Robert Schonfeld

Those following the expensive/cheap thread will be especially amused that Mazal found a shoulder of veal for .99/lb in the supermarket yesterday. Braised it with a little white wine, garlic and rosemary. Four generous servings of tender, tasty meat for less than $1.00 each. Sugar snap peas from the greenmarket, rolled in butter; arugula salad. No potatoes because we forgot to buy them at the market.

Jin, Thank you. It's not this kind of clarification, but all writing that is hard for me. I once read an interview with Woody Allen where he said that he didn't find writing especially difficult. Were it not for the sin of it, I would envy the man this. For me to write anything sustained, I need isolation and absolute quiet. I've done it from time to time, and I'm sure I'll force myself to do it again, just for the discipline, but nothing about it is fun or easy. Steve, one of the points imbedded (apparently too deeply) in my example of pasta with butter and sage is that the technique for making the noodles by hand, not with a machine, is very demanding. Even most Italians have abandoned handmade egg noodles in favor of the machine-extruded variety. But the nonnas who wear black still do it. The reason these noodles are superior to extruded ones is that they are stretched, rather than pressed, resulting in a texture that will marry better with the sauce or dressing. On the beans vs. cassoulet issue, there is none. Again, I never said Tuscan beans are more complex than cassoulet. That's an insupportable position. I did say that they are equally good, which is to say equally enjoyable, to a substantial group of consumers. This to me is as obvious as the absence of the issue of greater complexity. The concept of quality, to which I have devoted my entire professional life and more than forty years of vocational preoccupation (as a photographer), is yet another discussion of 20+ pages. What I've tried to get across here is that quality plays in many different arenas which have little or nothing to do with each other, and that talking about a mole vs. a sauce brun is interesting, but will not, and should not, result in an absolute qualitative winner. It is a comparative discussion, not a competitive one. Fresh polenta in the morning is a positively decadent idea. The cook would have to care an awful lot about those who would be eating it. I like the rest of the recipe.

Just for the record, I would not, did not, will not say this. If anyone wants to know what I said, read back. What I would say, did say and will say, is that the quality of Italian, Indian, Mexican, Chinese and other food is every bit as good as French, each in its own way. For the extremely small group of people who concern themselves with notions of cuisine and the even smaller group who concern themselves with the "advancement" of cuisine, and the condition of the food and restaurant business in the western world, French food, French cusiniers, French restaurants are dominant and are the arena in which such a discussion holds interests for its participants. I like French food. I'm interested in such discussions. But it's a big world out there with, as Carl Sagan might have said, billions and billions of people who just don't give a damn. To drag other paradigms into the French circle is wrong. Writing is hard for me. Please don't make me do this again by putting words in my mouth. Thank you and good morning.

Continued the fresh peas with pasta experiments: -Marcella's pasta with peas, bacon and ricotta. Good, as usual. -My own: fresh peas, half pureed, half left whole, fresh sugar snaps bias cut, pea pods, basil, lemon zest, lemon juice all pureed. Also good.

We've also been here before, Steve. You know that a comment like your most recent does not advance the discussion. You also know that Italian culture does not need a nice Jewish boy from New York to make excuses for it, any more than that is what has been intended. So what say? Let's move on.

I know that's what you think, Steve. Haven't you and I been down this road a few times already? I'll just say this: in my opinion, and I suspect there are one or two others who might agree, you just couldn't be more mistaken or narrow minded about this. But even more important, I don't care and neither do "they". "They" do not cook like that because they're stuck. "They" cook like that because they want to. Your paradigm is not a global imperative.

Steve, it was handmade egg pasta with butter and sage; the mozzarella and tomatoes was another subject. Handmade tagliatelle with butter and sage is just one example of an Italian masterpiece. It is a nearly perfect encapsulation of the Italian idea that great food is often achieved with the minimum number of the best possible ingredients, combined as simply as possible. Given the ingredients (admittedly, no small feat), the dish depends entirely on timing and technique. I'm amused by your hudspeh in intending to ask whether pasta is worth eating or not, and I look forward to seeing how you frame the question, but I feel comfortable saying in advance, as Jin already has, that this has to be a joke. If you can show me how I can learn something from such a discussion, I will be both surprised and pleased.

Thanks for the good wishes, Steve. I know you mean it. I appreciate your tacit recognition of the grandeur that can be found in simplicity. Maybe, as the FG says, we can move on more thoroughly to cheap eats, or I can. It's not true that anyone can make the pasta dish, Steve, unless you mean anyone can make it, but only a highly skilled and practiced individual can make it well. The noodles alone are a significant challenge. Then there's the combining of the ingredients in a manner such that they are placed before the diner at their optimum moment of readiness. And all that's assuming you can get the ingredients, which isn't exactly easy, either. Anyway, it looks as if the FG has screwed this argument into his Vice Of Reason. It will be diverting to watch the handle turn.

Life was so - dare I say it - simple, before this thread. I am saying that I find a plate of handmade pasta made with eggs from chickens raised in the courtyard and dressed with locally made butter and sage from the garden, and eaten in the cook's kitchen to be as enjoyable or more enjoyable than any haute creation you may wish to pose opposite, in any setting you choose. I don't know, and I don't care whether it is better or intrinsically more or less complex according to the terms of war on this thread. I'm also saying that, when the vine-ripened, field grown New Jersey tomatoes are in the market, I intend to eat them as often as possible. While their price will decline as their supply in the market grows, the outstanding mozzarella from Stew Leonard's in Yonkers that I have just discovered, will likely remain at $5.99 a pound, versus $3.99 a pound for the estimable version at Agata & Valentina on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I will most willingly pay for Stew Leonard's product to go with my tomatoes. And throughout this period, Mazal and I will go to Blue Hill or Jean Georges or one of the other faves a few times and have lots of fun eating and drinking all sorts of complex stuff. Not more fun than eating mozzarella and tomatoes; different fun.

Agreed. We should cherish the best of the dinosaurs while they last, and we should look for dinosaurish signs in new places (examples?) Unfortunately, evolution will have its way in the end.

May I suggest banging your head against a wall until you can no longer feel the pain, Wilfrid. It worked for me.

So, rather than regretting the imminent loss of a species (which is not to say we shouldn't enjoy it while we can), might we not instead see the glass as half full and celebrate the emergence of a new one?

At a talk I once attended by Dany Meyer, he made the point repeatedly that he felt himself not to be in the restaurant business, but in the hospitality business. The quality of the food is always meant to be as high as possible, but it remains his goal to deliver to *every* customer a complete experience that will leave that customer happy and anxious to return. As it is not infrequently necessary to have the obvious explained to me, this was a revelation. My own first requirement when going out to eat is that it be a complete experience. The reservation, the greeting, the room, the table, the service, the food, the departure (another memorable Meyer line is "Write a great last chapter".); all of these things add up to a rewarding experience. It all has to fit together, whether it's that Thai place in Queens, or ADNY. So here was someone who seemed to think, and to run a restaurant business, exactly along the lines that most appealed to me. My observation, in the form of a question is this: could it be that Meyer is the foremost practitioner of The New Old Dining, a Darwinian adaptation to the marketplace that is a synthesis of some past practices with some new ideas?

Wishing I could locate a sound file of myself banging my head against the wall...

Sometimes I feel like a nut, sometimes I don't. I agree that the nuts - maybe walnuts would be the thing - would add something, and make the experience more complex. But not better, just different.

Is a ripe banana and a perfect piece of gorgonzola dolce simple or complex? If Picasso is eating it, is it more or less simple or complex? How much is the banana skin worth if Picasso signs it?

Does it follow, then, that French cultural influences were transmitted to the English-speaking world through England? In any case, what explains the French influence on Russian culture?

Now this is interesting. If there is a citation for writing on the subject of the success of French cultural exportation, I'd be very glad to have it, or them. Wilfrid and Macrosan, I'm wondering why, by the 19th century, French was the standard language of culture and diplomacy and of the upper classes. Could it have anything to do with the cultural success of the Louis courts and the desire of some neighbors - not the Italians, I don't think, as they had been there, done that already - to emulate them? I'd just like to add that I know as little or less than anyone who has already claimed to know not much about this subject. I'd like to read up, though.

No comparison intended, believe me. Just a nod to Priscilla's entertaining comment

Quite right, Bux. I'm guessing the marriage of Catherine de Medici to Henry II resulted in some knowledge transfer on the food front, among another thing or two.

Steve, I still haven't abandoned hope that your demonstrated willingness to learn in areas unfamiliar to you will outweigh your tendency to shoot from the hip out of ignorance. Not to dwell here on something off topic, but suffice it to say that Picasso's quote is a touchstone for understanding his art and the plastic arts in general in the 20th century - and for the Ramones as well.

My new friends, with whom I have enjoyed this discussion even while finding its principal premises incomprehensible: thanks; this is fun. I hope that someday we'll have risotto or paella or pizza or something together. I mentioned this once on another thread and I think it's worth repeating. Picasso, a Spaniard (and the head Modernist), who lived most of his life in France, said, near the end, "I've spent my whole life learning to draw like a child."

I went to the gym instead of having lunch. Now I'm really hungry. Cabrales and Steve, I respect each of you as dedicated perticipants on egullet. Without even putting it to a test, I would admit that each of you has greater experience with French cuisine (which is not to say that I don't have any). At the same time, without meaning to be immodest, I do have a certain amount of experience with the subject of taste, both in the mouth and in the brain. I promise this is the last time I will say this, in this discussion, at least: to say that a particular cuisine is better than another is to misuse the word "better", or at least to waste its use. To say that a particular cuisine is better because it tastes better is embarrassing. Complexity does not equal better. There's all kinds of better. One day walking in Jerusalem, my wife spotted something and went over to a tree. As I watched, she gave the trunk a good kick, bringing to the ground a clatter of pods, which she gathered up. Coming back over, she handed me one and said "chew it". It was carob. Around the corner, we came upon a fig tree, black figs, ripe to the point that the base of each fruit had just split and begun to ooze honey. They were as big as your fist. We sat on the ground, eating carob and figs. That was the best.

An excellent supplemental grill is the Lodge cast iron camper, basically an American hibachi. It's for direct cooking only, and just big enough to handle a couple of butterflied Cornish hens. Indestructible.

We all need paella now. Can anyone attest to the quality of their own, and then volunteer to make it for all of us?