MaxH

Does anyone much advocate frying rather than baking ("roasting" maybe better name for same process)? Same with bacon, for instance. Standard quantity preparation of fine uniform bacon slices lays raw slices on parchment or other absorbent paper on baking sheets, then bakes in moderate to hot oven. I don't know anyone with experience doing this who still fries. I guess I fry meatballs occasionally for some special reason or recipe, but baking them permits good control, never adds gratuitous fats, requires less attention, and takes little more work even for vast quantities.

Just to endorse the voices here that touched on the point, many French cookbooks are highly accessible to English-readers for the same reason cookbooks of other languages are accessible: recipes use limited vocabularies. Also, anyone who speaks English already has some French vocabulary anyway, consciously or not (it was one of the major feeder languages into modern English) -- you can progress fast with the aid of a dictionary, and if you actually use the cookbook, new vocabulary tends to "stick" and stay with you. I don't have this book, but found the point above to be true with many others I have in French, a language I otherwise know very little, as well as for other languages. The obstacle of cookbook language difference is smaller than it may seem if you haven't tried it. By the way, I think macarons are popular around the San Francisco area, people post about them on food blogs and shops feature them. (Until reading this thread I didn't realize they were considered a rare or lost art.)

The following is off the cuff, but if you want more depth, email or PM. I have some older books that go into this. Home-made flavoring extracts and syrups seem to've been popular in earlier times (maybe as an extension of home preservation of seasonal produce?) I remember an emphasis on fermenting fruit before extracting it, supposed to greatly intensify or extract the flavor. It may have been for syrups or tinctures or both.

Haven't seen book or movie yet but regarding caricature, the subject invites it. Since her death, some people are inclined to make a saint of JC (relics of the True Kitchen were even reverently displayed at the Copia museum). Parts of her life like her OSS service in Ceylon in WW2, mundane in her own accounts that I saw, and in Fitch's original biography and other writings (JC worked as a file clerk there and by some accounts, a fairly inept one) can be cheaply spun for drama (wartime spy!). Despite actual gastronomic angles from that time (the "flied lice with mix" from the local restaurateur, mentioned in her 1970s cookbook FJCC -- is that interesting detail in the movie??) Peter if you mean the hour-long A&E Biography TV program, that aired in (IIRC) March 1997 while JC was very much alive. It was an independent production, and at least parts of it were filmed in 1996. Of course it was re-broadcast after her 2004 death, and at other times (and presumably will be again, whenever new interest in JC surfaces). I thought it was good too, including the part where JC's sister describes the three siblings, all of them six feet two inches tall, and her mother's accounting of producing "eighteen and a half feet of children."

No matter what coast it's on, the St. George loses its color quite quickly... ← When shanty and I exchanged about this subect a few months back, I mentioned that, notwithstanding chlorophyll, and other absinthes conceivably fading under light, I've always seen St. George with a pale green color and notable brown. In the region of its production. Including the bottles I got from the very first batch of it, soon after bottling, and with no notable light exposure. Even a pre-release sample that I was furtunate to be asked by the distiller to taste was not especially green as far as I can remember. Mentioned also here that I've seen other herb extracts with similar color when made. I suppose that the St. George might have faded slightly since (though I normally keep it in the dark) but I never saw anything like what I'd call a bright green. Does it really come to market sometimes with such a color?

Did you by any chance handle the garlic cloves after steeping in the sauce, and feel the texture of their skin? I ask because (though it's a new one to me too) I see no reason flavor can't diffuse out through the thin membrane of the peeled garlic clove's skin, especially if the tomato puree tends to soften it. Tomatoes are made up of all kinds of stuff, much of it organic -- fats, proteins, water, sugars, organic acids. Many of those components can dissolve oil-based flavorings, so there's a reservoir of mixed solvents just outside the garlic clove, and they may also serve to soften up the garlic clove's membrane surface. (Chemical components diffuse through membranes all the time in other situations.)

I'm a great fan of garlic, and garlic cooked in oil -- but surprised to learn that some professionals don't know about this anaerobic pathogen problem. It's a famous public-health concern, it's in online food-safety information from US and other gov't agencies, WHO, etc. With C. botulinum, as most of you know, the hazard is complicated because it forms in three stages (spores to viable bacteria to toxin, each with very different characteristics). Even some of the incidental science, apparently, isn't fully intuitive. Andiesenji, not to single you out but there's an insidious error here: Email or PM me if you need more background on the following or if it doesn't make sense to you -- I assure you it's well supported: Under no circumstances can you reliably raise temperature of most foodstuffs to 250 deg F (121 C) at atmospheric pressure. That's because as long as water remains, it very effectively limits microscopic local temperature to 212 F (100 C) regardless of convection medium (oven air, oil, etc.). In fact, water's very good at that, due not only to its boiling point and heat capacity, but also its Lvap (latent heat of vaporization) which absorbs energy before phase change can occur (liquid to gas). Water's Lvap is relatively high, over 2 Megajoules (millions of watt-seconds) per kg (incidentally the thermodynamic reason a "watched pot never boils!") Even foodstuffs that look dessicated typically contain significant water unless kept in vaccuum. Under steam pressure though, the BP and Lvap effect move to higher temperatures and the entirety of the food easily reaches 250 F. Cooking in a superheated medium like oil eventually raises surface temp. (that's why fried potatoes brown) and this could (I assume) helpfully kill many surface C. bot spores. But still not reliably, since a large thermodynamic "heat sink" from immediately adjacent H20 works to pull down even the surface temperatures, while the evolving gas (steam) surrounding the surface insulates it partially from the oil. Good luck in avoiding food poisoning so far does not guarantee it won't happen later. Incidentally, C. bot growth does not require complete oxygen exclusion, and one or two of the four important strains grow down to 3 deg C (37 F) (at or below many home refrigerator temps.) acc. to published data (other strains grow down to 8 C). Refrigeration does slow any bacterial growth, so keeping food cool and consuming reasonably soon is a safety measure. This and related issues in closely related current discussion here under "Food on the Internet."

One more detail, chef. You're probably well aware of this, but it might be worth spelling out in your writing. Most pizzas sold in the US are variations within a distinct style that's still fairly narrow by international and historical standards. Crust, tomato sauce, toppings, cheese. That combination is characteristic of neither modern Italian recipes (which are much more free-form, and often lack tomato sauce or even tomatoes, and/or cheese) nor ancient (Roman-era) roots, which for obvious reasons had no tomatoes, and from what I've read, were limited to a particular region of southern Italy. In contrast, people growing up in the US unaware of those contexts tend to perceive crust, tomato sauce, topping, and cheese as the very definition of pizza. Mariani's essay (above) describes the development of this larger style in the US, and its introduction to metropolitan Italy after WW2, where it was embraced (as an American specialty). Many writers have described ancient pizza origins, I think. In the US a popular author with specific references to Rome (and probably a source for many later writers) was Waverly Root, whose books (1950s-1970s) on the foods of France and Italy are standard US references. Root moved from US to Europe between the world wars, where he was a journalist and also the mentor of the popular US food writer A. J. Liebling.

Interesting subject, chef. Two pieces of information: If you don't have it already, get ahold of J F Mariani's landmark article "Everybody Loves Italian Food" in American Heritage magazine, 1989 or so. It says a good deal about pizza in the US, including the back-popularization of pizza styles into different places in Italy, from the US. (It's a bit more scholarly than some of Mariani's popular food writing.) If you don't have easy access, email me via clicking on my name here and I can get you a paper copy -- I have it on file. (Conceivably it has gone online. The overwhelming majority of important food writing I've seen, much of which isn't recent, isn't available online.) Also, after spending about a half century in California and paying attention to pizzas (cooked at home when I was a child) I question the existence of any genuine "California style" (not that some marketing hustler hasn't probably claimed such, to help sell their otherwise undistinguished product). Many restaurants in the state claim an established style such as Chicago or NY, but that's not my real point, which is I don't assess flexible use of toppings as a separate style. Nor do the modern Italian pizza books I have, which show a much wider range of toppings than I've seen in the US (certainly including goat cheese, green herbs, etc.). Thus when people like James McNair popularized a distinctive "barbecue chicken" pizza in the 1980s -- attributed to specific origins in Kansas City or somewhere -- or when simpler "Hawaiian" topping of pineapple and Canadian bacon or ham became popular in the 1970s -- these were new topping variations, among many others tried, rather than distinctive schools, or physical structures.

Sounds very good. But also, it's incongruous that this sandwich is from Oakland and not New Orleans, where it would be natural (more below). There could even be a connection. Many Oakland families had roots in Louisiana, wherefrom thousands of people moved for good jobs during the second world war. That history is a reason Southwest Airlines has run inexpensive nonstop flights between the two cities for years. (By the way Tupac, you always wait "in line" in the Western US. I never once heard of waiting "on line" in that sense until I lived in the Northeast. I think that's still the minority US usage -- the AHD would say. Might be a regionalism, like "duck sauce" -- Eastern -- or "frying pan" -- Western. But I have often waited "on line" on the Internet, starting with 2400 bps dial-up modems in early 1980s.) Question I asked bartender at Napoleon House in New Orleans, early this decade: "Why does this place serve Po'Boy [sandwiches], but none with seafood?" (Common in New Orleans.) Answer: "We have no deep fryer."

Great thread! Price, is my guess. Given that the traditional difference between vodka and water is alcohol, "alcohol-free vodka" joins a rarified group of earlier product concepts that, if you understand the descriptions, are completely contradictory. Fat-free half-and-half. ("Half-and-half" is a North-American name for a light cream, as for coffee -- traditionally half milk, half cream. It purpose is to contain more fat than milk. Incidentally the name half-and-half is famously unknown in most English-speaking countries, where recipes specifying it cause confusion.) I gather this is an artificially thickened nonfat milk. Passive preamplifier. In traditional home audio equipment a "preamplifier" boosts a weak source, such as a microphone. Its purpose is to amplify. "Passive" in electronics means something that does not amplify.

These foams and airs -- I have experience with various foam types -- are certainly real, legitimate, creative cooking. But what a set-up for abuse, corruption, parody! I've seen food trends arrive that had substance, but whose language became hip, and then inevitably used at whim, detached from the substance of the idea. (Come to think of it, that's not limited to food.) I can imagine an extreme, degenerate form of "air" where some future pretentious pundit asserts that the aroma is "virtual" or "allegorical" and must be substantiated in the mind. And patrons line up with testimonials. (As they do today for mystical gadgets, fanciful herbal cures that don't work, etc., which rake in millions of dollars and discredit legitimate ones.) Until some child, too simple for fashionable fatuities, speaks the truth and declares "it's only hot air."

Gotcha. Not just a phrase but a brand. In the same way that other established names like Bayerische Motoren Werke, or Svenska Aeroplan AktieBolaget, aren't normally translated either. (And a few names not only aren't translated, but also aren't understood -- the notorious Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerey for instance -- one of many GU bureaucracies of its time and place.) But maybe for some KFC markets (Quebec, Russia) a local name sells better. That will rule.

Timm, I researched the subject in some depth a while ago, viewed a range of online confit recipes, and consequently took that point for granted above. Certainly my caution is not intended for the older French recipes I have (in the standard early-1900s reference cookbooks), or any similar ones, designed properly for long unrefrigerated storage. An earlier summary below gives sources. If you want to correct Harold McGee, I can put you in touch, he's local to me; but I've seen modern recipes myself that support his point, using quantitatively far lighter salting than the originals (whether or not they characterize this with the vague term "preservation" -- any degree of salting can be said to help preserve meats, after all). I've also seen modern recipes for non-poultry and non-meat confits, cooked and preserved in fat, with very little salt at all. Without all of that, I would never have posted above. Current popularity of poultry confits has sometimes dangerously obscured the fact that originally, like other meats preserved for unrefrigerated storage, they were very highly salted, often with nitrite or nitrate preservatives ("saltpeter"). A detailed French recipe in the old Larousse Gastronomique begins by steeping a cut-up goose in a kilogram (two pounds) of mixed salt and saltpeter, and claims indefinite shelf life for the result. In sharp contrast, as Harold McGee explains [On Food and Cooking], most modern non-canned meat confits are made to be eaten within a few days, therefore salted much more mildly, for flavor and color, not preservation. This "few days" also coincides with published guidance on other foods subject to anaerobic bacteria.

Yes, that's a typical British-US meaning* and used in US cookbooks. (I just looked at a packet of Colman's Toad-in-the-Hole mix, made in UK and sold in US.) I don't have a name for that egg specialty, but it's a famous one and I've seen it before also, here and there (not online) over the years. * Quick offhand recipe from experience: Make unsweetened crêpe batter,** season with a little dry mustard, onion powder, white pepper, etc. In hot oven (350-400 F) roast some breakfast-type sausages, say 1 lb or 500g, until browned, about 10-15 minutes. Turn oven temp. to 425 F, remove pan, pour off excess fat but leave a coating on the bottom of the pan, along with the sausages. Return briefly to oven so pan is sizzling hot, then pour in batter to roughly cover sausages. Cook 25-30 min. at 425 F until puffed golden brown. It's Yorkshire Pudding (aka "popovers") with sausages added and an amazing wintertime comfort food. ** 2 eggs, 1 cup (250ml) flour, 1 cup milk; blend until smooth, rest at least 30 mins before cooking.

Incidentally for any of you seeking the classic 1961 Crown "First English" ed., so many copies were sold in the US in the 1960s and 1970s, and returned to the market in used form in recent decades, that I have seen (and sometimes bought) a copy in a majority of the US used bookstores I've looked into in the past 30 years that had cookbook sections. Online clearing houses have taken over some of that market now, of course (Amazon, abe, etc. in North America excellent for popular titles like that one). Throughout the 90s and early 00s the going US price in decent condition was $10-$15. In another thread some time ago I mentioned a discussion in a restaurant bar where chef estimated offhand to a customer that he would probably find one if he looked into the used bookstore across the street (he did). -------- "You have heard the news: excommunicated. Come and dine to console me. Everyone is to refuse me fire and water; so we will eat nothing but cold glazed meats, and drink only chilled wines." -- Talleyrand (Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord), in a letter to his friend the Duc de Biron (better known as the Duc de Lauzun), April 1791. In LG 1961 Crown edition [gone, as of 1988]; also Duff Cooper, Talleyrand (Harper and Brothers, 1932). Not from online.

lamington, I just spotted this thread, but I've long had many copies of this title in multiple editions. PM or email me if you want more information. In particular, the 1961 Crown, long sold in US (the edition that made the title famous here, indeed very close to the 1938 including certain delightful eccentricities, discussed periodically here and elsewhere) had an important mezzanine edition in the 1970s, based on the 1961 but with new photography and many random edits that mostly condensed long or potentially archaic articles. Some people have that one, and it often gets confused with the 1961. (Same thing happened with the main thick post-war US "high-end" cookbook, the Gourmet Cook Book, which was forever issuing updates and supplements after publication in 1950 -- I have those too by the way.) The LG could be called a cousin of the reference cookbooks from the movement circa 1900 to compile and "standardize" French recipes. (The Guide Culinaire, Saint-Ange, and Saulnier's pocket reference are famous results.) French people have remarked to me that, although the resulting canonical recipes set the stage for well-known rebellions later, it was a necessary defense against a 19th-c. trend of restaurants passing off distorted or shortcut recipes under famous French names. E. Briffault ends his Paris à Table (1846) with this assessment: "The two-pronged fork is used in northern Europe. The English are armed with steel tridents with ivory handles -- three-pronged forks -- but in France, we have the four-pronged fork, the height of civilization." -- LG under "fork;" one of the rare examples of such a quip that's in the 1988 and 2001 US English editions rather than the 1961.

Or PFK, which you can find in Quebec--"Poulet frit Kentucky." ← What is wrong with that, David? I'm not a native francophone, but it looks like a faithful translation. Closer than (for instance) the US "French fried potatoes" for pommes frites, or "Black Forest cake" for Schwarzwälder Kirchtorte -- there are many other examples. (Not that those two are especially bad translations either.)

Unfortunately it shows what's insidious about the Internet as information resource. People (including journalists, I gather!) are choosing ease over accuracy, and don't seem to know it. The most poetic example I saw was googling a few years back about Pope's famous saying -- a little learning being "a dangerous thing." Many hits came up, most of them garbling the quotation in different ways. (Pope would be gratified, I think.) In pre-Internet US, people simply looked the subject up in Bartlett's Quotations (or asked their friendly librarian, who steered them to it) and found the right answer. The experts paid (full-time) to research and write reference books did add something in return for the money.

That's less about words than about a mind-set that likes to agonize on the edge -- neither just skipping the dessert, nor enjoying it with plain gusto. Maybe it's the idea that forbidden fruit is sweeter. (Goes back a long time, I understand.) Now that's entertainment! Please advise if you see such.

You could devote a Web site to that stuff (no doubt several exist). Like "Please RSVP." If people aren't interested in what their words mean, they don't even need to reach into other languages ("In regards to," "Brussel sprouts"). However. Among all the Restaurant Fake French used in the US of A, my best experience was with Almondine. A skilled chef friend at a corporate cafeteria once had a fine steam-table display of his fresh fish special "Almandine" (sic) ready for the upcoming lunch service. As someone with a taste for word trivia I was aware that "Almandine" is actually a dark-red mineral, and I mentioned that, amid some banter back and forth. Without a pause, chef grabbed a dark-red sweet pepper, quickly diced and seeded it, and tossed the crystal-like dark red bits over the fish dish. Got me, but good.

Chris, you've peered into Pandora's Box. This problem is general online and acute on Wikipedia, whose serious look and sometimes authoritative content mislead some readers into accepting other content that's not just inaccurate but easily demonstrated as such! I've seen many examples about food and drink, it would be a full-time job to respond to them with well-documented history. (Is the macaroon origin still shown 200 years later than French reference cookbooks will easily tell you? The "sandwich" entry seems OK when I glance at it, no longer giving lip service to the notion that the Earl of that name "invented" it, a point food books have been correcting for a century or more.) In my experience, some Wikipedia subject areas are more reliable than others. It might be because there's much less armchair expertise around about, say, molecular structures or art history than about food.

I haven't read the article, but the problem is more subtle. If any water remains in the flavoring component (garlic etc.), that will self-limit its local temperature to water's boiling point (212 F) which won't reliably kill C. bototulinum spores even with hours of cooking. It's for this reason that commercial canning uses pressure cookers: pressure raises water's BP permitting water-bearing foods (which is most foods) to get hot enough to kill the tough spores. As others have said, garlic in oil is a classic hazard, it's cited in US and international botlism-prevention advisories. Same hazard lurks, unpublicized, in currently fashionable confit recipes. Historically, meats like duck to be cooked and preserved in fat at room temp. were first very strongly salted, often including saltpeter -- chemical preservation, which can inhibit Claustridia growth even with spores present. Today, many meat confit recipes are salted for flavor, not preservation. The meat's then cooked at normal pressure and stored anaerobically under fat -- conditions permitting C. bot growth which, over time, produces deadly toxin. Commercial fresh confits today come with instructions to use soon or freeze (also inhibiting organism growth). The toxin itself is fragile and killed by brief cooking (a safety factor in uses like cassoulets). Big risk is if a fresh confit is stored for more than a few days at room or even refrigerator temp. (one or two of the four major C. bot strains grow at refrigerator temps), then eaten or "sampled" without further cooking. I've seen online confit recipes and discussions describing room temp. storage for months. A public-health time bomb. On one popular food Web site, warnings about this (citing FDA/NIH/WHO guidelines)evoked a skeptic's reply that there's no cause for concern unless the poisoning is demonstrated (?!). By the way, even this food Web site has carried reckless advice to take Acetaminophen (a drug lately in the news) when you have a partially impaired liver!

That's not limited to cocktails, by the way. A wine parallel I cited here a few years ago (from an upstart, inventive, value bistro near silicon valley, at the peak of the dot-com boom, when restaurants saw unusual numbers of fashionable or trophy wines brought in by customers, especially for business dinners). House policy is quoted verbatim below from the menu at that time which, by coincidence, I just pulled out for another purpose (may have it in electronic form soon): Corkage fee: Silver Oak $500, everything else $17

I'd argue one exception: Vodka bars that specialize in the spirit, serving it neat (and, of course, cold as ice), with savory foods in the European manner. (This is not even an exception if neat vodka isn't a "cocktail," even though it's certainly a "drink.")