Toby
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Posts posted by Toby
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I like Buzet. I don't know much about it at all -- tell me whatever you know, please.
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Thanks for all the bibliographical material. I have the de Groot book, but none of the others; will go to library. I too know almost nothing about this subject and just a bit about French provincial cooking, so please forgive, and don't hesitate to correct, errors in terminology. Also, the questions I have may be somewhat off topic and I won't be insulted if you tell me to start a new thread. I would rather not confuse issues at the start.
I'm particularly interested in the "frontier" regions of France -- those that shared borders and intermingling of populations with adjoining countries, rather than central French regions. As someone said in the other thread, recipes in the Mediterranean area were probably passed from neighbor to neighbor with regional variations happening along the way. Were these frontier regions sort of buffer zones which resisted French haute cuisine (correct term?) spreading to neighboring countries? Would Burgundy, the Lyonnais, the Loire and the Ile de France regions be those in which haute cuisine developed and flourished? How did haute cuisine coexist with provincial/home or bistrot cooking, from the point of view of the "low" cuisine; when refinements were made to this low cuisine, how were they regarded by those cooking/eating the new dishes? I'm thinking of Keller's "Coffee and Doughnuts" dessert, Boulud's hamburger. (The Chinese did plays on peasant cooking, often as refinements, or as commentary on their haute cuisine.)
Another question about French cuisine in 18th century America -- I have scattered information in my head about French-American friendship during the American Revolution; also about Jefferson's interest in French cuisine and his bringing some of it home with him to Monticello and then I would guess, to Washington. Also, French colonies in the West Indies, Louisiana territories, Canada? During the 19th century turmoil in France, did French chefs come to the Americas?
A last question: in the previous thread, the chefs and creators of the cuisines being discussed were rather absent from the discussion. Was the French system of training new cooks in place in large court and estate kitchens before the Revolution and then transferred into the restaurants that opened? And did this system ever catch on in the countries which adapted French cuisine?
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Suvir, What a wonderful post about bones and mouth sensations. I love bones. We didn't have much money when I was growing up and my mother always told us the meat was sweeter next to the bone. I always liked to get every last bit of meat off the bone and then really get whatever else I could. I much prefer cooking meat on the bone -- I like long-cooked dishes in any case and the bones add so much flavor.
Your description of mouth sensations is also very much how I ate my food as a child. I think it's a desire to extract all the flavor instead of just chewing and swallowing.
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In such an instantaneous and multiplicative medium as this, it's helpful to define whatever terms, geographical areas, historical periods we use as carefully and as early as possible to prevent endless misunderstandings.
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and cymlings sauteed in a little bacon fat
What's a cymling?
Like an ortolan? Is it mythical? (j/k)
SA
A cymling is a type of summer squash with a delicate flavor, probably more popular in the South. It's round and almost flat with scalloped edges, pale green color. Some people may call it a pattypan squash. You can sometimes find it in farmers' markets, probably later on in the summer.
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Just read all your reassuring posts; I'm not distressed, and having read some of you guys previous arguments, this one is certainly on a much higher, really non-acrimonious level, and really is about food. While the conversation, debate, argument, whatever, has been tedious at points, there's been a lot of really informative and thoughtful discussion, and some really, really funny parts. But having to prove something the best is provincial, and can be truly harmful.
And on the whole point of food transmission throughout Europe, the Mediterranean Sea was of enormous importance (can't remember if that's been mentioned).
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Yes, Nina, and I'm enjoying it too, up to a point. If I'm learning something
than it's enjoyable; otherwise, arguing has diminishing returns.
Speaking of succotash, I made one once with butter beans and fresh-picked corn, grated off the cob with their milk. I cooked the cobs in some chicken broth, sauteed some diced salt pork and then cooked the strained stock down with the salt pork. Added the butter beans, corn kernels, corn milk, some thinly sliced green onions, seasonings and finished off with a little heavy cream. It was so good on a summer night with sliced heirloom tomatoes, salt and pepper fried chicken, and cymlings sauteed in a little bacon fat with peach and berry cobbler for dessert.
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I find myself becoming increasingly verbose -- truly scary. However, I feel compelled to write briefly about what may seem political, but is only meant to discuss the ways that individually we can clear a little space from the ugliness in the world around us.
Trying to formulate what has been so provoking about the need to prove French cuisine dominant (aside from uninformed guesses about historical processes), I think what bothers me is the need to make one thing be #1; the terminal point of this is fundamentalism. In this bloodied world, and in this wounded city and country, I believe it's imperative that we just accept that we can like and believe in what we like and believe in and let others do the same. We can make our case for why we love/respect French/Chinese/Mexican, whatever cuisine without having to deny someone else the right to make their case. There are so many intelligent people here at egullet, and each of us has some area we know alot about that others might not. So in learning more deeply about what we like and what others like, we enrich ourselves and our culture and maybe make this world a less hateful place. If we ever want to be that shining city on a hill (no matter if that hill is in the U.S. or anywhere, because isn't that really the point of the U.S. in its most realized idealism?), we have to abandon this need to be dominant. Everyone said after September 11 that everything was changed; then why not change it in a better way rather than just making it bloodier? The only axe I have to grind here is why don't we just put away our axes.
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"Balance is the key issue in making something complex."
Steve, I agree with you completely on the above.
Do you have a copy of the Lins' Chinese Gastronomy? I think you would find it fascinating. Immediately after the section Cabrales quotes, they talk about discerning the sweet natural flavor, the aroma, the concentrated rich flavor and the taste of fat without oiliness (Western examples: caviar, cold fresh butter, avocado) through texture. There are 2 different words to describe texture --
Tsuei -- crisp, crunchy, a texture often brought out or concocted.
Nun -- Soft and tender; non-fibrous, a somewhat resilient texture brought out by skillful cooking.
They then point out that fish balls are an example of a sweet, natural flavor, and a balance between crisp and tender. Later on in the book, 3 pages are devoted to the theory behind achieving this balance in fish balls and then the basic rule for achieving it. "The monotonous, flaky texture of fish can be made at once crunchy, crisp, resilient and tender." A description of how the texture alters is then given, including avoidance of fibers and membranes before chopping and crushing the flesh into a paste. Next, salt is added to turn the mealy paste into a sticky, shiny gum (insipid to crunchy). Then the fish balls are formed by squeezing the paste out between the circle of index finger and thumb and then dropping them into ice water. The contact with water hardens the surface of the ball. The ice water is slowly brought to a boil and then held just below heating point to poach the fish balls.
Which can then bring us back to hamburgers, the base point of which seems to be that the meat is transformed into something else -- another texture and more -- by chopping, seasoning and application of cold/heat. This changes everything. From hamburgers you can move to meatballs, meatloaf on the one hand and to the most gorgeous pates on the other.
I think the very best cooking works because it uses great ingredients, understands the strengths and weaknesses of each ingredient, has meticulous execution, and a deft understanding and imaginative use of what works with what else to bring out all desired qualities. And something else, too, the cook's love for what they're doing is present in some ineluctable way in the most delicious food, or else there will be a coldness. But all of these will be present from the simplest to the most complex preparations. Yuan Mei, 18th century poet and food writer, warns that "a good cook cannot with the utmost application produce more than 4 successful dishes in one day, and even then it is hard for him to give proper attention to every detail ... I once dined with a merchant. ... altogether more than 40 kinds of food were served. My host regarded the dinner as an enormous success. But when I got home I was so hungry that I ordered a bowl of plain rice gruel. From this it may be imagined how little there was, despite this profusion of dishes, that was at all fit to eat."
Chinese Gastronomy is really about a highly evolved cuisine's rules for the stomach. China has always been a country with a huge base of people at subsistence level and a very thin upper tier profiting from the former's labor. A recurring theme throughout the book is the interplay between "high and low cuisines" and the attitude of the gourmand to enjoyment of "low" cooking, as well as the attitudes toward cooking and eating of those who, if they are lucky to eat at all, ate only the plainest foods.
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Jaymes and jaybee and John, thank you for your beautifully written memories. This is why I love egullet.
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Steve P., although you've modified some of your original positions, timewise, actually the transmission of food along trade and travel routes is a fascinating, although difficult, subject. We all know about how foods of the New World were spread to the rest of the world, but the centuries before then are less clear. We can't really count the last 150 years as an unconnected unit to the past. When I was in elementary school, my father who was good in math would help me (not good in math) study for math tests. When he saw I didn't really understand what I needed to know for the test, he would start going backwards in the book, until suddenly we were on page one. I'd be frantic because the test was the next morning and all I wanted to know was how to get the answers--I didn't want to understand how they were arrived at. But now I understand what he was trying to teach me. If you want a deep and true understanding, you have to go back to the beginning, painful and tedious as that may be. While I would be the first to admit that I have only a superficial knowledge on this topic (that really could go back to prehistoric times) some books that have interested me on transmission of goods, ideas, knowledge, peoples and their foods might be:
Rome and China, a Study of Correlations in Historical Events, by Frederick J. Teggart, U of CA Press, 1939
Trade Routes and Commerce of the Roman Empire, By M.P. Charlesworth, Ares Publishers Inc., 1924
The World of the Huns, Studies in Their History and Culture, by Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen (a personal favorite), U of CA Press, 1973
The Mummies of Urumchi, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Norton, 1999
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, volumes I and II, by Fernand Braudel, Harper Colophon Books, 1949, 1966
Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, 3 volumes, by Fernand Braudel, Harper & Row, 1979
The Vermillion Bird, T'ang Images of the South, by Edward H. Schafer, California, 1967
The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, A Study of T'ang Exotics, by Edward H. Schafer, California, 1963
And for a panaromic insight into haute cuisine (among other things) in the lives of upper class Chinese and their servants at the height of the Ch'ing dynasty (c. 1760 a.d.), the greatest classical Chinese novel, The Story of the Stone, trsl. David Hawkes, 5 volumes, Penguin Classics, 1970s
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Cabrales, thanks for adding more quotes from the Lins' book. I'm on my way out the door, but I just wanted to add that food writing and analysis goes way back in Chinese history. I studied Chinese and one of my very favorite readings that we translated in class was from Mencius, and it began, "As for me, I like bear paws." Su Tung Po, a famous poet, also wrote about food and had some dishes named after him, most famously fresh pork belly which got a very involved treatment. I'll look this up later.
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Jaymes, thank you for your beautiful memory. The world really isn't like that anymore, is it. I, for one, am burnt out on dining out -- my last restaurant meal involved a psychotic waiter who tried to open my birthday gift, forgot to bring me cream for my coffee several times (I ended up putting in the whipped cream from my dessert into the coffee) and then, when he finally did bring me cream with a new cup of coffee, advised me not to be alarmed by the globules of fat that might appear at the top of the coffee. I'd just as soon have dinner parties at home where we can sit for hours and eat course after course and drink wine without paying double.
However, I can think of 3 excellent restaurant meals -- one at Bouchon in Yountville, CA 2 winters ago. We went for lunch on a Saturday, sat for over 3 hours and had: French onion soup, charcuterie plate, oysters, watercress and endive salad with blue cheese, quiche du jour, and the single best dish I've ever eaten, a cauliflower gratin with gruyere and a little horseradish. I was amazed at how delicious it was -- the cauliflower taste was so pure. We had the cheese plate with honeycomb, and for dessert I had tarte tatin. There was nothing spectacular about the meal, but everything was made with wonderful ingredients and cooked perfectly. The service was great -- they bought our food and left us alone. Oh, and we had lillet blanc to start, and then a bottle of Blockheadia Ringnosii Sauvignon Blanc and then a glass of Joseph Phelps Delice du Semillon with dessert.
In New York, I've had 2 meals at The Tasting Room, which while a little uneven, were the most interesting I've eaten in NY. We had scallops from the farmers' market and squab and rabbit with hominy and bacon and a nice little plate of early spring vegetables from the market in a small amount of very buttery broth, and then we had some duck, and for dessert roasted rhubarb with strawberries and whipped cream with toasted black sesame seeds ground up in it and a lot of California wine.
Oh yeah, I had a superb meal at Blue Hill -- shot of mushroom soup with parmesan foam, arugula and iceberg lettuce salad with parmesan, monkfish cheeks with creme fraiche and herring roe with microgreen garnish, lobster, poached salmon in green sauce with fava beans, string beans, duck with swiss chard and also some incredible steamed or poached chicken, and rice pudding with passion fruit foam.
But still, the best meals I've ever had have been home-cooked.
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But the Italians weren't very modern. Nor were the Spanish.
Off the top of my head: Picasso, Miro, Gaudi, Lorca, Marinetti, Pirandello, Svevo.
Dali, Machado, Cervantes (first meta-novel), the foam guy, Chirroco (sp?), Fellini et al...
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"But that may need a different thread." Please, please start one.
How do we know that more people are interested in cassoulet than Tuscan beans? Which more people? The people reading this thread? People on egullet? New Yorkers? Americans? 1 billion Chinese? What do you mean by analyze? Are you talking about eating something and talking about it or cooking it?
Is it possible to be curious and then try to become knowledgeable about any of the non-Western cuisines without engaging in cultural appropriation? (I'm thinking of the fusion thread which got caught up in talking about a French dish in which curry powder had been added; I think the Asian and Middle Eastern touches in French food are atrocious -- the Vietnamese, for example, did a much better job of incorporating French techniques into their cuisine as in banh mi.) And once knowledgeable about a non-Western complex cuisine, come to see that all of the world's great cuisines are amazingly complete systems of beauty, grace and practicality?
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Well, I just logged on today and I see this discussion has grown. Steve, I think you should be more careful when discussing history.
On just one point, I believe that the type of high cuisine you're talking about was first codified in Florence during the early Renaissance in the 14th century, transmitted to the Bolognese and then to the Venetians and only then to the French.
The Italians do make a dish with white beans, duck, sausages, pancetta, sofritto, red wine, broth and parmesan that is close to cassoulet.
Whatever point of view a person is comfortable and happy with is fine -- Eurocentric or whatever. But a complex dish, in any cuisine, is simply made up of a lot of simpler elements. So you have more elements to analyze, but each element is relatively simple. Quantity or quality? Like if you don't know the alphabet, you can't read.
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I sometimes woder what the chinese would have done with olives...
Well actually the Chinese do something with olives; the trees wre probably first planted in China during the 6th century a.d. (I would imagine they came from the middle east -- there was a lot of trade going back and forth over the silk route.) They're eaten fresh, preserved in salt or dried. In South China, jumbo purple-black olives are boiled with sugar as a snack, and are preserved in salt for use in country cooking. The dried olives are added to steamed fish or steamed with oil, sugar and ginger and used as a snack. The dried ones have to be soaked. There are 3 long seeds inside each stone; these are skinned and sold as olive nuts -- supposedly they have a rich taste and crumbly texture and are used in pastries (mooncakes) and at banquets. The only recipe I could find was for spicy ground pork stir fried with fresh straw mushrooms, fresh red chile peppers, garlic and pickled Chinese olives.
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Again, that is asking everyone to agree that fine dining is high-end restaurants, and that that sort of food preparation is the ultimate goal of anyone interested in food. People are interested in what interests them, I think, more than what's of utility to them. I love food because of its infinite variety and for what it says about human creativity. Anything is of interest -- I don't believe there's a hierarchy of interest.
I'm actually more interested in what I can cook at home or eat in small, chef-owned restaurants where the chef is doing the cooking (or closely supervising) than in restaurants where the chef no longer touches the food. I believe food reflects the personality and soul of the person who touches and cooks it as well as their talent. In that respect, high-end restaurant food can also convey very confusing messages. (Of course, now I'm just arguing for the sake of arguing. But really, who is to say what the pinnacle of good eating/cooking is?)
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Stellabella, I can get figs but I make terrible fig preserves. What exactly and in detail, please, do you do?
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Jaymes, I've looked it up -- the full name of the company was Jardine, Matheson & Company, Ltd. (There's also another one called Matheson & Company.) Unfortunately, their early history involved opium dealing and operated somewhat like Enron. It got out of the drug business over 100 years ago and is still headquarted in Hong Kong and does business with China.
As to chicken curry, for some reason I've never cooked an Indian curry. I've made Thai and Burmese chicken curries and Mexican moles, and of course, Jamaican curry goat and curry chicken, which I would imagine were influenced by all the people from India who settled in the Caribbean region and then modified using local spices and peppers. It's interesting that all of these dishes are based on a blending of fragrant and hot spices/peppers -- the Southeast Asian curries are, of course, influenced by India, but moles, I think, were probably indigenous to the region before the arrival of the Spanish? I'm not very fond of Vietnamese chicken curry -- as I've tasted it in the U.S. it seems to be similar to what the French do -- add curry powder; none of the thoughtful blending and pounding to give depth.
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I've been frustrated by not being able to find green walnuts. In Aperitif, Georgeanne Brennan says, "... the walnuts must be immature, and the shell not yet formed beneath the thick green skin. The developing walnuts must be still tender enough to be pierced through with a needle." Apparently most of the walnuts in the U.S. are grown in California, where the walnuts, to be green, must be harvested between late May and mid-June. When I lived in San Francisco, I never saw green walnuts in the farmers' markets, although I guess I could have asked for them, but I didn't know much about them then.
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Everything is open to analysis. The world is a multiplicity of possibilities. It just depends on breadth of mind.
An interesting book on the philosophy of Chinese cuisine is Chinese Gastronomy by Hsiang Ju Lin and Tsuifeng Lin. It attempts to explain all the elements that make up a cuisine. The chapter headings are: Ancient Cuisine, Flavor, Texture, Regional Cooking, Curiosities, Plain Cooking, Classic Cuisine, A Gastronomic Calendar. A pertinent quote:
The world of gastronomy was created by the vulgar and the rich, as well as the clever cooks and persons of good taste. Adventures lie not only in the exploration of the beautiful places, but also in the raucous streets, where people mill about. ... The flavor of the cuisine was also to be found in its faults and excesses. Eating is the pursuit of flavor, and the real connoisseur can relish even bad taste in food, for bad food often has a history or a genealogy to it. One has only contempt for those persons of shallow knowledge who know only the names of good wines and elegant dishes. Good taste should be the result of personal selection, and one really cannot make a choice without a certain amount of general knowledge. Therefore it is quite important to taste everything. If a person remembers the taste of everything he has ever eaten, he may eventually become a gourmet. This quality is fundamental, for a person's awareness results first in judgment, then in choice, then in taste.
If God is aware of every sparrow, shouldn't we be also?
I don't think I was agreeing with Steve P. in my rant on corn. What I was trying to say was that there was much to analyze in each of corn's many manifestations, but that an awareness of the importance of corn in civilization and its global reach in its myriad forms should inform any analysis of individual preparation.
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Everyone wants to turn my comment ABOUT COOKING TECHNIQUE into a point about populism. It isn't that foods that are simple to make merit less discussion, it just so happens that there is less to discuss about preparing them. To prove this point, all you have to do is to look at any thread someone starts here about a simple food. Look at B Edulis's corn thread. While people are waxing rhapsodic about the deliciousness of sweet corn, there is no discussion about how to prepare it. Last I looked, I was the only person who added a "recipe" to the thread.
While there weren't many recipes for cooking corn on the cob posted, that's not to say that the whole subject of corn isn't incredibly complex and open to endless analysis. Whole cultures and civilizations have been based on corn and even the Pilgrims -- remember Squanto? Seriously, just being able to cultivate corn was a major step for humanity in a large part of the world. And then the endless permutations of corn -- the varieties of corn -- heirlooms, hybrids (sweet and supersweet), field corn; popcorn; corn cut off the cob in fried corn and creamed corn and corn pudding and succotash; the fungus that grows on corn which is considered a great delicacy in Mexico; drying all the different varietiies of corn (I dry my own sweet corn in the oven and then make winter corn pudding with it for Thanksgiving) -- corn grits (grits pudding; all kinds of different grits preparations, some quite sophisticated in the new southern cooking); pozole, and then further refinement of masa for tamales and tortillas; polenta (preparation of which is open to endless analysis); cornmeal in the U.S.; cornbread (regional differences between north and south in U.S., and then differences within the southern states; corndogs!; spoon bread; Indian corn pudding; corn syrup which is found in more prepared foods than we might think. Libraries could be filled on corn-related subjects. And that doesn't even begin to talk about how to choose the freshest corn at the market, the pleasures of getting fresh-picked corn into the pot (which reminded me of MFK Fisher's piece on picking and cooking sweet peas), and all the different ways that people cook fresh corn on the cob. Any food is simple; but if you don't understand the food in its basic state, all the technique and frills you might add to it will probably be superfluous.
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Banana jam sounds delicious. How exactly do you cook it? Does it turn into a thick puree or do the bananas stay in pieces?
Fine Dining vs. Cheap Eats
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
How'd they do the figs? Were they grilled? (I used to do those a lot when I lived in the Bay Area.)