emsny

I've long refrained from looking at this topic, and was baffled about why it would attract so many posts. Well, now I've looked and, guess what: this weekend, we will eat roasted cauliflower.

Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Market serves brunch, probably pretty good - and certainly stylish.

In July/August we'll be traveling to St Petersburg and would be grateful for restaurant recommendations. We're interested principally in Russian food - Thai we can eat at home! My wife speaks fluent Russian, so menu and staff language issues don't apply. On the way home we are to spend a couple of days in Helsinki - any ideas there? Many thanks, all.

Bear in mind Jeffrey Steingarten's finding, after a series of blind tastings, that, with a very few, very weird exceptions, all salt TASTES the same once dissolved. So specific uses will be dictated by look and texture. My favorite table or finishing salt, for what it's worth, is Malden - it has the most beautiful structure, plus it is very easily crushed between the fingers: a great pleasure to handle.

On three visits, I've always found the fries at Orsay beyond reproach. I haven't been there since Feau was brought in, but I can't imagine that the presence of a higher-profile chef would (necessarily) ruin this key element of the restaurant's appeal.

I wonder whether, if you're using raw sweet potatoes, your regular potatoes shouldn't also be raw rather than mashed. Me, I'm a grating, not shredding, man, both for kugel and for latkes. Grating to a near-puree, in fact, on my late mother's Acme "safety" grater. The "safety" part is amusing, because I always remember a small amount of blood being a key ingredient in my mother's latkes - the Acme grater is very hard to use without breaking one's skin.

Not relevant to your research, time- or place-wise, but for a while Eli Zabar in NYC operated a restaurant across the street from his Vinegar Factory food market; during the day it was self-service - coffee, pastries, soup, a few sandwiches - then at night it became a true restaurant, with tablecloths, waiters and a full menu. Not bad, either. Oh - it also sold magazines and newspapers, so you could buy something to read with your daytime snack (too dark, as I recall, at dinnertime).

DTBarton: are you near a farmers' market? There, you may find pork raised the old-fashioned way.

What does the name mean?

I froze some heavy cream while on vacation last month. When gently defrosted it was grainy, and when I used it to make a butterscotch sauce the sauce had a somewhat granular consistency. Tasted fine, though. This was NOT ultra-pasteurized; I have no idea whether that would make any difference.

One of the best things to do with bergamots is make marmelade out of them; this is done in southern Italy, and it is quite remarkable. I wish I could tell you just how to do it in a way that will preserve their extraordinary aroma, but I can't. Great served with foie gras. In fact (since I gather from your comment that you weren't thinking of confectionary), you might try some sort of chutney, which again would be dandy with foie gras. Who supplied these, by the way? I tried to get some a couple of years ago but David Karp had evidently cornered the market.

I'm interested to note the uniformly negative comments about Darroze. I too had a grim experience there. The food was okay. It was certainly not outstanding, and too much of it was served stone cold. The service was appalling. Afterwards I wrote Darroze a letter - friendly and constructive in tone, I thought - which went unanswered. That says a lot about the level of hospitality. Nice dog, though - really nice.

True, Toliver, but not what I had in mind for the next six weeks. Still, I'll probably do it one day and will post when I do.

Thanks, all. This, of course, is why I ask whether there's any difference: all the brands I see have the same ingredients, and precisely the ones we want to see: corn, water and lime. You're right that I should just be a sport and buy a package of each and taste them head to head. But even though it would be cheap to do, I'd still be faced with six or eight pounds of tortillas. And as much as we love them . . . .

In Manhattan, I can buy 2-lb (or 30-oz) packages of corn tortillas under a number of different labels: La Mexicanita; La Poblanita; things like that. I've never tasted them head-to-head and have no sense of whether there's a notable difference among them. Does anyone have any views on this? (What I DON'T need to hear is how I should be making them from scratch - I know, but I don't use them often enough to make it worthwhile for me to get the hang of this!)

Thank you, Al - so the boudin mixture is packed into cans and then these are processed. A dandy idea. (If I can use plastic wrap as casings for my cotechino, why shouldn't they use aluminum or tin or whatever the can is made of?)

Many may view this as dangerous heresy, but I often toast nuts (for use in baking) in the microwave - two to four minutes depending on quanity, spread out on a Pyrex pie pan (no covering). In fact, I did it today, with walnuts for brownies. It works surprisingly well.

I'll certainly try a can when we're next in Paris. I'm curious: is it canned in fat or some sort of liquid?

Of course, we have to allow for a certain amount of blame-shifting by the Hungarian authorities, who will want to make sure we all know that native-grown paprika is unfailingly without risk.

A sad state of affairs: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/internation...ry-paprika.html I wonder if any of this not-pure-Hungarian paprika was exported.

Consider also the black matte line from Staub - I'm not sure why this should be, but I get better results with it than with any of my Creuset pots.

Consider also using good-quality lard or duck/goose fat for all or part of the frying fat. More Hungarian, perhaps, than Viennese, but also tastier.

The new chef of Atelier is Alain Allegretti, late of Le Cirque I believe.

If you feel like spending a few bucks, you could go to the Savoy Grill, then waddle across Waterloo Bridge to the theater.

VERY briefly steamed, then cooled, it makes a great ingredient in a crab salad. This is based on a frogs' leg salad with samphire and garlicky mayonnaise I remember having years ago at Jacques Maniere's long-gone Paris restaurant Dodin-Bouffant.