down cycle benefits no one. Sure, point out what is wrong, but concentrate on what can be right. In up cycles, the opposite is true. When folks are getting a little too full of themselves, when everyone is going to restaurants, that's the time to offer a little reality therapy if it is due--both to the restaurants and to the customers, who might need to be reminded that the hot spot of the week might still have some improvement possible. That's the situation at the Times and, I think, at most major newspapers. When you get down to the locals, everyone makes up their own rules. As a critic, you have to decide whether you can live within them or not. My advice would be to stick around for a while, learn what you can, acquire a reputation and then once you have some chips on the table, ask the bosses to revisit the policy. I probably wouldn't let this go much beyond 6 months, though.

You know, on re-reading, that sounds harsher than I meant it to be. But I do think that one of the reasons for falling readership is that folks don't recognize the real world in our writing. There's got to be some grease on your hands, some stink in the air when you're cooking. Painting pretty pictures just doesn't get it because even non-cooks recognize that that's not real.

Gosh, that's such a hard question. But such a pleasant dilemna. I'm going to start off the top of my head and I'm sure others will remind me of people I'm missing. I'm going to assume you have the usual suspects, or can find out about them, so I'm going to concentrate on folks who too often get overlooked. Richard Olney, Simple French Food. There's recipes but so much common sense. Patience Gray, Honey from a Weed. Wonderful sense of food and place. One day I'd love to meet her. Roy de Groot, Auberge of the Flowering Hearth. A pure romance, but if you don't fall in love with this book, you don't love food. Anything by Joseph Wechsberg, but particularly Blue Trout and Black Truffles, a great collection of essays that serves as a real reminder of what a magnificent food culture there was in Europe before WWII ... and NOT just in France. Madeleine Kamman, When French Women Cook. Ludwig Bemelmans, "La Bonne Table." Great behind the scenes restaurant stuff. no brides bent over, though. Waverly Root, "Food of France". Not to be taken literally, but there is some very good stuff and if you get one of the early editions, it's got some lovely Paul Child photographs. The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. A wonderful sense of France before the war. Edward Bunyard, Anatomy of Dessert. Just pure purple prose. I love it because there's hardly a dessert in it, all juicy descriptions of the best varieties of fruits (my kind of eater!). Idwal Jones, Sheila Hibben, gosh, there are so many. OK, so who did I leave out?

The supermarkets are basically sheep, running from side to side afraid that if they don't do what everyone else is doing, the other guys might get an advantage. Not that I blame them. There is no way I'd want to be involved in a 1% profit margin business, no matter what the gross is. Any mistake and you're in the tank. What I found ironic was that we changed our section day from Thursday to Wednesday at their request, after much discussion. Two years later, they were out of the section anyway.

In the old days, that was the biggest shopping day (along with Thursday ... at one point, about half the papers in the country, including the Times, had food sections on Thursday). That's when the grocery stores wanted it and that's when we did it. Of course, as women entered the workforce, the shopping days changed. Now it's Sundays. And they advertise in the A section. This is not trivial. If you want to know why there's nothing in your local food section, count the grocery store ads. When I started at the Times 15 years ago, it was common for us to have 50-page food sections, 3/4 of which were full page ads. During the holidays, we'd often hit 100 pages and go twice a week! Today, there are two full-page grocery ads in the section. It is a tribute to the LA Times that they devote so much space and expense to the Food Section even when we're no longer pulling in the big-buck advertising.

Check out the PDF, go to the food section, then look in the upper lefthand corner. It really is worth it for this story, the photographer did a magnificent job and so did our page designer. it's really beautiful, both the cover and the jump. As for insurance, he wasn't real clear. He said that his agent told him that insurance companies had taken it so hard in 9-11 that everyone's rates were going up. I do know that there is a business insurance crisis here in California. Maybe that's why.

Thanks, I'll try to answer the very good questions in order: blo: I only went out on the boat once. As you might imagine, working fishermen aren't really happy having a reporter and photographer on board. It took some negotiation to get this. I chose these guys because they were the ones who agreed to do it. I had done a story on petrale sole last winter and got a note from a woman in San Pedro who said I ought to do a story like that on sardines. I told her I'd love to, someday. I was reminded of that when I did a story on the best places to buy fish in Los Angeles and I went to Japanese groceries and saw the fresh sardines I'd always thought of as being a rare and precious ingredient, selling for $2 a pound. So I called the woman back and she hooked me up with someone who hooked me up with someone. It was an amazing experience. Jim: I think it is a chicken-and-egg thing, but demand builds in funny ways. I don't know what the market is like up in the Northwest, but down here, fresh grilled sardines are not uncommon anymore on the menus of "urban rustic" restaurants. I think it's a slow process, but the ingredient is there and it's good and it's also extremely sustainable. Why should those farmed bluefin be getting all teh good stuff?

Here's what I've been working on for the last couple of weeks. A big project like this is so much fun to do, but it is also an incredible sense of relief when it is done. Sardine Fishing Sardine Cooking I hope you like them.

First of all, I'm not a restaurant critic. I haven't been since I ran screaming from the practice more than a decade ago. That said, the policy at the Times is that we pay for our own meals, that the critics go incognito (well, as much as possible ... to the extent they make reservations in different names and pay with credit cards issued in different names). I have always follows this practice myself, but this does get tricky. A long time ago Michel Richard got mad at me because he never sent me a bill so I always left what he considered to be an extravagent tip for the staff. "This is my home and you don't pay to eat at my home!" he said. So I made one exception: if a chef has eaten dinner at my house, then I won't demand a check at his restaurant. Predictably, this is limited to only a handful of people. Most restaurant don't seem to have a problem sending me a check. There are a few that do and it is hard to figure out what to do. Balancing my professional life and friendship is a tricky proposition. I don't want to take advantage of a situation, but I don't want to be rude, either. When I eat at one very famous restaurant that I'm not going to name because I'm beginning to feel like a name-dropper for mentioning it so often, the chef refuses to send a check. He's been a friend for a long time. He used to write for me. I do two things to make up: one, I send him occasional gifts of things I think he might like: books, music, whatever. two, he has a secret food vice (nothing illegal) and before dinner I always hand over an abundant supply of it. Three, I always leave a couple hundred dollars per person as a tip. I know it's not as much as I would have spent had I been a civilian, but it makes me feel like I'm not taking advantage.

I've put off answering this one to the end because it's the most difficult. I'm afraid in many ways, you're right. The world does keep on turning and things do keep on changing and we're losing a lot of good things along the way. Agriculture is a particularly knotty problem. Americans spend so little on food these days and it sometimes seems the only thing they want is to spend less. That makes it really difficult for farmers to survive unless they can take advantage of economies of scale, which means bye-bye small farmers. Farmers markets offer some hope, but don't kid yourself: any farmer you see driving a mercedes probably had it before he bought the farm. Even the guys charging $4 a peach aren't making that much money when you measure it over a whole year. It's easy for us as cooks and consumers to say that they should be willing to sacrifice for their art. I'm extremely reluctant to ask other people to do things that I'm not willing to do myself. And I want to make as much as I can so I can send my daughter to college so she can choose what she wants to do in life (uh, and pay for dinners at the French Laundry). Farmers are in the same situation (except they rarely get to eat at fancy restaurants). I'm not sure what the solution is, but examining the problem is part of my next book. Maybe I'll have more answers in two years.

Uh, here it is after 10 and I still haven't brushed my teeth. I'm beginning to take this personally. When I started working from home (I need to point out that this is mostly: I hit the office at least once a week and more often when I have a story in process. I put in full office days the last three days [don't cry for me kathy purvis]). Whoops, got lost there. Anyway, when I started working from home, I worried about structure because I am by nature a procrastinator who is not satisfied to merely put off to tomorrow, but to put off putting off... To my surprise, it wasn't a problem. I do have my rituals. I get up in the morning and fix breakfast for my wife. I finish the paper. I exercise and take the dogs for a walk and then as soon as I get home I immediately start on the day's writing (which I've been rehearsing all morning and, usually, most of the night). It's only when I've finished what I can do there that I sign on and pick up e-mails, etc. Because I only write once a week, at most, I have a larger structure for doing stories as well. On recipe-driven stories, I'll usually spend the first part of the process testing the recipes and getting them right before I start to write. Actually working with the ingredient/dish/whatever and having that fresh in my mind is a great boon to writing well. Once that's done, I'll start my research. That may be nothing more than looking up statistics on the Web, or it may mean pulling some books and getting background. Or I might search out some people who have special knowledge, whether it be chefs (not as likely) or farmers or scientists (much more likely). Then I write. I just start and write until it's finished. Then I go back and rewrite the top. And then I rewrite the middle and then I rewrite the ending. And then I repeat ad nauseum. One thing that I've found to be a great advantage to writing at home is that I now take the time to print out the story when I think it's close to ready and read it aloud. I'll do this three or four times. At a certain point, I inevitably realize that I'm no longer improving the story but I'm just fucking with it (sorry girls), and that's when I file. For longer pieces like today's, the research takes on a life of its own. I am a complete over-researcher. I go to libraries, I hit the Web, I talk to everyone I can think of who might know something about the subject. One of the benefits of my luxurious writing schedule is that I don't feel the need to have every bit of research accounted for in the story. I really think that in big stories, the research should be like an iceberg, where only 10% is visible but you can sense the rest of it being there. I think that's what writing with authority really means.

Yes, i do find that people are reluctant to cook for me. Which is a shame, because I'm never critical, I'll help out when invited and I always bring lots of wine. (Reminds me of when my daughter was young and we were going to an adult dinner at some friends and had to tell her she couldn't go. She wailed "But I won't eat much!"). As for butter, I'm a big fan of Plugra and not just because at Trader Joe's it's cheaper than teh grocery store's. Probably the most memorable egg dishes for me have been the white truffle custard at French Laundry and a somewhat similar dish at Citronelle last year. Michel R. glue-gunned handles on the tops of each of the eggs. amazing. I do find that humor in cooking is treacherous. It needs to be very subtle and not the point of the dish at all (the point of the dish, of course, is simply to be delicious).

The Giacosas are such wonderful people. And anyone heading to the Piedmont would have to be crazy not to check out their B&B, one of my absolute favorite places to stay anywhere. So sorry about the truffles.

There are as many styles of pot pies as there are cooks. Personally, I prefer a flaky top crust and no bottom crust. And I like a stewed chicken rather than roast (that way you've got the broth to make the sauce). If you want a bottom crust, you could do a shortcrust, but I wouldn't sweat it too much. At a certain point you have to balance the amount of time required vs. the reward and I don't think using a bottom flaky crust is going to do enough damage to make it worth your effort to do two separate doughs (the problem with making something a big project is that when you're done you're very likely to say: "well, now I know why i've never done that before!"). I would definitely use shortening or butter rather than lard, unless you can find some leaf fat and render it yourself (see above). And I'd thicken it with flour so the sauce will be stable enough to last through the baking process (cornstarch goes gluey when it's heated too long). If you want to get fancy, check out the Zuni Cafe book. Judy Rogers has a quick puff pastry that is really easy to make and would be a great topping.

No, I don't have a science background. This has been both a blessing and a curse. It's good because by the time I've had something explained clearly enough that I can understand it, co can almost any idiot over the age of 12. It's a curse because I have to work that much harder to get things right. Complicating it is the fact that science has a very precise language of its own and when trying to paint visual pictures to make things clear, you have to be very careful not to mis-characterize things in that other language. If you're interested in this field, you should definitely read Hal McGee (after, of course, you read "French Fry"). But I found some of the most interesting things were done in food science back in the '30s and '40s when it still more closely reflected actual cooking rather than food technology. Look for some of the old texts by women like Belle Lowe and Pauline Palmer. I read everything they did before I even started to write "French Fry".

I'm not sure about any specific trends. But I do strongly believe that there is always a place for good work. That's not to say that someone won't tell you "oh, that's been done before." But if you do a good enough job, you'll find a market. I'l go out on a limb here and say that I think a lot of food writing is fundamentally dishonest and that the next big trend should be completely honest reporting. What I mean by that is the tendency to write about other countries as if they were all filled with colorful, honest, earthy peasants. The tendency to write about cooking as a romance rather than being involved in teh physical act. The tendency to regurgitate accepted wisdom without challenging it and trying it for yourself. We need independent, strong-minded thinkers in this field who are not afraid to write what they see rather than what they expect the market wants to read. A short example (and not to impute dishonesty on the part of the writer, rather a bit of a blinkered view of the field): When I was editing, I had a writer turn in a brilliant piece about visiting shepherds in Sicily who make ricotta out in the field. Wonderfully written. Great description. Old guys in scuffed shoes, old women in black dresses. Just before we publish, he sends me some snapshots from the trip. The family is sitting around the table and along with the accurately described "peasants" are their kids, two gorgeous young women in Prada and a very handsome man in D&G. To me, as good as the story was, I'll always regret not having had that note reflected ... the collision of tradition and modernity that is so much a part of the fabric of life in Italy. But he just thought it wasn't the type of thing that belonged in a "food" story.

Let's see, start with the not-so-hidden: La Super-Rica in Santa Barbara. Highlands Inn in Carmel (though I haven't been there since the new ownership, it used to have a fabulous cellar and a great chef ... and an amazing view. how often do you get all three?). Just free-associating here: the Little River Inn south of Mendocino for their amazing flannel pancakes. The little diner at the pier in Trinidad where all summer they serve pies made from wild blackberries they've gathered. A really big deal everyone ought to visit: Echo in Fresno, easily one of the best restaurants in the state, if you like the Chez Panisse thing (and I do). Pane e Vino in Montecito if you let the guy cook whatever's good. French Laundry, of course (I'm going next month!). Clam chowder lunch at the fish shop on Moss Landing after a morning browsing junque stores. How's that for a start?

I would never rule anything out, but that doesn't really sound like something we'd do.

Ha! that's the exact town she lives in.

Jim, It sounds to me like you're on the right track. If I ever found it easy to write 800 words I felt good about, I'd know for sure I wasn't reading myself carefully enough. There are no shortcuts or quick tips. The obvious is, unfortunately, true. Read a lot and when you find something you like, re-read. Try to figure out what it was you liked and how they made it work. Take it a part like a kid with a toy and try to put it back together in different ways and see if it works the same. Write all the time. Even when you're not writing. I thought one of the benefits of working from home most of the time would be that my wife and I could meet for lunch. Not while I'm working. She got tired of me starting into space while she was talking to me. Above all, be ruthless with yourself. That's the only way you'll honestly know when you do do something right. rp