Jonathan Day

Why not? Could you please expand on this?

I intended the music/cuisine comparison as a loose comparison rather than an exact analogy. Nonetheless I think that the analogy is defensible. We know that some chefs view their work as entertainment rather than nutrition -- a staged sequence of experiences. Here is Michael Ruhlman in The Soul of a Chef, writing about a meal he had at the French Laundry, in California: Perhaps opera is the best analogy for a meal of this sort. So I will repeat my questions: not "is it art?" but "is there scope for contrapuntal construction in a menu?" and "does any chef actually try to do this?"

I write this while listening to Bach’s c minor concerto for violin and oboe, BWV 1060. While this piece may not reach the heights of Bach’s contrapuntal architectures found in, for example, The Art of Fugue, it has a lovely series of exchanges between the two principal instruments, each sometimes stepping forward, the sweetness of the violin and the austerity of the oboe combining to produce something more than either can individually. Those with a reasonably speedy Internet connection can listen to the first movement of this lovely piece, as played by the Aulos Ensemble: http://216.194.72.42/aulos/concerto.mp3 I was struck by how rarely menus are constructed around point and counterpoint – alternating warm and cold dishes, for example, or sweet and savoury, or rich and meagre. Why is it not possible to introduce a theme at the outset, then return to it later in the menu? Have members encountered contrapuntal menus? Are there chefs who think explicitly in this manner? Are point and counterpoint impossible in the medium of food?

Let me take us back to Lizziee's post and again quote Escoffier's Livre des Menus from the tasting menus thread, now cooling in the Symposium Fridge: It seems to me that Escoffier was attempting to create some sort of "balance" here, at least to ensure that the menu covered different foodstuffs and different cooking techniques: soups, roasts, "made" dishes, etc. This is satisfying a culturally driven notion of balance. The Italians react this way as well: a full meal begins with some sort of soup or antipasto, continues to a pasta, then a meat main course, with vegetable side dishes (contorni), then either fruit and cheese or dessert, more often the former. Omit one of these things, or put them in different order, and the meal is out of balance, unhealthy. The notion of "surprise" (as with Achatz, Keller or other hyper-modern chefs) seems exactly contrary to this concept of balance, where the dishes have a degree of predictability about them. Here the idea seems to be to challenge our notions of sequence and balance, to deliberately knock us off-balance -- e.g. Trio's "pizza" which turns out to be a postage-stamp sized piece of paper flavoured to taste like pizza, or bacon-and-egg ice cream.

From the Fat Duck website: Bellet 1998 Domaine de la Source J. Dalmasso 45.00 M. Dalmasso is very friendly and we have bought cases at the property; also at Bellet producers Domaine du Fogolar (M. Spizzo, an Italian lit-crit professor turned winemaker) and Collet de Roustan (M. Blanc-Gonnet). I've seen Bellet wines in Paris and London (e.g. ch de Crémat, or ch de Bellet) but not in the US.

The French have a miracle health ingredient, derived from red wine and cigarettes, that makes people thin no matter how much fat they consume. My original post was not meant to say that the French don't eat well -- of course they do. Sunday, especially, seems to be a day of feasting, and the queues at butcher, baker and greengrocer are long. But even those feasts don't seem to involve truffles, foie gras, caviar except at special times of the year. Like Tony, I have wondered what happens to all the leftovers. A few thoughts. 1) It really isn't true that "every two bit horse town" has all those shops. Thanks to the growth of supermarkets, many small towns no longer have a butcher of their own. Many butchers have combined with traiteur/charcutiers. 2) A certain amount of recycling goes on: meats into rillettes, daubes into ravioli fillings, etc. 3) Bakers, in particular, are happy to suffer stockouts, especially on bread. I rarely see more than a loaf or two of bread left at the end of a day. Customers, as a result, tend to stock up and often have stale bread, which turns into crumbs, fed to animals or tossed out. 4) Having said all that, my impression is that the operation of an artisanal boucherie/charcuterie is arduous and largely unprofitable work. The owner of the best one in our town, a brilliant and obsessive perfectionist in his craft, is not optimistic that he will find someone to take over the shop when he retires. I don't think it's much of a moneyspinner for him, even though the prices are high by comparison to the local supermarket. I would guess that the economics of an artisanal baker, fishmonger, greengrocer are similar.

I prepared this note in early January, but LML's comment about feasts and fasts in the "menu balance" thread (click here) brought it to the fore. Spending consecutive weeks in a small French town has offered me an opportunity to observe the locals' food buying habits. These come to the fore at Christmas and New Years', when it seems obligatory for everyone to consume large amounts of luxury foods: oysters, smoked salmon, foie gras, truffles, etc. Our butcher works overtime and sacrifices his usual closing days and hours; the fishmonger sets up a large tent outside his shop where people can collect the plateaux de fruits de mer that must be reserved in advance. At Christmas midnight mass, the parish priest fulminates against viewing the holiday in terms of food, but after the service he announces that he, personally, has nothing against champagne and fine foods (especially the champagne) and invites the congregation to the traditional "thirteen desserts", presented by the village's office de fêtes (festivities department) in the plaza outside the church. But, from discussions in the queues at butcher and fishmonger, I am struck that this sort of consumption is a somewhat unusual event, even in Mougins, a very "foodie" town. "I'm trying the goose foie gras this year", says one woman to the butcher; "last year we had the duck". She tells me, while waiting, that she only buys foie gras for Christmas and New Year's and for important birthdays and anniversaries. My 12 year old son returned from a week's ski holiday with a French family whom we originally met through a school exchange. They are comfortably middle class, though the cost of raising three children in Paris means that they watch their pennies. But because they are deeply religious Catholics, they strictly observe the fasts of Lent and Advent, so that over several visits our son has been served numerous vegetarian meals – cabbage pie, green beans ("Is that what you had for dinner, green beans?" we asked. "Yes", he said. "Green beans and some rice and a salad. And then a bit of cheese".). Their 12 year old, visiting us, has been astonished that we eat meat almost every day, sometimes twice a day, and serve desserts with many meals. Reading these boards it would be easy to conclude that the French lurch from one 3-star meal to another, starting each meal with vintage Bollinger and working their way through flights of amuse guèles, washing down huge plates of truffled foie gras with Château Cheval Blanc, then finishing each meal with cheese, pre-dessert, dessert and mignardises. Then the magic of the French paradox goes to work and this rich eating has no effect on waistlines or health. Reading Richard Olney's biography Reflexions (Brick Tower Press, 2000) --click here to order -- would convey a similar impression. Olney seemed to begin every meal with an apéritif and drink several beautiful wines even with the simplest menu. For the French that I have met, the reality is different. They do consume luxury foods at a higher rate than many countries, but foie gras, caviar and truffles are not a daily affair. These things are special, in part because they are eaten relatively rarely. It would be interesting to hear from other members with experience of France, or data on consumption of luxury foods. Is the impression I have painted incorrect or realistic? Some starting pointers for further research: the French health site 'Doctissimo' (click here) proclaims foie gras "a dish of choice…and an exception", i.e. something to be enjoyed but not eaten frequently. It indicates that annual consumption of foie gras has doubled in the past 10 years, and is now 16000 metric tonnes per year. Given that the population of France is 61.1 m, this comes to roughly 260g per person per year, which seems like an astonishing amount…according to Doctissimo, this is roughly 6 average servings per adult and child, every year. The market research company SECODIP (click here) notes that the period from 9 September to 27 January accounts for 80% of annual consumption.

LML, can you say more about this? What element of Catholic thought or practice are you referring to?

I wonder if one reason for this isn't the haute cuisine technique of making fats "invisible" by emulsifying them into sauces, mousses, pastries and other preparations that may look light but aren't. In many other cuisines (Chinese, Italian, lower echelons of French) you may be served pork fat (lardo, belly pork, etc.) or duck skin, but it clearly is what it is -- it hasn't typically transformed been into something else, and hence it is easier for diners to find the balance that they seek.

John, a warm thanks from all of us at eGullet for participating in this Q&A and for joining further discussion in Symposium. Some comments from the past few days that I will long remember: It does. And we are grateful for your sharing it with us. We hope you've enjoyed your stay and that you will come back often; you will always be an honoured guest here.

John, you've spent several days with us. Now we would appreciate your view of internet food sites in general and this one in particular. WHere does this medium fit into the world of food writing? What impressions have you formed of eGullet? What's good, what's not so good? What could we do to improve the site?

Let us begin, O young and insensible one, with with the OED. Power or faculty of feeling, capacity of sensation and emotion as distinguished from cognition and will. Caird, writing on Kant: "Our assertions must be based on the very nature of our own sensibility, and not on the nature of the objects affecting it." (in the 18th and early 19th century, rare today): capacity for refined emotion; delicate sensitiveness of taste; also, readiness to feel compassion for suffering and to be moved by the pathetic in literature or art. Thackeray, Vanity Fair: "This lady had the keenest and finest sensibility, and how could she be indifferent when she heard Mozart?" A great deal of modern food writing (both restaurant reviews and essays) starts and ends with the technical merits of the dishes offered: the precision cut of the mirepoix, the dozens of layers of foam in the dessert, even the sheer number of courses presented. Wider considerations disappear: the only question is whether the kitchen has worked its way through the athletic challenge of presenting numerous "high degree of difficulty" dishes. I have a similar reaction to the notion of rushing from restaurant to restaurant, maximising the number of 3-star meals consumed per day of travel. Context and setting get lost. There's more to it than technique (or even ingredients, for that matter), and being open to that is what sensibility is all about, especially where we are talking about refined, 3-star, haute cooking, which in itself can seem to have little to do with satisfying fundamental hungers. Music criticism went down a similar road in the rise of the "period instruments" movement. For some critics, the only issue was whether "authentic" instruments, scores and performance practice were employed. It was purely technical apprehension of the music, with little consideration as to whether it was music at all. Having said this, some of the posts on this thread seem to imply that any technical understanding necessarily impairs a broader sensibility around food and life. I don't think this is the case. One can listen to music as well (or better) for having learned some theory, and indeed for having some experience of playing music. A cook can be a good food writer, both at technical and sensible levels.

Elizabeth David once reminded us* that a cookbook was supposed to be a piece of "technical instruction." Most food writing has something of that character to it, simply because we read it in part to satisfy a need, to provide clues on the quest. David was commenting on a dreadful cookbook, but the same would apply to a beautifully written cookbook whose recipes did not work. It would not be fit for purpose, like a knife that did not cut, and hence, in a profound sense, "not beautiful." This was one reason I was so delighted with John Thorne's take on Paula Wolfert, because I had been irritated by her reticence to give clues about her informants. It wasn't that I planned to drop in on Lulu Peyraud to see whether she would offer a bowl of bouillabaisse, but Wolfert's secrecy was annoying. MFK Fisher, of course, did a bit of the same. Do you remember the essay "Define This Word" (in The Gastronomical Me) where she visits a restaurant in northern Burgundy, "an old mill which a Parisian chef had bought and turned into one of France's most famous restaurants"? Fisher sits down, hoping for a simple lunch, and instead is served eight hors d'oeuvres, pâté, trout, salad, wild duck terrine, cheeses, apple tart, coffee, marc. It is all delicious, as is Fisher's writing -- this, in my view, is one of her best essays. But we never find out the name of the restaurant. Given that she wrote in 1936, that is less of an omission. Today, it would be an example of "lack of expertise". -------- *In An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, Elizabeth David with an Introduction by John Thorne -- click here to order

Actually, my bet is that she would have preferred to write about sex: a different hunger, a different fine reality of its satisfaction. But that kind of writing was harder to get away with in 1943.

MFK Fisher didn't always get it right, either the food or the writing. But sometimes she did:

I agree with this, Steven. And there are many "food writers" who travel to distant places, eat in expensive restaurants and then write stuff that makes it painfully clear that they really have no idea of what they're writing about. Or they write about everything other than the food. Or write about themselves at great length, then toss in a paragraph about the restaurant they are reviewing. The Sunday Times over here features A A Gill and Michael Winner, who both indulge in this. On the other hand, there is "food writing" that contains a lot about food, in some cases very knowledgeably assembled, but isn't particularly good writing. Its mission is more to inform the reader than to delight. Many guidebooks fall into this category, as do some of the bite-by-bite analyses of lengthy dinners found on Internet food boards. But, every now and then, we get both food and good writing together: cause for celebration.

As FG has pointed out, a restaurant reservation is an option: it gives the customer the right but not the obligation to buy food. The "strike price" of the option is given on the restaurant menu. (I am setting aside here both the legal question as to whether a reservation is a contract and the moral issue about no-shows by customers or overbooking by restaurants). The problem is that, unlike almost every other industry, the option is given at no cost. And therefore the system is inefficient and cumbersome. Customers and restaurateurs have become accustomed to it. And the industry therefore operates with a lot of waste (staff tied up dealing with reservations, no-shows, etc.) and consequently lower profits for most of its players. Airlines charge for the option to abandon or change a reservation: the option price is the difference between the full fare and the economy fare. Imagine that, in order to secure a seat from London to Paris, you had to hang on the phone at 2 am, or know the pilot's brother-in-law, or have learned a secret phone number from an Internet bulletin board, or have flown that route so many times that the airline staff have come to know you. Or have slipped the ticket agent a large banknote on previous flights. If the system is to be reformed, and I agree with FG that it should be, why stop at charging a deposit? For the most popular restaurants, perhaps options (reservations) could be traded. If you really wanted a reservation at the French Laundry, at short notice, you could pay more and get one. Restaurants, as the primary issuer of reservations, would charge the cost of a 3-course menu for the reservation, applying this to the final bill. Reservations could then be traded over the Internet. Of course there would be the usual abuses: some entrepreneur would snap up all of the FL bookings for a month, cornering the market or creating a sort of Rao's in Napa Valley. The system should self-correct before too long. In the long run, restaurants and customers might both benefit: restaurateurs would have far more predictable demand, and customers would have a simple and rational system for securing reservations.

Yvonne, it is true that Adria and Blumenthal use metaphors of the "laboratory" and have worked with food scientists such as Hervé This. But what about pomo chefs like Michel Bras, who seems to emphasise his connections with the land and intuitive methods in his cooking (in discussing preparation of soft-boiled eggs, he insists that you have to simply have to proceed by trial and error until you get the right timing for this particular egg in this particular pot of water) and says little about food science? See his website, www.michel-bras.com. Clearly there is more in your question than I've replied to -- I think you are making a broader point -- and I await Vedat's reply with interest.

From the Daily Gullet: click here. Are these the most important choices confronting a food writer? What other important choices must be made? John Thorne has made one very distinctive set of choices. What other food writers do you enjoy who have made very different choices, e.g. writing from a more omniscient perspective?

John, in Pot on the Fire you give a recipe for a yeast-raised biscuit (cookie), the Arnhemse Meisjes. Thinking on this, I started to wonder whether pasta could be made out of yeast-raised dough. Might it have more flavour, more "character" than ordinary egg pasta? Yeast-raised doughs can certainly be rolled very thin, and it should be possible to give them enough body to survive cooking in boiling water. Are there yeast-raised pastas in any culinary tradition that you are aware of?

Reflecting on this thread, I started to compile an "anatomy of disgust", a taxonomy of reasons why people might find foods distasteful. The list that follows is far from complete, and many of the categories overlap. But I found it interesting to write down -- it is a sort of catalogue of things to avoid. I omitted obvious impossibilities, e.g. iron filings, gravel, sulfuric acid. Presumably everything listed below would apply to some food that you might someday be offered, albeit some in strange circumstances. FOOD CHARACTERISTICS Flavour Excesses Too sweet Too sour Too salty Too bitter Blends too intense (e.g. overly reduced sauce) Insufficiency (bland) Texture Too crunchy/hard Too soft (cottony) Squidgy (jellyfish) Temperature Too hot Too cold Chemical characteristics Too spicy Too alkaline Too acid (cf. sour flavours) FOOD ORIGINS Species Insects Reptiles Amphibians Spiders, scorpions, etc. Worms, grubs, larvae Vermin (rats, mice) Household pets (dog, cat) Carrion birds Horses Human beings (cannibalism) Plants normally classed as weeds (thistles, etc.) Parts of the animal Organs (liver, kidneys, etc.) Heads, feet, tails, ears Reproductive organs, e.g. testicles TOXICITY Poisonous mushrooms Spoilt or putrefying meats, eggs, etc. Raw or undercooked pork, chicken, eggs Fugu (Japanese poisonous blowfish) PREPARATION METHODS Unhygienic Undercooking Overcooking Food still living when presented Poor butchering (e.g. scent gland left in duck) ... the list could go on a long way from here.

And to follow this up ... have you visited France? If so, did it meet your expectations?

Trillium, as the compiler of that bio let me say that I hope that gender wasn't the relevant issue. The sense I was trying to convey was: John not only criticised Martha Stewart (after all, lots of people did that) but he also took on Paula Wolfert, whom nobody had dared even to question. If it had been Pepin rather than Wolfert, the same rhetorical purpose would have been served. That said, John, I share Trillium's curiosity as to why these essays attracted so much attention.

John, one of the many things I find impressive about your work is the apparent degree of harmony that exists in the kitchen between you and Matt Lewis Thorne, your wife. The chapter on clafoutis in Outlaw Cook filled me with envy, not only for the clafoutis but for the ability of two cooks to work together so easily. When Melissa and I try to cook together, the results are tragi-comedic: we are constantly treading on each other's toes, trying to go to the same place at the same time, needing the same burner or bowl or knife. Fortunately we manage to laugh about it, but our usual pragmatic solution is for one spouse to cook while the other sets the table or handles other tasks. So how do you and Matt manage so successfully? I'm guessing that you don't have, Martha Stewart style, a kitchen for each of you. More broadly, could you say a few words about the ways that you and Matt collaborate in producing SIMPLE COOKING and your books?

Janet, perhaps my reaction comes from not being disgusted by many foods. I remember a documentary about giant (dinner-plate sized) spiders, which tribes in the Amazon capture and roast; they use the spider's fangs as toothpicks and especially enjoy the female's eggs, which they prepare as a sort of omelette. I don't particularly like either spiders or jungles, and would never go seek these out. But if I found myself around a cooking fire in the Amazon jungle, I would probably give them at least a taste. ("You've come so far, you must be hungry. Have a little spider cutlet..."). Can I raise, again, my earlier question about why people will happily eat, say, veal, but get upset about tasting the tongue, the brains or the kidneys? Or why many people are OK eating chicken breasts, but don't want to be shown the chicken from which they are taken? What is the origin of these dislike/disgust reactions, i.e. where the part is acceptable but the whole is not, or one part of the beast is considered tasty and another disgusting?