Jonathan Day

I was wondering why I was slogging through the ad personam remarks and the circular logic about (socially constructed) "objectivity" in this thread. But if the argy-bargy succeeded in eliciting that last post, FG, it was all worth while. A lovely bit of writing. Congratulations to you, and to Steve P for provoking it.

For the most part I use sel de Guerlande (coarse French sea salt) in solutions (cooked sauces, stocks, etc) and Maldon salt (fine English flakes) for sprinkling on things or uncooked sauces. I've been amazed by the low level of evaporation in oven-cooked stocks. I have done many of them completely uncovered, and only a small fraction of the stock evaporates, even over a long period. In some cases this is because a layer of fat floats to the surface; the simmer is so slow that the bubbles don't break through the fat. Perhaps this slows evaporation. The Aga does not have a convection fan, and I would advise switching off the fan in an electric oven. I struggle to believe the advice about removing the skin, simply because the flavour of roasted chicken skin is so good, and because there are substantial colour elements in the skin. I've done darker chicken stocks by par-roasting the chicken in a very hot oven. The skin caramelises and seems to lend a lovely colour and flavour to the stock.

Not much has been said about where to get chickens for stock. I've had great success with so-called "boiling" chickens, from a Halal (Islamic equivalent of kosher) butcher. If you buy two chickens at a time and cut them up yourself, they cost £1 apiece -- this includes the heads and the feet. They are scrawny birds, mostly bones and feet and beaks, but they make great stock. I use a different cooking technique for stock: simmering it in the oven. This is because we have an "Aga" cooker which is always running and has two ovens that work well for stock-making. One, the "plate warming" oven delivers a very gentle simmer; bubbles rise very slowly indeed. This works well for overnight stocks, i.e. about an 8 hour simmer, starting from cold water. The other, the "simmering" oven gives a slightly livelier simmer and works well for a 3- to 4- hour stock. In both cases, I roast the chicken just a bit to start, browning it more if I want a darker stock. I cover the pots but leave the lid slightly ajar. I concur entirely with Dave's advice about salt. Just a bit at the outset is helpful in extracting maximum flavour, even where the resulting stock will be reduced. But only a bit. I will sometimes skim the stocks a bit during the first hour of cooking, but tend to leave them alone thereafter, and sometimes don't skim at all. The resulting stocks are clear and flavourful, sometimes not needing any eggwhite clarification. The meat left in the pot is completely flavourless, suggesting that there has been a reasonably complete transfer of flavour to the stock. The stocks never have a scorched flavour, despite the long simmer. The proteins and scum tend to cling to the cooked bones and meat rather than coming out into the stock. In both ovens the stocks reach 100C and I reduce them somewhat before freezing, so I don't think there is food poisoning risk here. I've been using this method for almost 10 years without incident. I post this because it seems to me that you could just as easily simmer stocks in an ordinary oven, provided you regulate the temperature with care. The advantage seems to be that the pot is surrounded by heat and the stock isn't agitated the way it would be with a flame under the pot. One more comment, specific to France: I also make some stocks there, though not in the oven because the stove there has a "plat à mijoter", a hotplate that gives a controlled simmer. But stock making seems to be an unusual step for a home cook in France. Our butcher finds it odd that I do so and comments that few of his retail customers ask for bones or make stocks. And this in the best butcher in Mougins, a town full of foodies. It would be interesting to know other members' experience in this regard. Is there more use of bases or stock cubes? Or do French home cooks buy frozen stocks?

In my experience the French are irritatingly inconsistent about this usage. Sometimes soupe aux poissons has chunks of fish in it, like a cotirade or a bourride, in case which it's stewlike. Sometimes it is the strained, smooth product (like the base of a bouillabaisse). Soupe de poissons is similarly bivalent. I am on the road at the moment, not able to check cookbooks, but I'll bet that you'd get different views from equally "authoritative" sources. I've been with French diners who have asked waiters, as a result of this ambiguity, what they would be getting with either a soupe aux poissons or a soupe de poissons. Steve P is dead right about that soup at Loulou. It is outstanding. I think one reason is that they puree it very close to the time it is served -- you can hear the blender whizzing a few moments before the dish comes to the table. I don't know how thoroughly it is strained, if at all, but the consistency is light and fresh. It is an ideal start to a meal.

I find that many of these flavour memories (taste + smell) are very strongly linked to early experiences, in a way that is sometimes frighteningly visceral. For example: my grandmother's apartment in Chicago had a certain smell, a combination of old wood, furniture polish, and certain dishes she cooked very regularly. Every now and then I will encounter something like one of these smells -- most recently at a boardroom in a company in Italy. When this happened I almost had to wrench myself back, many years, to the present. But the experience was non-analytic: I didn't think "ah, this is a smell like my grandmother's apartment." I was there, in an instant. Doesn't this happen because smell and taste are very basic in the brain, closely connected to the limbic system? It's one reason, I think, that cookery is so powerful as an art, in certain ways more so than painting or music.

Today's newspaper describes a fair, "France of 1000 cheeses", now running in the Tuileries Gardens. "Yesterday hundreds of people queued ... to pay £1.25 ... for a plate of five cheeses from the region of their choice, bread, a glass of wine..." They are also offering advice on serving cheese, history of French cheeses, etc. Unfortunately it closes tomorrow...

Water. (Oops...missed earlier post...moderators, please feel free to delete this one).

When I lived in that area, many years ago, Chez Panisse only posted its menu for the current week. I had the impression that the menu was fixed once a week for the week ahead, giving them the flexibility to adapt to what suppliers could deliver or what they could grow themselves. Paul Bertolli, in Chez Panisse Cooking, says the same thing: once a week he had the task of fixing the menu for the week to come. And the website lists only the current week's menu. Robert, where did you get the impression that they planned 31 days ahead?

In sauerkraut. We did this 5 years ago and guests are still talking about it. A long, slow braise. It was served alongside a traditionally roast goose; both geese had been brined for 24 hours. Both geese were good but the one in sauerkraut stood out. After it was cooked, all the meat came off the bones, all the fat was removed from the liquid, then meat and sauerkraut went back into the oven for an hour to re-heat, slowly. I looked for a long time to find really good, mild Alsatian or German sauerkraut prepared with wine. I was on the point of making it myself when a friend found a supply: Manz "Omans Krautfass".

We tried the 7 course tasting menu at Chez Bruce on 20th September. All but one of the dishes were from the menu (which changes daily), and as far as I could tell most of these were served in the same sizes as the menu. The Middle White pork terrine was a small portion and was not on the menu that day. We had: Cream of cèpe soup with a poached egg A small terrine of Middle White pork, with an armagnac-flavoured plum embedded in it Grilled mackerel, potato salad, mustard beurre blanc and potato A goujonette of deep fried lemon sole with tartare sauce Filled and daube of beef with celeriac purée and bourguignon garnish The cheeseboard Our choice of desserts from the main menu. On offer that evening were - tarte tatin - crème brulée - a glazed plum tart chiboust - valrhona chocolate tarte with crème fraiche - hot chocolate pudding with praline parfait - prune and armagnac tart with jersey cream - rum baba with poached peach and whipped cream - iced coconut partfait with citrus salad and lime sorbet - vanilla pecan ice cream, pear sorbet. We tried the first four of these. At £60 for these 7 courses, it seemed reasonable value for money. The prix fixe is £30 for 3 courses, £37.50 for four, and the fillet and cheese together attract a supplement of £10.50. Most of the dishes were good, and a few very good: the soup was perfect, and a wonderful way to start the evening. The fillet and daube combination didn't quite work: the daube was rich and flavourful, and as a result the fillet didn't quite stand up to it. The cheeseboard at Chez Bruce is outstanding, with a deep selection of English cheeses from Neal's Yard and a good selection of French ones from La Fromagerie. The Australian sommelier / headwaiter was knowledgeable about the dishes, made some good wine suggestions and knew the cheeses intimately. The dessserts, as always, were very good. My impression is that the restaurant is still figuring out how to fit the tasting menu into the evening service pattern. We were asked to turn up at 1845, because they wanted the table back at 2115. This was fine with me, as I had arrived from Hong Kong at 0530 that morning. The service of the apéritif, white wine and first few courses was unplesasantly rushed. But then everything slowed down, and there were long pauses between the later courses. We left around 2230. As far as I could tell there was no pressure on us to leave, though the receptionist/telephonist cast a few worried glances toward our table. It's hard for me to be totally objective about this restaurant because we live nearby and have dined there from almost its opening day. It isn't perfect. but all in all there is so much to like about the place, the service team, Bruce Poole's cooking, the wine list and, above all, the atmosphere they are trying to create, that I am inclined to give them time to improve.

I have eaten at L'Oasis in La Napoule and wrote a comment about it back in May ... click here ... L'Oasis entry is at 17th May. I would summarise my view as "good but not great, and very expensive." It would have been more pleasant on a sunny day with the atrium opened up. The oyster with seawater granita was superb. The dinner we had at the Bastide St Antoine in Grasse (J. Chibois) was far better in every respect. I will unquestionably return there, but probably not to L'Oasis.

My surprise at the article was less about the price than to see a bread piece on the front page of the Sunday newspaper. Either there wasn't enough dirt and scandal to fill the page, or people here are getting deeply interested in food. I think it's the latter. I sometimes buy half loaves of Poîlane levain bread at Borough Market -- there's a stand just outside Neal's Yard. They assure me that it has come from the bakery. It's never quite as fresh as what you get at the bakery itself, but it is good and it keeps a long time. It also slices more neatly than some levain breads I buy (e.g. at Le Petrin Ribeïrou in France where the bread has larger holes and a more varied texture than the Poîlane product).

From this morning's Sunday Times: Waitrose are now selling Poîlane "sourdough" (levain bread) for £9.62. This received a front page headline: "Crumbs! It's the £10 loaf". To be sure, the loaf weighs 4 pounds, so the article's subsequent comparison with supermarket bread is a bit silly. "In a blind test last week nine out of 12 shoppers said they preferred the taste of a £1.45 loaf from Safeway to Poîlane's finest sourdough." A 75 year old retired marine engineer said, "They taste the same to me...I've no idea why people would pay £10 for a loaf. They must have too much money." On the one hand, it's great to see Britons interested in good bread and willing to seek it out. On the other, having returned from a small French town that is surrounded by bakeries, where very good levain bread is readily available and a fine baguette costs something like 50p, we have a ways to go before good bread is there for everyone, every day, at a reasonable cost.

Selection I can't see. It seems straight up to me, no dip in a "U." What's the theory behind a selection "U"? You are right. Good catch. If I really felt like arguing the point I would say that it depends on what you mean by selection. If it means "ability to get all sorts of products, whether or not out of season, in one place" then we have clearly travelled straight up the curve, no "U" involved. If it means "availability of interesting varieties, high quality local products, differentiated products as you travelled across the country" then as other posters have observed the standardised and easily-transportable have often edged out the local and interesting. I once drove across the US (San Francisco to Boston) and was struck by the sameness of the products in grocery stores. Iceberg lettuce and hard tomatoes everywhere. This must have been better at one point. It's improving again with the movement toward heirloom seed varieties, Old Spot pigs, different chicken varieties, etc.

I think that quality and selection -- in some countries at least -- have travelled a "U" shaped curve. Having grown up in the US in the 1960s my sense is that I started toward the bottom of the "U", so things have improved greatly since then. For the most part the eating back then was grim. Meat came from the local "Kroger's" or "National" and was mostly frozen. Fruit and vegetables were wrapped in plastic. Olive oil, if you could find it, came in tiny bottles ("Pompeiian", if I recall the brand) and was usually rancid. Garlic was sometimes available, but most people used "garlic salt". There were exceptions. We always had a large vegetable garden, and we picked all sorts of great things there including, for a few years running, delicious sweetcorn. There was a farmer's market in our area, and we could sometimes get very good produce there. I remember an afternoon spent sitting under a tree, eating an enormous quantity of sweet black cherries that had come from this market. Bliss. Things in the US got better, perhaps because they could not get worse. The UK travelled a similar curve, going faster in some areas, slower in others. Quality, selection and general awareness of food have improved a lot even since I moved here in 1990. "Gourmet" food no longer implies falsified versions of French recipes, with heavy, starch-laden sauces, as it did when John and Karen Hess first skewered The Taste of America or Elizabeth David wrote about English "gourmet" cooking (see An Omelette and A Glass of Wine). It is now possible to talk about food and wine with enthusiasm here, where it was once a bit embarrassing. Elizabeth David, the River Café, even Jamie Oliver have done their work. We are better off for it. Some things have become worse. There is more hype around food, and more restaurants that recall that scene in Brazil (Terry Gilliam) where the diners sit eating plates of identical green sludge while looking at pictures of different fancy dishes. A lot of the trickery around GM foods is worrying. Tasteless vegetables (e.g. peppers grown hydroponically in Holland) circulate through the system, and sometimes they are hard to screen out. What I don't have as clear a picture of is how deeply or how quickly things have changed in France or Italy or Spain. The EU regulations around cheeses, sausages and the like are problematic (though the USDA put through similar regulations years ago). Life is definitely harder for small farmers, artisanal butchers and small winemakers...bakers (in France, in my area at least) seem to be doing better, and indeed there seems to be something of an uptick in good bread, widely available. The supermarkets seem to be on the increase. My sense is that Italy is still in better shape, although I don't know it as well as France. All this talk about decline and fall seems a bit passive, as though we are observing the Titanic from a helicopter, watching it plow through the seas toward the iceberg. To me there is a more interesting set of questions: what could be done about this decline in France and Italy (if it exists) and what could be done to continue to improve things in other countries and to keep the ground already taken? I would argue that a very small number of people "turned things around" in the UK -- I would start with Elizabeth David, but she wasn't the only actor. A fairly small number of people had a disproportionately large impact in the US: we can argue about Alice Waters or Julia Child, but most would agree that they had a serious impact on national awareness of good ingredients and good cookery. The Slow Food movement started in Italy but its spread to France has been limited. Should we think about establishing a European version of "Copia", that centre for food and wine in the US? Robert Brown wrote an eloquent post in another thread, on "the old dining". John Whiting has made similar pleas for simple cooking. Steve Plotnicki has described what sounds like a golden age of high-end dining. We seem to agree that there's a problem. But I wonder what we could collectively do about it.

There is a yakitori-ya in Roppongi called Ganchan (6-8-23 Roppongi, Minato-ku, 03-3478-0092). I remember it as rather small and smoky from the wood fire where they cooked the skewered foods, but very good, both in the range of skewers offered and in their quality. Caveat: I have not been to this place in several years.

It does happen here, but as in many areas of life in Britain you have to break the ice in the appropriate manner. Many customers here would be surprised and a bit upset if a waiter, unsolicited, started discussing the food and wine with them, just as they would if a party at the next table tried to engage them in conversation. I know people who have expressed concern that a knowledgeable sommelier tried to discuss their wine choices with them. To me this the height of silliness -- there is so much to learn from a sommelier who knows his wines and is prepared to share some of that knowledge. But there you are. (A frequent conversation starter at a dinner party here is to describe one's recent visit to New York, or Florida, or somewhere in the US, and a waiter who came up to the table and said, "Hello, I'm ____ and I will be your server this evening." How American. How familiar. Like house prices, this is one of those topics that won't go away no matter how tired it gets.) As you observe, conversations with waiters (and with people at neighbouring tables) seem to start easily enough in New York. In France, waiters and sommeliers are almost always happy to discuss the food and wine and to share their knowledge. They are proud of their métier. This sort of pride may be harder to find in the UK because of class consciousness (table waiting as akin to domestic service, trade vs professions, limited scope for what constitutes "professions", etc.). But this is ebbing in an increasingly egalitarian society. In Britain it's important to distinguish London from the rest of the country: London is crowded and filled with tourists, and there is more of a tendency to try to isolate oneself. However in most cases it isn't that difficult to get a knowledgeable captain or sommelier to discuss the menu, if you take the first step. It helps to do this in a quiet and less-than-assertive manner. In London, the waiters and captains at Chez Bruce share the owner's passion for food and wine and seem very knowledgeable about the cuisine and prepared to discuss it. Same for the Waterside Inn, though many of the staff there are French. Marcus Wareing at Petrus regularly visits tables, especially at lunch, though as noted elsewhere I wish he would spend his time fixing problems in the kitchen. With some embarrassment I have to admit that I haven't yet been to St John. I would think the Chef's Table at Gordon Ramsay would be a great place for this sort of discussion, but it's reserved months in advance. (I will be off eGullet for the remainder of the week owing to travel).

A former professor of mine, David Tracy, put it better and more clearly than I can. The following is from his book, The Analogical Imagination (Crossroad: New York, 1981). I have adapted it very lightly because the original is talking about philosophical theology. But I think it applies to what we are talking about here. Serious, I know, and laden with phrases like "heteronomous privatization", but wise words nonetheless. The "disciplined and responsive conversation" with the great culinary traditions is the one worth seeking -- whether you call it "objective" or "intersubjective". (Legal department: the citation contains about 220 words. I am certain that David would not object, though I have not consulted him. Is it OK to leave this post in place?)

Objective simply means “uninfluenced by emotion, surmise or personal prejudice” or a “material object as distinguished from a mental concept, idea or belief” (Webster). It is a set of standards that prevail only at certain time, and it is a perfectly good term to use for evaluating food. How would one distinguish the quality of a musical performance for instance? One would know that a composer marked the tempo of a specific musical piece to be Allegro (fast). It is an objective standard identified by a composer/professional. Had the musician performed the selected musical piece in a different tempo, say Largo (slow), it would’ve been a good indication of its poor interpretation. Analogously, if an expert were to mark a steak to be cooked rare as an objective norm, then overdoing it would by default be considered to be a poor performance. After the musician followed an objective standard, however, more complicated and rather subjective elements are involved to form one’s opinion of the performance. It depends on this person’s natural talent, taste, experience, personal preferences etc. For example, one may like that the selected musical piece is played Allegro toward Presto (very quick) whereas the other would like it played Allegro toward Moderato (moderate). I’ll let you improvise an analogy with steak. The definitions of "objective" that I have cited in this board came from Collins and the Concise Oxford. These dictionaries and Webster's were presumably prepared by experts. Yet there can be nuance between their conclusions. How much more so in discussions about food? I suppose you could be "objective" in evaluating whether a dish was prepared according to a specific recipe. For example, I could arrange for a battery of scientists to watch Thomas Keller prepare a poached foie gras, measuring and monitoring at every turn. They would videotape, weigh, count each grain of salt he added. Then they would go into a duplicated kitchen and try to do the same thing again. Whether it worked or not (and I am almost certain it would not) I'm not sure we would say that they were "cooking" in the same way. (This is a variant on Searle's "Chinese Room" argument about language, but that's another story.) One reason the analogy with music doesn't work all that well is that, especially in the last century, there are musical scores of almost perfect provenance, in some cases featuring detailed performance information. As a composer I can not only write Allegro but also MM crotchet (quarter note) = 92. There is one score for Stravinsky's Rake's Progress. (I believe that the use of metronome markings is also the subject of substantial debate amongst music scholars, but again that is another story.) Cookery, in contrast, is still more like ancient music where there are many variants and, for the most part, anonymous authorship. I could try to play the Jupiter Symphony "exactly as Mozart would have wanted it played" (though personally I find the idea a bit silly) but I cannot try to reproduce the "original" bouillabaisse, because it doesn't exist. There is no single perfect recipe for bordelaise sauce. The river of tradition flows on. I think this is true for music as well, but it is hard to see how it is not true for cookery.

Of course this is an empirical question. My own assertion is that we would find that the best chefs start with passion and pick up finances as a means to an end. I would further assert that is almost impossible to produce not just good food (i.e. cooked to a precise recipe) but a good total experience if the primary goal is money. If profit is the main goal, in any event, you will go for economies of scale, mass production, replicability. How many high-end restaurants in hotel chains (Hyatt, etc.) are that good? I know that there are some chain hotel restaurants that manage to do good work, but there are not that many. Or more precisely: money has had an important role in what this young woman is about to do in the next stage of her career. I could cite many examples where people have chosen another pursuit because it "spoke to their condition" even at the sacrifice of considerable income. I know of many cases where early in life a decision was made to go for law or advertising or investment banking, primarily because of the money, and people subsequently "downshifted" to a career producing less money but (for them) more happiness. I speak with a lot of young people who have chosen to work in a large professional services firm not because they love to serve clients but because they see it as a way to increase lifetime earnings. Very few of them succeed. At some point the stress of providing service exceeds the financial benefits, and they leave. I hope it goes without saying that I am not speaking of your relative here, and I wish her every success in law school and a great law firm. Of course. Every decision involves compromise. I would never preach to anyone that they should live this way or that way. All I am asserting is that it's harder to produce superb cuisine -- with "soul" as you aptly put it -- if you are in it primarily for the money. By "the market" do you mean the equity markets? If I really knew how they measured things then my chauffeur would be writing this note. All that the principle of obliquity says is that in business it is better to aim at some goal other than a financial one: customer service, or quality, or the like. Of course the financial result needs to be a good one, and there is no gain in producing a stupendous product which you then sell for less than it costs you to make it. This has been discussed at length in Collins and Porras's Built To Last. Johnson and Johnson is a good example. Click here to see their "credo", or statement of corporate principles. Note that their own profit is important but comes last on the list of objectives. I think this is exactly right. I'm not sure where the emotion of resentment comes in. Are you attributing this to John Whiting? I have no data about his emotions, nor any desire to attribute motives to his comments. No, it is one measure of success for me, one way of keeping score. It is hardly the most important. Exactly. A world re-ordered according to my sensibilities would not be good for most people! This is one reason I have put a lot of effort (and money) in learning to cook and in building kitchens here and in France that are capable of working at close to high professional levels. For my last birthday party my wife brought in a chef to prepare a lunch for around 20. It was a wonderful morning, because I didn't have to worry about selecting anything other than the wines or about cooking. As you say, cook and diners were "on the same side". I must say that I find it harder and harder to get similar experiences in restaurants. Not impossible, just more difficult. That sounds very good, an opportunity to continue this interesting and enjoyable conversation and to learn more about food and wine.* * * * * Just one more note on this theme. Social scientists do regular surveys of "happiness" measures -- for example, in the US General Social Survey there is a question that asks, "Would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?". The methods and the data in these surveys are subject to fierce debate, but what is clear is that happiness as measured by the surveys has not increased in any way proportional to economic improvement. All though Britain is nearly 3 times richer than it was 50 years ago, overall well-being levels have hardly budged. A recent paper surveying happiness levels from the early 1970s to today found: no trend in the US, a decline in the UK, Italy and Germany, and an increase in France. See Cooper et al, "Status Effects and Negative Utility Growth", Economic Journal 111 (July 2002).

This discussion has been sufficiently interesting and civilised that I am going to take the risk of introducing an economic theme. I would not be prepared to "put myself in the hands of a chef" if I believed that she had no other motive than profit in opening the restaurant. This goes back to a theme I introduced in a post some time ago, and one that John Whiting has brought up in a different way. The great restaurants, the ones where I would happily turn the choices over to the chef, are ones that started from a concept or an idea, and then figured out how to make the economics work. Perhaps it was a new expression of terroir. Perhaps it was a new set of techniques. Or perhaps it was Molecular Gastronomy. In any case it started with something other than money. The money was a means of making the concept work. This "principle of obliquity" applies to lots of other pursuits. The greatest lawyers I know start with a focus on a particular kind of law practice and strive to achieve greatness in that. Billings, profits and the like will probably follow, but I don't believe for a second that these people devoted a lifetime to study and practice after a dispassionate calculation that this was a great way to make money. Similarly for doctors. And I believe that this applies more broadly to corporations, but that's another story. But restaurants illustrate the point well. You don't need to spend that much time behind the scenes in a restaurant to know that this is a terrible way to live your life if your primary goal is wealth accumulation. This is one place that the restaurant/opera analogy breaks down. There are restaurants -- probably the majority -- that try to operate purely as businesses. Even at the high end, if we define this by price, there are places whose goal is clearly to charge as much money and give as little as they can for the price. And hence the dreadful places often found in top hotels around the world. Most opera singers and classical musicians will make mediocre incomes, and in some cases incur enormous expenses for instruments and travel. They do it for the sake of the art. A few make a lot of money. Similarly for writers. As Whiting rather sharply pointed out, all of us are spending large amounts of discretionary time writing essays in eGullet. We could be selling insurance in our spare time... Fortunately, there are places where the restaurateur has primary goals other than money. That's the kind of place I am happy to go omakase. Steve P: your recent experience at Craft sounds wonderful. I am assuming you know the restaurant and the owners well. Have you often done this at fine restaurants you haven't visited before (assuming that such restaurants exist)? How have restaurants in France reacted when you have brought your own wines? None of this is to say that profit or wealth are bad things! May we all make lots of the former, keep lots of the latter, and give as much of it as we can to good causes.

Suvir, I've evolved the following method. This is for a 950 watt microwave, so it would have to be re-tested for a less (or more) powerful unit. I believe Julie Sahni specifies a longer cooking time than this. I put 2 cups of basmati rice, unrinsed, and 3 of water into a large glass bowl. This gets microwaved, uncovered, at full power for 9 minutes. Then a glass cover (a pie plate) is slipped on top and it continues at full power for another 3 minutes. Then it comes out of the oven, still covered, and rests for 6 minutes. It is then ready to serve. Could not be easier and the quality of the product is very good. The clean-up is also easy! For the stove top I use Julie Sahni's method from Classic Indian Cooking: I wash the rice, soak it for 30 minutes (water:rice = 2:1), simmer it in the water in which it soaked for around 10-15 minutes and then let it steam for 10 minutes. It works well but it takes more care and it's easier for this method to go wrong than with the microwave. If the result were better I would never do it any other way, but the microwave method works very well for me. This is one of the few dishes I cook in a microwave -- for the most part it is used for melting, defrosting, re-heating and the like. Are there better stove top methods than the one Julie Sahni recommends? I sometimes use basmati rice to make a Persian "chilau" -- this is that method where you cook the rice until it makes a golden crust. It is delicious, but not the same as Indian basmati rice.

All I could conclude was that I couldn't understand it. I started with the presumption that it had merit within a particular cultural frame, since my friend was deeply acquainted with the genre. I was unable to formulate a judgement either way. I agree with this and will remember this pithy and useful phrase. I think you are talking about the ability to stand outside oneself, to treat one's emotions as nothing more than another datum. In this sense a judgement can be somewhat "objective", i.e. depending on more than my immediate perceptions. Another judge could come to a different point of view, though, if she came from a different cultural matrix (Chinese opera example) or interpreted the tradition in a different way (Cabrales on Taillevent). This difference could emerge regardless of the level of mastery. Marco Pierre White used to throw customers out of Harvey's when they asked for a change in doneness or seasoning. A restaurant is a commercial establishment in a different way to most artistic endeavours. I am a customer of a restaurant but a patron of the opera. The relationship is different. I agree that the best chefs are gaining confidence e.g. to leave salt and pepper off the table or to recommend a particular way of cooking meat. Even at the high end, though, they almost ask for the customer's approval of their recommendation. Personally I wish there were more restaurants where you could walk in, agree a budget with the chef and ask him to produce a dinner with wines within that budget. No menus. To me this would change the nature of the experience, in a positive way. It does increase the stakes for the chef, because she has to take more responsibility for the diner's pleasure. I have found that in some restaurants you can ask the chef to order for you, but most either want you to make choices or to approve, in advance, the tasting menu. The act of handing a menu to the customer puts a lot of choice into the customer's hands. To then withdraw that choice around the matter of doneness would seem odd to many customers. Another issue, of course, is that many customers have special requirements e.g. severe food allergies, vegetarianism, no pork, etc. This is not true for the opera. So there are practical obstacles to putting the experience into the restaurant's hands.

There are at least three strands to this debate. The first is about cultural relativities. I was once taken to a performance of Chinese opera by a friend who knew I loved opera and was a connoisseur of the Chinese variety. The troupe was famous. To me it sounded a bit better than cats making love on a garden wall, but not by much. I could not understand the language or the music. Perhaps I could have learnt it after many years of study. But I won't say it was "worse" or "better" than a great performance of Rheingold. Just different, though in a way I could not appreciate. The second is that even within a distinct cultural genre there are genuine differences in view even amongst the connoisseurs. Look at the arguments over 3 star Paris restaurants. Some opera lovers believe that The Marriage of Figaro should be conducted at a fast clip, others prefer a more langorous interpretation. That last word is a useful one. Does Plotnickiism allow for interpretation? Just how rare should a steak be cooked? The third and perhaps most interesting question is why our preferences for food are so immediate and strong that many refuse to allow that tastes can be learned. Here I am a partial Plotnickiist in that I believe there is enormous scope for deepening and broadening one's horizons, not just to appreciate French cookery and wine but to get to enjoy ducks' tongues, raw fish, bitter melons, durians... My own guesses as to why many people refuse to learn about food: 1) We all spend a lot more time eating than going to the opera. Opera is in some sense optional, food is required for survival. It's in a lower rung of Maslow's hierarchy. 2) We first experience food as an infant, when we are less capable of being reflective about what we're doing. It is more immediate, more visceral. "Good" doesn't happen in the brain but in the body as a whole. Think of the first taste of food after you've been really horribly hungry for a long time. It is a different and more basic appreciation. It has (help! help!) a subjective quality of objectivity. It may be difficult to break through this. Some American friends came to visit us in Japan. We were travelling in a rural area and staying in lower-budget places where it was difficult or impossible to find Western foods. Breakfast was, interestingly, the most challenging meal of the day for them. After a few weeks they would talk about their cravings for scrambled eggs, or buttered toast as opposed to the fish and rice and pickles we generally found. When we finally reached a larger town (Matsumoto) they spotted a McDonald's and rushed in for a hit of burgers and fries. 3) A lot of people resolutely refuse to learn about anything. They know what they like and they like what they know. Why exempt food (or opera, or literature) from this self-imposed restriction? Alice Waters writes, somewhere, about her attempts to influence peoples' tastes, starting with children with the Edible Schoolyard project. She talks about Chez Panisse gently introducing newer and more adventurous foods and their menu broadening over time. For example, they once offered steaks and chops as a "backup" for customers who couldn't handle the no-choice menu they offered. No longer. She grew more confident and her customers more broad-minded. What other ways are there to develop taste and appreciation for culinary traditions in adults? Perhaps an adult education programme could offer courses in gastronomy as well as cookery.

Cabrales, if I recall correctly sliced truffles appeared only in the quail dish. The paté had bits of truffle, and there were irregular pieces of truffle in the consommé. I believe the turbot had been dosed with truffle oil, something that Petrus seems to use a lot. Since this was a business dinner I did not discuss the food with the waiter, something I might well have done otherwise. The texture of the sliced truffle was not great -- nor was the slicing that thin -- but I attributed this to the time of year. It is indeed possible that it had been frozen or otherwise preserved. The perfume was slightly muted. Clément Bruno's restaurant in Nice (it is Terres de Truffes, by the way, not Terre des Truffes) is interesting. The restaurant in Lorgues was once very good and very personal. It wasn't that large, perhaps 30 covers. You got what Bruno decided to cook that day. Nor was it particularly expensive. Many but not all of the dishes contained truffles. You did have to deal with Bruno, a big and somewhat noisy chef, who toured the dining room to proclaim the glories of his own cooking. But some of the dishes were outstanding. Then Bruno got to be better known. He was called, or declared himself, "the emperor of truffles". 3.5 tonnes of truffles, he said, passed through his kitchen every year. At least one book was written about him. Ducasse came to visit. Bruno earned his Michelin star. He produced aggressively self-promotional brochures. The word I've heard (and this is now hearsay, since I haven't been back in awhile) is that things have gone badly wrong for Bruno and that the cuisine has become slapdash. Terres de Truffes, on the other hand, seems to have preserved some of the smallness and personality of the original. The truffles we had there were of high quality, and I didn't detect truffle oil in the dishes. Somehow it wasn't irritating to find truffles in every dish (dessert included) at this place. It was at Petrus.