StevenC

The last time I made tuna confit, I mashed garlic and thyme with some coarse salt in a mortar and rubbed the mixture lightly over the pieces of tuna, which I then put in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. Then I wiped the fish and submerged it in olive oil, barely above 140F. At that point, you can either cook it all the way through, at the same low temperature, or refrigerate the partially cooked fish for at most a couple of days, and then finish the cooking right before service. Or, as a third option, you can cook it all the way through, put it in the fridge, and serve it at room temperature like canned tuna. (You don't want to serve it cold, because the olive oil congeals and doesn't look appetizing.) Personally, I find it has the best texture when you cook it straight through and serve it immediately. You have to be very careful with the cooking process, and particularly the temperature. A piece of tuna is much less forgiving than a duck leg, which has a lot of connective tissue, cartilage and its own fat. If you're not careful, the tuna will become dry and barely edible. If you're going to salt the fish before you cook it, also be careful not to use too much salt. Coarse salt is particularly useful in this regard. Done correctly, tuna confit can be wonderful--a real revelation to guests who are used to eating the canned stuff.

During a lunchtime walk, I happened to find a store that sold small bags of black Italian rice called Riso Nero di Venere. I had never encountered it before--I'm just familiar with the black rice of Southeast Asia. The label says the rice was produced in the area of Vicenza... I'll have to check my cookbooks from the Veneto this evening. Has anyone eaten or cooked with riso nero before? Can it be prepared as a risotto, or does the starch structure of the grains make it unsuitable for this method? Will it exude a dark purple color like Asian black rice? Many thanks!

Disheartening, but not in the least surprising. The article mentions hazelnut oil, among other types, being passed of as olive oil. I wonder how many people with nut allergies have gone into anaphylactic shock as a result of eating "olive oil" made from hazelnuts...

I know what you mean. When I lived in NYC I used to buy cooked jambon de Paris at Garden of Eden on East 14th between 5th and Union Square. Unlike American cooked ham, it smells and tastes of pork, not embalming fluid. Fantastic on a buttered baguette from Balthazar with a glass of Côtes du Rhône. I don't remember if they had Rosette de Lyon or other French cured meats. For example, I don't think I've ever seen jambon de Bayonne in the U.S.--I seem to recall that it was still on the federal ban list, but I'm not sure. You might also check Dean & Deluca in SoHo, maybe Citarella or Zabar's on the UWS.

Remember, lard is 100% fat, whereas regular sweet butter contains a significant amount of water, as well as some protein and lactose. So, the results are going to be somewhat different, with lard producing more crispiness. The public phobia about lard is stupid, especially considering that (1) margarine and artificial shortenings are more dangerous and (2) butter has twice the cholesterol (not that I take the cholesterol content of butter into account, ever). Plus, lard tastes much better than Crisco or the like. I think it was Rick Bayless who said that substituting Crisco for lard in a tamale is like substituting Crisco for butter in a croissant.

I regularly buy raw milk at Whole Foods here in San Francisco. On another eGullet thread I described the flavor as richer and more complex--"milkier"--than pasteurized whole milk, which seems to have a tired, flat taste. As for the health risk... I've never become sick, and I don't know of anyone who has. Even one of the scientists quoted in the article admitted that he drank raw milk throughout his childhood and never became sick. The article mentions that 25 percent of all food-related illnesses in 1938 were due to milk (note: the article doesn't say "raw milk"). But you have to ask, how were people getting their milk in 1938? What were veterinary standards like at the time? What about refrigerated transport? How long were milk bottles left to sit out on the front steps? And how many incidents of disease were caused specifically by raw milk? (I also find it noteworthy that the same scientist refuses to drink raw milk again because "the risk is not worth any benefit anyone has been able to prove"--that is, he'd drink raw milk only if someone could prove its purported health benefits were true. Better flavor never enters into the equation; it's totally irrelevant for him. What a fascinating peek into the mindset we're facing...) Sorry for the bloviating, but I get worked up about this issue!

A few favorites... A fig-and-lamb tajine Pan-roasted boneless quail stuffed with figs Bresaolo with mostarda di fichi Figs stuffed with almonds and dipped in chocolate Just be sure to serve Imodium with the after-dinner coffee...

According to this site--http://nv.essortment.com/makemozzarella_rkpy.htm--it's essential to use non-homogenized milk when making "mozzarella" from cow's milk at home. In other words, the sort that seems to come only in glass bottles, with the cream separated at the top.

Mukki, When I saw your post, my heart started to pound, and I rushed over to the Borders/Amazon site to search for the India book... alas, I saw the following message: "Availability: Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock." http://www.amazon.com/Culinaria-India/dp/3...86700268&sr=1-3 It still hasn't been published. I also checked the German Amazon site, and the German edition still isn't available. Where did you see the available listing? Could you post the URL?

Here in California it's legal to sell unpasteurized milk, and I regularly buy it at my local Whole Foods, which sells both raw milk and raw cream. Granted, it's not cheap--$3.99 for a quart of raw milk, $11.99 for a pint of raw cream--but it tastes a lot better than the pasteurized stuff. It has a rounder, more complex flavor... I guess "milkier" would be the best way to describe it. My next project is to make cream cheese from the raw cream... too bad it's so difficult to get proper bagels on the West Coast! I don't know that I'd put raw milk into a baby's bottle, but for otherwise healthy adults I simply don't see the issue. I mean, when we get into our cars every morning or go on a ski vacation we don't agonize over the risk of getting killed. Put a glass of raw milk or a hunk of Camembert in front of us, though, and we start screaming bloody murder, even though proportionally far more people die in car accidents or in ski mishaps every year than from drinking raw milk or eating unaged, unpasteurized cheese.

There was an interesting article this week in the NY Times about Senegalese stews. The cooking of Africa, apart from the Maghreb, is horribly under-represented in published cookbooks. A couple of years ago I bought Sénégal : La cuisine de ma mère, which seems a fair introduction. Is anyone aware of any other books out there, either in English or French? (Sorry, I don't read Wolof!) The NY Times article mentions regional/ethnic variations in Senegalese cuisine, and I'd be very interested to hear if anyone has encountered other books or monographs on the subject. Thanks!

I recommend anything by Sri Owen. I have Indonesian Food and Cookery, which I find quite thorough. More recently, she published Indonesian Regional Cooking. Both are available through private sellers on Amazon.

There are ISBNs for India and Britannia/Eire, but the books themselves were never published. The original German version of Culinaria: Russia is currently in print and available through Amazon.de. or www.buchgourmet.de ... I assume the English edition will be coming along sometime. There is apparently also a collection of Mini-Culinaria books--I just ordered Könemann's German edition of Mini Culinaria Provence. Quite a few others seem to be in the pipeline too.

Buch Gourmet in Cologne has a wonderful selection of cookbooks in several languages and great customer service for website orders. I buy from them often: http://www.buchgourmet.de/ Powell's in Portland, Oregon also has an extensive cookbook selection, with good prices. And, of course, there's the cookbook section at the Strand in New York, to which I owe a large chunk of my collection.

It works for me insofar as wines rated in the 80s often become wonderful bargains.

* The number of accessories and trinkets they sell * The absence of snobs like me

If you're into offal, go to Il Magazzino Osteria/Tripperia in the Piazza della Passera, in the Oltrarno. You won't find many tourists there.

Has anyone tried using goose eggs?

Back to the cheese-with-fish debate... I think the rule has a lot to do with the Italian philosophy of preparing simple dishes around a single theme. A pungent cheese and an oily fish are both too assertive and confrontational to allow a solo theme to come through when they're put in the same dish. In another context, another culinary tradition, a Stilton and mackerel pâté might be interesting, but I don't expect to see it on a menu in Italy. Also, "cheese" is a catch-all category. I'd hesitate to sprinkle parmigiano on a plate of spaghetti con le vongole , but a fresh mozzarella might play a very nice supporting role to the salty, hammy flavor of a giant prawn. Of course, rules are made to be broken. The foodwriter Fred Plotkin describes a meal in Venice where he ate spaghetti with a sauce of clams and cheese (I assume a hard grated cheese). And just try keeping me away from a white clam pizza in New Haven.

Leaving all the silly concerns about public drunkenness aside, I wonder if there may be an important commercial reason against allowing big-box supermarkets to siphon off revenue from smaller wine shops. Specifically, I'm thinking back to a similar debate in New York a few years ago. As I recall, owners of wine boutiques argued that they depended heavily on revenue from cheaper, mass-produced wines (Yellow Tail, etc.) to stay in business. If supermarkets were allowed to sell wine, they would draw away this crucial lower-end business, without necessarily stocking the quirky, artisanal wines that the sole proprietor of a wine shop might also sell. So, once the smaller shops were forced out of business by loss of revenue, it would be more difficult to find the more interesting wines. Meanwhile, proponents of supermarket sales argued that bad wine stores would be forced out of business, while the better shops would find a niche and survive. Not being terribly familiar with the economics of the wine retail business, I don't know where to come out. My instinct tells me that the buyer for a supermarket chain is much less likely to fill valuable shelf space with the handcrafted wines that intrigue connoisseurs, and the rise of supermarkets after World War II clearly forced thousands of independent butchers, fishmongers and fruit grocers out of business. On the other hand, it's just as clear that some specialty wine stores (and butchers, etc.) have managed to survive in places that allow supermarket sales. Does anyone know if before-and-after studies have ever been done?

Here are a few things I miss when shopping in the Northeastern U.S... peaches so purple-ripe they look like plums tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes, rather than styrofoam strawberries you can smell from across the street small-leaf Genovese basil fresh nepitella/mentuccia horse and donkey meat inexpensive guinea fowl and rabbit lampredotto 'nduja, guanciale, lardo di Colonnata and other artisanal salumi bottles of wine without insultingly stupid warnings on the back-label

Mentuccia is good with snails, as in the traditional Roman dish lumache di San Giovanni. I find it also works nicely with sauteed baby octopus and squid. Really, the possibilities are endless. In his article "Fries", reprinted in The Man Who Ate Everything, Jeffrey Steingarten describes potatoes deep-fried with garlic and fresh rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage and nepitella, a dish he ate near Lucca. He leaves out the nepitella when giving the recipe, a concession to the fact that it's almost impossible to find the herb in the United States. (I love his remark about nepitella--"an herb indispensible in Tuscany, where it grows like a weed, but virtually unknown in this country, despite the plague of eating places calling themselves Tuscan.")

Menus are posted at their website http://www.checchino-dal-1887.com/, but I don't know if it's up-to-date. I have a general rule of thumb for eating at restaurants in Italy: -- if the menu is just in Italian, the place is a must-eat -- if the menu is in two languages, still no problem -- if the menu is in three languages, exercise caution -- if the menu is in four or more languages, avoid the place unless you have a good reason to the contrary

Andre, Thanks so much for posting your notes. Food and wine--the great peacemakers. I have always been impressed with Lebanese wines. I should know more about Israeli wines than I do, but I'm learning. Best wishes to you in this difficult time.

Pure love of food. For instance, I quit a good legal job in New York and moved to Italy, where I studied wine and ate my way up and down the peninsula for a year. I guess that makes me a foodie (or an idiot).