MaxH

Davidson's quirky and useful encyclopedia the Oxford Companion to Food (1999) has a biography sketch on Grimod, by the way. This has less about his life in general than other references do, but stresses his establishment of food and restaurant criticism, and also his practical jokes.

Thanks for the link, tino27. I well remember the original "September" cycle when new college students poured onto Internet fora. In those days it was possible to tell them that there are online customs, and that it is in their interest to look these up. (It was also more necessary, because the tools required slightly more savvy than today's do.)Wikipedia (again) faithfully covers part of the story. (Its "1993" account is one standard "Eternal September" reference point long archived. Others reveal complications to the story because most AOL users received newsgroup access years after 1993, and the "Eternal September" tag became popular on newsgroups later too. The irony of AOL removing newsgroup access the following decade got remarks on newsgroups in 2005.) Remember that large "online" service firms tried for years to sell private network and forum services in isolation and competition with the existing Internet. Starting in the middle 1990s they eventually opened Internet email, then full access, to their subscribers. This important online history is well reported in print (maybe also on Wikipedia). Historical tidbit: The culture clash of "Eternal September" shows in this comment from a current Internet forum moderator who started in the 1980s: 'The first AOL posting I ever saw was on comp.unix-wizards, which was a group for Unix kernal hackers.* It begin with "I CLICK ON THE CLICKER AND I JUST GET ERROR MESSAGES" and it ended with "THE UNIX I AM USING IS AMERICA ONLINE."' *The writer uses "hackers" in its standard original sense of enthusiasts, or hobbyists. As you probably know, this was its main meaning in the computer world before Hollywood, Dan Rather, etc., in popularizing the jargon word beyond its original community, also distorted it.

Not to distract from the specific recipe comparison. I hope by way of context that people reading it know beforehand of the famous story of the "Newburg" name and its origin. Here I'm going not by something online (in who knows how many versions -- I haven't checked this subject online at all!) and I almost fear for the result of fingers rushing to online searches if they don't know what I allude to. It was in print for decades in mainstream US writings about the Delmonicos and "Newburg." For just one example, the popular postwar cookbook by Wood cited elsewhere on this site, Here. That is part of the implicit context of the posting above. (The story is familiar enough that many people may assume it's well known, and I don't know if ned did so above. If there's any question of finding it, I can easily quote, and so can many others.)

Tasting notes, 1996 red Burgundy assortment Background: Tasting group B (as I'll label it) contains importers, wholesalers, retailers, enthusiasts, of wines from Burgundy region, who are located throughout San Francisco Bay area. Meets regularly to appraise and debate these wines (usually current products; sometimes older, like this time). Members' Burgundy experience is 5-50 years (average around 25), most have experience tasting and buying in Burgundy itself, some regularly. I call it a co-operative tasting group because wine cost is shared, members rotate organizing and hosting, expenses are minimized. Format is taste-and-spit double-blind evaluation [1], impressions and rough preferences written down. Tasters' preference rankings then combine for a group ranking to structure discussion. Wines discussed, least favorite to most, then unveiled. Then we bring out food and re-visit the wines we liked, unblind and with food, using what's left in our tasting glasses and the bottles. You can extract a lot of information from a wine sample this way. Meetings occur at homes or friendly, moderately-priced restaurants accommodating this unusual format. (This group recently surfaced on the Squires wine web site re Burgundy evaluations.) These were nine generally respected wines. Obtained from members who bought them when new on market 1999-2000 for USD $30-75. Place-names not designated premier cru (PC) are grand cru (GC). (These wines use the Pinot Noir grape, in the region that has traditionally produced most of the wines from that grape.) Wines opened and decanted an hour before tasting. 12 tasters. "T" marks when I moved from smelling to tasting each. Red Burgundies of this vintage created high expectations with their concentration, good structure, strong tannins. I tasted some of these at the time, when first offered. Many of them entered a "closed" phase in recent years from which some are emerging (others, who can ever tell what will happen?). The strong acids, dry tannins, sometimes austere fruit today (especially from the Côte de Nuits wines) sum to a good metaphor: Cranberries. In descending group blind preference. 1996 Mongeard-Mugneret Grands Echezeaux. (Group 1st, my 2nd blind favorite.) Color browner than most. Faint meaty aroma opens in time (flavor too -- like some others, this developed considerably in the glass for a couple of hours). T depth, coffee, orangey fruit. Hard and closed initially but it opened up. 1996 Chandon de Briailles Corton Bressandes. (Group 2nd, my 1st.) Beautiful floral berry fruit with black olives. Unusually opulent in this line-up. T concentration, sap, glycols, fruit, toast. (I thought it must be from the Côte de Beaune subregion: yes.) Opened up even more enjoyably later. 1996 Mongeard-Mugneret Echezeaux. (Group 3rd, my 3rd.) Brilliant deep color. Faint pickle foresmell blows off. Toast. T hard clean classic struc, strong acid, some fruit. Marginal flaw in the back, a faint moldy or Bretty hint, many people caught it. Not TCA. Triage issue? (Many grape bunches were picked over, that year.) Still, popular wine. 1996 Hudelot-Noellat Chambolle-Musigny PC "Les Charmes." (Group 4th, my 5th.) Coffee and herbs. T closed, ungenerous, though finely made. Evident oak toast. Opened up later. 1996 Vincent Prunier Auxey-Duresses PC "Grands Champs." (Group 5th, my 4th.) Very faint and closed smells initially. Spicy fruit appears. T considerable fruit with still hard acid edge suggesting wine is still developing. Slight cooked smell. Beaune region I estimated, and later guessed correctly it was the Prunier. At $30 (in 2000), the "value" among these premium wines. 1996 Lamarche Echezeaux. (Here we get into wines I dumped out once food arrived.) Dark. Unusual smell, I characterized as India-ink. Wood resembling Scotch whisky. T coffee but little fruit. 1996 Maume Gevrey-Chambertin PC. Good dark color. Closed aroma. T closed, acid. 1996 Lafon Volnay-Santenots-du-Milieu PC. Very faint and closed aromas at first. T closed, hard, almost a mold hint. 1996 Thomas-Moillard Chambertin. Acidic/orange smells, toast, olive; not bad. (VA, some said.) T excellent struc with core of resolved tannin, but faded fruit. Disappointing wine from this illustrious location. A reminder once again why this group judges by the experience in the glass and not by the label. [1] Double-blind evaluation detail. Neither tasters nor host knows which wine is which during tasting, though they may know overall population. This time I hosted. After wrapping bottles to disguise them, I gave to another (who hadn't seen the wrapping) to mark, so neither of us knew which wine had which letter marking. Because the wines had some age they all had sediment, so I first prepped them to clarify. Stood up for a couple days; uncorked and poured each into pitcher with a bright light shining through the bottle. Near end of the pour, sediment appeared. Stopped the pour then, removed remaining wine with the sediment, replaced the clear wine into clean bottle. This was shortly before pouring the tasting samples. With care, this holds back only 10-20 ml of each wine. I collected the sedimented remains in another container, capped, to settle again and maybe use -- a "house blend." -- Pinot-Noir deluge, early reports: One wholesaler described industry scuttlebutt: Prepare for a tidal wave of mediocre pinot-noir wines from around the world (and attendant marketing), serving new consumer interest. Precursor waves lap at the shore already. His firm is being offered wines from countries and producers new to this grape, some of them awful. (Side note: Merchants in Group B sell other PNs besides Burgundies but are longtime specialists in this grape.) Remember Merlot wines in the 1980s, he said; it will be exactly like that. (I'll remind you of Harvey Steiman's newspaper feature article, October 1981: "Merlot, the coming red wine revolution." Still have copies on file, I just glanced at one.)

Good subject and thread. (Thanks, chrisamirault.) I wonder if experts (with the perspective for an informed opinion) might conclude on this subject (as with cookbooks for cooking) that what's in past books, easy to get and waiting to be read, dwarfs recent offerings that get more talk and advertisement. I started collecting memorable quotations (around 25 years ago) absent from Bartlett's (equivalently today, absent from easy online search). The "food" department of this file is large, but I checked and most are from other literature than cookbooks. However, the quotation at the bottom here (edited from additional sources) is from a favorite classic cookbook notable for much more than recipes (though I've rarely seen its other dimensions mentioned publicly). An earlier US cookbook author with some impact was Morrison Wood; here's a story, with link for more. 15 years ago on one of the few public Internet food fora then, someone requested an "eclectic" cookbook with recipes using wine. The description could have been written expressly for Morrison Wood. Wood's main book was in print for at least 30 years (1949-1979) and remains easily available used. I replied about it, readable in the Google archive Here. Part of the thread is missing there; email exchange occurred too. I got serious queries, including from Washington DC. The original poster later wrote that most people suggested the then-fashionable Frugal Gourmet Three Ancient Cuisines book, which he chose. I had that book also. It has its value, but I wondered then how many would have recommended it if they knew Morrison Wood equally. In the later (Frugal) book they'd find some recipes with wine, others with margarine and MSG where not really necessary. Morrison Wood in contrast had not only more recipes with wine, but advice on learning about it and pairing it -- and about real ingredients (not MSG and margarine) and flavor (garlic, mustards, spices) when these subjects were not even common yet in US cookbooks. Some thoughts for the day. -- Max -- "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. Sources include Larousse Gastronomique, 1961 Crown English-language edition (but missing, like so many other tidbits, from the two later editions).

I agree strongly that Keller deserves the utmost respect. But why should this start a battle? These recent comments in the thread compare apples with bicycles, I perceive. Ranhofer was of a different era and in a different part of his career when he wrote that book; and he'd been with the Delmonicos' restaurants for some time. (That sentence is from memory -- gladly yielded to authoritative correction.) The Delmonicos are credited in other, well-researched, historical writing with more or less founding the North American version of the modern restaurant, early 1800s, and mostly before Ranhofer. The focus and scope of the restaurant offerings documented in Ranhofer are hard to compare with Keller's. Michelin only very recently began rating establishments on US soil. If you really want to compare these two chefs directly, could you also give the basis for your conclusion?

That scene -- the increasingly appalling meal, despite every hope -- well paced and narrated -- is memorable among many food moments in that series, I thought. It's important to encounter the scene as it unfolds, in the course of the story. (This situation resembles one I know in some scholarly writing, where one co-author found an error while proofreading a long work -- an ordinary word rendered obscene by mistake -- but another co-author counseled leaving it, to reward any reader with the stamina to get that far through the whole thing. I counsel the same with O'Brian.) Bravo, reefpimp! At your convenience, please tip off the New York Times.(Today foundering. Tomorrow, parameters. Why not aim high?)

Greetings Old Foodie and I have not checked those online references as yet, but I know of a good famous (1990s) print treatment on the Delmonico family, their contributions to the modern restaurant idea, and possibly the story of the scandal of this Epicurean book -- I handled the document within a couple weeks, but it's not handy at the moment. It was maybe 1994, an important archival essay pub'n (not necessarily online, as usual). If anyone knows the one I mean, please fill in the details. Meanwhile could you tell us more about this "Internet Archive?" I know about a few generic Internet Archives going back some time but not that one, and would appreciate background from an experienced user. Bonus anecdote: One cook friend found The Epicurean for $10 circa 1999 at a neighborhood bookshop in N. Ca. that prices slightly used slick TV-chef cookbooks rather more expertly at whatever the fashionable market will bear -- $50, $120 -- but not (evidently) a 100-year-old book. This is why to look into used bookshops whenever you can. As if to prove the same point, in 2001 at a nearby bar, [a foodie] said to [a chef now working in US Southeast] that if [the chef] actually, seriously, lacked a copy of the 1961 Crown LG then it could likely be had instantly for $10-$15 at [the same bookshop I mentioned] because so many copies are in circulation you can find them on the shelves of most used bookstores. Foodie excused self and, in no more time than for any other call of nature, returned, Crown '61 LG in hand, demanding the $10 it had cost, plus tax. I witnessed this.

ladybug, I'm no expert on food books but I got curious and did a tiny check. (Again not online.) Vicaire, ultimate reference on food books (more posted here, search under his name) has pages on Grimod's Almanach and they're all about the original editions, First through Eighth Years (pub. 1803-1812, anonymously by the way) and his Manual des Amphitryons. A little about editions soon after. Publishers at Paris were Maradan, Joseph Chaumerot. Nothing on English translations (which Vicaire does list for other works). Two main 20th-c. English-language counterparts (US and British) just summarize Vicaire. If you are still and seriously interested, please send an email. I know at least some heavyweight resources in US and Europe, not to be used casually, who might rise to a challenge like this. If you can converse even slightly in French, it expands the options, but it's not essential. -- Max

Maybe the most common reference I hear, connected to Grimod at least implicitly, is a roast called a "Turducken" that people in the US started talking about a few years ago, though the ones I heard, like John Madden, didn't mention Grimod. It's a boned turkey stuffed with a boned duck stuffed with a boned chicken. I thought, OK, that's a simplification of the famous one, which various food writers and pundits allude to. Who knows how much of this is available online (little that I post on eG came from reading online), but I do find plenty of people who are not food professionals but know about the older dish. ("And isn't there, like, an anchovy in the very center, and some decadent gourmet would just eat the anchovy?" That sort of thing.) Something I posted elsewhere a few years ago. Some details here are from 1988 anglophone LG. -- This US triple bird is a simplified form of a venerable tradition of concentric bird roasts dating to the Romans and re-popularized in 1837 by the great food writer and theater critic A. B. L. Grimod de la Reynière at his death, Christmas eve 1837 -- he died during the midnight feast -- leaving a recipe for an "unparalleled roast," beginning with an olive stuffed with capers and anchovies and then into a garden warbler, and on up to a pullet, a duck, a turkey, and beyond -- 17 birds in all, and at the same time the recipe was an allegorical critique of the leading actresses of the day (except for the one that was his girlfriend) -- since he was, after all, a drama critic. By the way, on the snails issue (from another thread), Dumas does not have the story either [the one about the medieval family being saved after crop failure by eating snails, consequently being suspected, and cleared, of dealing with the devil], but he does say that snails were known as food also to the Romans and that "a broth that is very soothing to consumptives is made from snails."

A very brief (purported) passage is quoted in Rouff's translated Passionate Epicure (which in turn I mentioned in one or two postings here). In fact, I see I have it transcribed. There may be more in the same book. This is an argument for getting Rouff, if you don't have it already (which makes this posting a book review). It also suggests, apropos the French cookbook thread, that people complained about thickened sauces long before our time. -- Max -------- Sometimes, in the middle of the conversation, [Dodin-Bouffant] would rise, walk over to the favourite shelves of his library, select therefrom a rare volume of the Almanach des Gourmands, open it with the deft gesture of a habitual book handler, and say: 'Grimod de la Reyniere wrote: “Sixth year. Chapter on bindings. The immoderate use of roux and coulis has formed all the charlatanism of French cuisine for the past hundred years.” '

It's a fascinating book by the way, I know it also. Generally, books will care for themselves (if you keep them away from pests, moisture, etc). What's amazing is that quality went down so much during the 20th century (switch from rag to wood paper, often acid too, and departure from the old durable, "life-long" construction sensibility for mainstream books) that it's not unusual to find 100-year-old books in "newer" and more durable condition than 20-year-old books, unless they got a lot of handling and wear.

What's the real question here? Books on French cooking sort along multiple axes. Classic French cooking, later departures, or regional or specialty? Books by French cooks, or books by people who aren't French (or cooks)? If classic French cooking, do you want recipes (Escoffier), or step-by-step photos (Pepin)? Some classic French reference cookbooks I've used are the main one (Escoffier's Guide Culinaire) and two encyclopedias from one publisher: Larousse Gastronomique (various editions cited above, all different), and Saint-Ange (Livre de Cuisine, the 1927 has glorious oversaturated color plates, I've seen later eds. with more pix; now reportedly it's in English translation). A well-kept secret at least in US: Don't be put off by books in other languages. Cookbooks in European languages that I've seen use limited vocabularies. If you're seriously interested in cooking and can use a dictionary, you'll find they open up quickly, much quicker than general literature. (Besides if you are reading this you know English wherein maybe 25% of core vocabulary came from French anyway including many food terms. One Frenchman marveled after asking the English for sauté and being told "sauté." No, he said, I want the English, not French. They're the same, he was told.) Julia Child is often cited by US readers. Several predecessors did a good job of popularizing French cooking in their day, right up to Julia's time. (An earlier example was a former US president and food obsessive whose notes, experimental garden, and seed swapping read like Alice Waters.) Escoffier's Guide Culinaire has been in print in popular English translations for a century. (It's the catalog of recipes non-French authors adapt from. Why not go to the source?) Julia Child's books are basically bits of Guide Culinaire with more explanation, plus anecdotes of France and Colette and the OSS and difficult viewers writing in. (At least in my favorite of her books, the 1975 From Julia Child's Kitchen, which I just checked. You've seen that book -- the same copy in fact -- if you viewed the 1997 Biography TV program on Julia Child from the Arts and Entertainment network.)

Not to argue with that point, you'd likely be far worse off still, had you started with the original. It was basically a midwestern family cookbook based on canned food, sold as a fund-raiser. Each later edition was more or less unrecognizeable but even the major 1943 edition was pretty limited (when I checked a couple dozen savory recipes in it some years ago they all had the same seasonings: Salt, pepper, and paprika). It is as if the title became a "brand" -- like Hoyle for card games -- for whatever each edition's writers wanted to include. How much books change by edition depends on the book. In particular Marcella Hazan's original (1973) and second (1978) books were very well written and popular, millions of copies are on people's shelves. They are to northern Italian cooking in the US what Julia Child is to French (Julia Child said so too). They also led (very indirectly it's true) to the original public cooking discussion forum on the Internet (1982), of which what you're now reading is a remote descendant.

Yes, Prodigy was one of about a half-dozen major communications or computer-services enterprises that attempted commercial online networks separate from the Internet, with private content control (unlike the newsgroups or mailing lists, which were the standard Internet discussion-forum tools beginning in the 1970s). By the middle 1990s these independent networks had opened Internet mail service and (eventually) full Internet access to their subscribers.

A notice on the original public forum (still active) is Here. I've observed in that 25-year interval that when people come on to the Internet (or write about it from outside, as in the American Scholar article cited in the message), their attention is more on what's novel than on traditions. But sometimes those are worth noticing, especially on a milestone like this. Bon appétit! -- Max

A good point worth repeating. Methanol seems to've been a star in the crowded constellation of 19th-c. health problems associated with absinthe and misattributed. More below* from a summary I assembled of absinthe myths. Much of the misattribution story is in Barnaby Conrad's 1988 Absinthe book (reissued 1997), the standard modern US introduction to the subject. -- Max * Magnan, the French physician, branded absinthe a convulsive toxin in 1869, securing some of its notoriety (on early work and conclusions considerably discredited later). Some context helps to understand 19th-century stories of absinthe's ill effects. Early firms such as Pernod Fils made a premium product from grape alcohol and quality ingredients, aimed at connoisseurs. As a fad for absinthe developed in France and Europe, many firms entered to compete. Some of them employed industrial alcohol of uncertain composition, others used crude coloring materials for the emerald green hue Pernod got from herb leaves. (Food and drink adulteration were commonplace in those days.**) These shortcuts had health effects separate from those of quality absinthe. Anti-absinthe propaganda and absinthe lore (even now) have not always been particular about the distinctions. ** Get ahold of the common Crown 1961 (English-language) Larousse Gastronomique and look up Reverdir, the "re-greening" of vegetables by blanching with copper salts, which were seriously toxic but gave a fine green color. This, by the way, is typical of many interesting information tidbits absent from later editions of the same book.

This all reflects a longtime radical contradiction (long predating the recent growth in absinth interest) within USFDA's formal classification of thujone-containing herbs, which I've summarized elsewhere as follows. US FDA's massive EAFUS index (Everything Added to Food in the US) lists wormwood (A. absinthium) and its products as banned, beyond trace amounts, on the basis of containing thujone, whose 1869 French stigma as toxic was the technical rationale for banning absinthium-flavored liquors internationally (1910-1915). Thujone was later understood to be part of "many essential oils" [1940s source] including of common cooking sage, an ancient food herb with thujone levels like A. absinthium's and classified in the same EAFUS list as having the highest possible safety rating. More, if you're interested: If you smell a jar of reasonably fresh ground sage, you are sensing camphor and thujone, its two major principles and chemically related (as are menthol from mint and thymol from thyme, by the way). And be careful always to quantitatively define "toxic." Sometimes overlooked by current hobbyists and journalists is that natural thujone's lethal dose (available for decades in reference books in any library) resembles those of other physiologically active components in foods including caffeine (mouse LD50s both about 135 mg/kg), which, like thujone, kills by convulsions in gross overdose. Very gross, because for a human-sized animal that's around 100 cups of coffee for caffeine, or a staggering quantity of cooking sage for thujone, or 150-300 bottles of even thujone-rich absinthe liquor (and 1-2 bottles of any distilled liquor contain a human-lethal amount of alcohol). Besides which, traditionally-made absinthe liquors can lack any thujone in the finished product anyway, and have been boasting of it for about a century. All of this information has been available to anyone who'll read read the literature on the subject, though some of it is overlooked or "rediscovered" lately. Cheers -- MaxH

Note that Benson's English translation of Ali-Bab, cited repeatedly in this thread, got sharp criticism from the same source John Whiting cited above on the floured-sauce fad (the Hesses' broad, often critical 1977 Taste of America, ISBN 0670693766,* which besides its original content is a concentrated sourcebook on US and historical cookbooks). The Hesses mentioned unacknowledged omission of sections and of half of the recipes, and questioned some specifics of recipes retained and excluded. Adding (by coincidence) that the measurement conversions also implicitly increased the flour content of sauces. Same source also favorably reviewed Olney's Simple French Food and contemporary books (not all on French cooking) by Hazan, Wolfert, Diana Kennedy, Madeleine Kamman, etc. Of the (now) three main English-language editions of Larousse Gastronomique, all are readily available (US used book shops for decades have had inexpensive copies of the first, the 1961 Crown edition, which is close to the 1938 French original in many parts, and is enjoyed for reasons beyond just recipes). -- Max The Taste of America was reprinted in 1999 with supplements. It's in acid-free paperback as ISBN 0252068750. At the risk of repetition, you can quickly find any book with an ISBN by searching on that number at your favorite online used-book source, or at dealers like amazon.com that both sell new books and act as clearinghouses for used ones. You can even simply Google the exact phrase such as "ISBN 0252068750" and find copies of the book (which is how I verify ISBNs here before posting them). That's one thing online sources are very good for.

Thanks srhcb (I just returned to this thread and caught up). The distinction you spotlighted between "food writing" and writing directly about food seemed to me excellent, and worth exploring. Regarding earlier writers, I thought of Marcel Rouff (1925), an acknowledged (and quoted) influence on mainstream 20th-c. authors popular in the US. Surely including MFKF herself. (I mentioned Rouff in another thread Here.) Also Dumas's food "dictionary" (popular in US in Colman's edition, 1958) which, like Rouff, is full of parable and allegory; it concentrates its author's longstanding interest. To another point here, 15 years ago when I remarked that Rouff's book was a mixture of food and sex, a friend shrugged "Of course! It's French!" Much of this applies too to Grimod de la Reynière (d. 1837) who predated Dumas, crops up by allusion all over the place, and may have been more prolific as a "food writer" than all of these others together including MFKF (whose original career by the way was, if I remember right, writing for Hollywood and not all of whose books have even incidentally to do with food). These, and MFKF, all seem to me part of a continuum of writers I've run into, mainstream in their time and later, who express this idea of "food writing." I don't claim expertise on this literature: these are just some of the authors I've run into repeatedly, as a reader alert to food. If I did any research, I might identify many others from various countries. (I wouldn't start online, because this is exactly the kind of subject matter where easy public online sources give thin or highly skewed representation. And are excellent mythmakers as I could show in other genres). Maybe I'm over-sensitized now to claims of historical novelty. Thanks to recent published assertions about, say, the 1976 Spurrier (US-France) wine tasting, or who in the US pioneered mainstream writing about French cooking. (Assertions that contradict longstanding and easily available information.) This issue isn't limited to food by the way, it's a problem even in unrelated and scholarly subjects.

By the way, an earlier thread on this same subject (late 2005) developed on another (mainly wine-oriented) site but didn't go into nearly as much depth. srhcb, could you expand on that comment? The "invented" part. I think I get your sense of "food writing," but at least one famous antecedent comes to mind right away, maybe more. (Maybe to you too, or to other readers). I'm assuming that Fisher's "food writing" began, to speak of, about 1940. Even if the label is ultimately very apt, comparison to others of that era and earlier might be interesting. -- Max

This is an interesting, unusual thread. The question in the thread is a tough call for my collection because of several candidates. (The question being broader than just cookbooks opens important territory.) 10 or 20 years ago I might have named Marcell Rouff's Passionate Epicure (just cited in another thread under Food Literature, currently Here.) That book was familiar to the point of cliché in the US some decades ago but probably unfamiliar today. But I have something more unusual, and until recently hard to find: Vicaire. More or less the principal reference book on food and cooking literature in the Western world, from Apicius forward. It's not useful for "recent" titles but that has little to do with its impact or sometimes exotic content. Vicaire was the great European bibliographer of vast scope and contacts, whose name surfaces in the book world on other subjects, but he was a food enthusiast also, and his Bibliographie Gastronomique may have been a labor of love. It was also the reference of Bitting (below), whose US counterpart book is the standard US historical food-book reference (and whose collection later started the US Library of Congress cookbook section). Vicaire is now, very helpfully, available in acid-free facsimile edition at moderate price from Martino Press as ISBN 1888262354; previously you had to find an original, which was more expensive, I assure you. (Before posting this, I checked for references to Vicaire on eGullet but found none, beyond a quotation from it that I posted in 2005.) -- Max “Real progress [in my collecting of books on gastronomy and allied subjects] was not made, however, until [i got] a copy of Vicaire’s _Bibliographie Gastronomique._ This masterpiece in its field was published in Paris in 1890 and covers the early European literature in a most satisfactory manner. Vicaire was librarian to the Bibliothèque nationale and correspondent to the Vatican Library, thus having access to unlimited works. . . .” Katherine Golden Bitting, 1939 (San Francisco)

(Not to mention -- a more general point -- that many, many good quotations aren't online anyway -- the updated equivalent of "not in Bartlett's." And therefore not Googlable. Even if well known in print, or among enthusiasts. Unless someone happens to post them in a thread like this one, for example.) -- Max The Brillat-Savarins came of heroic stock and all died at the dinner-table, fork in hand. Brillat's great-aunt, for example, died at the age of 93 while sipping a glass of old Virieu, while Pierrette, his sister, two months before her hundredth birthday, uttered (at table) the following last words which are forever enshrined in the memory of good Frenchmen: `Vite,' she cried, `apportez-moi le dessert -- je sens que je vais passer!' -- Lawrence Durrell, preface. Marcel Rouff, The Passionate Epicure; La Vie et la Passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet, Delamain, Poutelleau et Cie., 1925. English translation by Claude [sic], E. P. Dutton, 1962. LCC number 62-7803. This book was well known to anglophone cooking readers of the generation that saw the translation appear in the early 1960s. It is cited in cooking writings by Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, and others.

Have to be careful of course what you mean by "butter," since caseinate and carbohydrate solids in unclarified butter lower its temp. range (or turn it into "brown" or "black" butter sauce). Please also teach the first quoted comment to ducks, because the duck fat I used in the earlier anecdote didn't seem to've gotten the word, and was smoking low enough to greatly slow the browning of the starch, compared with clarified butter (which I've used more often, the past 40 years). Both smoke nominally around 375 but this particular batch of duck fat was very obviously low. YDMV. Also I referred above not to light roux for white sauce, but 20-minute "roux" roux (the classic, Escoffier's "brown," from literal "russet" coloring; the 20 minutes is a typical number, also mentioned by Escoffier among others) for another purpose, less relevant for white sauces for M&C, but still a cautionary lesson in duckfat temp range. But to repeat, the whole issue is less relevant anyway, because of a principle I think is more important: you can always "decouple" the fat's cooking properties from the starch's by cooking them separately. (This also decouples the roux-making from tradition, but again, it's SOP in industrial food processing.) I'd reviewed it before posting here. Actually the thread began with exactly that distinction on roux colors, and ranged very wide, spinning off a larger thread by email (including diverting but secondary exchanges on language and anglophone language reference dictionaries -- AHD, "NED," OCD, ...). A contributor immediately cited Prudhomme's popularization of the so-called "Cajun napalm" from extremely hot oil, and described (the contributor) keeping rendered goose, duck, and chicken fats on hand as well as lard, but doubted their utility in Cajun roux because "the smoking point is too low."My comments on roux were not, by the way, meant to hijack the thread onto one on roux science, a potential separate topic. Part of my own interest comes from experience with commercial vegetable dextrins starting around 1967. They are common simple vegetable gums and if you do what I do periodically and roast corn or potato starch in the oven, gently, until it is beginning to brown uniformly, then keep it in a sealed jar, you will have instant "roux. " The powder has a faintly sweet taste and aroma that may seem familiar but hard to place, until someone recalls a sheet of traditional postage stamps -- same aroma because same stuff, it's used as a water-soluble gum for paper products.

I can see that. FYI unfortunately there's a technical problem making roux with duck fat, and I can testify because it nailed me not long ago. (This is actually an old topic on Internet food fora, there was a long public discussion of roux subtleties including fat differences, in rec.food.cooking, August 1988.*) The problem is that to cook the starch efficiently (converting to dextrin and slightly browning it too) favors temps around 375 Fahrenheit or higher. Unfortunately duck fat, of all cooking fats, has a very low smoke point, often lower than that -- Your Ducks May Vary of course. Last time I did it, keeping the heat at a point where the duck fat didn't break down resulted in very, very slow rouxmaking -- not your customary 20 minutes or so. (Higher-temperature fats have higher smoke points around 450 F, which is where many hydrocarbons start to burn anyway.) Of course you can always do what they do industrially: Brown the starch separately (in the oven or a pan, but without water) then add the fat of choice. It's not Guide Culinaire but as I say, it's done all the time. I still think (repeating from upthread IIRC) the most elegant Cheese-Pasta dishes are made with just pasta and (mixed) cheeses that will melt into it, with other flavorings to taste. And by the way, ironically that is in the Guide Culinaire from 100 or so years ago! Cheers -- Max * Not in the Google archive I think, though archived by participants. Main source for Google's "Groups" archives omitted Internet food and wine newsgroups in late 1980s and early 1990s though it had them earlier and later.