Ptipois

Piper longum is a recent rediscovery in France. During the medieval era, at times, it was more widely used than black pepper.

I have indeed noticed that tearing them develops their flavor. The same can be said of kaffir lime leaves and fresh bay leaves. I think I have seen those smaller "thippili" at the Sri Lankan shops in La Chapelle, northern part of Paris. Larger thippili may be bought in a specialized spice shop in the Marais. So I may even be able to use both! So if I understand well, the garlic version has only black pepper and no thippili. Right? I'll experiment with all versions because the recipe sounds awesome. Could you tell me how and when garlic is added? Boiled or fried (i.e. in final seasoning)? I have also noticed that asafoetida and garlic seem to clash. Funny, when you think that their flavors have a lot in common. I've concluded that you don't need garlic in a recipe that involves asafetida anyway, and vice versa.

Try this one: LE RUBIS 10, rue du Marché Saint-Honoré 75001 Paris Remember that there are twenty arrondissements in Paris; your group should be in an interesting shape by the time you reach the vingtième. Bon courage !

Thanks a lot! But I have questions. What is arisithippilli? A few lines down, there are "salted pinched curry leaves" which do not appear above. What exactly does "salted pinched" mean in this case? I think I'll omit the toor dal too, or try the variation another time. Is the requirement that there be no garlic based on medicinal reasons? I'm all ears.

Use a pen-name, or do it with a co-author who would endorse the responsibility for the porky parts.

I do too, when cherries are not in season. Works wonderfully, though I deplore the absence of pits Which keeps it in shape, Interesting. This certainly keeps the cherries from releasing an excess of juice and helps them stay in shape; they are cooked by the time the batter sets. If they were defrosted before cooking, they would ooze juice and that would probably dilute the batter. Hm, that sounds lovely. I might want to pop into Mulot's this afternoon and check this

Well, we have set a pretty efficient defence system against "single true authentic traditional recipe" thread attempts, maybe you'd like to come over and test it?

This is a tough one. So far, we've been spared a cassoulet war Actually there are local differences in the basic recipes. Supposedly there's a threefold tradition represented by Castelnaudary, Carcassonne, and Toulouse. The first cassoulet, being allegedly the "original" one, is nicknamed "the Father", Carcassonne's "the Son" and Toulouse's "the Holy Spirit". All are based on beans, garlic, pork and tomato, but additional ingredients make the difference: Castelnaudary: all pork, including pork rinds and garlic sausage. Confit de canard added in some versions. Gratineed in oven with breadcrumbs. Toulouse: same ingredients, confit de canard mandatory. Additions: Toulouse sausage, mutton neck and mutton stock. Gratineed. Carcassonne: same basis as Toulouse but more mutton added, plus some red-legged partridge. No breadcrumbs: the gratinage is done by getting a top crust in oven and pushing it back into the cassoulet several times before the dish is ready. Of course there are variations, etc., and no rigidly set rules. I am very suspicious of set rules when it comes to country and regional cooking.

So far, we've been spared a cassoulet war.

Thank you. Historically, I disagree with the website. Pela is an old and traditional recipe. The true part is that tartiflette was recently evolved from pela to suit tourist appetites in ski resorts and boost reblochon sales. I never heard of tartiflette before the late 1980s.

Ducasse uses ground almonds in his clafoutis too. The cherries are pitted. Almonds don't only make it acceptable, they also make it delicious.

It's OK as long as you don't pit the potatoes.

I suspect she is telling us how to make a "tartiflette". Which is the way I would make it. I don't eat pork. ← Well, tartiflette doesn't really exist IMO, which is why I'm giving you the recipe for pela (which, incidentally, doesn't contain any pork).

Be our guest. (The forum is run by two persons, a Swiss chef and I.) Anybody else is welcome too, but French is the lingua franca there... Beware though — as I wrote above, I kid you not, the two evil words are booby-trapped

I'm interested in the rasam. Maybe we can discuss it in the India subforum?

Well, thank you! Yes, I know. Sometimes I say stupid things that are just stupid things, sometimes I say stupid things that are just undeveloped ideas.

Une vrai tartiflette must have cured savoyard ham or it is a cheap shadow of real Alpine cuisine! (Is that they one does it on the French boards, P'titPois?) ← Sorry — some time ago I decided that I would never discuss about tartiflette anymore, and you can see that I have made a tremendous effort with clafoutis. On my food forum (in French), both words are booby-trapped! Only those two words. Seriously, I can tell you about the pela des Aravis, a traditional recipe that evolved recently into a touristy dish called "tartiflette", but AFAIK there is no such thing as a "vraie tartiflette". For a pela, you need a nice ripe reblochon, diced potatoes and onions. The potatoes should be slowly roasted in butter with the onions, salt and pepper until they're nice and golden, almost soft. This already takes about half an hour. The potatoes should not stick to the pan. Cut off some of the crust of the reblochon (at angles), scrub the remainder. Cut the reblochon in half horizontally like a layered cake and just lay both halves on the potatoes, cut side down. Leave the pan on very low heat and just forget about the whole thing for about 45 minutes or a bit more (NEVER stir), until the reblochon is melted and only a layer of warm crust covers the potatoes. Cut into pieces with a spatula and serve with a well-vinegared and shalloty green salad. No ham, no bacon, no herbs, no oven. Just that. What makes a pela interesting is the different stages of melted reblochon that can be found simultaneously in one serving: creamy and soft, crusty and pungent, and lightly browned and crunchy.

Whatever you order, you get what their machine churns out

And you haven't seen the worst of it.

Guilty! good Lord! If I were to include guilt in my experience of cooking I think I'd chose another occupation. As for "traditional" clafoutis, I've had many opportunities to discuss this so I am not going to start again, but it is a country recipe, of which many versions exist, and I think one should not be too rigid in defining "the real authentic recipe of (this or that)". In the case of clafoutis, well, black cherries - OK, sure, but when you had other cherries on hand, well you used them and nobody felt guilty about this. And what do you do in Auvergne when you want to make a clafoutis in Winter? Well you use raisins soaked in rum. And so on.

Sorry, I am entirely deprived of humor.

I am sorry that a few of my remarks were taken out of context and amplified in such a way that the consequences much exceeded what I meant in the first place. But for some practitioners of forum ballistics, this is some kind of sport. I can't help it. However what's done is done and I must try and make myself understood more clearly. I agree perfectly with every single thing you've been writing here on Italian cooking. I never wished to diss Italian cuisine and I don't think I am a snobbish gourmet at all. I too believe that Italian cuisine as I know it is deeply underestimated and, when I wrote that "I'm not interested in Italian restaurants outside of Italy", it's because I have yet to find — in non-Italian surroundings — Italian cuisine of the quality I'm used to. And what I find there is so far from what I've been used to that, really, I have trouble understanding what the fuss is all about. It used to be said that the three best cuisines in the world were French, Italian and Chinese. I think there are others, but I do agree about Italian — what kind of Italian cooking is another question. At any rate, IMO, not the one that has been made internationally trendy outside of Italy during the last ten years or so. I was partly brought up near the Italian border, in the comté de Nice, by a couple of cooks from the Genoese region who had a country albergo in the mountains. That's where I first experienced excellent Italian cooking, I was practically brought up on it. That's also where I got my interest in cooking in general. Later on, I spent a lot of time with another family, half-Italian, whose cooking was more Piedmontese, the lady being from Cuneo. She was an outstanding cook too. Therefore I had a good experience of delicious Italian food at a very early age and I believe my knowledge of Italian cooking is not superficial. This is why I do understand what you are talking about. Also, please note that I haven't mentioned trattoria cuisine even once. And my experience of food in Italy had nothing to do with journalism. On the other hand, I find it really unfair that the sort of Italian cooking that is so hyped and successful in English-speaking countries is, in fact, only a matter of ingredients. It seems that cooking with pasta, balsamico, ricotta, parmigiano, olives, grilled peppers and extra-virgin olive oil, etc., is what defines it. It looks good on British TV, it makes a perfect Jamie Oliver salad, it's oh-so-sunny-Mediterranean and all, but I don't think that's cooking at all. Do you see my point? To me Italian cuisine is a different thing, it's like a secret, it is so little-known and so little-experienced outside of its borders. And so is French cooking to me, another sort of secret, very much like Italian. However, French cooking has found its way outside of France but I think that it had to sacrifice some of its mystery and some of its soul to achieve this. I think you express the same idea somewhere. That's it, that's exactly what I'm referring to. France had to sacrifice some of its magic in order to make itself more easily exportable. But I think that this magic is in no way different from the magic of Italian cooking, which you describe very accurately as the "sensibility for how a dish should taste which can hardly be replicated even with superior technique by a foreign cook". It is my deep belief that French cooking and Italian cooking, by this respect, are identical to the core, while the dishes and tastes may differ. It is the same culture deep down. It's only that French cooking managed to develop a snotty side too. Therefore, when I write that I think that "Italian cuisine is a bit overrated the world over", I am in fact referring to a cuisine that is not, in my opinion, true Italian cuisine but something colorful, Southern and easy to put together, with not much skill or poetry to it. The rest of your message I am not going to reply to directly, for (and maybe it is the consequence of my expressing myself too clumsily, but again I wasn't expecting someone to fish out my words and feed them to the lions), because they are taking me to a place where I did not mean to go, and for sure you're criticizing me for thoughts that I never had and things that I never meant. I do agree with you about preparation, skill, history and everything else. I should have been more precise the first time I referred to Italian cooking, but I didn't think it was necessary at this point. I was wrong. Well, as you know by now, I do not feel concerned by this. I mean, I never needed an Italian to explain to me — successfully or not — what Italian cuisine (or cuisines) is, because I litterally bathed in it from my early childhood. And very early I realized there was something unexplainable: ravioli with daube never taste the same outside of the Nice mountains. And the rabbit stew that my Genoese grannies used to cook in the Nice mountains forty years ago is simply impossible to imitate. They used a rabbit, of course; white wine, thyme, dried porcini, a bit of tomato coulis, onions and garlic. I have noted the recipe. I found the best rabbit, and I used white wine, thyme, dried porcini, tomato coulis, onions and garlic. I am a good cook, but I never managed to get this rabbit right. This special taste cannot be imitated. And it's not that the grannies refuse to tell me what the secret is: there really is something unexplainable about those recipes. I've often been in this situation in relation to Italian or French "mother" cooking. Maybe the reason why your countrymen are unable to explain what your cuisine is abroad is just that: it IS unexplainable and there is nothing you can do about it. That's also how traditions are lost, and sometimes there's nothing you can do about this either.

It is all a matter of preference. The traditional method is with unstoned cherries; not only for flavor but also because it keeps the juice in the cherries. Some people prefer it with stoned cherries so that they can eat it greedily without fearing for their teeth. I prefer the unstoned version but I prick each cherry once or twice with a pin before putting the dish in the oven. (By the way, "stoned" or "unstoned" clafoutis is probably the biggest troll subject on French cooking newsgroups. "The true recipe of tartiflette" comes second. )

Long pepper or pippal, tippali (?) in tamil.

I suppose that your tongue was also wholly in cheek when you exported some of the discussion here to the Italian forum with a few quotes of Ivan's and mine, ending with "you're not going to take that, are you?" Isn't that some sort of trolling? It is at least very rude. As I think your efforts to bring the wide and complex phenomenon of French cooking down to a simple matter of royal alliances are somewhat misplaced. Again, I have much admiration for Italian cooking, and I don't mean to minimize it, much less to engage in a discussion like the one you're trying to start somewhere else. I only have trouble understanding why it it so hyped these days, outside of Italy (and especially in Britain), when the rave is sometimes only over Parma ham, pasta, roasted vegetables and olive oil, which are not really cooking after all.