Toby

John, further research has confused the issue for me. In The Vermillion Bird, Edward Schafer describes a small fruit, comparable to the jujube in size, as the "so-called Chinese olive (Canarium album)." Apparently, they were sour when eaten fresh, but became very sweet when steeped in honey. So maybe these were native fruits, not related to the Mediterranean olive???

MFK Fisher was the writer who let me see that it was OK to write about food and one's life together. Food has always played such an enormous role in my life, memories, imagination, but I'd always thought it was a subject you didn't mix with non-food writing -- that readers wouldn't be interested in the mix of emotion, memory and food.

Judy Rodgers, chef at Zuni's in San Francisco, is supposed to have a book coming out in the fall. I can't wait. Also, Deborah Madison's Local Flavors is beautiful, probably the most successful of her cookbooks. The recipes are light and simple.

The first Indian food I ever cooked was Lamb Pullao from Jaffrey's Invitation to Indian Cooking. I loved that dish and used to cook it over and over. I always used lamb neck -- it was very inexpensive and I prefer meat with bones. I'd never use an expensive cut of lamb for stewing. I also used to make pyazwala khare masale ka gosht -- lamb neck or shoulder with whole spices and onions, and kheema with ground lamb and peas. I also cook Italian lamb stews and Moroccon tagines; also a Moroccan steamed lamb, where the shoulder or neck is left whole and rubbed with a paste of garlic, cilantro, cumin, salt, pepper and olive oil and then steamed for about 2 hours. The meat comes right off the bone. Is meat ever steamed in India? The only place I've found whole lamb neck in New York is in the meat stores on 9th Avenue in the 30s. Does anyone know other sources? I eat a lot of Jamaican curry goat and that also uses bony meat. The only goat I've seen has been in Chinatown butchers, but it's frozen. Again, sources for fresh goat? Some recipes, Suvir, please for Indian lamb/goat dishes?

I'm always amazed that there are so few Indian cookbooks in the U.S. in comparison to other cuisines. An Invitation to Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey was the first Indian cookbook I owned (my copy cost $3.95 back in 1975). I loved that book and found the recipes worked. But I had less luck with A Taste of India, although the book is beautiful and the writing about regional Indian food and traditions is beguiling. I recently got her World Vegetarian book; there are many Indian recipes in it. Jaffrey's writing is more inspiring to me than Sahni's. And I'm grateful to Suvir for his writing on the philosophy, multiplicity and social customs of Indian food and cooking -- he gives a dimension to Indian food that I previously didn't know about. I recently bought Curried Favors -- Family Recipes from South India, by Maya Kaimal MacMillan, but haven't cooked from it yet. Has anyone used it? Also, The Indian Inspired Cookbook, by Bharti Kirchner is an attempt at Indian fusion; I get a muddled impression from reading the recipes and have never been galvanized to get up and cook from it, although I keep on thinking I might.

A few years ago the Times had a recipe for rose with a few spoonfuls of creme de peche de vigne (no idea how to do these accents either) added to it for before-dinner drink. It was so delicious. My neighborhood wine store had a rose from Saintsbury with something about van Gogh in the name (can't remember) that was good and under $10. I also like Bonny Doon's vin gris (I think the Times last Wednesday had an article on roses, rating several).

I've heard that about digestion, too, but don't know if it's accurate. Do you have any idea why some recipes say to soak lentils? They cook in 30-40 minutes as it is. I just wash them. When I used to soak beans, sometimes I then didn't have time to cook them and would just leave them in the refrigerator til the next day. Sometimes they smelled a little fermented. I also found soaked beans tended not to get as silky in the middle; I'm wondering what soaking and then freezing might do to the texture?

V, slightly off topic, but what are the benefits of soaking? I used to soak beans and then I forgot to soak them so I just threw the dry beans in the pot. I found I liked the taste and texture more unsoaked. (I still soak chickpeas.) It takes longer to cook them, so I try to get fresh beans, by buying in places that sell them in bulk with a high turnover so they're fresh. Sometimes I can get freshly dried beans at the farmers' market. I know cookbooks always tell you to soak them, but people from countries where beans are a staple seem not to soak them when they cook at home.

Colette wrote some lovely short pieces on food and eating. Four of them are included in a collection of her autobiographical writings, Earthly Paradise: Recriminations; Wines; Cheese; and Truffles.

"If you dig deep into Persian you start to see the Indian in it." Steve, sometimes your gnomic expressions actually come close. The Mughals who ruled India had ties to Iran; I think Farsi was the court language in India during the Mughal reign. Also, note similarity between Indian miniature illuminations and Persian ones. Also, look at map (geography).

I don't usually go to vegetarian restaurants because I like meat, but the food at Pongal is so delicate and yet so hot that I don't really miss meat for the meal. I agree with you that all food can be wonderful; I was talking with my friend who's a vegetarian about why I eat meat. I've tried for long periods not to eat meat, but my body seems to need it; I feel very weak without meat, otherwise I wouldn't be involved in causing animals to be slaughtered. But since the animal gives up its life, I feel better knowing I'm eating all the parts of it. I've seen people eat lobster, and they eat the claws and the tail and want to throw away the rest. Aside from the rest of the lobster being delicious and the pleasure of sucking and picking at the hard-to-get parts, the lobster valued every parts of its body equally, so why shouldn't we? And all food, if grown/raised well and prepared well, is delicious. The thought that there's so much food, so many varieties, so many cuisines, so many ways of making even the same dish, makes me want to live forever so I can get to eat all of it. Suvir, how is Bhel Puri made? We just picked it off the the appetizer menu -- I'd never heard of it before, and it was delicious. It was crunchy and made a nice contrast to the iddly.

Mark, those are my nephew's peppers in the pictures. The farm is called Eckerton Hill Farms. We did the Bowers festival for a few years, but not 2001. I'm glad you posted them -- the former co-manager of the farm is visiting in NY this weekend, and I had seen these pictures on the internet (I think your website) and wanted to find them for her. There was another picture that she was in, waiting on a customer (Bowers Festival 99). We packed that bottle full of peppers -- I think there were over 1500 peppers in it. It was a total production involving a lot of people and the jar was extremely heavy and difficult to transport. It was pretty funny. Pepper season starts in late August, early September and lasts until frost, usually sometime in October.

I buy African bird cayenne powder at the African market on 9th Avenue, around 39th Street. It is very hot. I use it in gumbos, jambalayas, etoufees, and a little bit as seasoning when dredging fish or chicken in flour, along with the salt and peppers. In San Francisco I got a super hot variety of this pepper -- one time, I got a little on my hand and it literally burnt my skin. My nephew is a farmer who grows over 100 varieties of chile peppers (as well as heirloom tomatoes). We sell the peppers at the farmers' market in the fall. Chiles are so beautiful and so fragrant that people stop just to marvel at the colors. Among my favorites are fatalli -- a beautiful, lemon yellow pepper in the scotch bonnet family, that is very hot and goes very well with fruit or fish. Grenada seasoning pepper is a pretty yellow pepper with scotch bonnet flavor but with very mild heat. We have all kinds of thai peppers and some slightly bigger green peppers that Indian customers recognize from home. We have peppers from South America, including the tiny wiri wiri from Guyana, and all over the West Indies, as well as some European varieties that are bigger and mildly hot. One of the best parts of being at the market for me is seeing people's faces light up when they see a pepper from home that they haven't seen in the U.S. before. It makes you realize how much food is wrapped up in who we are. Another pepper I love isn't a chile pepper but a sweet pepper -- it's shaped something like a pasilla and is scarlet colored -- called a Nardello. They're wonderful sauteed, or grilled. I make a lot of hot sauces (pepper sauces) with the different scotch bonnets and seasoning peppers combined with spices and fruit and sometimes, rum. I made a mild sauce with several kinds of Turkish and Asian red cayenne peppers combined with pomegranate molasses that I use in stews with vegetables or with chicken or lamb. The West Indian combination of fresh chiles with nutmeg, cloves, pimento leaves, allspice seems very influenced by Indian cooking; I know there are many Indians living in the different islands and in Guyana.

Suvir, Anil, Thanks for suggestions. We went to Pongal. It was wonderful. It's only a few blocks from my house and each time I eat there I am astonished that I don't eat there more often. We had iddly and bhel puri to start and then paper masala with spicy mashed potatoes (potates were delicious), and gulab jamun for dessert. Everything was delicious. We both like chiles, and it felt great having all those hot flavors going on in our mouths. It was a real treat for my friend, who'd never eaten food from South India before, and being in rural Pennsylvania, doesn't get much of a chance to eat good Indian food of any kind. I could have eaten everything on the menu. I think I'll try Dimple in the daytime. Thanks again.

Isn't all this economic stuff based on the assumption that the marketplace is made up of business people and corporations motivated by honesty, integrity and honor?

And as for bread, I love their filone (I think that's the name -- it's the big one that they'll sell half loaves of); also their seeded loaf.

The grape and anise bread (is it schiacciata?) is wonderful. I also like their white pizza with potatoes.

This is very interesting thread -- it seems that whether people do or don't taste as they cook can be an instinctive choice -- I never thought about it one way or the other and then when I started cooking with people I saw some of them tasted all the time. Maybe it has something to do with the way you set up and maintain rapport between yourself and another entity. I also don't like people tasting food I've cooked until it's actually on the table and we're serving it. My best friend cooks professionally and he tastes as he cooks and what drives me nuts is he tastes all the way from the kitchen to the table and before anyone's started eating he's nibbling, very delicately, but picking off pieces. I had a hot sauce business and when I was developing the recipes I pretty much had to do it by smell because once you tasted it once, it was so hot you couldn't tell anything by tasting it again. So I tasted it once at the end to see if it needed more salt. Working with chiles is very difficult because the heat level varies so much from one pepper to another, and you can't taste each pepper, so smell is really the only indication you have. I know when the food is cooking and I'm in the kitchen very close to the stove the aromas are much more discreet and individual than if I go out in the hallway where the smell is much more rounded and of a whole. You know how people say "Oh that smells delicious," when they first come in. So maybe it's the closeness that lets me be able to tell the balance of flavors, seasonings. When I have a bad head cold I don't even bother trying to cook anything other than soup, because I can't taste a thing.

Daphne's on 14th St. near 2nd Avenue for Jamaican food -- and the rum cake. Second Nathan's in Coney Island (french fries and they have fried frogs legs) and the Mexican place Tommy said on 9th Avenue -- the tacos are great. Manna's (I think that's the name) on east side of Lenox Ave. near 135th Street (right near the hospital and subway station) -- cafeteria style food with huge turnover from hospital workers so food is always fresh -- huge assortment of southern food (smothered pork chops, fried chicken, smothered chicken, bbq ribs, collards, sweet potatoes, cornbread, macaroni and cheese) and West Indian food (jerk, stewed cabbage, fried platanos) sold by weight, prices are unbelievably low.

I use Chaokoh brand also for Thai and Laotian curries. Lately, I've been cooking a lot of curries from the Caribbean islands and Guyana, which I'm sure were influenced by the Indian populations who settled in the region. I make Jamaican curry goat and curry chicken. One of my students is Indian from Guyana and she made a shrimp, potato and green bean curry with coconut milk for a party that was extremely dark and spicy tasting. What kind of a utensil is used in India to raw fresh coconuts? My Laotian friends had a device called a ka-tai or "rabbit" -- it looked something like a skateboard with 2 legs underneath. You sat on one end and grated the coconut half over the other end, which was sharp and projected out from the end of the board.

I hardly ever taste while cooking; I don't know why, I just never did. The only time I taste is when I'm making something I've made before and really like and I taste it because I like it so much, but not to see how it's doing. Generally, I can tell from how it smells and how it looks in the pot (color, degree of activity from heat) how it tastes. The only times I ever have trouble is if I change the type of salt I'm using and then I taste. I've noticed that when I cook a very large meal and might be cooking all day long, even though I haven't been tasting, I usually feel as if I've eaten, but then the leftovers next day are a treat. I think it's because I've been standing over the stove inhaling the smells all day. What is the tradition in India and what is the thinking behind the tradition?

A friend who works on a farm in Pennsylvania is coming to NY for the weekend and we were thinking of eating at Pongal's. She's lived in Mali and traveled throughout Africa and Southeast Asia so she is quite open to new foods. Also, we worked on a tomato and chile pepper farm together, so she likes spicy food a lot. However, she is a vegetarian, so I thought Pongal's would be perfect. I haven't eaten in Pongal's for some time now. Aside from the dosas and idlis, does anyone have any recommendations for other things to order there? I read through the thread on Dimples and now I'm torn about whether to go there or to Pongal's. My friend lives in a rural area with no chance of eating Indian food, and rarely has a chance to come into NY -- which restaurant would be a better choice? Also read through the thread on acquiring a taste for Indian food and was amazed all over again at the sheer complexity of the cuisine and the subcontinent itself. What a wonderful and informative -- I'm busy pulling my Indian cookbooks down from the shelf to look things up.

Ed, which cane syrup do you use? I'm always looking for different brands.

What about the countries that France colonized in the 19th century? What French influences did they accept into their own cuisines? Thinking mostly of SE Asia, which at the time of contact with the French had successfuly incorporated Indian and Chinese cuisines to make something unique. Did cuisines based on oil rather than butter never embrace French cooking in its entirety?

Excellent analysis, Jon. We often forget the importance mouth-feel and texture bring to the sensual satisfaction of eating and to our later memory of the food.