Jonathan Day

"Cul de poule" literally means "chicken's arse". The term refers to a bowl with a rounded, as opposed to a flat bottom. "Culs de poule" are used in patisserie, for example for beating eggwhites or for making custards with the bowl set over boiling water.

Many friends who come from the US seeking Indian food are looking, not for "authentic Indian food as served in various regions of India", but for something just a bit more varied and interesting than the rather standardised stuff that is served in all but a few US cities in the name of "Indian food". Hence places like Rasa Samudra on Charlotte St (Keralan) or Kastoori, in Tooting (Gujarati) or the New Tayyab in Whitechapel would all fill the bill, whether or not they are truly "authentic". All three of these restaurants have, in my experience, been uneven in their delivery: superb food when they are performing well, but marked by occasional problems. But there are very few restaurants for which that statement isn't true.

Patrick, Le Moulin de Mougins is something of an unknown (on this site at least) since it changed hands late last year. It was in decline under Roger Vergé, but is now run by Alain Llorca. I am told that the Guide Gantié, which specialises in that area, has given it a high rating, 3 out of 4 olive branches (Louis XV got 4). You can be the first eGulleter to visit the new Moulin and report!

I used to buy poultry from the Boucherie Alain in Mougins; it may well have supplied the poulet de Bresse to L'Amandier, where Ducasse cooked that chicken described in the link Moby has provided. It supplied a number of the area restaurants. Sadly, the Boucherie Alain is now closed and my last meal at L'Amandier, which no longer associated with Vergé or Ducasse, was horrid -- e.g. parts were burnt. But Alain, while it was open, was a marvel. I once ordered a Bresse capon there; Alain's apprentice started to prepare it, removing pinfeathers, trimming the bird, and in general going through the wonderful ritual that artisanal butchers follow before handing a product over to the customer. The queue was long and Alain himself was busy, but he spotted the apprentice at work, swooped down on him and grabbed the capon. "C'est un chapon de Bresse," he admonished, "et il faut le respecter." That's a Bresse capon! Show it some respect! Quite a bit of cookery advice could be summed up in those four words: show it some respect!

I very much want to get back to Le Manoir. We last dined there in, I think, 1992. I really wanted to like this place and still do. The concept of a fine hotel, fine restaurant, cookery school, garden is very attractive. The setting is lovely. But the meal we had was frightfully expensive, and rather "blah", both in concept and in execution. So I'm hoping a return visit will completely change my memory of Le Manoir.

I had downloaded and installed all three of those. Unfortunately there's some sort of missing link between GIMP and my "default browser" that doesn't allow the HELP files to work, even after re-starting the machine. AND, apart from those tutorials, which I had read, the pages containing overall documentation (http://manual.gimp.org and http://wiki.gimp.org) won't load. I think this is because the gimp.org site is undergoing some sort of reconstruction. We're drifting off topic here, so let's take further discussion on this to PM.

I've downloaded GIMP for Windows. It starts fine and seems very powerful, but the HELP system doesn't work. I've tried setting my default web browser, which the HELP system uses, both to Mozilla and to IE6. No luck. Nor does there seem to be any GIMP documentation online -- all the places that the site points you for documentation are broken. Too bad, because it looks like a terrific piece of software; but if there's no way to learn how to use it, it's useless.

Links to the restaurants' own sites would be great, not only on London Eating but even here on eGullet. Discussion of search engine technology as such is indeed off topic, so let's end that strand of the conversation. Thanks.

Yes. The English are still referred to as "les rosbifs", an almost exact parallel to the use of "frogs" to describe the French.

On Sunday I joined some friends for a pleasant Sunday lunch. There were several beautiful bowls of berries on the table -- raspberries, strawberries, blueberries -- and a pitcher of thick cream. We ate the berries and cream and talked, somewhat rhapsodically, about how wonderful summer was. We had a few moments of sunshine, then a shower, then another moment of sunshine, then a blast of cold rain that lasted a few hours. Now and then the sun would shine through the conservatory windows...and then the clouds would gather again. But it felt summery. A long winded way of wondering whether the summer puddings and Pimms and strawberries simply confirm the general trend in these islands toward cold and dampness: we make much of these summer foods and of summer warmth and sunshine precisely because they are so rare. On the other hand, British weather means that you can sensibly have an Aga cooker without, as one Houston socialite did, installing industrial air conditioning to carry away the heat generated by the thing. A consolation, like cups of tea. Another hypothesis about English cookery: a tendency toward the unadorned and simple. I don't have the literary references to hand to check, but wasn't (isn't) "French" viewed as connoting overly fancy, frilly, hyper-refined; as opposed to plainer and simpler English fare. Perhaps this explains some of the affinity for Mediterranean cooking, which tends to be a bit simpler than classical French cuisine.

A return to Morgan M this week. The room was very pleasant, with midsummer light streaming through the large windows. Smoked scallops were great, as was the chocolat moelleux. Rack and confit leg of lamb didn't quite measure up: slightly overcooked, the sauce just a bit thick, with dull gnocchi as an accompaniment. A pre-starter of horseradish, beetroot and crème fraîche was perfect. Service was excellent, with no communication problems. As with Racine, a decent French restaurant in London, at prices well below the top ranks (GR RHR, Gavroche, Waterside Inn, etc.) but very creditable food. As with Racine, though, hard to escape the thought that the genuine item, in its native land, would have been cheaper, better, and not all that difficult to access.

We had gone to a party in South Kensington and wanted something to eat before returning home. I called Racine. Was there a table for two available? The person on the other end was almost inaudible, given the background noise, but I finally worked out that they had one table left. We had a pleasant meal, though a light one: I had the crab/cucumber soup and the brains with capers, my wife a ballotine of foie gras and then scallops. Service was attentive and efficient, and the Echiré butter noted by other posters was fresh and good. The crab-cucumber soup was delicious, though it was better before the oil in the ice cube entered the soup, rendering it a bit stronger and spicier than I would have preferred. Calf brains with black butter and capers had a pleasant interior texture but were just a bit soggy, with no exterior crispness, and I found the caper sauce somewhat too strong and salty. The foie was unusally good and the scallops fresh and sweet, though again the flavours seemed slightly exaggerated. It's good to know that Racine seems to be doing well. But it's entirely French, from the menu to the waiters, and I found it hard to escape the thought that, for a quick train or plane ride and about half the menu price, I could find food in France with equally good (or better) ingredients and more balanced flavours. A similar problem applies to Italian restaurants in London: "the real thing" is not that far away, and almost always better and cheaper, despite a restaurant's earnest efforts. There are places in London that aren't trying to replicate a French bistro, but truly doing their own British thing, even though they draw on French traditions: Chez Bruce for example, or St John, though St John's culinary language is more British than French. That's something you can only find in the UK; it's something I find more and more valuable.

Elizabeth David may have catalysed Med-mania, but she at least recommended restraint in using herbs! Miguel, what are some of the dishes that you would classify as representative of "the great traditions of British gastronomy?"

Damn you, Shaw. I tried to restrain myself, but I seem to have ordered this from Amazon. EUR142.50 with free shipping within France. Too bad we can't attach an eGullet affinity code to non-US Amazon purchases.

For those into fancy temperature probes and precision measurements, this is the chart of French cooking temperatures I've used for some time; these are temperatures at the centre of the cooked meat at the point of service -- so if the meat will be held, it should probably be a bit cooler than this. Beef: "bien cuit" = 77C, "à point" = 71C, "saignant" = 63C, "bleu" = 60C Veal: "bien cuit" = 74C, "à point" = 68C, "saignant" = 60C, "bleu" = 57C Lamb: "bien cuit" = 74C, "à point" = 71C, "saignant" = 63C, "bleu" = 60C Pork and chicken: recommended temperature is 82C, but I generally cook these meats a bit less than this. In practice it's more a matter of prodding the meat with a finger to estimate the doneness.

With absolutely no data to hand (a wonderful place from which to argue) my sense of price and quality is something like this: Sainsbury's generic sausages, price £2/kg, quality mediocre Sainsbury's "taste the difference", price £3/kg, quality a great deal better Best sausages from London artisanal butcher (Dove's), price £4/kg, quality excellent Best sausages from French artisanal butcher, price £6/kg, quality almost perfect Similar differences would apply to fruit and veg. My greengrocer in France recently had cherries that were astonishing -- eating one was like drinking a cup of fine wine. But they were over €20/kg! The "finest" and "taste the difference" products aren't perfect, but they are a lot better than the ordinary supermarket stuff. Fruit, fish, vegetables, meats from the local shops can be very good indeed, but they are super-premium products. Some of the French supermarkets (even the mighty Carrefour) will have "store within a store" operations, where a local producer will set up a stand within the store and sell olive oil, olives, sausages, ravioli. Does anything like this happen in the UK? I haven't seen it.

It hasn't helped the small shops that the Mayor and some of the local councils have enacted draconian anti-parking regimes, "traffic calming" chicanes, £5 congestion charge, etc. I am lucky because Northcote Road is an easy walk from home; I can trundle wheeled basket from one end of the road to the other and buy fish, meat, fruit and veg, bread, cheeses, wine, coffee, Italian specialities and "healthy things" like tofu, grains, baking supplies. As a visiting friend remarked, it's an outdoor supermarket. Any further distance requires a car, and that means parking. The supermarkets have all the advantages there, because they all have car parks. I do some shopping at Borough, by tube, but it's a huge hassle because of the need to drag multiple bundles or the wheeled basket down the stairs. I'm all too well aware of the reasons for anti-car measures; my point is not that these are wrong, but that there are difficult and complex tradeoffs at work here.

Not to quibble about this: the initial flavours are definitely a result of the olive, as Margaret says. But peppery flavours, especially, can diminish with age -- I'm speaking of months, not years here. For the most part age is not a good thing with olive oils. But I have tasted several where 6 months' aging results in a marked improvement, a smoothing and rounding of the flavour. As it happens we went back to Baussy for a large bidon of their ordinary oil, which comes from Spéracèdes. But they now have a small property near Les Baux, and the cuvée speciale oil from there was aptly named. We brought some of that back for finishing dishes.

I've nothing against tasting menus per se or even tasting menus at Per Se. It's fine to have an option on many different courses -- although, as Robert and Steven note, some dishes simply don't take well to being served in tiny portions. What I think a number of us on this thread are concerned about is the tendency to make these tasting menus the norm, the thing a chef should aspire to. Tasting menus can also go spectacularly wrong. I remember a dinner at a place in Boston -- I believe it was called Clio. We ordered the chef's tasting menu, which I believe had 12 courses. The kitchen was in trouble that evening, and the wait between courses grew and grew, until the wait between the 7th and 8th courses had become 30 minutes, and we were feeling tired and uncomfortable. We asked that the menu be foreshortened and left early. Some of the dishes were tasty (though I must admit that I don't remember them well) but it was an unpleasant experience in all.

On menus dégustations, here's a passage from Pascal Remy's exposé of the Michelin Guide organisation, L’Inspecteur Se Met à Table: « Les menus dégustations, même excellents, sont en général des pièges qui gomment les souvenirs. Sur le moment, on se régale, on est impressioné, c’est la fête! Mais huit jours plus tard on a tout oublié. Impossible de se rappeler ce que l’on à mangé. Or, à mon avis, un grand restaurant, c’est un endroit dont on garde le souvenir précis d’un plat. Méfiez-vous des cortèges spectaculaires! Ils brouillent la vue et ne permettent pas une bonne lisibilité d’un établissement. » He goes on to describe how he remembers, after 15 years, a côte de veau from L’Ambroisie, a moelleux au chocolat from Michel Bras. And he ends: « La morale de l’histoire est claire : la simplicité s’imprime dans la mémoire. Et devant un plat sophistiqué on est épaté sur le moment mais on finit par l’oublier. »

Doc, is it possible to do this at the French Laundry or Per Se? Could you say: hold all the other bits and pieces, just give me a main-course sized portion of that butter-poached lobster?

It strikes me that "tasting menu" covers a number of different concepts. One is the restaurateur's need to economise on product waste, by pricing a particular menu lower than the one composed of similar items from the carte. In some cases, the restaurant has insufficient staff to manage a carte, or lacks the technique to handle simultaneous production of many different dishes. I believe that Alice Waters wrote somewhere that she set up Chez Panisse with a fixed menu mainly because she didn't know any other way to do it. Her early menus were fixed, but there were options for steaks and grills for those who wanted them. Later, as the restaurant became more confident, the additional items were dropped. In many restaurants in France, the upward extension of the prix fixe becomes a menu gourmand or menu découverte or something similarly named: three courses becomes four; perhaps a cheese course appears in addition to the sweet. People start to describe this as a "tasting menu", though I don't think it fits Robert's description very well. At the Plaza Athenée Ducasse, for example, you can have three half-portions of main dishes, cheese and dessert at a fixed price. A second concept is a menu designed to give the customer a taste (dégustation) of the restaurant's dishes, perhaps in order to enable shorter menus of larger portions on a subsequent visit. It's not unlike visiting a vineyard and tasting multiple wines. The experience can be pleasant, but it is far from the pleasure of drinking several glasses of a great wine. Finally, there are the avant-garde constructions of an Adrià or a Grant Achatz, where there is no possible "full" version of a particular dish owing to the degree of transformation that's been applied to the main ingredients. My sense is that Keller is trying to deliver something more like the second concept, in part as an exercise in virtuosity, demonstrating that he can serve many courses to one table with exact precision. There is no doubt that this is an impressive trick. But is it much more than that?

They certainly could rise that high, or even higher; I don't think there are any French three-stars that are in such demand. But from some comments that Adria made during our London interview and at the demonstration that followed, I doubt that they will. One reason he keeps prices relatively low at the restaurant (e.g. wines sold essentially at retail prices) is that this adds to his sense of freedom to experiment. If this or that dish is not to the customer's satisfaction, well, the other 29 may well have been, and the €145 price has been good value; in any event I've seen claims that the restaurant and the Taller aren't recovering much more than its operating costs. I'm guessing that these are high, given that there seem to be more staff than customers at el Bulli. The other businesses -- hotels, catering, books, etc. -- are seen as the cash generators.

This was certainly true a few years ago: the wonderful chocs from Artisan were served at both Petrus and RHR. On my last visit to RHR there were chocolate salty caramels that were delicious but didn't look as though they had come from L'Artisan. Does anyone know who makes these?

Adria demonstrated this technique when he was in London. Here's my understanding of it: Sodium alginate (a carbohydrate found in seaweed) is added to the liquid solution. Then spoonsful of liquid are dropped into a solution of calcium chloride. This sets off an ion exchange reaction, and causes the polymers in the alginate to link and thicken, creating the "skin" of the ravioli. Adria uses the same technique to create "caviar" out of apple juice, essence of ceps and other liquids. Waldman, Amy Sue; Schechinger, Linda; Govindarajoo, Geeta; Nowick, James S.; Pignolet, Louis H. The Alginate Demonstration: Polymers, Food Science, and Ion Exchange J. Chem. Educ. 1998 75 1430. (November 1998) For a student lab demonstration in which this technique is used to make "snakes" out of Gaviscon, click.