Jonathan Day

There are a number of good recipes out there for "steamed and roasted" ducks/geese, where you start by steaming the bird, then remove it from the steamer and let it finish in dry heat. The advantage of this technique is that the steaming loosens and softens the fat, and the roasting leaves you with a skin even crisper than you would get simply by doing the whole thing in dry heat. The River Café cookbooks have one of these recipes, and I think one of Julia Child's later books (The Way to Cook?) does as well. From time to time I have started a roast duck by poaching it, very gently, in stock for about 15 minutes. The poached duck then goes into the oven to roast. Similar effect: you lose more fat during the roasting, and the skin comes out very crisp, with tender meat. A third way would be to slow-cook the duck, either in dry or moist heat, at very low temperature, then crisp the skin with a blowtorch.

And the white truffle price continues to rise. Today's quote from the Borsa del Tartufo (www.albatartufi.com) is EUR 3,800 per kilo. The White Truffle fair is under way, and sales in the first week were not unusual, but there is steady demand (and increasing prices) especially for speciments of medium-to-high quality.

Just standing in for Andy, who is away for a day. He'll be back online tomorrow.

I asked that the debate be closed because there is no way that we are going to resolve the issue on the board. One member says she was given a bottle of '66 Ch Margaux. Another questions whether she was in fact given said bottle. Each side has set out its position. Each cites evidence (a call to the restaurant, a receipt). Somewhere in the chain, someone has either misunderstood something or is not telling the truth. That someone could be the person who called the restaurant, or the person who asked that they call the restaurant, or the original poster, or the person at the restaurant who answered the call. Further debate on the board is only going to result in mutual accusation. Hence this part of the discussion ends here.

Apparently my last post wasn't sufficiently clear. So let me make this one very clear. There will be no more debate on this thread (or anywhere else on the board) about whether that wine was or was not on the list, or otherwise available from the restaurant. That topic is closed. Any further posts on the matter will be deleted.

Let's end this last element of the discussion now, please. No more debate as to whether or not that wine was on the list. That goes for the related thread in the Wine forum as well. Thanks.

I would never want someone to feel guilty or deficient because they can't cook, or don't want to. Likewise, I would never feel guilty because I like to cook. We have members of this site who have a very refined appreciation of food, but can barely boil an egg. Should they feel guilty? As far as I can tell, the cook-vs-non-cook dimension is almost gender neutral, at least here in the UK, if you control for children. Lots of childless men can't cook and have no interest; lots of women likewise. Having children changes the equation, because you have to do some cooking to raise children, and women still bear the heaviest burden of child rearing. I've read in a couple of places that the manufacturers of cake mixes, back in the 60s, tweaked their recipes so that you had to add a cup of oil or an egg, because research had shown that consumers felt inadequate if all they did was to toss a box of powder into a bowl, add water, mix and bake. Adding an egg didn't change the quality of the product, but it made consumers feel more creative, or at least less guilty, reduced the cost of the mix and enabled the manufacturers to raise the price a bit. By the way, the idea that all or even most Europeans sit down for family dinners, every night (at a long table, of course, with olive trees in the background, sun glinting on the meadow, three generations at table, etc. etc.) and eat a delicious, langorous, home cooked meal, flowing with olive oil and red wine, is simply a romantic myth. French supermarkets have more instant, frozen, pre-cooked, take-away foods than many places in the US -- some of it quite palatable. McDonald's and the fast food joints are very much in evidence. And I'll bet that television, not to mention mobile phones, are often in use during European dinners.

This is very true. To really experience this, go for lunch at a rélais routier (truck stop restaurant) at a busy time, e.g. 1230 on a weekday. (The food at most of these is dreadful, by the way, but there are a few where it is good and good value). You will get about 2 nanoseconds in which to place your order and tell them the cuisson (degree of doneness) you want. God help you if what you ask for doesn't fit a category they are expecting. My wife, for example, likes her steaks "between medium and well done", bien cuit mais pas trop bien cuit, with just a bit of pink in them. At a slower-paced restaurant, you have roughly a 60% chance of getting this message through, and they are in any event happy to recook a steak that isn't done enough. At a rélais routier, order this way and you will either get your steak very rare (as I like it) or resembling broiled leather. Or they will give you the French equivalent of "fugettaboudit". A matter of knowing the context you're in and adjusting your expectations accordingly.

Now we know how those Barclays Capital bankers (click) managed to pay £44,000 for a meal at Petrus. Banker: "Give us some red plonk with that." Waiter: "We've got some superb Chateau Petrus tonight -- I think you'll love it." Banker: "The house wine, eh? That'll do."

First, a word of thanks for giving us this Q&A and even more for your lively participation in eGullet. I hope you are enjoying the site as much as we are enjoying your posts. Some of your recipes are demanding of your readers. Even the cannelé recipe on your website calls for bees' wax -- not something many readers are likely to find in their local supermarkets. The cassoulet recipe takes more time and effort than many would put up with. You can look at many threads on eGullet (e.g. this one) that proclaim or bemoan time pressure and the need for shortcuts in cooking. I don't find the length or complexity of your recipes a problem at all, and I enjoy reading your recipes for the richness and authenticity they convey. But I wondered what kinds of reactions you have had from readers and editors? Have you ever been under pressure to slim down, simplify, substitute, either because of lack of available print space or an editor's view that readers will never put up with a complicated recipe or one requiring unusual ingredients.

Where should we draw the line between "real food" and "convenience food"? - Pasta from a tin, precooked and presauced? - Dried pasta, cooked, with a bottled sauce? - Egg pasta made from flour and eggs, using a food processor or electric mixer and a pasta machine? - Egg pasta mixed and kneaded by hand, cut with a knife? - Grind your own flour? Raise your own hens? Grow your own wheat? I personally tend toward the purist in these matters, and I gnash my teeth when our nanny insists on buying pre-cooked rice that goes into the microwave. Then again, I didn't slaughter or butcher the sheep that turned into today's mutton stew. I didn't dry and harvest the Maldon salt that went into it. I even used some dried herbes de provence that I hadn't personally grown. Was that "convenience food"?

And this week's Borsa del Tartufo -- see www.albatartufi.com, where you can sign up for these e-mail updates -- says (my loose translation): Summer truffles, EUR 450.00 per kg; indicative price for specimens of 20gr, price expected to rise. By now, customers have started to become aware of the shortage of product on the market and also of the alternatives -- frozen, in brine, or simple substitutions of things other than truffles -- that help people cope with their needs for fresh truffles in times like these. Current prices remain unchanged from last week, but it is tough to guess how prices will behave as the first week of the White Truffle Fair begins. White Alba truffles, EUR 3000.00 per kg, indicative price for specimens of 20/25g; price expected to rise. We are in the week before the start of the national White Truffle Fair of Alba. Those in the business ask themselves how the market will react to high prices, especially in a time of economic downturn. At the same time, good product remains difficult to find. Thus, contrary to what we forecast last week, the price hasn't risen in accordance with the expected increase in demand. Only from Monday, as the fair begins, will we be able to take a view on price, based on demand in the first few days of the fair.

Definitely interested. I travel to Mexico on business and Melissa, a transplanted Texan, has been there often...we miss Mexican food in London.

Once, very late in her career, Julia Child spent a few hours cooking on the line in a restaurant. That's it, according to the Child biography by Noel Riley Fitch. In public presentations and interviews Child often stressed she was not a chef (the name "The French Chef" was chosen for her television series because it fit the narrow columns of the TV listings) but rather a cookery writer and teacher.

The olive oil merchant next door to La Merenda co-operates with the restaurant; at lunch, at least, they bring a little "degustation" to every table, offering several varieties of their oil to taste. Because we buy in bulk from Alain Baussy, in Speracedes, we have never bought bottles of their oil, but it is tasty. The Alziari product is good but a bit bland for my tastes -- on the positive side, it is smooth and buttery, but it doesn't have a lot of deep flavour. We regularly visit the Bellet winemakers, just to the north of Nice. Some of their products are very good value, especially if you buy from the vineyards themselves, but the production and quality are uneven from year to year. More recently we've enjoyed both whites and reds from Collet de Roustan and Domaine du Fogolar. See www.vinsdebellet.com. The fishmonger we use in Mougins, Poissonerie Develay, sometimes has "vioulets" that answer to Busboy's description. The flavour is very strong, almost brutal. One is enough. Richard Olney frequently served these as starters, leaving me puzzled about how someone with such a fine palate would incorporate these into a meal.

Agree about Maximin; could not disagree more about Chibois. We have always enjoyed meals at the Bastide St Antoine, not just for the warmth of the welcome but for good ingredients, clean flavours and creative ideas -- a salad of thinly sliced courgettes, mushrooms topped with a quenelle of potato ice cream comes to mind. I have also dined at his Menton place, the Mirazur -- not as good as at Grasse, but not bad either.

Just to underscore Robert's point: one thing that will help establish a stronger avant garde movement is documentation. The Adria brothers and Juli Soler seem to have been obsessive about cataloguing and documenting their experiments -- the kitchen at el Bulli itself, not to mention the studio (taller) in Barcelona, contains a shelf of their notebooks. Without documentation, without a record of what people have tried how others have received it, it's hard to see how any avant garde movement can move beyond an individual. eGullet is already playing a minor role in helping to document the avant garde movement, both in Spain and in America, and we expect this to increase. Avant garde cuisine will be a particular focus of the Special Features area over the next year.

Especially curious given that theme of this issue of CJR (see contents page) is "The New Age of Alternative Media", and the issue includes two pieces on the "blogging" movement.

Ferran Adria listed the following as descriptive of his cuisine: Some of these reflect little more than personal preference, e.g. numbers 15 and 25. Some are about the cook's craft at a very high level, e.g. 6, 16, 17, 21, 26, and especially 27; it's hard to imagine any great chef disagreeing with these. But the ones I have marked with an asterisk in the list above seem to me indicative of Adria's fundamental trans-formation of the cook's art, what Robert calls a manifestation of form. Steven Shaw said elsewhere that almost all cookery is transformation, and I agree with that. You take carrots (long, crunchy, fibrous, cold); juice some of them; cut up the rest and simmer them in the juice; puree the whole thing and then strain it several times -- and you've ended up with carrot soup: liquid, silky-smooth, warm, etc. -- if you've done it right, you have preserved the essential taste of carrot but given it a totally different form. That's transformational, but hardly avant garde. Does whipping that soup it into a carrot "air" make it avant garde? Drying the soup into "crisps"? Coating the crisps with chocolate? No. What is striking, shocking, "deeply transformational" about Adria's cuisine is that he innovates in form in so many different ways: the structure of the meal, the tenuous boundary between savouries and sweets, the dishes on which items are served. It is not one of the asterisked ideas, it is all of them in play at the same time that make this food so completely different -- "Martian", as one of the diners in our group put it. And for me, most of all items 8 (simplicity) and 10 (transparency): the shock of the new in a simple and seemingly effortless style; served neither in a palace of crystal and glitter nor in a bizarre setting (e.g. the restaurant that serves food in the dark), but in a simple, rural restaurant.

From the Borsa del Tartufo's quotation of 25 September: Summer truffles, EUR 450 per kg, price expected to rise White Alba truffles, EUR 2750 per kg, price expected to rise, especially as the Alba truffle festival draws near. See http://www.albatartufi.com; you can subscribe to their e-mail service for regular updates.

Restaurant Simon looked (and smelled) good when we walked by, and after Menton1's review it is now on my list of places to try. A problem with many of these "little gems" is that their menus and wine lists are often very short. So you need to have several of them on your list of bonnes addresses, or dining can get a bit boring!

The carrot air I tasted at el Bulli was very stable -- it sat on the table for a few minutes, and in any event we ate it at a leisurely pace. Is it conceivable that the clarified carrot juice was reduced somewhat before being foamed? I've made Keller's carrot soup in which you gently simmer carrots in carrot juice, then puree and strain the whole thing. The character of the juice changes a bit as it is heated. I have no idea whether this would make the air more stable.

Karen and Andew -- A glance around eGullet will make it clear that many of our members have a lot of interest in the so-called culinary avant-garde, the work of chefs like Ferran Adria, Pierre Gagnaire, Heston Blumenthal, Grant Achatz. Yet of those four, only one is working in the USA. What do you think of this movement? And, in your view, why hasn't it attracted more energy in the US? Thanks again for joining us here!

Andrew and Karen, many thanks for joining us on this Q&A. One of the striking things about Culinary Artistry was that table of "what goes with what" -- the food pairings. It is unusually complete. How did you go about putting this together? Were the pairings a reflection of your own aesthetic or more a view of the many chefs you've come to know? Did you ever think about a table of "what doesn't go with what", e.g. things not to pair with a lobster?

Steven, can you give an example from your own reviewing of a case where a restaurant had all the signs of systemic decline, yet you subsequently discovered that, as it were, the shotguns were just in the kitchen for that one dinner service?