Daily Gullet Staff

<img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1151265230/gallery_29805_1195_15624.jpg" hspace="8" align="left">from Real Food: What to Eat and Why by Nina Planck Special to the Daily Gullet; part one of two My mother was a natural if amateur scientist with an interest in biology, nutrition, and babies. She read about the pioneering experiments of Clara Davis in the 1920s and 1930s. Davis set out healthy, whole foods for infants and let them eat anything they wanted for months at a time. The smorgasbord included beef, bone marrow, sweetbreads, fish, pineapple, bananas, spinach, peas, milk and yogurt, corn meal, Toatmeal, rye crackers, and sea salt. At any given meal, the choices babies made could be extreme: one baby ate mostly bone marrow; others loved bananas or milk. One occasionally grabbed handfuls of salt. Over time, however, the babies chose a balanced diet, rich in all the essential nutrients, surpassing the nutritional requirements of the day, and they were in excellent health. The nine-month old boy with rickets drank cod liver oil (rich in vitamin D) until his rickets was cured; then he ignored it. The Clara Davis experiments were limited, and to my knowledge, never repeated. Proven or not, the idea made a deep impression on my mother. She believed that anyone, even an uninformed baby or child -- perhaps especially a baby or child -- could feed himself properly on instinct alone if you gave him only healthy foods, and that was how we ate -- at home anyway. There was some leeway for junk food on car trips (Oreos were a treat) and on the rare occasions when we ate out, we could order anything we wanted. At home, however, there was only real food, and my parents never told us what to eat, or how much or when. My mother’s other nutritional hero was Adelle Davis, the best-selling writer who recommended whole foods and lots of protein. Before dinner, Mom put out carrot, apple, or turnip sticks so we would eat raw fruits and vegetables when we were hungry. Main dishes were basic American fare: fried chicken, tuna salad, spaghetti, quiche, potato pancakes with homemade applesauce, meatloaf. There were many frugal dishes, such as chicken hearts with onions, and we ate a lot of rice and beans. At dinner we always had several vegetable and a large green salad. Most of our food was local and seasonal. I fondly remember the exceptions, such as the boxes of oranges and grapefruit we bought each winter. We drank fresh raw milk from our Jersey, ate bright-orange eggs from our free-ranging chickens, and a couple of times we slaughtered spent laying hens for soup. Our honey came from a local beekeeper. Occasionally, there was venison or blue fish when we let local people hunt or fish on the property. In those days, few farmers nearby were raising meat and poultry for local markets, so we had to buy those foods at the store, but today our beef, bison, lamb, and chicken come from farmers we know. Above all, we grew truckloads of vegetables. The simple act of picking vegetables for dinner -- a pleasure known to all kitchen gardeners, one that feels maternal and generous to me -- is positively extravagant on a real farm, where there are acres of fresh things to choose from. In June I might set out from the kitchen with a basket and a rough plan of attack -- to find lettuce, zucchini, and young fennel -- and come back with a wheelbarrow-full, seduced along the way by the old spinach patch (abandoned in the hot weather) or by a head of green garlic, still too young to sell but irresistible. If I’m feeling lazy, there’s no need to go to the fields at all. In the cool, dark basement, beans, eggplant, and peppers sit in baskets, ready for market. Our berries, lettuce, herbs, and vegetables made a feast of every meal from April to November. In the old, strict days when every penny counted, the first picking, however tiny -- a dozen spears of asparagus or two pints raspberries -- went to market, not to the kitchen. But once each crop was in full swing we ate as much as we wanted. We grew only the best-tasting varieties, such as Earliglow strawberries and Ambrosia melons. What we didn’t grow, we bought or bartered for at farmers’ markets. In the winter, we ate canned tomatoes and frozen red bell peppers. We all ate huge amounts of vegetables -- four ears each of buttered corn, giant plates of sliced tomatoes, enormous green salads -- and still do. I’ve never met anyone who eats more vegetables than my family. To me, a half-cup serving of cooked broccoli is silly, a doll’s portion. Everything we ate was homemade. We made whole wheat bread and buckwheat pancakes from fresh flour ground in an electric mill, and apple, beet, and carrot juice in the juicer. Making granola was a weekly chore for us kids. On winter car trips we packed our own food, typically large pots of beans and rice, bread, apples, and peanut butter. The everyday dessert was apple salad with yogurt or mayonnaise, walnuts, coconut, and honey. When we had proper desserts such as vanilla pudding, cherry pie, and strawberry shortcake -- which was not often -- they were always made from scratch. Portions were big, leftovers prized, and nothing wasted. Egg shells and vegetable scraps went in a bucket for the chickens. It all sounds perfect now, but jars filled with blackstrap molasses and homemade granola did not impress me. I wanted American food, the kind normal kids ate. By far the biggest taboo in our house was junk food, and for that very reason it was deeply compelling. When I had stand duty in the town of Purcellville, I made a bee-line for the High’s convenience store to buy ice cream sandwiches -- and told no one. On my 11th birthday, my parents said I could have anything I wanted for dinner and I greedily ordered a store-bought cake. I can still taste the faintly metallic neon frosting. Yet I ate it gamely, unwilling to admit that my hideous cake was inferior to the dessert my mother always made on our birthdays: chocolate éclairs with real milk, butter, and eggs, and good chocolate. The first time I laid eyes on an all-you-can-eat salad bar, at the Leesburg Pizza Hut where my mother waited tables that first winter, I ate a bowl of tasty-looking bacon bits with a spoon. They made me very sick -- and embarrassed, too. No one told me you don’t eat bacon bits -- the lowest form of pork, if they aren’t imitation bacon made of soy protein -- straight. These wince-inducing memories suggest that the Clara Davis experiments -- sometimes referred to as proving “nutritional wisdom” -- work only when all of the choices are good ones. Sure, the baby cured his rickets with cod liver oil, like a little instinctive scientist, or a wild animal self-medicating by eating certain plants. But Davis gave the babies only good foods to eat. What if the babies could have eaten ice cream sandwiches, neon pink cake frosting, and bacon bits? To my knowledge, no one has tried such an experiment -- unless you count our daily exposure to all manner of cheap junk food -- but the evidence is not encouraging. In the short-term, at least, availability seems to determine what we eat, rather than instinct for health. Squirrels, given the choice between acorns and chocolate cookies, take the cookies. The natural diet of sheep is grass, but when offered dense carbohydrates -- the ovine equivalent of store-bought cake -- they will binge until they are listless. Even a modern hunter-gatherer will drink honey until his teeth rot, if he can get enough. “As stupid as these choices seem, one can’t really blame them on a lack of nutritional wisdom,” writes Susan Allport in The Primal Feast. “During the course of evolution, squirrels, sheep, and humans have rarely encountered large quantities of concentrated, high-energy foods. Why should the food selection mechanisms of animals include protections against overeating these things? Our human tastes for foods evolved and enabled us to survive in the forests and the African savannas where animals were lean and fibrous, food shortages were a fact of life, and sugar came only in the form of ripe fruits and honey, foods that were available only on an intermittent, seasonal basis.” It seems that animals and humans both lack brakes for runaway junk food craving. Once you grow up, of course, you have to take responsibility for what you eat, and my parents believed in Emersonian self-reliance. When I was ten or so, they decided that Charles and I should learn to cook, and drew up a dinner and dishes schedule. We all cooked the same way, building simple meals around our abundant, gorgeous vegetables. The ingredients weren’t fancy and the recipes weren’t sophisticated. I loved my night to cook, especially the grown-up feeling of providing for my family, and here and there I made a stab at something original. Once I invented Chinese noodle soup by boiling vegetables and pasta in water with lots of soy sauce. My mother wasn’t impressed -- it probably tasted terrible -- but I was proud of my creation and the memory of her reaction hits a tender spot. Another time I baked chicken with rosemary. “It’s good,” said Charles, “except for the pine needles.” My cheeks flushed with shame for introducing a fancy -- and risible -- ingredient to plain old chicken. Simplicity was a virtue, and culinary experiments weren’t much encouraged. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1596911441/egulletcom-20" target="_blank"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1151265230/gallery_29805_1195_21783.jpg" align="right" hspace="8"></a>What was prized was the idea of the farm as physical paradise. We were encouraged to sigh with delight over the sound of the spring peepers, the flash of the fireflies, the scent of honeysuckle, and -- most of all -- the flavor of our own melons and tomatoes. I was a little nature-lover, and took huge pleasure in our beautiful farm and unsurpassed vegetables. But I never understood how appreciation of nature conflicted with making dinner a bit different -- tastier, fancier, sexier. Wasn’t nice food also a gift of nature? Now it’s obvious that I lived in a kind of paradise about food. My mother’s philosophy -- provide good homemade food on a budget and then leave your kids alone to eat what they like -- was working. Her children were healthy, physically active, never picky eaters like other kids we knew -- and looked down on. As for me, it all seemed simple. We grew the best vegetables in the world. At home there was only good stuff, which I ate happily. From time to time, there were treats -- like Danish butter cookies -- or compelling, but quite possibly regrettable, stuff in restaurants. Mostly, I was ignorant about the big world of food and therefore unashamed. When the school principle sent me home with a free turkey for Christmas, it seemed like nothing more than a stroke of good luck. If my parents didn’t care that we didn’t have a lot of money and ate simple food, why should I? Above all, I wasn’t neurotic about food or my body or my appetites. An untroubled child with lots of energy, I ate what I wanted, when I was hungry for it. Naturally, it didn’t last. How I became a vegan & my virtuous diet made me plump & grumpy A typical teenage girl, I was anxious about all sorts of things, and placed my anxiety squarely on -- what else? -- food. The experts said that many of the foods I grew up on -- like Yorkshire pudding topped with a pool of hot butter -- were unhealthy. The smart advice was to be a little bit more vegetarian: eat less meat, less dairy, less saturated fat. The medical wisdom began to dovetail with our somewhat alternative subculture. Our farming friends and the college students who worked on our farm each summer were health-conscious and green. In those circles, being a vegetarian -- better yet, a vegan -- was environmentally, nutritionally, and ethically correct. In the worker kitchen down by the little pond, the famous vegetarian Moosewood Cookbook was the bible, and communion was rice and beans. Times have changed. Now the workers buy raw milk, eat local venison, and dream of keeping chickens, goats, and cows on their own farms. The ecological and political arguments for a vegetarian diet came to the fore in 1971, the year I was born. In her seminal book, Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappé argued that modern beef farming was ecologically unsound (it wrecks natural habitats), politically unjust (you could feed more people on the grain cattle ate than on the steaks), and nutritionally unnecessary (we don’t need all that protein). The idea that a vegetarian diet was healthier clinched it for me, and I became a vegan in high school. It was perhaps my only act of rebellion against my stubbornly tolerant parents. My state of mind is still vivid. With all the bad press animal foods were getting, the quickest route to salvation seemed clear: eat only plants. The summer of 1989 was the last season I lived and worked on the farm. In late August, still the height of the season, my parents drove me to Oberlin College, with the stereo shelf my mother built and my other things in the back of a pick-up. Later I transferred to Georgetown University and set up house with my boyfriend in Washington, D.C. In my own kitchen, I was free to invent my own philosophy about food. But I’d lost my instincts and didn’t trust my appetite. Eating became an intellectual question. How many people could you feed on the grain it took to raise one steak? If saturated fats are dangerous, why eat any? The vegan experiment ended fairly quickly -- I liked yogurt -- but for many years I was a vegetarian. Fear of fat and cholesterol dominated our kitchen in the row house on 27th Street. Even a hint of slippery, creamy food on the tongue sent me into panicky disapproval. Peering at labels, I stocked the pantry with low-fat foods. In those days, I believed the conventional nutritional wisdom: that unsaturated fats were good for cholesterol and saturated fats were not. Monounsaturated olive oil -- star of the Mediterranean diet -- was the only fat I trusted . . . but not much of it. The taboo on cholesterol and saturated fats meant no beef, eggs, cream, chocolate, or coconut. Our only dairy was non-fat yogurt and there was plenty of rice milk and soy ice cream. Today it’s hard to picture what we ate. I loved to cook, but most foods were off the menu -- no beef, pork, lamb, chicken, fish, milk, or eggs. We ate lots of fresh local vegetables, large green salads, burritos, and bean soups. I ate mountains of rice, beans, and pasta. For dessert there was fruit salad, but without the mayonnaise of my youth. A well-used recipe for non-fat oatmeal bars with pineapple springs to mind, and on special occasions I made fruit pies with butter crust. Now and then I grated low-fat cheese over salad or treated us to grilled shrimp from the D.C. waterfront. Now it’s clear why my boyfriend gave me a cookbook on my 19th birthday: the poor fellow was desperate for variety. It was Martha Stewart’s Quick Cook Menus and I read it from cover to cover in one sitting, fascinated with the fancy foods she touted, like balsamic vinegar, crème fraîche, and homemade mayonnaise. Now Martha Stewart is famous for all the domestic arts (and more), but in those days she was a champion of simple, seasonal meals -- and her recipes always work. Quick Cook was my first cookbook, it bears the marks of many good meals, and I still use it. As for my health, I felt terrible. My digestion was poor, and I was moody, tearful, and tender in all the wrong place before I got my period. In cold and flu season, I got both. I was depressed, too. Partly to stave off the gloom, I ran three to six miles a day, six days a week. On this virtuous regime I also gained weight steadily -- and before I knew it, I was plump. How plump? Well, women and weight is a treacherous topic: no one agrees on the definitions and people get touchy, so I’ll try to be objective. I’m almost 5 feet 5 inches tall and weigh 119 to 125 pounds, much of it muscle. In my vegetarian days, I was 147 pounds and soft all over. That’s a body mass index of almost 25, squarely in the “overweight” category. Back home on the farm in Wheatland, meanwhile, my omnivorous parents were the healthiest people I knew, lean and cheerful as they tucked into fried eggs and pork chops. Something was wrong with me, but I certainly didn’t suspect my perfect diet. Excerpted by permission from Real Food: What to Eat and Why, by Nina Planck. The Daily Gullet thanks Nina and her publisher, Bloomsbury USA. Nina Planck created farmers' markets in London and Washington DC, and ran New York City's famous Greenmarket. The daughter of Virginia vegetable farmers, she wrote The Farmers' Market Cookbook and hosted a British television series on local food.

<img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1150756212/gallery_29805_1195_7398.jpg" hspace="8" align="left">By Priscilla There’s a lovely pair of mallards visiting our creek, swimming about in its seasonal water, rooting upside-down in its seasonal mucky bottom, roosting compactly among its seasonal vegetation. Ivan swears that this is the same pair of mallards who visited our little creek last year. Could be. Cursory mallard research, including Adam Balic’s expert advice, seems to concur, although Adam did offer the proviso that duck monogamy may be somewhat less than airtight. We call them Charles and Camilla. But the real question, when they come a-quacking, as they do in the a.m. sometime during tea prep or tea consumption or tea cleanup, and then again at about cocktail time, flapping and hopping up the creek bank, waddling smoothly along the flagstone, sometimes right up the stairs to the terrace to peer, ducklike, into the kitchen door, is what to feed them? Last year’s mallard pair didn’t like tortillas, corn or flour, so one thing I know is tortillas are right out. The bread we nearly always have in the breadbox, if the household is to be expected to run smoothly, is the perfection-in-sandwich bread from the Japanese baker. So the ducks have had their share of this, both the whole wheat and white varieties. Both white and wheat are perfection; yes, there are two perfections. (And if you add in the ciabatta and baguette and multi-grain walnut and so forth from this baker, well, you’ll be up to a half-dozen perfections right quick.) The ducks like both. One morning I had sweet-potato biscuits left over from the night before, when they’d accompanied chicken drums with a sticky spicy glaze, corn on the cob, and homemade coleslaw -- a favorite recipe, just the thing for some menus, from Craig Claiborne’s Southern Cooking. I thought, proverbially, those lucky ducks! Now here’s something they’ll really like. But they completely eschewed the tender, pale-orange crumbly bits -- unequivocally turned up their bills without even trying a microbite, our family minimum requirement for new foods. Especially Camilla. She made it quite clear that sweet potato biscuits are not what she had in mind. The omnipresent flock of gorgeous mauve mourning doves, which I consider to be my personal Greek chorus, was kind enough to clean up the detritus. For Charles and Camilla I scrambled -- they were hungry! <img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1150756212/gallery_29805_1195_15065.jpg" hspace="8" align="right">If I may, as modestly as I can manage, what Charles and Camilla have especially enjoyed is my 100% sourdough rye, a bread I’ve been working on after a liminal-state realization the other week that what my sourdough starter wanted was to be refreshed with rye flour. I got this starter from eGullet’s own Jackal10 from the generous offer he made at the start of his incredible sourdough class for eGCI. For evidence of a small donation to a charity of choice, he would send actual sourdough starter winging my way. I donated to a favorite charity hell-bent on doing good works, in whose fabulous thrift store I have made many great scores over the years. I’ve been the proud mother of not only a 14-year-old boy and three kitties but also my very own sourdough starter ever since. And so I did, refresh it several times with rye, and even though it’d been, well, dormant would be the nice word for the sort of neglect to which it had been treated, down there on the bottom shelf in the back of the fridge for some unknown period of time, it roiled and bubbled and just generally came back to life like mad in short order: short order in sourdough terms. And the latest loaf I’d put together with this reborn starter wasn’t bad. It wasn’t the 100% sourdough rye of my dreams, if I were to dream about 100% sourdough rye, but it was not bad. Edible. But even with propitious-seeming oven spring, it was a damn sight too dense. Excellent flavor, however, earning the highest accolade imaginable -- it would be impossible to overstate the immense highity of this accolade -- from Ivan, who is the reason there is sourdough bread, 100% or otherwise, being made at all by me. Said accolade: "Tastes like Russian black bread." Flavor, check. Now, if only one didn’t need the big mawl and the log-splitting grenade from the firewood crib in order to break into it, we’d be in business. <img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1150756212/gallery_29805_1195_12395.jpg" hspace="8" align="left">With the big old offset Dexter bread knife I was able to shave off slices and cut them up into bits for the ducks -- they like bits -- which is a good thing because 1) it was the only bread in the house and 2) they liked it SO much! No cook can help but be charmed by that. They’ve been eating it happily, morning and evening, for days and days. Did I mention it was a very big loaf? I will make the remainder into Melba toasts, but only after Charles and Camilla indicate they want to make a change. I’m thinking slender crispy ficelle from the Vietnamese French baker. This particular bread inexorably, inexorably recently anyway, raises the specter of my beloved Paul Prudhommeian flavor layering: chicken-apple sausage sandwiches, topped with apples and onions sauteed a la Alamanzo Wilder’s Ma in Farmer Boy, and the nice German apple juice mustard we keep around for just this dish. Could be time for Charles and Camilla to further broaden their horizons. Priscilla writes from a Southern California canyon populated by the typical mix of old hippies, wannabe off-the-gridders, equestrians running the gamut from 20-acre Thoroughbred full dressage to clip-clop nag-riding busted flat in Baton Rouge, schoolteachers, artists, wealthy entrepreneurs, and law enforcement officers (for some reason). Photos by the author.

<img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1149481013/gallery_29805_1195_16614.jpg" hspace="8" align="left">by Tim Hayward We stood at the door, staring at the "For Sale" sign, a confused turmoil of emotion. My wife had wanted to live on this street all her life. The house, the only derelict left in a gentrified district, was phenomenal opportunity for improvement and investment. She was thinking about money, about decoration, about room to expand the family, about local schools and about growing old together, happy in our beautiful home. I was thinking about the smell. Not the musty honk of a long neglected dump but the penetrating, rich, oily odour of fresh roasting coffee drifting from the end of the street. "You clearly need some time to think, Sweetheart. I'll just pop along and get us a coffee." In a space between two tall old houses was a tiny shanty of a shopfront. A stovepipe spewing the intoxicating smell was jammed through a hole in the plate glass behind which lurked an elderly man, tinkering like some mythic kobold among a fantastic collection of antique machinery. A hand-lettered sign, patently of the same vintage as shop and owner said "Coffee" so I tried the door. "Go away!" he yelled. He was of Mediterranean descent with a long, lugubrious face, dark bags under his eyes and an enviably full shock of grey hair. "No coffee today. Closed." He spun the sign on the door and shot a couple of dozen home made security contraptions across the frame. I was electrified. A lifelong lover of the bean, I'd spent a considerable amount of energy loathing the chain "coffee" emporia. I'd gone into print many times, bemoaning the death of family owned local cafes at the hands of unfeeling multinational chains. I'd decried the third-rate, slave-produced, ersatz cack they dispensed and now, I had the chance to live this close to probably the last surviving outpost of the real deal -- an authentic, cranky old eccentric who roasted and ground his own beans. I rushed back. "Let's do it," I gabbled. "But it's a derelict shell." "I'll do all the work. I'll build, fix, paint. It's your dream. You should have it." My wife tells me it's the most romantic thing I ever said. If only she knew. We bought the house and I did, indeed, spend six months putting on a roof, plastering, painting, plumbing and installing God's own kitchen. Often the neighbours would drop in to see how things were going. As each found out what I did for a living, the conversation would turn the same way. "You're a food writer? Have you had Gregory's coffee yet?" I hadn't. My Pavoni, my grinder, my cups and all the paraphernalia of addiction were in storage. I was deferring gratification. But each day I walked past the shop and slowly my relationship with Gregory developed from open hostility to a begrudging nod. From my neighbours I learned his legend. He'd been an engineer. He'd left his country during some military upheaval. He built and maintained his own machines. He secretly ground special blends for all the best restaurants in town. He was an eccentric millionaire. His beautiful daughter was a politician in their home country and each neighbour proudly confided that Gregory made a special, personal blend just for them. Finally, the house was finished. I moved the family in, unpacked, made sure everyone was happy, then headed off on my personal pilgrimage. I was going to my local, independent coffee-man. This eccentric genius, this zensai of the Arabica would create a personal blend for me and I would reach a pinnacle of happiness the envy of my peers. Maybe I looked wrong. Perhaps it was something about my cheery demeanour that pissed him off. Perhaps, in some paranoiac way he loathed newcomers. Whatever the reason, the coffee he sold me would have choked a goat. It was vile in way you can't possibly imagine unless you've felt you've discovered your life's greatest wish, waited six months, spent everything on a wreck, destroyed your L4 and L5 vertebrae carrying bags of cement and then had a crap cup of coffee. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Eight times. I kept going back, discussing with him various blends, grinds, roasts, hoping against hope that it was some momentary lapse. But the coffee just got worse. I started lying. First to Gregory. I would buy cans of Illy from a delicatessen in another part of town and smuggle them past his shop under my coat. Then to my neighbours . . . "We're still working to perfect the blend." Then, when I felt I couldn't keep up the deception a moment longer, I confided in my neighbour, Keith, an erudite and respected psychotherapist . . . "Gregory's coffee -- it's not terribly . . . good, is it?" He looked at me as if trying to decide if I was a viperous disloyal cad or merely mad. I'd failed to support a beloved independent trader -- a cardinal sin in the middle class enclaves of North London. He'd have taken it easier if he'd caught me in bed with his wife . . . and daughter. So that's how things stand now. Keith knows my shameful secret but I hope he's enough of a gentleman to keep it to himself. The rest of the street are drinking truly abominable coffee to keep a small trader alive and I'm still smuggling it into my own house and lying to the neighbours. But I'm watching. One day I'm going to catch one of these bastards with a can of coffee under his coat. Tim Hayward is a freelance writer living in London, and former host of the UK forum. He publishes the newsletter Fire & Knives. Photo by the author.

<img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1149034986/gallery_29805_1195_29809.jpg" hspace="8" align="left">by Chris Amirault When I skidded into my late thirties, I went through a predictable, even clichéd series of life upheavals that revealed, among many other things, that I was drinking way too much. Starting around 5:00 pm every day, I’d enter a state of intense anticipation, awaiting the cool bite of scotch or the warm wash of red wine. It didn’t matter whether I was at a business dinner in an increasingly unpleasant, anxious job or at home in an increasingly unpleasant, anxious marriage. I always had at least two drinks -- usually three or four -- work days and weekends. Over the span of several tumultuous months, I changed many things in my life for the better -- work, marriage, home -- and my drinking changed, too. I didn't drink at all through the first months of this transition, and when I started again, I drank less frequently. After sustaining this change for a couple of years, I got a phone call from a researcher who wanted me to participate in a six-month study about alcohol consumption. I agreed right away. You see, my reform was wholly my own; I hadn't needed a helping hand from any twelve-step programs, therapists, or medications. If science wanted me to help needy others by modeling my superior awareness and control, I’d provide that service, humbly, to humankind. As part of the study, I started recording my drinking, and over the course of the first couple of months I noticed a pattern. Occasionally I had nothing to drink. Occasionally I had two drinks. But on all other nights, week in and week out, I had exactly one drink, whether at home or at a restaurant, stressed out or happy, in town or on the road. By the time the survey wrapped up, I didn't worry about keeping my records up-to-date; I'd just try to remember those exceptional drink-free or multi-drink days at the end of each two- or three-week period, mark them down, and fill in the rest of the calendar with ones. I was smug about those numbers. I‘d reduced my daily drinking from two, three, even four drinks down to a single drink most nights, and I had the scientific data to prove it. That single evening drink was not only evidence that I was drinking less, it was evidence that I was drinking a healthy amount, like, you know, the French. One evening drink was the 21st century version of an apple a day, right? When the study wrapped up, my hubris made the beginning of my exit interview pretty fun, as I rattled off my last few weeks of ones. But the hubris didn't last long; science wanted a final datum, not of counted number but of measured amount. "When you have a drink at home," the researcher asked, "how many ounces of alcohol do you usually drink?" "Oh, you know, a regular serving," I sputtered. "So, when you have a bourbon, say, your glass has about two or three ounces of liquor in it." "Yeah, that's right," I replied, feigning confidence. "You know, one drink." She asked her final questions, thanked me, and hung up. But I was pretty sure I’d just sold science, and my pride, down the river. For a while I pretended that her question hadn’t bothered me, but it kept nagging, particularly when I pulled down one of the glasses I used for drinks at home. Months after the survey had ended, I took one of those glasses out of the cupboard to split an Anchor Steam with my wife. I nearly filled my own glass and handed the bottle to her. "Not exactly half," she said, tilting the bottle and finishing it off. She was right: there had been no more than an inch of beer left in her bottle. I’d stiffed her because I assumed my drinking glass held six, maybe eight ounces max. Surprise: it held exactly twelve ounces of liquid. I was now shaken and stirred. A few days later, when no one was around, I grabbed a glass from the cabinet, placed four ice cubes into it, poured in my usual amount of bourbon, and then strained the bourbon into a measuring cup. This one drink -- bourbon on the rocks, the one I enjoyed most consistently -- consisted of more than three two-ounce drinks. It was little consolation to realize that I was, by any measure, drinking far less than I had been back when I regularly knocked back three or four of these bombs. But I knew I’d been deluding myself about my drinking, and I invested a lot in my seeming self-awareness. I stood at the sink, looking at the glass full of bourbon and ice, more deluded than I’d been moments before. Turns out that, most nights, I had a three-drink minimum. <div align="center">* * * </div> My maternal grandfather was one of those Mainers that you read about -- a great accent, rough hands, wry humor, and a prodigious belly on a wiry frame. Grampa bounced around in different jobs from the Depression through the 1970s, baker to farmhand, bus driver to janitor. Though I never became close to him, I’ve got vivid, important memories dating back decades. I remember sharing a Fanta orange soda in a glass bottle with him after a hot afternoon of work in his beloved garden, where he wrung tomatoes, peas, and rhubarb out of the Maine clay. I remember standing next to him at a table covered with old newpapers, bowls, and cups of melted butter, greedily consuming the clam necks that his dentures, which had bitten off the tender steamer bellies, hadn't allowed him to chew. And I remember his daily ritual. When he arrived home from work at the school he cleaned, he'd putter furtively by the kitchen sink and the surrounding cabinets. My brother and I spent many weeks at their house near Waterville each year, particularly during the summers, and I grew familiar with the strange rhythms of my grandparents’ life. I never quite understood many of those rhythms; tip-lipped Yankees both, they had little interest in self-reflection and offered few insights to kids. But even when I was young, I sensed that his habit of heading straight for the kitchen sink held odd, perhaps troubling, meanings. I was eight when grampa first asked me, soon after getting home, if I was ready for a bit of hooch. Gramma, a teetotaler, overheard this, and scolded him, completing an exchange I found baffling. So, the next afternoon, I rushed to my grampa's car the moment he arrived, and asked, "What's hooch?" He grinned and walked me from the driveway through the back door into the kitchen, glancing around to confirm that gramma was in a back room. He reached up to the cabinets above the sink, extending his hand to the back of the top shelf, and brought down a small glass. It was clear and thick, with an indented bottom, encircled by a thin white line just below the rim. He reached under the sink and pulled out a large, unfamiliar bottle. Showing me the turkey on the label, he said, "This is hooch," and he poured a splash of liquor into the glass. He handed the glass to me without speaking, letting me decide what to do; I didn't taste it, but just stuck my nose into the glass. And, all at once, I figured out what hooch was: hooch was what my grampa smelled like every night of his life. He took back the glass, filled it, and drank, slowly enough to savor it but quickly enough to wrap things up before gramma popped in for a look-see. He rinsed out the glass, wiped it with a dish rag, and placed it back in its place on the top shelf, out of sight. As I grew older, the familial tensions I’d sensed when I first heard the word "hooch" recurred with greater urgency. Now and then, I'd hear my grandmother say something to him under her breath. He'd snap at her to mind her own goddamned business. On the car ride back down to Massachusetts, my parents would whisper when they thought my brother and I had fallen asleep, asking each about his threats to "lie down on the train tracks and be done with it." In the year or two before lung cancer destroyed him, there had been family discussions about alcoholism. By then I was old enough to know what that meant. But on summer nights when my gramma was reading in her bedroom and my brother and I watched the Red Sox at my grampa's feet, hooch was just a wisp in the warm air that floated through the living room screens. And sometimes, during a Schaefer commercial between innings, my grampa would go around the corner into the kitchen, squeak open cabinet doors, twist on and off a bottle cap and then the spigot, squeak open the cabinet doors again, and settle back into his easy chair, having turned one drink into two -- or maybe three -- with no one the wiser. <div align="center">* * * </div> For a few weeks after discovering that I’d been knocking back double scotches or triple bourbons most nights, I decided to go cold turkey once again. Lacking the zeal that had filled my veins during my divorce, I failed miserably. Though I knew I didn't crave the alcohol-based depressants, I wasn't sure what, if anything, I did crave. To figure it out, I started wondering about my relationships to other quasi-addictions. I had been one of those smokers that real smokers hate, lighting up only when I would enjoy it entirely and able to go without a smoke for days, even weeks, at a time. The nicotine did little for me. However, tapping the cigarette on table or thumbnail, deciding how I'd hold this particular smoke, exhaling through the nose, mouth, or both: that stuff I loved. I still missed the rituals of smoking, so I decided that I missed the rituals that surround drinking. I needed the most obsessive mode of drinking I could find, one that would provide me the satisfaction of alcohol, while cutting back on the amount. Since beer holds no romance for me, and serious wine consumption breaks my bank, I turned to the playland of vintage cocktails. I started stocking up on all of the requisite fetish objects and elixirs with fervor. Soon, I’d accumulated a Hawthorne strainer and barspoon to accompany my fine Boston shaker, several obscure mail-order bitters and hard-to-find liqueurs, and a set of genuine 1950s cocktail glasses wrapped in tissue paper that I’d discovered, unloved, at a local yard sale, four for three bucks. Those glasses were the turning point, for they held just the right amount for a single, stunning drink. I find deep pleasure in drinking a single, stunning drink most nights. Though my knowledge is slight and new, it’s well-rounded, thanks to a number of sources, primary among them Gary Regan's Joy of Mixology. Regan's book provides many deep, persnickety truths, just the sort with which a novice can legitimate his own prejudices and peccadilloes. With a few weeks of practice, I developed a solid, if rudimentary, ritual. First, I ponder what's on hand: Do I have Tanqueray, Plymouth, or both? Did I use all of the lemons? How much of that homemade grenadine is on the refrigerator door? Then I search for a recipe that corresponds to both supply and desire. With recipe in hand, I choose the right glass for the occasion and chill it. I select the necessary tools and lay out the bottles I'll need: my liquid mise en place. I measure (I always measure) a half-ounce of this and two ounces of that, pouring each in sequence into my shaker. Even if they aren't in the recipe, I squirt in a dash of bitters -- two, if the recipe asks for one. I stir, counting to forty, or I shake, counting to twenty. Each count is one-half second; I've timed it. I strain. And, only then -- after I've performed a meticulous, pleasurable ritual that may not rival a Japanese tea ceremony in complexity of meaning but does in anticipation -- do I drink. Following that engaging, satisfying, and obsessive process, I find I want to have only one drink almost every night -- but what a drink it is. I spent a full week marveling at the perfection of the Pegu Club. I've had my world opened to the dry backbone that maraschino adds to gin and lemon in the Aviation Cocktail. I've come to understand why Gary Regan calls the Manhattan, a concoction I’d been throwing together for years with little thought, "the finest cocktail on the face of the earth." Over the last few weeks, I've been intrigued by one particular vintage cocktail. While it’s a great drink, its recipe makes it legendary, a ritual so involved and contentious that debate about it continues to this day. After reading about it in Regan, on-line, and elsewhere, I decided that I had to try the glass-rinsing, sugar-muddling, rind-twisting procedure that makes the Sazerac the Kama Sutra for cocktail ritualists. There are dozens of recipes for this famous drink, but for my first time out I decided to go with Regan's less intricate recipe. I had lemons and simple syrup on hand, and I've been fortunate to find a regular source so I can keep Peychaud's bitters in stock. In a moment of criminality that would make a New Orleanian cringe, I dug a bottle of Pernod from the back of my liquor cabinet as a substitute for the essential Herbsaint -- impossible to find in my hometown. That left me with one item to find: a bottle of rye. I'd never had rye; didn't have a clue about it. Conversations with liquor store clerks didn't help much, as they hadn't ever seen a bottle of the stuff. After trudging all over town, at the eighth store I visited, I spotted a bottle of Old Overholt, lurking on the bottom shelf behind the register. I drove straight home and set to work. I filled my cocktail glass with crushed ice and water to chill it. I measured out the rye and simple syrup into my shaker, and I splashed in several dashes of Peychaud's bitters. I trimmed off a thick curl of lemon rind with care, lest I spray the precious oil on my fingers instead of atop the drink's surface, and set it aside. Working quickly, I dumped the ice and ice water from my glass, dried it, rinsed a capful of Pernod around the inside, and poured out the remainder. I added crushed ice to the shaker, stirred while counting to forty, and strained the drink into its anisette-lined glass. Finally, with pride, I twisted the lemon rind over the glass and dropped it in. Even without the lovely, tortured ritual, the Sazerac is an elusive drink to describe, complex at some moments and simple at others. It starts quick and bright in your mouth, the lemon and anise sitting on top, and turns slow and dark as the rye releases and lingers. That first Sazerac was unlike anything I've ever tasted, but I recognized it immediately. The lemon gave way to the rye, my tongue became my nose, and once again I inhaled the hooch on my grampa's breath.

<a href="http://www.egullet.org/imgs/daily_gullet/table_russe.htm" target="_blank"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1148345459/gallery_29805_1195_47670.jpg" align="left" hspace="8"></a>by <b>Darra Goldstein</b> <br> <br> During the Gilded Age, the leisured class elevated dining to an art, discarding once and for all the early American virtues of plainness and unpretentiousness. Such visible ostentation was a mark of how far American society had traveled. When John Adams brought silver forks home from France for the presidential table, he was accused of abandoning the ways of democracy. But by the nineteenth century’s end, the dining room had become nothing less than a stage where every impressive detail was carefully conceived, from the wallpaper to the sideboards to the performance of the meal. The dining table itself was adorned with lavish centerpieces, sparkling goblets, and an extraordinary range of specialized silver utensils that demonstrated not only the hostess’s wealth but also her savoir faire. <br><br> <a href="http://www.egullet.org/imgs/daily_gullet/darra_chaud-froid.htm" target="_blank"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1148345459/gallery_29805_1195_21128.jpg" width="143" height="200" hspace="8" vspace="5" align="right"></a>The nineteenth century witnessed great changes in the way the middle and upper classes dined. As early as 1841, a few sophisticated diners in New York City may have staged their dinners a la russe, in the Russian style, instead of in the classical French mode. But such formal dining, with each dish presented in individually portioned servings, took popular hold in the U.S. only after the Civil War. This innovation left the center of the table free for extravagant ornamentation. Tables set a la russe appeared architectural in their use of floral displays and skewers that emphasized verticality. For additional drama, the hostess might thread silver skewers with cubes of aspic (a clear gelatin) to shimmer in the candlelight. Exotic fruits like pineapples were often part of the decoration, and on some tables, a 'tussie-mussie' -- a small nosegay of flowers and herbs that conveyed symbolic meaning -- was placed to the left of each plate. <br> <br> <a href="http://www.egullet.org/imgs/daily_gullet/darra_community-design.htm" target="_blank"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1148345459/gallery_29805_1195_35285.jpg" width="160" height="200" hspace="8" vspace="5" align="left"></a>Even more than fanciful decorations, however, silver flatware embodied the excesses of the Gilded Age table. Beginning in the 1860s, the great American silver companies like Tiffany, Gorham, Meriden Brittania, Towle, and Reed & Barton produced an abundance of individual flatware and serving pieces. These manufacturers were extraordinarily inventive when it came to silver design for the moneyed classes. Like perfect household servants, they not only responded to, but even anticipated, the whims and requests of their clients, playing on Americans’ social anxiety by introducing ever new forms. This attentiveness, reinforced by attractive advertising in jewelers’ books and illustrated volumes of silver patterns, helped to spawn the vigorous consumer culture that characterized the last decades of the nineteenth century. At their most excessive, turn-of-the-century American sets contained 146 pieces in a single pattern; contemporary place settings of English manufacture did not come close to matching this number. The Russian style further encouraged a proliferation of flatware pieces, because clean utensils were needed for each course. In a household with plenty of servants, new utensils might be brought in for each round of dishes, but more often all of the flatware for the entire meal was set out at the beginning, leading to considerable anxiety among the diners over which implement was to be used, and when. <br> <br> <a href="http://www.egullet.org/imgs/daily_gullet/darra_asparagus-tongs.htm" target="_blank"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1148345459/gallery_29805_1195_263.jpg" width="160" height="200" hspace="8" vspace="5" align="left"></a>Any hostess who wanted to be considered truly in the know numbered among her utensils a poached egg server, an asparagus fork or tongs, a berry spoon, a gravy ladle, a mayonnaise ladle, sandwich tongs, a cheese knife, a petits fours fork, a horseradish spoon, a fried oyster spoon, a sweet jelly spoon, an aspic slice, a tomato server, a waffle knife, a punch ladle, a strawberry fork, an olive fork, a terrapin fork, a baked potato fork, an ice cream hatchet or saw, a pea server, and sugar tongs, to name only some of the utensils considered de rigueur. <br> <br> <a href="http://www.egullet.org/imgs/daily_gullet/darra_oyster-fork.htm" target="_blank"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1148345459/gallery_29805_1195_5040.jpg" width="160" height="200" hspace="8" vspace="5" align="right"></a>For soup alone, at least four different spoons were required, depending on whether a bouillon, cream soup, chowder, or gumbo was served. In the 1860s, American silver manufacturers devised a new style of spoon with a round bowl that enabled diners to eat soup from the side of the bowl rather than from the front -- an innovation that entailed less slurping. But because these newfangled spoons were the size of many present-day serving spoons, a smaller spoon was developed to enable the diner to partake more easily of the stylish bouillon often served in small cups. <br> <br> <a href="http://www.egullet.org/imgs/daily_gullet/darra_serving-pieces.htm" target="_blank"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1148345459/gallery_29805_1195_12049.jpg" width="140" height="200" hspace="8" vspace="5" align="left"></a>Forks were similarly specialized. Fish forks had slightly curved tines to flake the fish gently, while the tines of salad forks were widely spaced so as not to bruise tender lettuce. In 1869, Reed & Barton patented a special pie fork with a cutting edge on the left. But savvy diners knew that this fork should never be used to eat terrapin, even when it was served in a sherry sauce over toast points for which a cutting edge might have proved useful. Instead, the terrapin fork with its almost bowl-like curve allowed the diner to scoop up sauce along with the turtle meat. <br> <br> New technology also encouraged this madcap proliferation of forms. With the spread of railroads and the advent of the refrigerated railway car, previously unavailable foodstuffs became more commonplace. After 1866, when the first oranges were transported by rail from Los Angeles to the East Coast, special orange spoons, with a narrow bowl tapering to a sharp tip, appeared so that diners could enjoy the fruit in style. Specialized spoons were even fashioned so that gentlemen could eat genteelly without sullying their moustaches. <br> <br> Not only did flatware for individual use proliferate, so did serving utensils. Following a visit to Italy, Thomas Jefferson had introduced a fashion for macaroni and cheese (a recipe appears as early as 1824 in Mary Randolph’s Virginia Housewife). By the second half of the century, macaroni and cheese was deemed an important enough dish to warrant its own ornate serving utensil. The most common design had spiked edges along one or both sides so that the macaroni could simultaneously be cut and scooped without compressing the noodles. <br> <br> <a href="http://www.egullet.org/imgs/daily_gullet/darra_chip-servers.htm" target="_blank"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1148345459/gallery_29805_1195_20174.jpg" width="200" height="186" hspace="8" vspace="5" align="left"></a>The chic hostess also needed a buckwheat cake lifter -- Mark Twain and Washington Irving had both lauded these pancakes as one of the glories of the hearty American breakfast. A Saratoga chip server was another newfangled implement. Today we wouldn’t dream of reaching for potato chips with anything but our hands, but after they were introduced to customers at a Saratoga Springs restaurant and became all the rage, Tiffany developed a special server with a pierced bowl to drain the chips of any residual oil. Butter knives, which seem so commonplace today, were also a late nineteenth-century American innovation that did not appear in European silver services. A master butter knife was set out with the butter dish for transferring butter to each diner’s bread plate, at which point an individual butter knife was used for spreading. <br> <br> <a href="http://www.egullet.org/imgs/daily_gullet/darra_macaroni-server.htm" target="_blank"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1148345459/gallery_29805_1195_2432.jpg" width="178" height="200" hspace="8" vspace="5" align="right"></a>Today, as we read the novels of Edith Wharton or see them recreated on film, we can fantasize about sitting down to a feast of oysters on the half shell, terrapin soup, filet of beef with sauce remoulade, rock quail with watercress, and an assortment of relishes, salads, and punches -- each afforded its own perfect utensil. Our modern style of dining may seem not only lax but unglamorous by comparison. Yet simplified tables were an inevitable result of twentieth-century social changes. Domestic help became too expensive for all but the wealthiest families to afford, and when large numbers of women entered the workforce after World War II, they had little time to devote to elaborate table settings. Today’s overextended American family barely manages to dine together, let alone set a faultless table, and the right serving tool no longer carries much cachet. Even so, the best silver always comes out on festive occasions, when Grandmother’s oyster ladle serves up the soup, and her old-fashioned cucumber fork does justice to the holiday turkey or ham. <BR><BR> <hr noshade size="1"> Dear Reader, in case you missed the fun: each photo in the essay links to a larger rendition. Just click on the picture for a more detailed view.<br><br><hr noshade size="1"> Darra Goldstein is the editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture and food editor for Russian Life. She is a professor at Williams College, where she teaches Russian language, history and art.

<img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1147547522/gallery_29805_1195_6492.jpg" hspace="8" align="left">By Priscilla As an inveterate letter-writer, it is perhaps inevitable that over the years some of the recipients of my missives have been people I don’t know. Or, maybe it’s the farthest thing from inevitable. After all, sending letters to people one doesn’t know is usually the bailiwick of direct mailers and charity solicitors, isn’t it? Either of which I am not. But at any rate, it’s true. In the interest of full disclosure it should be said that, to me, the mail is something pretty close to magic, or maybe sacred, and I have a stamp fixation rivaled only by my, um, other fixations. And the mail just keeps getting more magical -- e.g. Click-n-Ship®? A beautiful thing. So some of these not-known-to-me-personallys have been editors of publications whom I’ve felt could benefit from my considered if unsolicited advice. Very infrequently, they’ve been principals of companies or organizations with whom I’m disappointed. This particular sort of letter writing holds little interest for me, although there are times when disgruntlement must be aired. (Briefly: Keep it brief. State the problem, state desired compensation, sign off. Oh, and cc: everybody in the executive suite. I never participate in surveys, unless I’m trying to skew results.) But by far the best category of not-known-to-me-personallys continues to be writers. Whether I’ve received simple deep enjoyment reading a compelling book, or learned a lot or both, the strong, not-unpleasant feeling of residual indebtedness sometimes inspires me to write what is,of course,a Fan Letter. When I write a Fan Letter (it seems doubtful I’ll ever inure myself to the cringefulness of the term), I send it off with no expectation of response: it’s quite sincerely and simply an expression of appreciation. That said, I’ve been astounded by responses! A nice note from Patricia Wells after our first trip to Paris wherein we made great use of the first edition of her Food Lover’s Guide, with further information on her directions for putting up one’s own cornichons. There aren’t thanks enough for leading us to the bakery and tea room Laduree, and to Dehillerin, the mind-blowing restaurant supply store. On that first visit to Dehillerin I acquired financier molds toted home to try to replicate Laduree’s. A sentimental favorite from Craig Claiborne, on his New York Times letterhead, saying that my letter gave him a boost, then relating a short anecdote about running into M.F.K. Fisher in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel and inviting her to join him at the caviar tasting he was attending. That one I framed, and it hangs in my off-the-kitchen powder room. Craig Claiborne is one of only two writers (the other is Paul Prudhomme) I’ve ever purposefully gotten a book signed by -- I’m a letter-writer, not an autograph collector. But I did go, because it was Craig Claiborne, to a book signing for the reissued New York Times Cookbook. Craig Claiborne appeared, improbably, at a no-longer-elegant department store in Santa Ana. It was the height of Southern California summer, which is to say HOT, and while I was wilted by the time I got there, Craig Claiborne waited cool and nonchalant in a navy blazer and striped shirt, open at the neck. When I handed my book over to be signed, I told him about my fan letter of a few years earlier, and how much I’d appreciated his response. He stopped signing my book for a second and looked mildly surprised. “I answered?” he said, and then went on, “Usually, it’s nothing.” And then there were a couple of notes from Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher herself. She not only responded, but asked me to write back to her! It was the tortoiseshell cat connection, I feel certain, although we also talked about her annotations for Sylvia Plageman’s Fine Preserving and uses for the chermoula recipe contained therein. She admonished me to spay my tortoiseshell cat believing that her genetic irregularities shouldn’t be passed on. She was already spayed,of course -- I’m a cat-overpopulation activist from way back. (I believe in tortie genetic irregularities, although my evidence, while no less anecdotal than MFKF’s, is more behavioral than physiological.) And then there are those I’ve missed. Elizabeth David, I missed. She was living when I discovered her work and through the years when I cooked my way through her books. But she intimidated the hell out of me and I was reticent to write, even though I knew it was the right thing to do. After girding my loins and summoning my strength and taking a deep breath and performing sundry other mental exercises, I was ready to write. And I missed her. By mere days, it seems in memory, but was probably not quite so close as that. But I think I learned the there-is-no-later-there-is-only-now lesson with that one. Post-internet, I have sent some fan letters electronically. E-mail is an irresistible tool for us letter-writers. Charles Perry, the erudite and funny writer for the Los Angeles Times, sent a cordial reply to my e-mail of several years ago, and has equally cordially answered occasional questions about Russian, Middle Eastern and Turkish cuisine. And I adore the ease of the eGullet PM system for sending notes to Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman about their work. Even in this era of food celebrity on a scale never before seen -- and no end in sight -- the writing part of the job remains the same. Writing is a solitary endeavor. Someone once told me that writing is like tossing a stone into a pond, and there may be ripples, but one never knows the actual effect or extent. My friends at the USPS understand: they’ve just issued an especially beautiful first-class stamp series, Crops of the Americas, ideal for bouncing back one of those ripples to its source. Priscilla writes from a Southern California canyon populated by the typical mix of old hippies, wannabe off-the-gridders, equestrians running the gamut from 20-acre Thoroughbred full dressage to clip-clop nag-riding busted flat in Baton Rouge, schoolteachers, artists, wealthy entrepreneurs, and law enforcement officers (for some reason). Art by Dave Scantland

<img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1147109473/gallery_29805_1195_15985.jpg" hspace="8" align="left">by Shaun Chavis Drive into Chapel Hill, North Carolina on a typical March weekend, and you'll see Franklin Street humming with students and alumni, many wearing Carolina sky blue. Spot a few people on street corners holding signs that read, "I need tickets," and you'll know the madness is hours away from its peak. This is where Michael Jordan played basketball for Dean Smith, it's where legendary battles are fought on the hardwood every spring, and it's where pride bursts like the wide-open flowers of the dogwood trees. The Tobacco Road rivalry is just one battle with Southern roots:you don't have to drive far from Chapel Hill to walk across Civil War battlefields. There's another ongoing struggle with roots in the American South, one without territory or uniforms. It's a war about identity and acknowledgment, things any proud person would fight for. This battle gained voice in Oxford, Mississippi, on the campus of Ole Miss, where writers, chefs, restaurateurs, historians, and other members of the Southern Foodways Alliance gathered to talk about race, food, and the South in October 2004. Passions rose as people tugged over Southern food and soul food, debating which cuisine came from where, who taught whom how to cook, and whether there ought to be just one name for both. You might look at this scene and wonder why it exists. You'd rather go get some deviled eggs or fried chicken. As long as it tastes good and the sweet tea keeps comin' (or maybe you'd prefer Tennessee whiskey), who cares if it’s Southern or soul? Certainly there are better things to debate, and even so, you're not going to get into them now, not with that Jack Daniel's in your hand. Dr. Jessica Harris is a member of the SFA, an author, and a culinary historian. She's got an explanation worth thinking about. "Your food is your heritage. We're passionate about it because in some cases we didn't get it when we were growing up. Certainly for African Americans, it is one of the few things we can claim, and need to claim, and are discussing it. I think the passion comes from that. And certainly there is a subcutaneous discussion: somewhere in that room, someone's granddad owned someone else's granddad. All the more so, we grew it, cooked it, served it, cleaned up the waste it caused, and didn't always get to eat it. That's a big problem." The notion of getting rid of either name, Southern or soul, is enough to offend, because you're not just talking about renaming food. "It's an emotional, valid, African American identity. It's an emotional trigger," said Nathalie Dupree, SFA member and cookbook author who is white. "I think the emotionalism is that white people, too, think this is their food." <div align="center">* * *</div> In Chapel Hill, one street over from Franklin, on Rosemary, is a restaurant Michael Jordan himself enjoyed, a place where food writer Craig Claiborne found a suitable plate of chitterlings. It looks like a one-story house with a wrap-around porch filled with chairs and tables. A sign out front, shaped like a kettle, reads "Mama Dip's Traditional Country Cooking." On a typical weekend, you may circle a few times looking for a parking space, and then wait 45 minutes for a table. Yet the lobby still fills with people of all ages and races, some wearing their Sunday best, some wearing Carolina colors, all dressed with devotion. A board lists the day's specials: fresh flounder, fresh oysters, collards, corn pudding, pineapple coconut cake, rum raisin bread pudding, and blueberry cobbler. At the bottom, in sky blue letters: "Go Heels!" A gray-haired white gentleman calls out, "There she is. Dip, come on out heah!" Out of the kitchen comes a black woman in her mid-70s, six feet and one inch tall, wearing a brown and black dotted short-sleeve blouse. This is Mildred Council, also known as Mama Dip. No one's ever uncomfortable at Dip's, because comfort's right there on your plate: fried green tomatoes, served piping hot as any fried food should be, with the taste of the sun's warmth in them. The mac and cheese is so creamy, you want a spoon to gather all the sauce. A light sweetness kisses the yams. The biscuits are small by commercial super-sized standards, but what's size got to do with it? They're two inches across, if that, and as high as they are wide, ideal carriers for butter or the savory juices on your plate. Peach cobbler in March is just as delicious as in August, because Council buys locally-grown peaches and freezes them for meals like this. The cobbler's so good, you don't want to eat anything else for the rest of the day so you can savor its lingering flavors. You'll find some of the same ingredients used at Magnolia Grill, a restaurant in Durham that's about a 20-minute drive away from Mama Dip’s. From the outside, the restaurant itself is a delicate green building that gives little hint to what Ben and Karen Barker have built inside. Here, the couple interprets Southern food with the elegance and creative mix appropriate for fine dining, and they've done it to national acclaim. Just as you feel warmly welcomed at Mama Dip's, you're no less cared for at Magnolia Grill. Paintings spill their colors into the room; warm lighting and thoughtfully spaced tables create a space just as right for treating your mother on her birthday as it is for charming a lover. The Barkers give passionate attention to the food as well: Ben knows exactly what's on your plate before the waiter carries it to your table. "I hope to retire before I can't see all the food go away from me," he says. Magnolia Grill's menu changes with the seasons. They cure pork themselves and preserve locally-grown produce for use in off-season months. At any time, you may find greens, ham hocks, grits, pork chops, or sweet potatoes mingling with other, exotic flavors: twice-baked grits souffle with wild and exotic mushroom ragout, aged sherry-mushroom emulsion and shaved confit foie gras, for or curried sweet potato bisque with shrimp, toasted coconut and sultana chutney. For dessert, the Southern combination of peanut butter and bananas morphs into a phyllo Napoleon, with a milk chocolate sauce. The Barkers are aware that Magnolia Grill is the place that visiting Yankees may taste traditional Southern ingredients for the first time. "I guarantee you we're the only white tablecloth restaurant in the Triangle that serves creesy greens," said Ben. (Creesy greens, or creecy greens, grow wild in North America; they have small leaves and are also called dry land cress.) This corner of North Carolina is as much Ben Barker's home as it is Council's. Barker grew up a few hours' drive away. "My grandparents and my aunt and uncle ran a tobacco farm, and had sharecropped it with neighbors I grew up with who were black. ...I was mostly taken care of, when I would stay with them, by Louise, who was the black lady that minded me like a ma. But I never really thought that there was any difference in the food that we ate, that she fixed or that my aunt fixed or that my grandmother fixed. Their style of cooking was the same, the ingredients that they chose to use was the same." Move the foie gras aside, and you'll see Magnolia Grill and Mama Dip's share some roots. Both Ben Barker and Council draw on common history and flavors to create their cuisines. Barker's food is Southern, and some call Council's food soul. She, however, doesn't, not even in her first cookbook, Mama Dip's Kitchen. "When the cookbook came out, I called the food country cooking, and then when people started coming in, especially if they were black, they would call it soul food, and I was telling them that my cooking is country cooking because I didn't hear about soul food until in the sixties, during the demonstrations. Blacks became to be more visible on television and out in the world. That's when they started calling it soul food. But our food, the food I cook is just country, because I cook fresh food, fresh vegetables." You'd be right to think there's not much culinary difference between Southern food and soul food. Pick up a copy of Nathalie Dupree's New Southern Cooking, and you'll find recipes for black-eyed peas with duck giblets, old-style greens and 'pot likker', fried green tomatoes, and peach cobbler. Thumb through Sylvia's Soul Food by Harlem restaurateur Sylvia Woods, and there are recipes for black-eyed peas and rice, collard greens with cornmeal dumplings, fried green tomatoes, and peach cobbler. Or consider the works of Edna Lewis, the Virginia-reared granddaughter of slaves who treated New York to her culinary talent first in the 1940s at Cafe Nicholson. Her published recipes include black-eyed peas in tomato and onion sauce, cooked greens, fried tomatoes, and peach cobbler. Lewis didn't use the term "soul food" in her books; the title of her first is The Taste of Country Cooking. <div align="center">* * *</div> People started using the term "soul food" in the sixties, when black Americans were redefining themselves. Men were "soul brothers," women were "soul sisters," and they grooved to "soul music." New Jersey poet and civil rights activist Amiri Baraka is likely the first person to put the words "soul food" into print. In 1962, he wrote an essay addressing another writer's criticism that the problem with "Negroes" in America was that they had no language of their own and no characteristic cuisine -- both elements of cultural identity. "This to me is the deepest stroke, the unkindest cut, of oppression," Baraka wrote, and he pointed out items brought to America from Africa, such as watermelon. He listed the foods on the black American table: sweet potato pies, greens, Hoppin' John, hush puppies and fish sandwiches, all "soul food." Baraka didn't define a cuisine as much as he exposed an element of black American identity, an identity much needed as an anchor during a time when blacks fought through a social storm to gain civil rights. Just as people used the term "soul" to define themselves and create a community of acceptance and belonging, today groups of people who call themselves neo-Confederates are rallying around their own definition of Southern: a culture they see as primarily Anglo-Celtic. Their adopted language is the King’s English, and their slogan is “heritage, not hate” -- a message many don't buy. "It's by its nature hateful because it's exclusive," said John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. "They use the term 'Southern culture' and mean white Southern culture. Southern culture is a multi-racial culture. When you talk about the South, you are, whether you know it or not, talking about white folks and black folks, Native Americans, and multiple other origin-points of ethnicities. I think a term like Southern food embraces it all." Harris, author of The Welcome Table: African American Heritage Cooking, is not sure she likes the term "soul food." "Most African Americans in my experience did not say, 'I'm going to get some soul food' until the sixties," she said. "Bottom line, it was dinner. All cultures have food for the soul, and this is just the food for the soul for African Americans." To Harris, the term "Southern" can also fit. "All soul food is Southern, but not all Southern is soul food, in the sense that most African American food, in the narrow sense, has its genesis in the South. …There are dishes in the Southern culinary lexicon that are not soul food at all -- Country Captain, for example." Country Captain, a chicken stew flavored with curry, is a dish that likely found its origins in India. <div align="center">* * *</div> It isn't as if the declaration of a cuisine called "soul food" in the sixties took its dishes off anyone else's table, nor has it kicked anyone out of the kitchen. Fighting over which food is mine,not yours, isn’t the point of the effort to link food and heritage – doing so, to many, is futile. Council, for example, sees her cuisine as American (though you could also call it Southern, soul, or country). "I don't like just to say it's just for blacks, that it represents blacks," Council said. "It's everybody's food. I wouldn't want to say that they took it away from us, like they took a lot of things, but they want to use it, use it." "The better point made is that there is a debt of acknowledgment that white Southerners owe to black Southerners," said Edge, who is white. "It is a debt of acknowledgment that has not been erased, has not been fully attributed. That's a different matter than saying, 'this food is black folks' food' or 'this food is white folks' food.'" Ben Barker knows his taste for creesy greens came from his black neighbor Louise, and it's that memory, that flavor, he consciously tries to preserve. "I think it's important to try and keep doing that kind of cooking. Now, because I'm a white guy cooking it, does that mean it's not soul food? Maybe. But Louise used to cook that for me, because she'd gather the greens up on the way over to my aunt's house and she'd fix up creesy greens for lunch. I don't ever remember my aunt cooking creesy greens." Barker's experience is one example of why it's so difficult to distinguish two separate cuisines. The food, and the people, are mingled. "There is so much integration of foods and attitudes in the South, which perhaps people from the North don't really realize," said Dupree. "In the South, for all of its flaws and difficulties, within the food aspects there has been an enormous cross-over, not just from African Americans working in white homes, but it's from intermarriage, it's from people having farms next to each other. Everything here has been intertwined, which is what has made this a distinct culture." Economy is also a common element in the foods of the South: what people ate depended more upon resources than ethnicity. "When I talk to some people, they think somebody called it soul food because we like food with the bones in it," Council said. "We like fish with the bones, we like our pieces of meat with the bones, we like the pig tails, we like the neck bones. It was affordable. We're always getting the big packet of pork chops because it's cheaper. It's got more bones it in and it comes from the economy part of the roast, you understand. ...It was about economy, you know, what we could afford. It wasn't about [race], because white people bought those big things too, and they ate them." Barker agrees, again drawing on his family experience. "I think what most distinguishes [them] in general from an intellectual perspective is the choice of protein that you might use because of the cost of it. But because both families were farm families, the protein that we ate were yard chickens and hog products that they raised themselves." "The core is, these are the foods of poverty," says Edge. "Granted, African Americans have suffered more at the hands of poverty than perhaps many whites. There's a heck of a lot of poor white folks out there that are gnawing on pork chop bones and eating the hell out of chitterlings, too." <div align="center">* * *</div> Culinary historians have traced specific elements in Southern cuisine to their African roots. Okra, watermelon, peanuts, pumpkin, and black-eyed peas, for example, came to the United States from Africa. Techniques such as deep frying, seasoning food with small pieces of smoked meats, and making fritters all have some element of Africa in them. Dig a little deeper, and you'll discover that peanuts were indigenous to South America and introduced to Africa by Portuguese explorers. The slave trade brought peanuts to North America. The use of nuts and seeds as a thickening agent is also an idea from Africa, but the Arabs were using ground almonds to thicken sauces since the 13th century, and perhaps earlier. Is it possible the Arabs passed that practice on to others as they traveled through North Africa? Some scholars believe black-eyed peas may have come to Africa from Asia. And while we get the word "yam" from Africa, the actual vegetable never made the Atlantic crossing. The American sweet potato became yam's substitute. Truth be told, throughout history, someone's always swiped ideas from someone else's kitchen. "You see this over and over again," Dupree said. "You go to an Afghani restaurant and you love the food. And then you get a recipe of something you liked, but you may not have all the ingredients, so you substitute. So then, whose recipe is it? Is it Afghani? Is it yours? The English have always cooked with small pieces of meat and greens. Turnips and rutabagas proliferate there. How do you put your finger on this? So then, you have to ask yourself, why do you want to put your finger on this? The answer is because African Americans have been robbed." This is why a battle exists. "There are no people who have been less embraced, with possible exception of Indians, than African Americans," said Jessica Harris. "American food is changing like the country is changing. There are all sorts of things that are becoming American – pizza is American, sushi is becoming virtually American, mojitos. I think the slowness with which the food of African Americans has been accepted speaks to the slowness with which the people are being accepted. Go to a Barnes and Noble and look at the cookbooks -- shelves and shelves of Chinese cookbooks, Cuban cookbooks, just about everything outnumbers African American cookbooks." Chef Ben Barker also senses a lag in racial reconciliation. "I feel like we've come a long way, and not nearly the way we should have come by now," he said. "It seems like to me there was such tremendous progress in the sixties, and then people became apathetic about what it takes to make us a whole country." The very language used to describe Southern and soul food is a hurdle on the path to harmony, simply because of the politics behind the words. The term "soul food" gives African American heritage an acknowledgment it hasn't fully received, yet signals white Americans are excluded. "Southern" is used by some to encompass a multi-ethnic culture, and by others as a racist code word. "The South has a uniquely troubled history," said Edge. "Even those of us that don't spend a lot of time pondering that, it's kind of subcutaneous. It's still a part of our experience. I think we realize more so -- some of us reluctantly so -- how our food is weighted with this legacy." <div align="center">* * *</div> If food is a point of contention, it can also be an agent of unity. The many culinary professionals who attend SFA's symposia know this first hand: they take raw ingredients, apply culinary skill, serve, and watch food build relationships and create life-long memories. It's as awesome as any force of nature. Many in this crowd believe racial reconciliation will happen around the table, and, in fact, they left Ole Miss 19 months ago with a charge to start dialogues around tables in their own communities. “I think it will happen through food, intermarriage -- let's face it, it is happening,” said Nathalie Dupree. “Society is becoming accepting of things that my generation couldn't, things that are very natural and normal. I think food is just one aspect of it. If you can come to my house and enjoy the food and be comfortable, then I think that we have a better chance of having a good conversation." "I think the simple act of breaking bread together, of that kind of communion in not necessarily the religious sense but in the humanistic sense -- I think that offers opportunities for all," said Edge. "The most intimate act we engage in every single day is eating, and it fosters bonds and breaks down some of those chasms." "I can feel it," Council agrees. "Since the five years I've been out there, just the five years since I've put the cookbook out, this what I feel all over the country." She likely knows this from daily experience. Council walks through the dining room of her restaurant, going from table to table, often sitting down right next to her customers. "How y'all doin' over here?" she says. The noise is thick: there is clinking of dishes and silverware from the kitchen and a moderate roar of conversation. Now and then you hear her laughter above it all. Sometimes she laughs so hard she takes off her glasses and wipes a tear from her eye. Council has long belonged to this community. In the 40s and 50s, she cooked on campus and for local families. Since she opened her restaurant in 1976, every North Carolina governor and UNC-Chapel Hill president has dined at her tables. It has taken her decades to battle her way from a domestic worker hidden behind kitchen doors to a position of appreciation as a businesswoman whose contributions are honored and sought after. Even after this long time, she may have to confront stereotypes each time a stranger to Mama Dip’s comes in to eat. "I have a lot of white customers and I have black customers," Council said. "I didn't want them to come here, 'let's go get some soul food at Mama Dip's.' I want to be an American woman. You understand? That's what I want to be." Shaun Chavis (aka shaunchavis) is a soulful Southerner now living up North, where she's finishing a Master of Liberal Arts in Gastronomy at Boston University. She's spent most of her life in newsrooms and kitchens. Art by Dave Scantland (aka Dave the Cook).

<img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1145918940/gallery_29805_2457_37779.jpg" width="324" height="285" hspace="5" align="left">Everyone knows that a restaurant is not just its kitchen, and that there are many essential factors without which the establishment would not function. It is obvious that the kitchen would be nothing without a group of people attending to the diners and acting as a liaison with the chefs. In El Bulli it has been our intention that the treatment afforded to our guests, like our cuisine, matches our own outlook on life.<br><br> As we have said before, this outlook on life is embodied in an attitude marked by cordiality and helpfulness. The service in El Bulli treats customers with respect and friendliness, with the same attitude as if we were receiving a friend at home. We should not forget that our main objective is the diner's pleasure, a factor that is sometimes analysed in a way that is overly self-serving: the customer's happiness should not just be interpreted as a guarantee that he will return to the restaurant one day, or that he will speak favourably about his visit. The happiness of each diner is a chef's greatest reward, beyond other interests related to financial factors or prestige, although these undeniably have a part to play when we remember that a restaurant is a business that needs to be more or less profitable in order to stay open. <br> <br> <hr noshade size="2" color="#666666"> <table border="0" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> <tr> <td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1145918940/gallery_29805_2457_1250.jpg"></td> <td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1145918940/gallery_29805_2457_7100.jpg"></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1145918940/gallery_29805_2457_102.jpg"></td> <td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1145918940/gallery_29805_2457_5635.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">El Bulli has followed a pattern of attention that has been perfected over time, and which increasingly matches the general philosophy of the restaurant. One of the most important factors has been the revision of the conventions of gourmet restaurants, avoiding arbitrary customs that only owe their existence to habit, and which add nothing to the diner's pleasure. We have already spoken of our interest in avoiding the excessive solemnity of some restaurants. In this respect, we have a maxim that has always guided us: the diner should feel at home. This is embodied as much in the physical surroundings (which aims to be welcoming, elegant and warm, but without any superfluous elements) as in the typical restaurant accessories (cutlery, tableware, furniture) and in particular, the conduct of the staff. <br><br> This last aspect is the one that, in our opinion, distinguishes us from others. In El Bulli we are aware that every meal is like a theatrical performance, which begins with the preparation of the dishes in the kitchen and continues with serving them at the table. The waiters are the actors, professionals who must know their lines perfectly. That does not mean that there has to be a fictitious or artificial distance with respect to the diner; on the contrary, a good waiter should know how to transmit with his attitude, with his conduct and with his knowledge of what he is serving, and that his objective is, once again, the comfort and pleasure of the diner. In this respect, it has been important to instil a particular attitude: a waiter at El Bulli must avoid routine at all costs, and use his five senses for each dish he serves the diner, with no distinctions whatsoever. The objective is to give the same service to all types of diner. <br> <br> </font> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top"> </td> <td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1145918940/gallery_29805_2457_2464.jpg" hspace="5" align="left"> All this means that an El Bulli waiter should not be just a true professional, perhaps with proven experience in other gourmet restaurants, but he should be steeped in the spirit of our restaurant. And the strangest thing is that this does happen, and in just a few days the waiters are immersed in this philosophy and seamlessly integrate as players in this show. For this we are lucky to have senior restaurant staff who are the real backbone of El Bulli, who have been with us practically since the start of our story.<br> <br></td></tr> <tr> <td valign="top"> </td> <td> Another particular aspect of El Bulli has been the elimination of the barrier that traditionally exists between service in the restaurant and the kitchen. The waiters are a definite liaison between the kitchen and the dining area; they have access to both worlds and become transmitters of the work done at the stoves and serving benches. In this respect, it may be said that there is no separation between the kitchen and the dining area. In addition, in 1994, when the new kitchen came into service, we installed a table to serve diners with the same care and attention as in the restaurant area, and it has enabled us to reduce even further this traditional gap between the two worlds. <br> <br> <img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1145918940/gallery_29805_2457_8188.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">As we have said, this care of the diner has been an objective pursued since the beginning, but it has been adapted over time. 1994 saw the introduction of changes in the cooking style that needed to be carried over into the restaurant area as well. Getting rid of the à la carte menu in favour of the menu de dégustation, and the fact that this was growing yearly, meant that a type of service that reflected these changes had to be introduced. This gave more importance to the role of the waiter as a transmitter of a cooking style, as a person who accompanied the diner so that he would adapt to the rhythm set by the kitchen. This rhythm, far from being frenetic, aims to maintain human contact at all times, to the extent that, whatever the rhythm our “show” calls for, the diner’s requirements are always paramount. In this respect, the attention given by the waiter is fundamental. In short, from 1994 onwards, the service at El Bulli was even more distinctive and was devoted to the transmission of a culinary philosophy, but with the same requisite at all times and an objective that has been paramount since the outset: for the diner to be happy. <br> <br></td></tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1145918940/gallery_29805_2457_2505.jpg"></td> <td> <img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1145918940/gallery_29805_2457_295.jpg" hspace="5" align="left"> One of the typical scenes in a creative restaurant is the waiter explaining to diners how a dish should be eaten. In a traditional restaurant, this hardly ever occurs, since the diner usually knows in advance what type of dish he has ordered, and any variations are minimal. There are usually two reactions to the waiter’s instructions, acceptance or rejection. The latter is not very frequent, but there may always be a diner who mutters to his partner that he does not need to be told how to eat. This is a perfectly reasonable attitude, as is reading alternate chapters in a novel or looking at a painting upside-down. <br><br> The waiter’s instructions are not gratuitous, and they are delivered in order to explain the best way of eating a dish so as to fully appreciate the chef’s intention, and thus receive more enjoyment from it. The idea is that the dish in question has been created to be eaten in a particular way. For example, if a diner does not know how a fondue works, someone needs to explain it to him. On the other hand, there is nothing to stop someone in a Japanese restaurant from eating a sashimi and soy sauce separately. Yet almost certainly the fish will taste insipid and the sauce too strong. With a creative dish, especially if the concept is brand new and there is nothing to compare it with, it is imperative to know what order to follow . . . (F)or some dishes it is essential to know the sequence in which it should be eaten, otherwise the diner will not be able to appreciate all the refinements. This should not make us lose sight of the fact that there are gourmets who, when they see the layout of the elements of a dish, intuitively guess (usually correctly) the order in which they are to be eaten. But they are exceptions that prove the rule, and the waiter’s instructions, far from restricting the liberty of the diner, are directed at ensuring that the maximum pleasure is obtained. <br> <br></td></tr> <tr><td colspan="2"></font><hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"> <font size="-2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Our thanks to Juli Soler for his invaluable assistance in this project. <br> Copyright Ferran Adria, Juli Soler, Albert Adria © 2006. Photographs by Francesc Guillamet. <br> Introduction by Pedro Espinosa.<br> El Bulli books may be purchased here.<br> </font></td></tr> </table>

<img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144805729/gallery_29805_1195_14898.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">by Margaret McArthur The doorbell rang while I was dishing dinner to Ajax and Willow -- a half can each of Friskies Turkey and Giblets served in Pyrex custard cups. Callers are rare in the early evening, so as I extricated my ankles from avid feline fur and opened the door, I was prepared to greet a siding salesman or a pair of white-shirted missionaries barely old enough to shave. Instead, the doorway disclosed a bouquet of party-dressed six year olds -- one carried a Marshall Fields shopping bag, another clutched a sheet from a yellow legal pad. A tiny blonde blossom stepped up as Spokesgrrrl and consulted the canary document. Looking up, she thrust it in my direction. "Do you have any of the things on this paper? Kelsey’s having a scavenger hunt for her birthday party." Kids still have birthday parties that don't involve bad pizza, a dizzying decibel level and surrogate Moms far from the family McMansion? Who knew? I scanned the list and grabbed the item closest to hand, which, given the hour, was a napkin on the coffee table -- in this case the cocktail variety, bearing the damp imprint of a martini glass and a handy recipe for my winsome mixologists to be. I wended my way back to the kitchen and mused about the wonder of this encounter. A scavenger hunt! Hair ribbons! Was it possible that Kelsey's mother had baked the birthday cake rather than order the supermarket slab? Had she done better than the tombstone encrusted with shortening buttercream, limned with an image of Barbie, outlined in gel the texture and color of Colgate on crack? I dared to hope. I really wanted to hope. McArthur's Law: Nostalgia leads to heart failure, selective memory and hardening of the attitudes. The good old days weren't. Tomorrow is another day, Maggie, and it just might be a better day than yesterday. This principle helps how this bemused, befuddled and bufflebrained woman greets the morning, because any other way would encourage vapors, Valium and lipstick neglect. But the sweet scavengers had shown up Proust and his madeleines as the pikers they are. I grated cheddar for the cheese grits and discovered that my red mules had meandered down that twisty treacherous path: Memory Lane. Along with pin-the-tail on the donkey, white industrial garter belts and an ashtray on my desk at work, what else had gone the way of MS-DOS and the dodo while I was taking a forty year nap? Cousins imprisoned in iron lungs before Salk invented polio vaccine. Restrooms labeled “White” and “Colored.” Cars without seatbelts or cup holders. The Soviet bloc. All are as extinct as that red-handled Rube Goldberg device the eggbeater, three-martini lunches and bridge in the afternoon. Remember a letter in the mailbox, glam rock and macramé plant holders, to say nothing of those October 31sts when I waited for the dark and snow of a Quebec Halloween, wearing quilted pants under my fairy princess costume. We spared nary a worry about razor blades as we gobbled homemade fudge and McIntosh apples and popcorn balls that other kids' Mums had made from scratch. I stirred my grits and read the Wednesday grocery store flyer I'd propped against the Cuisinart. Prime rib was on sale, but way out of reach for me -- if meat costs more than three bucks a pound, I can't afford it. Russets were on sale for 99 cents a ten-pound bag, carrots were 39 cents a pound, and -- be still my Anglo heart -- Brussels sprouts were a steal at a buck ninety per sixteen-ounce package. Still, while I informed the cats that the gravy train ended here, and they should look forward to breakfast, I considered standing rib, roast potatoes, carrots and sprouts. I longed for Sunday dinner. <div align="center">* * * * *</div> I've never cooked the classic Sunday dinner, which is consumed after church in the early afternoon. With typical understatement, the English call it Sunday lunch. In my WASPy household in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, it was the culinary touchstone of my youth. I know it was, too, for the French-Canadian Catholics who made up ninety-eight percent of the population of my town; I could sniff the same seductive wispy tendrils of roasting meat and wild blueberry pie wafting from their windows, the same aromas that filled our kitchen on that special day. St. James Anglican Church is a tiny historical and architectural jewel, snuggled next to the docks on the St. Lawrence, the very waters that were the kick-off point for Radisson, Des Groseillers, Marquette, Joliet, La Verendrye, Cartier, Champlain, and de La Salle. Name a French guy with a county, river or town (or park or hotel, for that matter) named after him anywhere in North America, and he'd dipped his paddle into my harbor. He mapped the continent, thrilled my ten-year-old history geek self, and filled the vaults of the Hudson's Bay Company with beaver pelts and gold. We went to Matins because St. James was Low Church. Although Communion was offered every Sunday and Friday at eight, the popular eleven o'clock was the magnificent Matins service, with Holy Eucharist offered only once a month in the featured time slot -- just often enough to keep the Nicene Creed fresh in memory. My church was built by the Recollet Fathers in 1703, rebuilt in 1754, and impounded by the English conquerors after the Seven Years' War. A renovation in 1830 cast off the three-foot thick walls erected for a more dangerous time, revealing the light and grace of late-colonial Georgian interior architecture within. It was the first beautiful building I'd ever known. Even when we'd checked out the hymns on the board and found them seriously wanting, even when Canon Gourlay preached his driest -- even when Malcolm Moir didn’t stride down the nave in full Highland regimentals -- there were always the tablets on the walls celebrating the lives, deaths and marriages of parishioners who pulled up the kneelers two-hundred years ago. As an eight-year-old innocent, I couldn't help but notice all those Henriettas and Altheas who died before they were thirty were preceded in the cemetery by six children. Sir Isaac Brock, the victor and hero of the Battle of Queenston Heights, the commander who took back Detroit for the British, the man who kicked American ass all the way back to Buffalo, visited his sister in the Regency rectory because she was married to the pastor. Most thrilling for us kids was the ancient trap door hidden behind the font, so those Papist Recollet Brothers could make a subterranean escape into the Ursuline Convent across the street when the local Iroquois decided that conversion was not an option. The bell rope hung behind it, and my brother in his altar boy black and white pulled it at 10:58 -- the bells chimed as sweetly as they had when George the Third was king. I am breaking McArthur's Law, but nostalgia for that beautiful church, and the Casavant Freres organ and the Wesley brother’s hymns -- pumped out by Mrs. Kendall, the wren-like wife of the verger -- are the happy incidental melding of history, art, architecture, music and Parish politics that, excepting my family life, were the sweet, savory and spicy of the McArthur I am today. With all due respect, your mall superchurch just doesn't cut the mustard. My mother was not a regular attender, even by Episcopalian standards -- I think she managed to dodge even the Easter and Christmas services. Daddy dragged his butt out of bed Sunday morning after a late night dancing and wallowing to the quartet from Rigoletto, performed by the band of amateur opera singers on the payroll of the Blue Bird Café. My parents tripped in at three a.m. after a cheap date dancing the bossa nova and criticizing the reedy tenor's take on “Nessun Dorma.” Mummy got a pass – a free ticket allowing her to sleep until 11:00, sip some espresso from the stovetop Melitta, and start Sunday prep. When I turned ten, I introduced myself to the Mixmaster manual and Fanny Farmer. I begged a pastry lesson from my mother, and devoted my Saturday nights to babysitting my younger siblings, rolling out pie dough, gossiping with Joanne Kathan (phone cradled against my neck as I painted my nails) and watching The Avengers. (I didn’t consider this a boring teen Saturday night, by the way, and my parents even paid me the going rate of thirty-five cents an hour Canadian for my services.) With dessert stashed on the sideboard, Mummy had the time to demonstate how delicious a meat and potatoes dinner could be. The old Dominion Store on rue Des Forges sold prime beef (called in Canada “Grade A,” an appellation stamped into the creamy fat with purplish-blue ink); pork that roasted up tender, not stiff; Canadian lamb; and fresh turkey. She was the mistress of the English savory sauces -- mint, red currant and pan gravy from Five Roses flour blended into pan drippings and meat juices. Today, she's a sophisticated cook -- the kind who always has homemade demi-glace at her fingertips -- but in her early thirties she could stir up a dark-brown, madly meaty gravy with nothing but drippings, flour, water and salt and pepper. Daddy, Ian, Meg and I shed our boots and scarves in the tiny vestibule, jostling for the opportunity to grab that first smell. We'd impersonate a basket of baby bloodhounds, sniffling, wiggling our bottoms and practically barking for joy. Was it roast beef day, or leg of lamb day or the happy Sunday when the glorious crackle-crusted roast pork hunched on the platter? (Roast pork meant applesauce!) Would it be potatoes roasted in the melted suet or Yorkshire Pud? A handful of Sundays, it was both, an event so miraculous that I can still remember what I was wearing on each of them. My mother was an early carb-counter, the better to slip into the toreador pants and tiny-waisted circle skirts she wore on Saturday nights, who meted out rice by the grain during the week, but Sunday was the feast day of St. Starch. The vegetables came and went as the seasons dictated, but the old faithfuls were carrots and Brussels sprouts -- come to think of it, they’re semper fi on my table, to this day. I remember only two conversational themes, but they were far ranging and endlessly gripping. We talked about the many excellences of dinner, whether the stuffing was tastier this time than last, the blueberries more tart, the asparagus fatter. Then we processed down the aisle like Sunday morning drama critics, counting the house -- fifty on a good Sunday -- the costumes (had Colonel Moir worn his regimentals -- the kilt, the sporran, the dirk in his sock?) the set (skimpy altar flowers) and always, the music. What a misguided selection of hymns this week! We weren't an overtly religious family (the Anglican way, after all) but we were musical, and being stuck with a couple of stinkers like 242 (Jesus to thy Table Led) or 650 (O Savior when we have no work) -- well, it made us grumpy. After we'd fought for the last piece of pie, Ian and I did the dishes as we did every night, then hit the piano bench. I didn’t grow up in a log cabin or a Victorian parsonage -- we had avocado appliances, The Doors on the turntable and wine with dinner, but we huddled around Daddy as he accompanied our Sunday afternoon sing-along, like the offspring of Louisa May Alcott. We’d sing the hymns we'd wanted at Church, like 401 (Immortal Invisible God Only Wise) or 406 (Guide me O thou great Jehovah), then we'd pull out the secular songbooks – Steven Foster's Greatest Hits, Airs of Old Scotland, and Songs and Shanties of Newfoundland, -- a special favorite. After a final chorus of "The Squid Jiggin’ Ground", the second half of Sunday was a diminuendo -- homework, napping parents, writing the mandated weekly letters to our grandmothers. I don't remember Sunday supper, though I know we had one. I do remember that sinking of heart as I slipped into bed, knowing that nine hours hence I'd be waiting for the school bus in miniskirt and pantyhose, thawing my thighs in first-period geometry. The cubicle has replaced the classroom, but I slip into bed on Sunday night as bummed as I was when I was sweet sixteen. My modern Sunday routine is bacon and eggs at noon and dinner at nine, probably a bowl of soup or a home-stretched pizza. I like baking on a Sunday afternoon, so the Sunday meal is likely to feature dessert, not a sure thing on any other night. But if I'm not keeping the faith about Sunday dinner, looming as large as it does in the makeup of the modern gastromical me, why should anyone? I gave over a portion of my Monday in the cubicle compound conducting on-site research. Here's my demographic sample: fifteen folks, 45 percent African-American, mostly with roots in Mississippi, like most black folks around Chicago, and mostly members of large evangelical churches. The other fifty-five per cent are Caucasian -- and like most white folks around Chicago, Roman Catholics of Irish, Italian, Polish or Hispanic descent. When I asked, “Did your Mom make a big Sunday dinner after church every week?” their eyes lit up -- all thirty orbs. “My grandma cooked for all thirteen of us kids, her thirty other grandbabies, and the aunts and uncles. It was family visiting day.” When I asked how she'd managed to provide a spread like that and still sing in the choir, Ebony said, “Grandma made everything the night before -- the ham, the chicken, the greens, the spaghetti, the cornbread, the pies, the coconut cake, the lemonade -- and she'd just heat things up a bit.” I broke a sweat thinking about cooking anything, let alone heating it up, in Alcorn, Mississippi in August. Mrs. Ebony doesn’t make Sunday dinner -- they like to stop for Popeye’s on the way home from service. “Yeah, Mom would put a pot roast in the slow-cooker way before we left for Mass, and I'd peel potatoes when we got home. Always cabbage, mashed potatoes, Jell-O salad, dinner rolls -- stuff like that. She wasn't much for desserts, but we'd always get a pie from Baker's Square. We'd wash the dishes, sit around the table and play cards. It was really fun! Sometimes my cousins would come around.” Janet's crockpot doesn’t get much action these days. “Well, since we go to 6:15 Saturday Mass, we mooch around on Sunday -- I'll do laundry and maybe Jeff will throw something on the grill around four. “ Jim tore a page from his Dilbert calendar. ”We'd eat roast duck and red cabbage and pierogis at Grandma’s after Mass. The uncles would drink vodka shots and us kids would play stickball in the alley when were little, or smoke weed in the park when we got older. It was fun.” And last Sunday? “Well, we go to 6:15 Saturday Mass, and Karen doesn’t like to cook, so mostly I'll throw something on the grill around four.” Keath mumbled: he was busy deleting personal email. “My Gram used to have us over for ham biscuits and gravy after service, me and my cousins. It was fun, but now? Mom looks at us mad crazy if we ask her to cook -- anytime. There's a soul food place on 73rd where we hang after service, or I'll go to the Golden Corral with some of my homes from Youth Choir.” I felt less guilty -- even the faithful have dropped along the wayside, at the barbecue grill, the buffet or Burger King. The two last nails to seal the casket on the dining room table -- the final resting place of Sunday dinner -- are women with jobs, and the Vatican’s decision to offer a sneak liturgical preview on Saturday night. Like me, everyone misses the food and the occasion, but like any folks dealing with the dear departed, we smile and talk sweet, and move on. My co-workers weren’t eager to leave the wake -- they lingered, testifying to Nonna’s braccioles or Gammy’s corned beef. Nostalgic, yes, but I didn't feel wistful, or shackled by McArthur's Law. We were a happy scrum of work buddies, invoking the ghost of Sunday dinners past. Just before we decided that it was time to scatter and look busy, Juwanna poked her head over the divider. “Hey, I had Sunday dinner yesterday at Big Mama's: my Mom, my kids, my sisters and their kids -- looking so fine in their church clothes. My Mom cooked shit when I was little cause she was a crack ho back then and DCFS placed me with Big Mama. Mom's been straight for years, but she still doesn't cook. We all picked over the collards and my sister made Jiffy cornbread. Big Mama had roast chicken and fried chicken, mac-and-cheese, peach cobbler and caramel cake, just like back in the day. We played cards after dinner and the kids ran around. It's like the beginning of the week for us.” A wag brought up Mapquest and asked for Big Mama's address. I began to check my voicemail and then thumped down the phone. Juwanna was right! All those Sunday feasts were ushering in the new week, not marking the end of the old. How had I forgotten that? My attendance chart at Sunday School was solid stick-on stars, and I’d received my Confirmation from Russell Quebec on May 31, 1965. I remember the day because the Bishop noted it in my Book of Common Prayer when he autographed it for me, not because it was the date I underwent a spiritual awakening -- in fact, it was down the slippery slope shortly after. I’d quickly outgrown the white lace minidress in which I received my first sip of Communion wine. During the months leading up to Y2K I'd taken some nerdy interest in the calendar. Back then, I knew that months that start with a Sunday also feature a Friday the 13th, and knew whether Denis the calendar monk was The Short or The Fat. I knew back then that the Biblical Sabbath was the last day of the week -- Saturday -- and that Jesus rose from the dead on Sunday (Mark 16:9.) Pentecost, the first meeting of the Christian church, fell on a Sunday, not the Sabbath. (Acts 2:1) The Quakers call Sunday First Day. Heck, who cares if the International Organization for Standardization decided that Monday is the kick-off for the week (ISO-8601) The wonks at the ISO are busy sorting out ANSI E-standards, so they live for Monday when we all log on, pull up our mail and open our calendars. But in Russian, the translation for Monday is something like “Do Nothing Day,” celebrated in cubicles everywhere. Even agnostics like me can embrace the comforting concept that Sunday Dinner isn't pulling down the scrim on the old week, but starting off the new one with a bang. And I did, back then -- singing out loud, eating a brilliant meal at lunchtime, writing to my grandmothers, setting my hair on orange juice cans and drifting off to bed listening to White Rabbit. It’s sustaining to know that the first day of the week isn't really Monday, but Sunday -- for 6:15 Saturday Mass attendees and fallen-away Episcopalians like me, it’s a wondrous correction. There are lots of Greek and Italian recipes for roast potatoes in vogue right now -- just cut ‘em up and cuddle them around the roast. Along with the techniques beloved of grillers and roasters that involve nothing but unpeeled baby red potatoes slung on the grill or in the oven, they supply spuds that are fine in their way, but they’re not Sunday Roast Potatoes, which everyone --everyone -- needs to know how to cook. For starch salvation, peel some medium russets (Americans might know them as Idahoes) and cut them in half. Parboil until they're about halfway cooked. Lower them into the pan drippings when the roast has an hour to go. If you don’t have enough drippings to come halfway up the sides, add some shortening or lard -- never the Extra Virgin or the canola oil. When you tong them from the pan, they'll be crispy and golden without, mealy, starchy and soft within. Pass the gravy boat -- that's a righteous start to a new week. Margaret McArthur, aka maggiethecat, is host and Dark Lady of the Daily Gullet Competition forum. She writes, cooks and tends her garden near Chicago. Impression of St. James Anglican Church, Trois-Rivieres, Quebec by Dave Scantland, aka Dave the Cook, after a photo from the Trois-Rivieres web site.

<img align="left" src="http://egullet.com/imgs/golden_gully.gif" width="185" height="290" hspace="5">We're calling this one a draw, and not from fear that the odd woman out would have hard feelings. andiesenji and Pontormo both wrote off-beat, scholarly pieces, and they were the only writers around these parts to embrace the challenge of this competition. (To say that neither entry is exactly a foodblog is a minor cavil.) If you’ve missed these treats, here’s your opportunity to catch up on your reading. Pontormo and andie, here are your Golden Gulleys! <hr align="center" width="50%"> Euripedes Unbound: New Classical Discovery Proves a Feast by Pontormo One of the great tragedies of the ancient world was played out not upon the stage, but on papyrus: scroll after scroll worn, torn and eaten by bug or flame. We know the playwright Euripides (d. 406 BCE) by virtue of eighteen surviving dramas. None is represented in a complete group of the four the Athenian originally submitted in competition to be performed at sanctuaries in honor of the gods. Such a body of extant work is rare. Of more than seventy documented plays by Aeschylus, all but seven are lost. Sophocles? Six. While Aristophanes (d. c. 380 BCE) gets the last laugh, submitting poor beleaguered Euripides to humiliation after humiliation as a character in his farce, The Frogs, the joke is on him. Merely eleven plays remain from his prolific career, most patched together from this source or that, with brackets around text that translators must approximate, based on their knowledge of Greek myth and the proclivities of the writer. Therefore, it is with tremendous excitement that I am now able to share a discovery that has gone unreported for nearly two years, ever since the close of a special exhibition devoted to late Byzantium at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sewn into the binding of a thirteenth-century Psalter (Saint Petersburg, National Library, Ms. gr. 269), botanical fibers were noticed by a meticulous curator. Russian paleologists investigated further, ultimately excising fragmentary text written in the same hand of late fifth-century Athens on the front and back of well preserved papyrus. For further information about their findings, see Appendix I below. For the reader's purposes, it is sufficient to know that classicists gain irrefutable evidence that Euripides had indeed composed a cycle of plays featuring the women Odysseus encounters on his voyage home from the Trojan War. The surviving passages foreground the titular heroine, Circe [Kirke], a goddess who breaches xenia, the Greek code of hospitality, by luring unsuspecting sailors to her palace, sating their hunger, quenching their thirst, and transforming them into swine. Aided by Hermes, Odysseus escapes the porcine fate of twenty-two of his men, and by ingesting an herb, proves invulnerable to her potion if not her other charms. Food historians and students of popular culture will be startled by the degree to which these terse fragments anticipate the preoccupations of our own world, as if an oracle spoken to us across time, voice of the seer muffled since her mouth is full. What the contemporary reader will notice is a fixation on minutia that Freudians would be tempted to locate somewhere between the oral and anal stages of development. This is especially discernable in the exhaustive detail of description that is proto-photographic, if logocentric in nature. CIRCE Characters Eurylochos Odysseus Hermes Chorus of Swine Circe Mageiros, a cook Dionysus Various attendants of Circe & sailors (silent parts) Scene: the Island of Aiaia. A sandy beach flanked by two palm trees stretches the entire length of the proskenion. Raised upon a platform directly behind the strand, the Palace of Circe commands the stage. Eurylochos, the sailor who delivers the opening lines, stands before a scarlet cloth draped across the colonnaded portico of the deity's home. Only the title character appears center stage, moving forward, once the curtain parts. All others enter from the wings. Eurylochos I am called Eurylochos, son of Nireas Who makes a divine fish soup worthy of the gods. To all who rise in marble rows that spread before me, As if borne upon a briny scallop shell Within the sacred dark we share, I pray: Tread upon these holy grounds with reverence! Breathe deep the smell of incense, Not that of goat roasted on the spit. Hold hymns upon your tongue And not, like me, the honeyed fig between your lips. Beware that which you crave For hunger seizes men and turns them into beasts. I speak of more than hunger of the belly. When revelers recline to feast and late, throw down their bones and raise their brimming cups to Dionysus, Aphrodite is not far away, loosening her hair Before the mirror Eros holds for his comely mother. With every sip, a pin slips from her garments, And as they fall upon the floor, So shall you, soused, upon all fours. As embers died amid the ruins of the house of Priam, I set sail with the great Odysseus from the shores of Troy, Bound for Ithaca, wandering home Beneath the lying movement of the stars. I could tell you of such marvels our crew has seen, And epic misery we have endured, but must not, For rules of classical drama confine the plot To the events of a single day and I must conform To earn the laurel and the honor that the playwright seeks. Thus, nothing of the years, months, or even week Prior to the calamity I report— Nor of the lengths of leathery cod we ate night after night With rings of barley bread and little else until each jug and pot Rang clear, drained of water, so we did thirst Tossed upon the fleur de sel of blackened sea. When at last the mice grew thin from lack of grain, And we, from lack of mice, our ship found port, Here upon the island of Aiaia—home of Circe, Goddess of Deceit, whose palace I turn my back Upon with terror. Our hero sent us sailors ahead, And thus we found ourselves enchanted by a lilting voice, As if Melody danced with knotted kitchen twine And cast her nets around our limbs, and pulling taut, Drew us to these marble halls you see: (The sailor pauses to replace aural experience with visual sensation. Orality becomes spectacle, and audience, viewers: a collective eye of reception whose sight writes text. Female attendants pull the curtain from the portico to reveal the palace interior. At the far right, shimmering silk upon a loom. Its wanton patterns invert the chaste purity of linens Penelope weaves as she awaits the return of her beloved husband, Odysseus. To the far left, a bed spread with a similar textile. Most prominent in the center, upon the bare polished surface of Cyprus wood, silver bowls of fruit, platters of sweetmeats, cheeses, eel glistening with oil. Beside swelling flasks painted with wide-eyed octopi, kraters for mixing water and wine. Couches for dining can be glimpsed to one side. While Circe has not completed the tablecloth upon the loom, you may purchase an exact replica of the finished item at the gift shop as you leave the amphitheater. Also check out the black-figure kylixes decorated with some of your favorite moments from tonight's performance.) Pious Egypt holds the reverence of the gods most high, We Greeks, the pact between the traveler and the host, For home is where we have to take you in, Bathe your feet and offer all the weary need. A hut is but a hut, a palace but a palace—yet, When you are there, every house becomes a home. So as Circe, with her voice in song, threw out her arms To bid us welcome, we threw down ours and entered Without fear. And as our eyes beheld her beauty, Our bellies growled like wolves who knew of danger More than we had wisdom to, for the scent of thyme-rubbed Meats urged our senses to the table where, as you can see An osophagos like Callimedon would find much to be content: The haunches of a fatted calf that Zeus would snatch if altar-placed, Tuna seared with running blood to praise Poseidon, Olives, purple, green and black, that I would cup As gladly as the balls of boys with down upon the chin. Poppy, sesame and all the seeds Demeter strew Studded loaves of wheat, as yet upon the air, the swaying flute Coaxed the servants in the kitchen kneading more. O, to win a man through his stomach, This was the art of the Sorceress! Bothered not were my companions as, sprawled, Barely propped up by their left elbows, they raised in toast Kantaroi filled with wine unmixed, spiced and perfumed With orange, cherry bark and just a hint of Attic clay Thrown by Euxitheos circa 518 BCE, And sealed with the skin of ram, slightly singed. Had they but caught the eye of Circe—but no, their heads flung Back, they guzzled like geese as rain announced Persephone's return. They did not learn the source of the witch's smile until their cups Shattered in chards upon the floor, No longer grasped as fingers cloven changed, Hands becoming hoofs, and balance lost as elbows fled Accompanied by the definition of pecs, tapered thighs and fluted abs. How they snorted in horror as, in short, Bewitched, their bodies metamorphed to snouted pigs And poisoned by Circe's drink, sullied, they Lost the arête that grafts the physical splendor That is Greek Man to his moral beauty. I owe to Plato and to Socrates my austere tastes and thus my life. Clear water in my cup, more than bladder could sustain, My not being bovine. I was just returning from Elysian fields, relief, when all this I spied. I chant with panting breath not because this monologue Is droning on and on, but because I ran back to shore To warn Odysseus. Why did he not believe me? I do not understand! Look at me! Is this the face that launched a thousand lies? At any rate, he approaches soon himself, aided by Hermes Who intercepting him along the way, slipped him moly— An herbal remedy— To shield him from a fate suspended, cured and smoked. (Exit Eurylochus. Enter from left and right, in grave dance, steps timed to the beat of the drum, the Chorus of Swine. Actors wear the shortened garments of slaves, hems slit in the back. Holding pig masks before their faces, as they turn, those seated close to the orchestra may glimpse stiff, bristly tails.) Chorus You know, it's hard out here for a pig! Routing around, No truffles in the ground— Sun beating down No shade from the tree, No shade from Hades (That's The Odyssey Book XI, this is Book X) Skin turning brown, Turning crisp—Sniff! Can you smell me roast? Like a sacrifice to the gods, This island, an altar, Our ship, the pilgrim who deposits his gift In the open air. Here, the temple is cursed. The goddess has no mercy. Koi-koi! Koi-koi! Koi-koi! Koi-koi! Anointed by greed, I hunger! I burn! (A falsetto weaves through the sky, rising and falling, lapping like waves upon the shore, like the tongue of a lion upon a carcass, as Circe moves from behind the loom to take position center stage and the chorus parts.) Circe Here piggy! Piggy! Souie! Souie! Chorus Koi-koi! Koi-koi! Koi-koi! Koi-koi! Circe Why the lament? Did I not feed you just before mid-day? Is there not deipnon e'er long? Chorus Same old, same old. Nothing but acorns. Grouts sprinkled on mud in our sty. Circe Is that not the fare of the Ideal Republic? Is sitos not the essence of life? Chorus In Plato, Glaucon taunts and asks if such food is better for fattening a city of pigs. Circe Well, you're not exactly spring chickens, are you now? Chorus In Plato, barley was laid upon fresh leaves. Men feasted on couches of myrtle. Circe Did not my swineherd set you loose upon the fields today? You are free-range. Chorus In Plato, symposium follows dining. We want our women, wine and song! Circe So in mating you create squealing little [spare ribs]? Was not drink your undoing? Chorus We were drugged! Hating math, you have us eating like Pythagoreans, strictly vegg. Circe Would you like a little ham with your barley? Beer to make you wiggle, nose to tail? Chorus Koi-koi! Koi-koi! Koi-koi! Koi-koi! Trapped upon a ship for years, we longed for land! Now trapped within a pen, we long for the ocean and for home! O Athena Gray-Eyes! Look across the wine-dark sea and take pity On poor Odysseus, father of Telemakos, husband of Penelope! You who shaped the Horse from clay and gave it to the Greeks, Reform us muddy beasts, whole: Men again, that we might sip the wine That makes us who we used to be, not with our muzzles: With lips pressed moist upon kiln-blackened rims, Adrift only in a sea stirred by Dionysus and the vine! * * * * Unfortunately, it would appear that the scribe to whom the text was dictated must have paused and gotten a little too inspired by all the talk of drink, for the writing becomes difficult to decipher. I have had to send the little that remains to a colleague since my skills in reading what seems to be a second-century commentary below the original text are rather limited, I confess, and besides, my own duties in hospitality call now that the cherry blossoms are in bloom and friends journey from afar. Because there is only one small fragment of papyrus, the entire play does not survive. The Russians are rather reluctant to share the juiciest bits--fragments of a dialogue between Circe and Odysseus in bed--understandably, since their scholars wish to publish an analysis of the most evocative and provocative language first. I beg your patience, first for reading all of this, but second since the appendix will have to wait. A glossary will follow shortly with a brief description of the final snippet of text should it be of interest. (The Postscript is here. - The Editors <hr align="center" width="50%"> Samuel L. Clemens, aka Mark Twain by andiesenji I would like to take this opportunity to thank Mrs. Warfield for the great honor of inviting me to address this impressive gathering in this august city of Annapolis. I would also like to thank Bessie, the cook, who, I have been led to believe, produced the exceptional bill of fare set before me at luncheon not two hours ago. I have consumed dishes all over the world but the crab cakes I tasted today were a glorious fate for the denizens of the Chesapeake and would not be out of place on the table of the Tzar. The pie made from lemons, that sour and bitter fruit, was of such sweetness, with its cloud-like topping, as to make the very angels regret not being able to taste it. What secrets must abound in that kitchen, what mysteries of flavor and mixing are hidden there. Were I but a fly upon the wall in that place to learn them. Now I have never claimed to know any more about cooking than I know about farming, and that is precious little. I have essayed a time or two to prepare a pot of coffee, but with results less than stellar, I decided to leave it to those who know which end of the pot goes up. Suffice it to say that I do know how to enjoy food and hope that all of you had as delightful a luncheon as did I. Alexander Belford: Am I to understand, Mr. Clemens, that you are to write a book of cookery? What experience have you had that encourages you to take this course. I have not heard that you know anything of the art of the kitchen. Will you produce these receipts from your own imagination or will they be the work of others. And who will publish this text of a heretofore unknown talent? (This is, I know, quite obscure. Everyone has heard of Mark Twain and just about everyone has read one or more of his books. However not everyone knows the story of how Alexander Belford, a book publisher in Canada, printed thousands of unauthorized copies of every one of Mark Twain’s books, so that he derived little or no profit for the early ones. Belford bribed pressmen, copywriters, and even postal employees, to get copies, sometimes incomplete, lacking illustrations, and distributed them cheaply. When sued in court several times, each time he managed to get away with it, often with speculation that he had bribed the court. Of course now Mark Twain is one of the most famous American writers and few know that Alexander Belford even existed.) <hr align="center" width="50%"> To catch up on the real eG Foodblogs, take a look at the index. To catch up on your reading, follow the link to Smackdowns Past. Pour yourself another cup of coffee. Heck, bring on the bonbons, brik or bacon -- it’s dangerous to read on an empty stomach.

<img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144897038/gallery_29805_2457_5544.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">It has often been said that the human activity that calls on the greatest number of senses is gastronomy. When we look at a painting or photograph, only the sense of sight is brought into play, just as when we listen to a symphony, the sense that transports the information to the brain is hearing. An opera or film calls for the joint participation of sight and hearing. When we are eating, four out of the five senses come into play, to a greater or lesser extent: sight, smell, touch and taste. Even hearing plays a small but interesting role in food with certain preparations, such as those with a crisp texture. <br><br> Sight is the first sense that transmits information to us when the dish arrives on the table. It enables us to identify the product, and appreciate its composition, presentation, colours and shapes. <br><br> The next to come into operation is smell, thanks to which we perceive aromas. All products have a specific odour which we appreciate when we smell them close up, and sometimes it can be very powerful (truffles, shellfish, certain fruits and vegetables). Stews and other products and preparations that are served hot can be smelled from further away. To appreciate wine, smell is essential.<br><br> The perceptions related to touch are two-fold: firstly the whole gamut of temperatures that the mouth can discern, as well as possible contrasts between different temperatures. Secondly, the various textures of products and preparations. <br><br> The sense of taste is the one that plays the major role when eating. Just as it is perfectly understood that the senses are the gateway for information to the brain, it goes without saying that taste is the sense that needs most attention when suggesting a dish to a diner. This is also true in our way of understanding cooking, although we are now aware of the fact that the right proportion of stimuli for each sense increases the pleasure.</p> <br> <hr noshade size="2" color="#666666"> <table border="0" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> <tr> <td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144897038/gallery_29805_2457_1700.jpg"></td> <td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144883250/gallery_29805_2457_2702.jpg"></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144883250/gallery_29805_2457_1803.jpg"></td> <td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144883250/gallery_29805_2457_3169.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">When a diner goes to a gourmet restaurant, he will experience physical reactions that go beyond the need to feed himself, but also a series of sensations that his brain will process based on data collected by his senses. This process is usually taken for granted, and many chefs accept this as an undeniably important aspect, without warranting further consideration or thought. For example, they know that they have to choose a high quality product, cook it in its own style and ensure that the diner’s requirements are met. This does not necessarily mean that it is routine, or that disdain is shown for the options provided by the senses, even though they are not usually taken into account as a starting out point for the creating process. <br><br> For several years, this was more or less our attitude. We knew that the gateway to gastronomic sensations was the senses, but we never really asked ourselves how they functioned and how they could be influenced. Apart from one or two specific ideas prior to 1994, it was from that year onwards that a change of attitude began to be forged, directed at exploiting the entire potential of this relationship between the chef and the diner. Three years later, while we were writing Los secretos de El Bulli, our method of tackling this aspect had taken root, and in that book we explained what the senses meant for us. In all fields of human activity, knowing how a process functions helps one to work with it, by modifying it, being sparing with some factors or enhancing others, in order to obtain the desired result. This is equally true with cooking: if we analyse how cooking is perceived, how each sense influences the appreciation of a dish and the pleasure it provides, we can then offer the diner much more information, and thus increase the emotion. <br><br> Of course, this understanding meant that when creating, it was essential to bear in mind all the information that the diner received. In other words, because this information directly depended on the senses, we had to study the role of each one in the act of eating in order to use them as a creative method. For several years, this was more or less our attitude. We knew that the gateway to gastronomic sensations was the senses, but we never really asked ourselves how they functioned and how they could be influenced. Apart from one or two specific ideas prior to 1994, it was from that year onwards that a change of attitude began to be forged, directed at exploiting the entire potential of this relationship between the chef and the diner. Three years later, while we were writing Los secretos de El Bulli, our method of tackling this aspect had taken root, and in that book we explained what the senses meant for us. In all fields of human activity, knowing how a process functions helps one to work with it, by modifying it, being sparing with some factors or enhancing others, in order to obtain the desired result. This is equally true with cooking: if we analyse how cooking is perceived, how each sense influences the appreciation of a dish and the pleasure it provides, we can then offer the diner much more information, and thus increase the emotion. <br><br> </font> </td> </tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <tr> <td valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144897038/gallery_29805_2457_685.jpg"></td> <td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144883250/gallery_29805_2457_9210.jpg" hspace="5" align="left"> We stated earlier that sight is the first sense to transmit information in the act of eating. The data can indicate various aspects, such as the amount served, the shapes and proportions of the products and preparations, colours or the layout of food on the plate. Thanks to sight, we can immediately identify, before trying it, what food we are going to eat, as well as the type of cuisine the dish belongs to. In creative cooking, it is often even possible to identify the chef that has created a dish, merely through what we might call its artistic style. In view of all the data that the diner receives using his sense of sight, the chef has various options. Firstly, the appearance of a dish is undeniably a motivation: playing with colours, shapes, proportions, layout and so on – in short, everything that gives rise to what we colloquially call “eating with one’s eyes”. But this appearance can also “tell” things, such as indicating how the dish should be eaten, in what order the ingredients are to be consumed. There are gourmets who are particularly good at “reading” a dish, people who know the right way to appreciate the chef’s idea. <br> <br> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144897038/gallery_29805_2457_79.jpg"></td> <td> <img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144897038/gallery_29805_2457_2795.jpg" hspace="5" align="left"> This is one of the senses that intervenes the most in the act of eating, and it plays various roles. Firstly, it has a physiological function which has nothing to do with culinary sensitivity: it is responsible for preparing the gastric juices for digestion. In the area of perception, thanks to smell we perceive the aromas of a dish. Furthermore, smell is a very important aid for the chef in order to judge the quality or condition of a product. <br><br> When creating, only the second of these functions, perceiving the aroma of a dish, is important. The aroma of a product or preparation is essential, to the extent that if we could not appreciate its smell, we would only be able to perceive a fraction of the basic flavours and refinements when tasting, but without the characteristic personality of these ingredients, since the two senses are very closely related. It is well known that a person whose sense of smell is neutralised (because of some product or a simple cold) does not experience the “savour” of food. <br><br> It was not until 1997 that we dealt with smell at a creative level in our cuisine, when we decided to concentrate an aroma to add flavour to a dessert. In 2000 we enhanced the aroma of a dish with rosemary in our Norway lobsters au naturel with rosemary or with a sprig of vanilla in our sweet vanilla potato purée. In 2001, with the creation of the aromas of elBulliolor, we invented three dishes in which smell played a crucial role: raw/sautéed St George’s mushrooms with elderflower and yoghurt and pine foam with a woodland scent, orange, pumpkin with yoghurt powder and bitter almond and oysters on a trip.<br><br></td></tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144897038/gallery_29805_2457_89.jpg"></td> <td> <img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144883250/gallery_29805_2457_8046.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">The first tactile sensation that our mouths experience when we introduce food is temperature. The human palate is capable of standing only a certain range of temperatures, and anything that exceeds the limits of -20 ºC and 70 ºC approximately (depending on a person’s sensitivity) should not be considered when cooking. Within this range of temperatures, the sense of touch acts by detecting whether a food is cold, warm or hot, and also by perceiving contrasts between various temperatures. <br><br> So temperature is a source of sensations that a chef should know how to exploit, so that, for example, contrasts between different temperatures may be appreciated. In addition, it is important, and not just in creative cuisine, that the temperature of each dish is right, a factor that is often ignored. A variation of 5 ºC in a preparation can mark the difference between success and failure. <br><br> When creating, it is also important to bear in mind which preparations lend themselves to different temperatures. Soups, sauces, custards, crèmes or purées can be cold, warm or hot. Since 1998, jellies and foams, which until then could only be cold, can also be hot. In other cases, temperature defines the physical state of certain preparations: the temperature of a sorbet will always be below 0 ºC; the same preparation at 5 ºC is no longer a sorbet. <br> <br> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td align="right" valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144897038/gallery_29805_2457_1351.jpg" align="top"></td> <td valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144883250/gallery_29805_2457_7074.jpg" hspace="5" align="left"> After appreciating the temperature of a mouthful (or sometimes simultaneously), the sense of touch detects its texture. This factor is very important (borne out by the fact that many people do not like a product, not because of its taste but because of its texture), and in El Bulli it plays a vital role. The wealth of sensations provided by texture is only limited by the number of textures that actually exist. <br> <br> Firstly, one can play with the original textures of a product. It might be said that the appeal of certain products is based more on their texture than their flavour: pasta, rice, elvers, caviar, etc. The gelatinous texture of pigs’ trotters, frogs’ legs or cod plays a vital role in their gourmet value. Furthermore, by working on these textures, an infinite number of variations can be obtained: countless textures are provided by cutting and cooking asparagus in as many ways as possible. A large number of textures can also be obtained from a liquid or purée: whey, mousse, foam, water ice, sorbet, ice cream, custard, jelly, and so on. Then there are other preparations whose textures are not based on liquids or purées, such as caramels, croquants, pastry and all its variations (biscuits, sponges, tiles, millefeuilles), etc. <br><br> Creative playing revolves around offering contrasts in textures, and also modifying the usual texture of a product to provide a completely new perspective. Deciding which textures to provide in a product and combining them with others is one of the most complex, yet at the same time agreeable, aspects of creativity based on the senses. </td></tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr><td align="right" valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144897038/gallery_29805_2457_395.jpg" align="top"></td><td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1138590929/gallery_29805_2457_2236.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">The world of prepared textures: the panaché, a distinctive dish. It is not often that we can say that a dish of ours has generated a whole line of evolution. Almost certainly, one of them would be our textured panaché, since it represents a veritable frontier between our way of tackling cold dishes up to 1994 and what we did afterwards. The panaché opened up a new world to us, the world of prepared textures, in which the transformation of products took on a new prominence in our cuisine. The origins of the panaché dish occurred more or less simultaneously. In 1994, concepts and techniques to obtain new textures were created: savoury ice creams, foams, or jellies which we had been experimenting with since 1991. All these factors were subsequently incorporated into our panaché, an ideal showcase displaying this complete range of different textures. <br><br> We usually say that the need to create this dish goes back to the time we tried Michel Bras’ gargouillou dish. From that moment, our dream was to create a vegetable dish that would offer the same response to a different attitude. With the panaché, we succeeded. Furthermore, it was probably one of the first dishes for which we used the deconstruction method, although at that time we had not even thought about it. For all these reasons, we consider this dish to be a symbol, a distinctive dish. </td></tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td align="right" valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144897038/gallery_29805_2457_739.jpg" align="top"></td> <td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144883250/gallery_29805_2457_5850.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">The sensations perceived by the sense of taste while one is eating may be categorised as follows: <br> <br> - Perception of the primary flavours: sweet, savoury, acid, bitter.<br> - Perception of refinements: sour, astringent, spicy, balsamic, iodised, smoked, aniseed, etc.<br> - Identification of the characteristic flavour of each food. <br><br> Through taste we also perceive the harmony between the elements of a dish, although it is not actually this sense that judges the success or otherwise of combinations. This is done afterwards by the brain taking into account the perceptions that arrive via taste. <br><br> When creating, we can play with this harmony by modifying the proportions of basic flavours, complementing it with refinements, etc. To understand the potential of this creative method related to taste, we had to think about it for a while. For a long time we had assumed that the savoury flavour should predominate in a savoury dish, and sweetness in a dessert. On that basis, the other primary flavours merely acted as points of contrast. The evolution of the symbiosis between the sweet and savoury worlds stimulated a new way of looking at things. Our intention when creating a dish based on flavours is to provide variety, in which the four flavours are balanced, so that different sensations may be experienced. An essential ingredient of this method is the chef’s sensitivity, which will enable him to attain balance and harmony between all the elements. <br><br> When we are asked to give an example of the importance of balance between the basic flavours, we usually say that if one adds too much salt (or too much sugar) to a savoury dish, it is out of proportion. Harmony is the objective. And multiplying sensations does not mean multiplying the ingredients in a dish. For example, if we put a pinch of Maldon salt on a grapefruit segment, we have a taste of something with the four basic flavours. To these are added the flavour refinements (spicy, astringent, sour, etc.) that are as important in gastronomy as the basic flavours, and a vital component for enhancing a dish; however they are sometimes relegated to second place when talking about the sense of taste. This search for balance between flavours and refinements has also been the driving force that has led us to use new products that are distinguished precisely because of some of these aspects. </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr><td align="right" valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144897038/gallery_29805_2457_1383.jpg" align="top"></td> <td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1144883250/gallery_29805_2457_2923.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">The concept of sequence when eating a dish is one of the ideas that enabled us to enter into the world of the senses with a different attitude. The catalyst was our green asparagus wrapped in ceps, which we wanted to serve with a ceps jelly, macadamia nuts and a parmesan vinaigrette. After trying the dish several times we found that the balance was almost perfect, but there was something missing, something to set it off. At that time, we were also working on citrus fruit reductions, and it occurred to us that we might add an acid flavour by using a mandarin reduction. <br> <br> Now we just needed to know what part of the dish to apply it to, and we saw that the most suitable solution was to put it on the asparagus tip. This led us to set a sequence for eating it: the waiter told the diner that the dish was to be eaten in a certain order, and that the tip with the reduction had to be eaten last. This would produce an explosion of the acid flavour of the mandarin once the asparagus had been finished. In short, the dish consisted of three asparagus spears that had to be eaten in sequence. This was the catalyst of the analysis that led us to understand that there were two ways of eating: in the first way, the order in which the elements of a dish are eaten is not important; in the second way, it is essential so that its entire harmony can be appreciated. We also realised that the proportion of each element was extremely important, and that a lack of balance in this aspect could thoroughly upset the result. One only has to think of what happens if too much salt is added to a dish. If the harmony of a dish were to be expressed in an equation, order and proportion would be major elements. </td> </tr> <tr> <tr><td colspan="2"></font><hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"> <font size="-2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Our thanks to Juli Soler for his invaluable assistance in this project. <br> Copyright Ferran Adria, Juli Soler, Albert Adria © 2006. Photographs by Francesc Guillamet. <br> Introduction by Pedro Espinosa.<br> El Bulli books may be purchased here.<br> </font></td></tr> </table>

by the Daily Gullet Staff In the days of Escoffier and classic haute cuisine, there was little controversy surrounding the simulation and proper execution of what appeared on the platter. Haute cuisine meant copying the dishes of Escoffier as faithfully as possible; the closer you got, the better you were. This approach was universally accepted, understood -- and appreciated. Maybe it started with nouvelle cusine, maybe earlier. Perhaps the genesis of today's avant garde movement gave it real focus. But there's no denying that traditional culinary attitudes have given way to advancement, augmentation and innovation. Among avant-garde restaurants and chefs, revolution is the norm. A laboratory milieu, an atmosphere of culinary invention, and careful documentation has permeated the professional kitchen. Online food media like eG Forums encourage diners to distribute photographs of new dishes found the world over -- within hours of their capture. Our understanding of culinary ethics has not kept up with this evolution. On 14 March 2006, eGullet Society member Sam Mason (aka Willie Lee) noted similarities between dishes served at Interlude (a restaurant in Melbourne, Australia) and dishes from American avant-garde restaurants WD-50 (Wylie Dufresne's New York restaurant, where Mason is the pastry chef) and Minibar (Jose Andres's Washington, DC restaurant). Soon after, other Society members noted similarities to dishes from Alinea (Grant Achatz's Chicago restaurant), and suggested a substantial pattern of duplication. Chef/proprietor Robin Wickens of Interlude, also an eGullet Society member, responded to the claims. Information about the dishes was gleaned from a series of photographs resident on the Interlude restaurant website. When we checked, the photographs weren't there. The eGullet Society doesn't have an official position on this matter, but it's appropriate to publish the following for two reasons. First, by presumably removing the photographs from its website, Interlude has made examination of the evidence impossible, unless we bring these photos to light in a journalistic context. Second, we believe the Interlude controversy is not a simple matter of a lone Australian restaurant copying a few dishes from halfway around the world. Rather, it's one of the most significant issues facing the global culinary community today. The eGullet Society and its membership, including most of the world's foremost avant-garde chefs as well as a broad range of consumers and commentators, is a natural nexus for discussion of those issues. Of course, it is our hope that these discussions will influence the understanding of ethics in cuisine, and perhaps worldwide public policy in such matters. Interested parties can judge for themselves the extent and severity of the emulation. We look forward to constructive, civil eG Forums comment and discussion. We have invited several chefs and restaurateurs to weigh in. (Images from the Interlude web site appear as the first in each pair. The second in each of the first four pairs are from Alinea; the last is from the WD-50 web site.)

<img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1141577940/gallery_29805_2457_21200.jpg" width="324" height="285" hspace="5" align="left">Within the family of products with soul, we include in this analysis all products that have played a major role in El Bulli, those that have warranted special attention or have been important in our evolution. The N2O that we blow into siphons to obtain foams meets these criteria, except in one crucial aspect that might be debated for hours: is air a product? There are many preparations in which air plays an important role, even though it has never been treated as a cooking ingredient, but the creation of foams in 1994 certainly gave it star status. <br><br> What in fact characterises foams is their airy texture, their lightness, and the fact that they have more air than traditional mousses. The mission of the siphon is to blow air into the preparation with the help of N2O capsules that charge this utensil. Without the magic of the siphon, without the intervention of this gas that is not only harmless but also tasteless, foams would not be possible. Air is an essential element for obtaining these foams for which we feel a particular fondness, and for this reason we think that it deserves to be included in the family of products with soul. <br> <hr noshade size="2" color="#666666"> <table border="0" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> <tr> <td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1139674845/gallery_29805_2457_381.jpg"></td> <td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1141577940/gallery_29805_2457_4833.jpg"></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1141577940/gallery_29805_2457_1999.jpg"></td> <td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1141577940/gallery_29805_2457_7110.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">Foams arrived in 1994, but they had undergone a lengthy germination phase. The only reason that this preparation did not come to fruition until then was because of technical problems, as we did not know how to achieve this texture that we dreamed about, and if we had the right tool, our dream would come true. Early experiments were carried out in 1991-1992 in Xavier Medina Campeny’s workshop, but after some amusing domestic disasters, the ony thing that we knew was that gas was essential to reap success in this aspect. The appearance of the siphon in our kitchen was to give us the solution, but even then it was not so simple. <br> <br> </td></tr> <td valign="top"> </td> <td> In 1993, our dear friend Antoni Escribà brought us back from Switzerland a gadget that we called “the phantom siphon” because it was always getting lost. After buying a set of CO2 capsules, we attempted to make our first foams, but we knew nothing about gases at that time, and the foams we obtained seemed fermented to us. Strangely enough, we went back to CO2 in 2001 for our mojito and carrot soda. In any case, these discouraging results caused the “phantom siphon” to be banished to the cupboard. <br> <br></td></tr> <td valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1141577940/gallery_29805_2457_829.jpg"></td> <td> <img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1141577940/gallery_29805_2457_6625.jpg" hspace="5" align="left"> In the winter of 1993-1994, while we were helping our friend Eduard Roigé to draw up the menu of the restaurant Bel-Air in Barcelona, a customer asked for a dessert with whipped cream. To our surprise, the cream was served in the kitchen with a gadget they took out of the fridge, from which whipped cream emerged by pressing a lever at the top. Suddenly we saw the light, and we reckoned that this siphon might solve the foams problem. So we borrowed the siphon, and in a matter of just a few days, our dream became a reality. <br> <br> Now, when we look back on that time, it is hard to believe how long we used this siphon "full stop," the name we gave it to distinguish it from the ISI siphon that came to El Bulli in 1997. The siphon “full stop” was charged from a bulky cylinder containing N2O, and it was a sizeable gadget which meant that ease of service from it left a lot to be desired. Even so, for three years we were inventing foams and serving them from that lovable monstrosity. The ridiculous thing was that when the ISI siphon arrived in 1997, we realised it was very similar to the "phantom siphon" that we used to charge with CO2, and that if we had used N2O instead, we would almost certainly have adopted it instead of our siphon "full stop".</td> </tr> <tr> <td align="right" valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1141577940/gallery_29805_2457_1187.jpg" align="top"></td> <td valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1138590929/gallery_29805_2457_7783.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">At this stage of the game, so much has been written about foams in the gourmet media (and even the general press) that it only remains for us to mention the brief history of this preparation, which is a technique and a concept at the same time. Cold foams were hatched in the El Bulli kitchen on March 19th 1994, the year the development squad project started. <br> <br> Since 1990 we had been nurturing the idea of achieving a lighter mousse, in which the product’s flavour would be much more intense than in traditional mousses. The idea came to us while we were in a specialist fruit juice bar and we noticed the foam that formed in the top part of the glass. Between 1990 and 1993 we conducted a good many tests, some as crazy as the ones we did in Xavier Medina Campeny’s workshop (see elBulli1983-1993), but it was not until 1994 that we reached a satisfactory outcome. <br> <br> For this, the crucial moment was when the siphon came into our hands, the utensil that enabled us to turn our dream into a reality (see The siphon “full stop”, page 90). Our first test involved putting a consommé into the siphon; when it came out, it had maintained its consistency, and we thought that this was because of the natural gelatin contained in the consommé. Therefore, if any product did not gel naturally, we could always add gelatin leaves, something that had not occurred to us the year before during the tests with the “phantom siphon” our friend Antoni Escribà had brought us. <br> <br> And this is what we did with a white bean purée on that fateful 19th of March 1994. The first foam served at our tables was this one, accompanied by sea urchins. The same year we made foams out of beetroot, coriander and almonds. These preparations began life in the savoury world, but once we discovered their potential, their migration to sweet preparations was only a matter of time. In 1994, we only made coconut foam, the first in a long series that we began to prepare from the following year onwards. <br> <br> Foams were born with the intention of using only the juice or purée of the product in question, without the addition of cream, eggs or other fats that might diminish the flavour. As time went on, we began to realise that on the one hand there was the philosophy of foams, but on the other hand we had a marvellous gadget, the siphon, which provided us with innumerable possibilities: creams, meringues, extremely light mousses that were easy to prepare, and so on. Today we would probably call anything that comes from the use of the siphon, a “foam”. <br> <br> Of course, foams are very well known today, and hundreds of chefs serve them in their restaurants. It remains to be seen whether they will be so important in twenty or thirty years’ time. As for the controversy surrounding them, we still find it hard to understand why criticisms have been so harsh. Current results lead us to claim, without hesitation, that there are good foams and foams that are not so good, in the same way as there are mousses with varying degrees of success. </td> </tr> <tr> </tr> <tr> <tr><td colspan="2"></font><hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"> <font size="-2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">This is the second part in a multi-part series. Part one is here.<br> El Bulli books may be purchased here.<br><br> Our thanks to Juli Soler for his invaluable assistance in this project. <br> Copyright Ferran Adria, Juli Soler, Albert Adria ©2006. <br> Photographs by Francesc Guillamet. <br> Art by Dave Scantland, after a photograph by Francesc Guillamet.<br> Introduction to part one by Pedro Espinosa.<br> <br> </font></td></tr> </table> </body> </html>

by Brooks Hamaker I woke early, as I always do on that particular Sunday, and made a quick breakfast of juices, homemade pancakes and local strawberries. My boys and their friends crawled out of their beds, dressed, and ate like trenchermen -- all the while discussing last night’s valuable trinket acquisitions and opportunities for the same over the next twelve hours. Once everyone was fed and the dishes were sort of done, we headed out the door towards St. Charles Ave, a block and a half away from my house. The Sunday before Mardi Gras on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans has, for a very long time, been pretty much the same. Families gather at nearby houses for early meals and relaxing early morning libations. Aromas of gumbo, grilling meats, red beans, chicken sauce piquant and other delicacies, easily transportable and even more easily fed to large number of revelers, fill the air up and down the seven or so miles of the parade route. Groups magically fill the Avenue in the early morning hours, staking out their spots and setting up for a very long day of fun and food. (Yesterday the first parades began at eleven and ended well after eleven, delayed by the inconvenient relationship between giant man-made floats and even larger, God-made, live oak trees.) The scene when we arrived was pretty amazing. A block of St. Chuck that just seven hours before had been strewn with debris from the previous evening’s parades had been tidied up by magic cleaning gnomes and repopulated by families in the full swing of BBQ, Bloody Marys and the day’s first cool ones. Children of all ages threw foam footballs in the streets, generally acting like kids with a day off and only moderately attentive supervision. Groups of self-important and seriously preening teen girls roamed St. Charles in search of cute guys, who were making sure to ignore them until the microsecond that the girls passed by. Then the cute guys indulged in the age old sport of carefully paying attention while not paying attention to the members of the opposite sex. Pickups were parked on the side streets, their beds filled with, variously, BBQ pits, couches, port o’ johns, prep tables, ice chests, crawfish boiling setups, and just about anything else one might possibly need during a long day of fun at the parades. These setups ranged from what, clearly, were last minute arrangements, to full-on catering operations that would put many, more professional, caterers to shame. On the tailgate of one truck, there were two guys shucking fresh, very cold, very salty oysters. I stopped to chat with them and within, oh, let’s say, five seconds, I was invited to sample a few. These few turned into about twenty-four in pretty short order. Nice guys, those oyster guys. They invited me back for a few grilled oysters later in the day -- enticing me with the claim that their grilled oysters would make those poseurs at Drago’s wish they had their secret recipe. I promised I’d return later in the evening, knowing that the chances were slim that a) I would be on that part of the route later in the day b) that they would have any oysters left and c) that, if there were any oysters left I would likely be shucking them as those guys were already, at eleven a.m., fast approaching the coordination danger zone that often occurs when beer and oyster knives meet. But you can’t predict what a Carnival Sunday will bring so I didn’t turn them down. My boys met up with some friends at 1st and St. Charles and I got them squared away with the friends’ parents, swapped cell phone numbers, the general plan for the next few hours, and sampled a few of the snacks they’d laid out on a couple of tables covered with garish LSU tablecloths -- Tulane logos are much more tasteful. The remains of a lovely brunch held earlier in the day at a nearby home had been duly delivered to the parade route: all kinds of good cheeses, some canapés consisting of very large shrimp and remoulade sauce, a nice gumbo z’herbes, and lots of French bread. There were also pitchers of fresh juice, milk punch (in a silver pitcher -- and being poured into silver beakers), Bloody Marys, soft drinks, and, if you were up to it, an entire bar set up. It might sound as if these people had gone a bit overboard, but there were probably 2000 folks with more or less the same setups along the parade route. It’s about sharing and having fun on the Avenue, and we are, if nothing else, pretty good at sharing and having fun. Gracious, effortless hospitality is what we do here and what we’ve always done. If you can’t find any friends anywhere in the world, come to New Orleans during Carnival week and you’ll probably make some for life. Once the boys were squared away I walked uptown about fifteen blocks to meet some friends at General Taylor and St. Charles, just down the block from the Columns Hotel, and directly across from Rayne Episcopal Methodist Church. This Mardi Gras season the church is surrounded by a chain-link fence, necessitated by the fact that the very tall, very old, and very grand steeple on the sanctuary blew off during the storm and the church is only now beginning repairs. My friends, who are, unlike me, very organized, had gone out in the middle of the night and secured the spot by placing a couple of tables, some chairs, a few ladders, and other parade accoutrement on the side of the street. The stuff was left there with the hope that it would still be there when they returned in the morning -- and it was. Much like the gentlefolk up the street where I’d left the boys, my friends were enjoying a pretty elaborate spread, though this one was accompanied by decent champagne poured into plastic flutes. It was all very civilized. Just down the block, I saw a friend of a friend slaving over a couple of burners and some cast iron pots. I walked down to say hello and to scope out the food. He’d just hit the serving stage of an excellent duck and andouille gumbo that had been concocted, roux and all, right there on the spot. He’d been out since about seven in the morning and was pretty well as done as the gumbo. He offered me a bowl of the stuff and some really great bread from Boulangerie, the excellent French Bakery on Magazine Street. I looked around for a place to sit, spied an empty folding chair, and plopped down to eat. Inside of two minutes, an older woman, very tiny and very cute in her carnival finery, walked up and informed me that I was in her chair -- but that it would be okay to stay if I’d introduce her to “the gumbo man” and help her acquire a bowl for herself. I got her some gumbo and we both sat down and enjoyed the rich soup, chatting like old friends even though we’d just met. In the tradition here, it took her only three moves to figure out that she actually knew who my (long passed away) grandparents were and that her son had gone to Tulane with my Dad. I wasn’t surprised -- it happens here all the time. Instead of the usual, “What do you do for a living?” it’s “Tell me again, who are your Mama and Daddy?” Once I’d completed old home week, the parade was in full swing and I rejoined my friends. This was a pretty typical Mardi Gras group -- old New Orleanians, out-of-towners there for their umpteenth carnival, and people visiting New Orleans for their first parade weekend. All of us had an equally good time, acting like fools and begging people riding by on the floats for tiny plastic trinkets and the occasional “big score.” The throws vary from cheap plastic beads to very valuable (at least for the next few days) stuffed animals, spears, cups, and toilet paper with the Krewe logo embossed on every super--absorbent sheet. Successful grabs were marked by the laughing recipient holding the prize high and showing it off triumphantly. This behavior went on, this particular Sunday, for more than twelve hours, thanks to an Endymion parade that had been rescheduled from the previous night because of inclement weather. This Sunday was one for the record books in New Orleans -- more floats rolled down St. Charles Avenue than on any other Sunday in history. In this post Katrina world, it seemed to make it a very important and historical event, even though it was caused by an unforeseen overnight rain shower That evening, just as the last Bacchus float passed, there was a delay in the parades and I was feeling pretty worn out. I quietly said goodbye to my friends, new and old, and started the long trudge home. As I walked down St. Charles, I realized that I was feeling a bit peckish -- and remembered the oystermen at the corner of Thalia and St. Charles. I knew my chances were slim, but it had been a very lucky day. I decided to walk an extra block and see if there were some grilled oysters at the ready. I lucked out. The grill was smoking, and as I walked up the oysterguys (who by this point could also be known as the “going to be really hung over on Monday guys”) yelled out that they’d been waiting on me and to hurry up. They said that they were running out and didn’t want me to miss out on the planet’s best grilled oysters. Never one to disappoint a bragging chef, I sat down in the offered chair and scarfed up six on the half-shell, grilled with butter, chopped garlic, Worcestershire, and Crystal Hot Sauce. Now, I’m a lover of Drago’s finely grilled bivalves, but the guys were right -- their oysters were absolutely delicious. Oysters have rarely come to such a worthy end. I made sure to find out if they were coming back (yes, on Tuesday, all day) and bade them a good night. As I walked the quiet side street back to my home, the only sounds to be heard were of a distant, soon to pass parade. I was full, happy, and feeling some hope for this place, my city that is so unlike anywhere else on the planet. Sure -- absolutely -- the place is a mess. Just a two-block walk to the other side of St. Charles Avenue from my house will put you square into no-man’s land -- a place that is still, even six months later, largely uninhabited and shows few signs of recovery. Most of the city is like that, though the older parts, the parts built on the high ground, are coming along remarkably well. There are burned-out buildings, abandoned or closed businesses, cars that haven’t been moved in months, streetlights that don’t, and might never, work, and many, many other constant reminders of the disaster that happened here last August 29th. The parts of the city that are operating and habitable are coming back remarkably well -- though it’s only about a quarter of the city in terms of both land mass and population. There are parts of town that, no matter what your political stance on the issue, will probably have to be razed before any practical rebuilding effort can occur. It’s a mess, that’s the one thing here that’s for sure. Much of the city will take years to repair, and much of it, in fact, may never be repaired. What that storm couldn’t kill, what ten Katrinas can’t kill, is us. We’re still here. More and more of us are coming back every day, and we’ll keep coming back as long as we can find a job and a place to live. This is our home. The Feds won’t send us the money because they don’t get it and we’re off of the front pages because the most of the media don’t get it -- but that’s OK. We get it. It’s the people, it’s the food, it’s the people and the food. It’s Mardi Gras, it’s Jazz Fest, it’s strong coffee, it’s red beans and rice, it’s Bloody Marys in the middle of the street at eight in the morning. It’s your mama and them’s house, and mostly, it’s everything that makes us what we are. We live in New Orleans and we don’t want to live anywhere else. It might not be right, and it might not fit neatly into most people’s “normal” slot, but we’re good with it. We like us. The rest of the stuff? The infrastructure? It’ll get fixed. Eventually. We’ll start next Wednesday morning. Just as soon as we wake up. Brooks Hamaker (aka Mayhaw Man) is a freelance writer living in New Orleans. He hopes that all of his neighbors can come home soon. Photo by Sara Roahen, whose untitled memoir about a Yankee discovering New Orleans' unique food culture will be published in 2007 (W.W. Norton).

<img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1139674845/gallery_29805_2457_23208.jpg" width="324" height="285" hspace="5" align="left">Few chefs and restaurants have documented their creations with the detail and systematic approach that Ferran Adria, Juli Soler and Albert Adria have taken. The trilogy El Bulli 1983 - 2002, which will be followed by a new volume (already published in Spanish) documenting the years 2003 and 2004, gives unique insight into the history of El Bulli -- which is to say a unique insight into the avant garde movement. <br> <br> Taking advantage of the upcoming publication of the volume corresponding to the period 1994 -1997 in English, French and German, we present a series of four excerpts: what happened at El Bulli during 1994, and a peek at the style developed in 1995 that revolutionized cooking: deconstruction. Twelve years later, much of what the El Bulli team created has been adopted in high-end cuisine the world over. We'll learn how products are analyzed; how senses are used as a starting point for creativity; how the frontiers between preparations in savory and sweet dishes began to blur; and the philosophy behind El Bulli service and dining. Finally, we'll learn how one of El Bulli's most pervasive techniques came to be: 1994 is the year of the first foam. <br> <br> Controversy, challenge of the established mindset, and cuisine have always gone hand in hand at El Bulli. To this day, foams and deconstruction are questioned in some circles, though their creation dates back more than ten years. I'm sure that the members of the eGullet Society will find food for thought in this series. And of course, food for discussion. </font><br> <br><hr noshade size="2" color="#666666"> <table width="100%" border="0" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> <tr> <td><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1139674845/gallery_29805_2457_381.jpg"></td> <td><img width="497" height="69" src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1139674845/gallery_29805_2457_7255.jpg"></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="right" valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1139674845/gallery_29805_2457_1128.jpg" align="top"></td> <td valign="middle"><font size="-1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Our reflections on products led us to develop a work system that all chefs use to a greater or lesser degree, but which at that time we decided to take to its ultimate consequences. This was something as simple as going to the market and buying a product, not for the daily requirements of the restaurant, but in order to study it, to try and understand all its characteristics, and then get as much use as we could out of it. A product should be touched, turned over, looked at from all angles, as a sushi expert does with a tuna fish, in order to assimilate its shape, density, weight, volume and so on. <br> <br> <img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1138577531/gallery_29805_2457_4028.jpg" hspace="5" vspace="0" align="left">Here is an example to illustrate this process: the mango. We know that it is a tropical fruit, which tells us that it is available all year round. It has a wide range of flavours and subtle features, reminiscent of the peach, the banana or the passion fruit, while at the same time it is easy to combine with other flavours because of its balance between acidity and sugar. There are some sixty varieties, and in each one there is a distinction between the mango (male), fibrous, smaller and tastier (usually used to make purees) and the manga (female) which, because it has a more pulpy texture, is easier to manipulate. It can be zested (and the skin mixed with mango puree to take advantage of its resinous flavour), and it is then that we see that, unlike other fruits, it does not go brown, which increases its usage potential. Because of its size, we can cut it up in various ways: julienne, matchsticks, brunoise, etc. It can be sliced, and if we do so thinly with the slicer, we see that its texture is similar to pasta al dente. This may lead us to treat it as a new pasta and shape it into tagliatelli, ravioli and so on. In addition, a mango puree could give rise to a good many preparations: sorbets, foams, coulis, etc. The example of the mango could be expanded even further, and perfectly illustrates a way of observing products that is of great use to us for developing creative ideas.<br> <br> </font></td> </tr><tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td align="right" valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1139674845/gallery_29805_2457_2444.jpg" align="top"></td> <td valign="top"><font size="-1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Until recently, it was a given that going to a gourmet restaurant meant eating products that were expensive: caviar, foie gras, truffles, lobster and other products that had become veritable myths of cuisine. We too had this view of haute cuisine, but in 1994 we began to consider the scant logic of this concept if it is thought about completely objectively. In fact, the price of a product is set by the law of supply and demand: if the product is scarce and much sought after, its price is high; if there is a glut, and not many people want it, then it is cheap, with all possible conditions in between. This is how the situation stands. A good example of this phenomenon is salmon, which was the luxury fish par excellence until salmon farming began a few years ago. Since then, its consumption has spread widely and it is affordable to a large public today. <br> <br> <img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1138577531/gallery_29805_2457_5867.jpg" hspace="5" vspace="0" align="left">This new perspective opened our eyes to the fact that every product, regardless of its price, is magnificent as long as it is of good quality, and can play a role as important as any other product. A young almond does not enjoy the same gourmet prestige as a Norway lobster in traditional terms, but we believe that both products have the same culinary value. So we decided that as far as we were concerned, a sardine was as important as a sea bass, or an artichoke as a truffle, and that what should govern our choices was sensibility, not price or prestige. This does not mean to say that we place little value on products that, like truffles, caviar or many others, we consider to be divine. <br> <br> </font></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td align="right" valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1139674845/gallery_29805_2457_1066.jpg" align="top"></td> <td valign="top"><font size="-1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">As stated previously, from 1994 onwards our evaluation of a product was focussed not so much on its gastronomic prestige as on its flavour characteristics -- the features that made up its individuality or, to borrow a term that should only be applied to humans, its personality. In El Bulli we have called this set of a product's refinements and characteristics, the product's "gene". For example, this "gene" is what enables us to taste asparagus and identify its flavour, to be aware that it is, in fact, asparagus. <br> <br>Our memory stores data about the various product "genes", thanks to which we can tell what we are eating. Some products have a very strong personality and only a small amount needs to be eaten to tell us what they are. For example, spices and aromatic herbs have a stronger flavour concentration than other products. Furthermore, it is easier to tell half a dozen vegetables apart than half a dozen types of fish. <br><br>This way of looking at things came to us along with the previously-mentioned assessment of products. In El Bulli we began to accentuate this "gene" in 1994, in an attempt to highlight its characteristics, and we decided that it was a priority for us to preserve this personality even when we submitted the product to manipulation or preparation. For example, we had always dreamt about making a basil jelly with as much or more flavour than a fresh sprig of basil, or an asparagus sorbet with as much flavour as the vegetable in its natural state.<br><br> </font></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td align="right" valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1139674845/gallery_29805_2457_840.jpg" align="top"></td> <td valign="top"><font size="-1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">In 1997 we mentioned in Los secretos de El Bulli the existence in Roses of a magnificent restaurant. Luckily, Rafa is still running his establishment, and we still go there when we want to eat fish that tastes only of fish. In the book, we said that Rafa's cooking, thanks to the honest flavours he was able to extract, was something we could learn from. We might say that the most important thing in his cooking was to preserve the pure flavour of the product. <br> <br> <img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1139674845/gallery_29805_2457_4165.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">These reflections were in response to ideas that we had every now and then between 1983 and 1993, particularly regarding molluscs, cooking vegetables, shellfish, fish etc. on the griddle, and they caused us to review a good many habits in preparing certain foods. For example, molluscs and crustaceans are usually overcooked, when in fact this reduces the intensity of their flavour, no matter how delicious the accompanying sauce is. Overcooked meat, fruit and vegetables consumed out of season (that is to say, often after they have been in cold storage, which reduces their freshness, aroma and flavour), or canned truffles, lacking all the aromatic potency of this product, are just some examples of customs which, if we want to be true to our philosophy and fully respect the flavour intensity of each product, should be looked at again. In fact, we are getting used to doing this in our daily life with certain products that do not have all the flavour that potentially they could have. This is a pity, but it is so true that perhaps when we taste a product whose flavour characteristics are intact, we may find that it has "too much" flavour. 1994 marked a change in this respect, as the sporadic concerns of previous years came together in an idea that we have been applying ever since.</font><br> <br></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td align="right" valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1139674845/gallery_29805_2457_2389.jpg" align="top"></td> <td valign="top"><font size="-1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1138577531/gallery_29805_2457_8436.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">When trying to understand a product it is essential to know how it can be consumed and the best way of preserving its original flavour. There are three ways of consuming a product: raw, cooked and by modifying its texture. The first way enables one to appreciate its original flavour and texture, and in many cases this is the usual way: oysters, fruit, certain vegetables, etc. By means of the second method, the product is cooked in some way. If the cooking time is short, the final flavour will be nearer the original (griddled, barbecued, sautéed). Long cooking tends to remove the natural element from most flavours (casseroles, stews, etc.) and although the result may be appealing, it could be said that the product’s “gene” has been overmodified. <br><br> The third way of consuming a product is perhaps the most complex. It consists of preparing and modifying its texture (soups, jellies, foams, sorbets, ice creams, mousses, etc.) while attempting to preserve as much as possible its original flavour. It has been claimed that a prepared product can never beat the perfect flavour of the original, but this should not be taken as gospel. Sometimes a new texture is just as pleasing as the product in its raw state. Back in 1992 we set out on this path with our cold jellies and liquidised soups; by 1994 (with foams, savoury sorbets, etc.) products in prepared textures were incorporated in a big way and started to become a feature of our cuisine.<br> <br> Finally, two observations. Firstly, there was criticism for a while of this idea of preparing products in textures other than their original state in the savoury world, even though this was common in the world of desserts. Nobody claims that a pear jelly, banana sorbet or raspberry mousse perverts the product’s flavour and yet the opposite seems to apply in the savoury world. This does not mean that we must only offer prepared products; there should always be a balance in a menu. <br><br> Secondly, there are products that have been prepared and become other products, often as pleasing as the unprepared product or even more so. One only has to think of tinned molluscs, which offer two completely different flavours (either prepared in this way or au naturel), or a product as singular as wine, the result of a preparation that is so sophisticated that one almost forgets the grapes. </font><br> <br></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td align="right" valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1139674845/gallery_29805_2457_2716.jpg"></td> <td valign="top"><font size="-1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1138590929/gallery_29805_2457_27896.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">Up to 1993, our relationship with dairy products had given rise to a few results, as we attempted to understand the characteristic of each product. It was probably parmesan whey that led us to analyse dairy products in a different way, and this opened up a broad range of uses, no longer limited to just textures. Thus, in 1994 we began to use yoghurt as a sauce, brie and other soft cheeses as a soup, or mascarpone as a sort of garnish. In addition, some of these dairy products enabled us to introduce a touch of sourness, which was added to our range of flavours</font>. <br> <br></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td align="right" valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1139674845/gallery_29805_2457_226.jpg" align="bottom"></td> <td valign="top"><font size="-1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1138577531/gallery_29805_2457_2935.jpg" hspace="5" align="left">From the moment we began to think of playing with basic flavours in our cuisine, we started to broaden the range of ingredients that could be used in the sweet or savoury world. In our culinary milieu, it is quite clear at what point in the meal savoury or sweet dishes are served. The development of the symbiosis between both worlds in our cuisine opened our eyes as to how relative these dogmas can be. <br><br> In fact, when we analysed a series of products that were usually consumed in the savoury world or in the sweet world, we realised that their usage was somewhat bound by convention. Marrows, carrots, tomatoes, peas or beetroots are more sweet than savoury, yet until recently they had appeared mostly in savoury dishes. Our contribution was to look for the necessary harmony for them to be included in sweet dishes effectively. It is true that some fruits had already often been used in the savoury world: oranges, pears, apples, grapes and plums. But there was room for further diversification: raspberries or passion fruits, which possess acidic properties similar to those of lemons, could replace them in a good many savoury dishes. Lychees are similar to grapes, mangoes can replace peaches, providing their own character. The possibilities are endless. All one has to do is rid oneself of one’s prejudices and concentrate on the intrinsic flavour properties of each product. </font><br> <br></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"> <hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"></td></tr> <tr> <td align="right" valign="top"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1139674845/gallery_29805_2457_671.jpg" align="top"></td> <td valign="top"><font size="-1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Product association had been one of our main creative methods up to 1993. We had thoroughly systematised and explored it, and we established the foundations for certain flavour combinations which had accompanied us and had been added to over the years. In 1994, our creative approach focussed on other methods (mainly the search for new concepts and techniques), but we were still open to new discoveries. One of these was really interesting: the combination of molluscs and fruit provided us with a superb contrast between the savoury and sometimes slightly bitter flavour of the former and the sweetness and acidity of certain fruits. This happy alliance between two families resulted that year in our rock mussels with coriander foam (with a blood orange reduction), cold/hot clam chop suey (with lychees), and scallops in holy oil with mushrooms and redcurrants. </font><br><br></td> </tr> <tr><td colspan="2"><hr size="1" noshade color="#333333"> <font size="-2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">This is the first part in a multi-part series. Part two is here.<br> El Bulli books may be purchased here.<br><br> Our thanks to Juli Soler for his invaluable assistance in this project. <br> Copyright Ferran Adria, Juli Soler, Albert Adria © 2006. Photographs by Francesc Guillamet. <br> Introduction by Pedro Espinosa.<br> </font></td></tr> </table>

<table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspace="0"><tr><td colspan="2"><img hspace="5" vspace="5" align="left" src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1136363934/gallery_29805_1195_16739.jpg">by Chris Amirault <br><br> In college, I became a sixty-minute man. Forget Billy Ward and the Dominoes; I mean a sixty-minute man in the Pierre Franey sense of the phrase. Like many people who learned to cook in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I got my start with Franey’s indispensable, genre-defining New York Times 60-Minute Gourmet. More importantly, I learned how to learn how to cook with it. <br><br> The first edition of the book was a compendium of Franey’s Times columns, in the format that he had perfected there. First came the deft, informal introductions to the dishes, often with references to unnamed “acquaintances” (Claiborne? Soltner? We never learned), to tempting, unavailable European foodstuffs with odd names like rascasse about which you could only dream, and to the rolling hills and bucolic seacoasts of France from which most dishes hailed. These introductions cut through the formality of many of the recipes that followed, with Franey’s gentle voice encouraging novices and talented amateurs both. <br><br> Then came the recipes -- Franey often included a side or two to go with the main -- which were paragons of clarity and simplicity. They generally required seven or eight pieces of basic equipment: a chef’s knife, a paring knife, a cutting board, a colander, a skillet or saute pan, a covered sauce pan, a stock pot, and a roasting pan. Ingredients were chosen based both on their availability at Food Emporium and by the likelihood that a contemporary shopper might actually pull that item off a shelf and place it in her cart. The directions were precise and no-nonsense, in the style of his colleague Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook: there was only one way to do things, so no need to fuss with extra verbiage. </td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="50%" valign="top">Those sixty minutes imposed many constraints on methods and dishes, meaning a lot of sauteing and almost no braising, one quick fish “broth” but no stocks, plenty of cream and butter but few of the classic sauces; as a result, there’s no daube, coq au vin, or cassoulet, precious little offal, and only a few roasted entrees. But Franey used those constraints to turn a short hour into a lesson on French a la minute preparations and their related foundational concepts. The lesson could be on steak au poivre, tossed into a superhot skillet and poked repeatedly to teach you how to tell when it was done; or it could be a lesson on the simple magic of browned butter, lemon and caper sauce for that flounder -- or if you were being risque that strange, delicate skate wing. It could be a lesson on fond and flavor, during which a perfectly sauteed pork chop waited patiently for its companion apple quarters to absorb every bit of porcine goodness from the deglazed pan. <br><br> Every page implied the same unspoken message: “Learn these dishes and you’ll know the right way.” The recipes that fill the original version of 60-Minute Gourmet meet that simple demand, within a particularly French, or perhaps more broadly “continental,” culinary context. In every dish one could find a few crucial insights into food, cooking, and eating and Franey was gently but insistently suggesting that paying good attention for that short hour could make you, too, into a better cook. That is the lasting genius of 60-Minute Gourmet: instead of trying to teach you everything, Franey sought to teach you a few things from which, if you wanted to do so, you could learn almost everything. <br><br> It comes as no surprise, then, that Sara Moulton declares in her new and excellent cookbook, Sara’s Secrets for Weeknight Meals, that her “own model is Pierre Franey, whose 60-Minute Gourmet -- the product of a more leisurely era -- still inspires me.” She’s chosen the right model, revamped it for the current zeitgeist and infused it with her own voice and mission. In doing so, she has created a book that will become the stained go-to cookery book for many of her fans -- and a book that can be, for the right readers, what Franey’s book was for so many twenty-five years ago. <br><br> The book announces its differences immediately. Following succinct but useful “How To Use This Book” and “Stocking Your Pantry” sections, subsequent chapters are broken down conceptually, including some that are frank encouragements to expand your horizons by, for example, allowing “Side Dishes [to] Take Center Stage.” The bulk of the chapters provide thoughtful, trimmed-down preparations of dishes both expected and surprising. The “Oven-baked Chowder” is ingeniously simple, using a 375 F oven to add depth of flavor in a relatively short time with little fuss. In addition, I suspect that the “Breakfast for Dinner” chapter legitimates the furtive evening meals of the truly busy with nods not only to French egg preparations but also to the Egg McMuffin itself. <br><br> The recipes range through several cuisines, and Moulton takes special effort to encourage combinations that reflect the expansion of the American palate without pretending that she’s offering authentic interpretations on favorites. To wit, she suggests that her honestly named “Cheatin’ Jambalaya” is a great way to use that leftover Chinese takeout rice in your fridge. If that sort of cooking jars your sensibilities (insert Sandra Lee joke here), you’ll certainly find the chapter in which it resides, “Shop and Serve,” to be thoroughly annoying. In it, Moulton proposes to embrace rather than decry the home meal replacement phenomenon that is claiming square footage at your local supermarket, using salad bars as the source for gazpacho and grabbing some roasted vegetables from the deli for ratatouille pizza. It is a bit mysterious, too, that the chapter, “Just Open the Pantry,” contains both a detailed explanation of what a caper is and a dorm-worthy recipe for souped-up ramen noodles. <br><br> One can imagine a few simple explanations for such gestures. Her tastes are democratic; like her work at Gourmet and on the Food Network, she’s balancing high and low. But something more complex is going on. After all, this book was written by a woman with a degree in the History of Ideas and in emulation of Pierre Franey, who, like Moulton, always seemed to have a bit more going on than his smile would indicate. Take her representation of her audience. Moulton draws an expansive community in, and into, her book. She regularly mentions her colleagues in the test kitchens at Gourmet and behind the scenes at FTV; her family members pop up now and then, primarily to indicate that even finicky eaters like a particular dish. Most notably, the community of viewers and callers who participated in her call-in Food Network shows is well represented, chiming in with tips, adaptations, and correct pronunciations. (“VIE-DAY-LI-A,” her Southern viewers insisted, correcting her Northern gaffe.) As she so masterfully does on television, in Sara’s Secrets for Weeknight Meals Moulton knows how to be that rarest of foodies: both informed and inclusive, humbly committed to quality cooking and eating for all. <br><br> “Meanwhile,” as she writes, “the clock is always ticking.” Like Franey, Moulton strives to keep the recipes under 60 minutes, and most have listed “hands-on time” of 15 minutes, the stated desire of the many people she met while promoting her first book, Sara Moulton Cooks at Home. I wondered throughout whether those times were accurate; though Moulton claims to have “dispensed with what the French call mise en place,” many seemed to cram an awful lot of prep into a brief quarter hour. To prepare her "Mexican Chicken Salad," for example, this cook (with decent knife skills but limited counter space) was hard pressed to clean and stem 1/2 cup of cilantro, squeeze 1/4 cup of lime juice, chop up half of a chipotle en adobo, clean and shred a head of romaine, cube two cups of cooked chicken and an avocado, rinse and drain a can of black beans, chop three plum tomatoes, and grate four ounces of cheese in such a short time. <br><br> This inaccuracy may be a bit problematic if the fam is insistent on getting fed precisely between Seinfeld and The Simpsons. However, I suspect that these inaccuracies might better be understood as part of Moulton’s master plan, a wonderfully sneaky strategy for luring the 15-minute crowd toward the hour and beyond. There are other, more explicit nudges to be found. For example, take the substantial “Cooking Ahead” section, a collection of stews, braises, and the like that are “time-saving” because you can make on weekends and pull out for weekday dinners. They are also clear indications that time and cooking are swell companions, and that depth, complexity, and melding of flavor, not to mention tenderness and texture, are enhanced when one takes one’s time. <br><br> Putting a five-hour, ten-minute (“plus marinating time,” natch) "Cuban-Style Roast Pork" recipe in a book devoted to 15-minute meals makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Poke around a bit and you’ll see more evidence of the master plan. In her introduction, Moulton confesses that she “could never discount the joys of slow food,” and gives a nod to Julia Child’s “anti-rush-rush-rush” philosophy. Julia wasn’t just talking about roasts and braises, of course. As US consumer culture was driving us ever faster, she wanted you to stop and consider that leek or sweetbread or monkfish because she believed that absorbing the pleasures of food during its preparation was a unique, important benefit for every cook. It would be foolhardy to say that Sara’s Secrets for Weeknight Meals is devoted to that pleasure, but it would be naïve not to notice that pleasure lurking here and there throughout. <br><br> So, then, is it foolhardy to imagine the following scenario? While preparing that "Mexican Chicken Salad," one of Moulton’s 15-minute fans is fascinated to find that taking an extra moment to consider the romaine reveals the curious structure and textures of this Caesar pleaser. Perhaps another is proud to cut that cooked chicken into perfect 3/4 inch cubes, or is challenged to get each of the hundreds of tiny juice cells that fill every lime to burst. (Roll it? Ream it?) In each of those brief, otherwise banal moments, might there be a lesson about food and cooking, making those moments not so banal after all? <br><br> Moulton is betting it’s not foolhardy, at least. Sure, she gives you the basics if you want to slam out a chicken breast, but there is a hidden door in every recipe urging the cook toward different approaches to food and cooking, giving the 15-minute crowd opportunities to linger, try, and ponder. Like Franey, perhaps, while she helps the harried home cook plate meals, she can at the same time, teach her readers how to learn how to cook. Call me a convert: after Franey got me started, I turned into a two or three-hour man pretty quickly, seeking out long-simmering daubes, 14-item mise en place preps for bibimbap, and insanely intricate methods for fried chicken simply for the pleasure of cooking. Sara’s Secrets for Weeknight Meals will help you when you have to rush, rush, rush for fifteen minutes, but if Saint Julia appears on your shoulder now and then to slow you down and nudge you toward the hour and beyond: well, that might just be another of Sara’s secrets. <br><br> Chris Amirault (aka, well, chrisamirault) is a host of the eGullet Society General Food Topics, the self-styled Czar of the eGullet Recipe Cook-Offs, and the proud owner of an apron displaying Yoko Ono's ass. He also runs a preschool and teaches in Providence, RI. </td><td width="50%" valign="top"> <hr noshade><div align="center"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076791659X/egulletcom-20"><img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1136363934/gallery_29805_1195_2092.jpg" border="0"></a> </div><blockquote><hr noshade><font size="3" face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b><br><br>A Preview of Forthcoming Cookbooks Guaranteed to Save You Time</b></font> <br><br> <font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">The 1979 publication of Pierre Franey's <i>60-Minute Gourmet</i> (now <i>The New York Times 60-Minute Gourmet, by Pierre Franey with an introduction by Craig Claiborne</i>) gave rise to a contest of culinary time-saving one-upmanship that continues to this day. <br><br> Between then and now, according to Amazon.com, there have been in the neighborhood of 552 cookbooks along these lines, including the category-dominating <i>30-Minute Meals</i>, by Rachael Ray, and the <i>30-Minute Vegetarian Indian Cookbook</i>, by Mridula Baljekar (this last title, it should be noted, is part of the 30-Minute Vegetarian Cookbook Series). <br><br> Not to be outdone, both Weight Watcher's and Cooking Light have published 5-Minute Cookbooks (perhaps it is possible to cook more efficiently when preparing fewer calories). The American Heart Association, always conservative in its claims, offers <i>Meals in Minutes</i> (this would seem to describe any length of preparation). Some have even upped the ante by introducing additional numeric restrictions, for example <i>4 Ingredient Recipes for 30 Minute Meals</i>, by Barbara C. Jones, and The <i>5 in 10 Dessert Cookbook: 5 Ingredients in 10 Minutes or Less</i>, by Natalie Hartanov Haughton. <br><br> Last month, however, celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito came on strong with the boldest efficiency claim to date: <i>Rocco's Five Minute Flavor</i>. The book promises a time-saving trifecta: "every dish is ready in 5 minutes or less, using 5 ingredients, and all for under $5 per serving." He writes, in the introduction, "I want 5 minutes to be the new 30 minutes." <br><br> One could be forgiven for assuming it can't go any farther. Yet a look at forthcoming titles for 2006 indicates that the game is hardly over. In February, the Institute for Prevention of Obesity is releasing <i>The Zero-Minute Epicure: 250 No-Cook, No-Eat, No-Calorie Recipes that Taste Great!</i> (Emphasis in original). Then, in June, we can expect the long-awaited translation of Russian physicist Vladimir Fradkin's <i>The Negative Ten Minute Cookbook: What Einstein's Chef Told Him About Today's Meals, Done Yesterday</i>. Rather than presenting traditional recipes, the book is in the form of a novel about the unrequited love of a Russian circus bear for a visiting marsupial, set in the era of Stalin. <br><br> Thankfully, the Slow Food movement has not jumped on the bandwagon. Slow Food will be issuing, in August, <i>The Slow Food 60-Hour Gourmet: 3 Recipes for the 3-Day Weekend Warrior</i>. Although the book begins, unoriginally, with a recipe for how to cook a wolf, the other two recipes are excellent. <br><br> -<i>Steven A. Shaw</i></font><br> <hr noshade></blockquote></td> </tr> </table>

<img hspace="5" vspace="5" align="left" src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1135858466/gallery_29805_1195_4989.jpg">by Ya-Roo Yang You can tell a lot about someone by the way he eats. That was how I started entertaining myself at boring dinner parties, then it became my default pattern of behavior. Over the years, I sat at many tables quietly observing the eating habits of my dining companions, many of whom were dates. Doug, an investment banker I dated a while back, usually tore into his steak the minute the server set it down in front of him. I often wondered if he confused me with the steak. Jake, an equity analyst, on the other hand, liked to take his time to savor everything he ate, believing himself to be one of those refined, sensitive types. Being around Jake was slower than watching corn grow. The meat-and-potato guys are usually conservatives at the core with homespun values, no matter how radical they claim to be. The eclectic ethnic eaters tend to be idealists, always mildly discontent at their lot in life. The devout Michelin/Zagat followers lack backbone as a whole, despite the confidence they exude. The complainers and picky eaters just want to feel like they are in control, although they never really are. Vegans are just about the most oppressive dining companions one can have, no matter how easygoing they appear. As for the wine guys: well, they're a category to themselves. Anyone reading this may think that I’m one of those spoiled petulant products of the post-feminist chick-lit era, but the truth is far from that. I simply view people in two categories: those who see food as sustenance, and those who see food as one of the ultimate pleasures in life. When it comes to dating, I prefer the latter to the former. And, of the latter, the ideal is to have someone who can delight in a simple fish taco from a beach shack in Baja, California as much as an intricate twelve-course degustation at Alain Ducasse. Of course, not everyone needs to be that way, but it’s an ideal to which I aspire. “You can’t always get what you want,” my friend Lisa told me. “You have to give everyone a chance. At this rate, you're going to be alone for the rest of your life.” Lisa meant well, but her worries seemed unnecessarily dramatic. And even if it was true, the prospect didn't seem so horrible, as long as I had plenty of dates to keep me entertained at restaurants. Then of course, the inevitable happened. I broke up with the guy I had been seeing -- a chef, meaning we had conflicting work schedules and never really had the opportunity to eat together, precluding me from any discovery of unappealing character traits --and came down with a bad case of mid-life crisis. I had sailed past the age of forty, blissfully unaware of the old age and decrepitude; I thought I had escaped that tedious malaise. But it caught up with me on the verge of forty-one -- all of a sudden, my biological clock; the waning possibility of a family; the prospect of Social Security and Medicare; and spending the rest of my life alone -- dying in a run-down, clutter-filled apartment with no one to date my ass -- became very real to me. I was in bad shape. Instead of buying myself a new sports car or having serial affairs with guys half my age, like any of my respectable male friends inflicted with the same bug would do, I decided to double my effort to find Mr. Right. Or maybe just someone I could tolerate across a dinner table for the rest of my life. Hence Ray, one of the guys Lisa had been dying to set me up with. “He likes food,” she said enthusiastically. “He’s eaten at most of those places you like to go, and he’s really cute!” Great potential, though Lisa’s idea of someone liking food may just mean that he likes to eat indiscriminately. We met at a Malaysian restaurant on the border of Chinatown: my choice, figuring that it was low-key enough for a casual date, and that the stir-fry kang kong was decent enough to provide interesting diversions, should the date turn out to be a total bust. Ray, a freelance computer game developer, was certainly everything Lisa described: cute, funny, bright and brimming with Southern California charm. Over dinner, I learned that he loved to travel and surf, and knew how to fly a plane. Good signs. He votes Democrat. Great sign. We shared the same opinions of the French Laundry and Per Se. Really great sign. But the real bonus point came when he ordered tamarind chili fish (unconventional and spontaneous); stir-fried lotus roots (sophisticated) and coconut rice (easy-going). I felt like I had won the dating lottery. We swapped dining adventures, drank Asian beer, dipped paper-thin roti canai in spicy curry sauce, and shared steaming bean curd hot pots. By the end of the dinner, I was beginning to think that maybe I had misjudged Lisa after all. Then he leaned over asked if I wanted to go back to his place. I missed The Rules. I am not one of those girls who requires the mandatory five dates before the sex. Quite the contrary, if all vital signs seem reasonable, there are certain things one needs to know before committing oneself to the ritual of dating. There’s really no point in going on if certain aspects of the relationship are not up to par. I know, I know. One can always show the other person the proper path to intimate bliss, but seriously, why educate when you can move on to someone else who might do a better job at it? As I stood on Grand Street pondering the possibilities, he whispered into my ear, “You know, I’ve got lots of toys.” “Toys?” I muttered. A warning light flickered in my head. “Yes,” he said in a low voice. “I’ve been very bad, and I need to be disciplined.” The warning sign was in full flash; sirens were going off as well. As much as I believe in innovation and experimentation when it comes to food, and perhaps most aspects of life, there are a few things I hold sacred -- my notions of what constitutes good sex being among them. Like good food, sex should never be a three-ring circus. After many years of eating at the best dining establishments in the world, I have concluded that fancy gadgets, chemically enhanced foams and latest scientific techniques are, quite often, ways to disguise a chef’s inability to engage the diner on a simple level. The same goes for sex, if only for the reason that simplicity can sometimes be one of the hardest things to manage. While all this may sound terribly vanilla to many thrill-seekers out there, just remember how extraordinary vanilla can be, especially when it’s a lovely Tahitian vanilla that recalls the breeze of a warm summer night. “Come on,” I said icily. It was the wrong thing to say. He looked disappointed at first, then his eyes lit up. “Oh, I get it,’ he said, visibly excited. “You're punishing me. I know I haven’t earned my discipline. I don’t deserve it.” He straightened up suddenly. “I will call you tomorrow.” With that he turned and walked quickly in the opposite direction. I swore under my breath and called Lisa. “It’s a minor issue,” she said. "If you two really like each other, you should be able to work that out. Besides, how many people do you know that actually have the same taste in food as you do?” The next morning, my cell phone rang promptly at 9:00 am. It was Ray. “Have you changed your mind?” he asked respectfully. “No,” I said, feeling rather irritated. “I see." His voice was breathless with excitement once again. “I am still being punished.” I hung up on him and set my phone to reject his number. A few weeks later, I was having girl conversation with Lisa when the topic of Ray came up. “Oh, he’s doing fine,” Lisa said. “He’s hot after some girl who’s blocked his call.” You can tell a lot about the guy by the way he eats. Or so I thought. Ya-Roo Yang (aka Bond Girl) works in finance and lives in New York City's East Village with her corgi. She hosts the New York forum.

<img hspace="5" vspace="5" align="left" height="290" src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1133147633/gallery_29805_1195_8520.jpg">by JJ Goode Ruth Reichl's egalitarian view of food, along with her unorthodox, novelistic reviewing style, outraged critics and delighted fans. Garlic and Sapphires, her latest memoir, recounts her occasionally tumultuous tenure at the New York Times and the lengths she took to avoid being recognized by the city's chefs and restaurateurs. In it, she offers readers a great deal of herself, depicting her fear of failure, her writing and reviewing processes, and her struggle to retain her identity. Since 1999, Reichl has steered the great ship Gourmet, guiding it toward today's most pressing food issues -- sustainability, food and health, and the ethics of eating. She is the real thing -- articulate, knowledgeable, hungry. Recently, JJ Goode engaged the engaging Reichl in conversation, the recounting of which follows. jogoode: When you wrote your first memoir, did you know you were going to take on your time at the Times? Ruth Reichl: I didn't even think Tender at the Bone would be a memoir when I started. When I got to the Times, after I'd been writing for years, I kept getting these calls from editors saying, "You must be writing a book." Well, I wasn't writing a book, and in fact I didn't even have an agent. After the fifteenth call like that, I thought, "Maybe I should be writing a book." So I found an agent, and then I started thinking about what the book I wanted to write was. I'd been telling stories about Mrs. Peavey and my Aunt Birdie, and I thought I would just put these stories down. When I was done writing and turned my manuscript in, Ann Godoff, my editor, said, "These stories are all great, but now you have to make the book work as well as these stories." I became the throughline. After the first one I thought I was done with that. I mean that was it, that was what I intended to do. And then I went to record the audiobook, which by the way is a truly extraordinary experience. We did it at Carnegie Hall, and you're sitting in a booth and you have a completely captive audience -- a producer, a tech person . . . I came to the end and these faces look up to me as I read, "The End" and they go, "That's it? You're not going to tell us what happened?" And they made me take them out to lunch and tell them what happened next. At that point the first book hadn't come out yet, but I called my agent and said, "I hadn't thought about this, but if they want to know what happened next, maybe other people would want to know what happened next too." I felt badly in Tender at the Bone about exposing my mother in that way. She had always wanted to write a book about what it was like to be a manic depressive, so I thought, "I sort of owe it to her. I'm going to write that book." So I had been planning as my next book to write my mother's book -- I had been reading her diaries. Instead I decided to write the book that became Comfort Me with Apples. And again I didn't truly intend to take on the Times but when I was through with Comfort . . . I like to write, you know, and it was sort of the obvious one. And I have to say that the first editor I went to see when we were selling Tender at the Bone said, "You want to write about your childhood? All anyone really wants to know is what it's like to be the restaurant critic of the New York Times." jogoode: Did you face any new challenges in writing Garlic and Sapphires? It's one thing to take on your own life, but writing about colleagues must be difficult. Ruth Reichl: Well, I did that in Comfort -- I mean, Colman Andrews is still very much alive and editing a rival magazine. But writing about the Times was different than writing about friends. The other thing was that I had gotten so close to my life. With the other books I was still pretty far back in time. The first book was easy because most of the people were either dead or relatives. With this book I was really taking on a lot of people who were in a position to say, "It didn't happen that way." jogoode: So how did you balance accuracy with effective storytelling? Ruth Reichl: Well, the difference between memoir and autobiography is that you get to pick and choose what you're going to write about. You don't choose the things that you're not going to be able to be accurate about. jogoode: Have you received any responses from colleagues? Any challenges to your version of the story? Ruth Reichl: I got a really lovely letter from [Carol Shaw's] husband, saying how happy she would have been with the book. I got a strange postcard from Bryan [Miller]. I can't remember what it said exactly. But nobody challenged me and said, "It didn't happen this way." The thing about this book was that I still had all my notes. They were in my computer. So it was incredibly easy to be accurate about this stuff. jogoode: Frank Bruni, the present New York Times restaurant critic, has been criticized, often rather harshly, for his style and his restaurant choices. Does this bring back any bad memories? I know you're aware of The Bruni Digest . . . Ruth Reichl: I feel incredibly lucky that I predate all of that, because I'm sure exactly the same thing would've happened to me. But on the other hand, that comes with the territory. If you're not making people talk and annoying people, you're not doing a very good job as a critic. Part of a critic's job is to get people talking and to create controversy. And if you're so bland that that isn't happening, you should probably start looking for a new job. jogoode: You said in your farewell column in the Times that you wished the crowning of the first four-star restaurant in New York that owes no debt to France could've happened on your watch? Frank Bruni gave four to Masa. Do you wish you were reviewing at a time when there was this appreciation of non-French food? Ruth Reichl: I was a huge fan of Masa's when I lived in LA -- I think I wrote the first review of his restaurant when he was in this tiny place next to a Subway sandwich shop. His New York restaurant is just amazing. I would have been thrilled to have been able to give him four stars. I would still love to see those kinds of changes accelerate more. I think it's telling that the new Michelin has so little use for Italian restaurants in a city that is in love with Italian food. jogoode: Do you think you influenced the increase in appreciation for ethnic food? Or did you just live through and document it? Ruth Reichl: I think I was just here at that point. I mean I might have moved it up a little bit, just because having lived on the West Coast for 20 years I had and have this passion for Asian food. I came [to New York], and desperately wanted my first review to be of a Chinese restaurant. In fact, I spent that whole summer looking for a place that I felt I could review, but couldn't find one that I thought was going to knock people's socks off -- especially having come from LA where the Chinese food was so incredible. And I'm still disappointed that I couldn't move New Yorkers off the dime about Korean food. It's a totally seductive cuisine, everything about it -- it's beef based, it's interesting vegetables, it's garlic and sugar and heat, it's everything Americans should love, and it's frustrating to me that this wonderful cuisine has never caught on here. jogoode: What does it mean for food to be authentic? Ruth Reichl: I think the authenticity thing is really overdone. Food changes. It always has, it always will. I think we're now at the point where we're able to say Italian-American food is an authentic cuisine. It's not Italian food, but it's its own thing and wonderful in its own right. Purity is a silly thing to strive for at a time when what's wonderful about our food is that we have an incredible clash of cultures, a collision where we're all tasting each other's food and it's changing our tastes and changing what we eat. And then you get into the whole local thing: Is it better to have an authentic olive oil that comes from Crete or Italy, or locally made olive oil that's fresher? Well, if you're in California and can get olive oil that was made three weeks ago, you're going to be a lot better off with that than with two-year-old olive oil from Italy. jogoode: What do think of restaurants like El Bulli? If you're a fan, how do you reconcile your feelings for those restaurants with your affection for homey food? Ruth Reichl: I think Adria is a genius. And I've had some of the most fun in my life at Heston Blumenthal's restaurant [the Fat Duck]. I think that the problem is that there aren't many people who can do what Adria does, and what you end up with is an incredible lot of stupid food. You end up with copycat chefs who don't have his talent or his discipline. Then you get someone who's just combining herring and honey or giving you wasabi ice cream for the titillation of it, and it's just a different thing. One of the great things about food is that it's wonderful to go out and get a great hot dog, and it's wonderful to go get a great dish by Adria. jogoode: Then you have people who have never had pimientos de Padrón and suddenly they're eating some sort of deconstructed pimientos in a light bulb . . . Ruth Reichl: You know, I took my niece and her husband to the Fat Duck. They're not sophisticated eaters. His response, for instance, was, "This is guy is doing his work with so much passion that I feel as if I'm now inspired to do my work with more passion." They loved that food, and it wasn't because they had references -- they were just excited by it. If it's wonderful and exciting and makes you think about your life in a new way, so what that you've never had real pimientos de Padrón? jogoode: What do you think is the present state of the restaurant review? <img hspace="5" align="right" src=http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1133147633/gallery_29805_1195_9784.jpg>Ruth Reichl: I don't think they're that different than they used to be, and I think with the blogging world, they may have become less important, which is a good thing. We've actually stopped doing straight restaurant reviews in Gourmet, because I think they don't make sense for us as a national publication. We're trying to do trends and to have a bigger reach. We're in an interesting state right now where you've got all of those voices out there on the net. So if you want to find out about a restaurant, if all you want is consumer information, which is what a lot of people want, you've got a lot of places to go. If what you want is a great read, then you'll go to the newspaper and the magazines. This means that they must have good writers to keep their audience interested, because for just straight information they're unnecessary. It's also an interesting thing for restaurants themselves. At the Times, I was wearing disguises so I could be every man. Well, now every man is important. They used to be afraid of me because I might be the New York Times, but now everyone is in essence the New York Times. If you mistreat someone, they're going to go out there on the net and say, "This is what happened to me." jogoode: In what direction do you see food writing going? Ruth Reichl: I think it's going to be an amazing time. I mean, when I started writing about food, I was writing to an audience that was basically uninformed. So it was easy. You didn't have to know that much, and I got to learn on the job. Today, you've got a huge audience, a growing audience, of smart, young people who are incredibly knowledgeable about food, who have traveled everywhere and eaten everything and are interested in food in a really good way. And the dirty secret of food writing is that a lot of people who have real reputations as food writers aren't good writers. But they're getting better all the time, and the quality is going up. I was at Yale a couple of weeks ago, and there are kids there who want to be food writers and who bring real depth to it. We're past the time of the home economist who writes nice little stories about food. It's a time when you have people like Mark Kurlansky writing books about food and Eric Schlosser -- talk about a great journalist -- turning his attention to food. Or this book Hungry Planet that just came out -- have you seen this? There are a couple of great journalists! It's by Peter Menzel, who is a photographer, and his wife, and Faith D'Aluisio. They went around the world photographing families in 24 countries with a week's worth of food. It tells you everything about not only these families but also what's happening to our food supply. It's a very depressing picture. You see what industrialized food's reach is. But the idea that these books are increasingly being published and that people are writing books about the ethics of eating -- it's a very exciting time. jogoode: How have you incorporated these issues in Gourmet? Ruth Reichl: Right from the get-go, my deal with them when I came was that I'm not going to make this make this magazine about lovely little dinner parties. I believe that these issues are important, and don't hire me unless you're prepared to deal with where food comes from, what's happening with the food supply, and the politics of food. That's always been a goal. When we first started doing these types of articles we weren't sure whether the audience would accept them, but it's been totally positive. We went from doing an occasional article about gene patents or fish farming to its just being part of our regular mix. I think people today need help navigating the food world and our readers clearly want it. If only we had paid more attention twenty years ago we wouldn't be in the state we're in now. Ruth Reichl is featured in an eG Spotlight Conversation, 28 November to 2 December 2005. JJ Goode is a host of the eGullet Society New York Restaurants, Cuisine, and Travel forum, a freelance editor for Epicurious.com, resources editor for Leite's Culinaria, and a freelance food writer.

<img hspace="5" align="left" src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1132669338/gallery_29805_1195_1374.jpg">by Margaret McArthur I know the joyous abandon of dining with a woman who isn’t shy about acting happy. My mother’s side of the family is mental illness-free, and she’s a fabulous cook. But when she enters a restaurant she’s also uniquely capable of abandoning herself to appetite, enthusiasm and wonder. A chic, well-traveled grande dame, she’s never become jaded and for her every restaurant outing is an occasion of delight. Restaurants are so eager to enchant her that they roll over on their backs and beg her to scratch their tummies. Last month, I sipped a late afternoon Dubonnet with my parents at the bar of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Mummy loved the elegant nibbles set out on the bar -- the cool luxe. She commented on the embroidered linen coasters; the bartender handed her a starched snowy stack with his compliments. Another meal at a two-star with Mummy: the staff sent her home with an armful or orchids fit for the Queen Mother. She declined a basket of the beautifully rolled hand towels from the Ladies Room. It was a close escape: five more minutes and the staff would have boxed up the custom china (service for twelve) she’d admired, the executive chef’s Bragard jacket and two racks of pre-sale. Two weeks later, Mummy’s LA stories and royal treatment were distant dreams stiffened against a Great Lakes November wind. They shivered as I scraped the copy of Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires (Penguin Press, 2005) from under the front-stoop doormat where the UPS guy had hidden it -- not the last gasp of memory, I would learn, but a premonition of bracing refreshment. I slid through the back-from-work ritual: fed the cats while holding my breath to avoid the whiff of Seafood Supper, put a pan of water on the stove and checked for that ominous tinge of pink behind the glassine windows of the bills. I broke a nail prying open the cardboard coffin from Amazon, removed my business heels and hose and found an ashtray. For the rest of the evening, I raised myself only twice, and only from necessity. Ruth Reichl is, thank God, living proof that an Art History major can find a good job, have a good time, and make a lot of money. She lived the California Culinary revolution, fed a commune in Berkeley, palled with Alice Waters, cooked at and co-owned a restaurant, edited the Los Angeles Times food section, won awards for journalism and memoirs. That’s before her stint as restaurant critic for the New York Times, 1993-1999, the period she describes in Garlic and Sapphires. She’s now editor-in-chef of Gourmet magazine. Her professional cred is impeccable, but her memoirs are as intimate as the secrets shared between siblings: Reichl is the most emotionally available food writer since M.F.K. Fisher. She knew Fisher, of course -- Mary Frances packed a lunch for Reichl and Michael Singer, her husband, and told them to follow a path until they found a clearing suitable for an amorous fete-champetre. There isn’t any name worth knowing in the food culture that Reichl doesn’t know; her stories read like Tiger Beat for foodies (boomers of the female persuasion will recognize that as a compliment). Who knew, for instance, that the grandmotherly Marion Cunningham once stockpiled gin because she was terrified that distillers would stop making it? (She got herself off the sauce by force of will.) All of us who've survived high school understand that appearance is all: prom and pompoms for the pretty, Saturday nights with Starsky and Hutch for the plain. Every girl wants to know how the other one sees life, and how life sees her. If you’re a woman over forty, you’ve looked around for your mother and realized that she's not in the room, or even in town -- her voice has become yours. Ruth Reichl decided to go there. She would actually become her late mother, wearing her mother's dress and jewelry, haircut and attitude. Mom Miriam was a no less difficult woman than Ruth had remembered, but the daughter finds herself confessing "Having spent most of my life being embarrassed by Mom, I was surprised to see how easily I slipped into her shoes." Finding out it was fun was even more frightening: “Becoming my mother was like getting cosmic permission to abandon my superego, act without considering the consequences, behave badly.” Ruth as Miriam not only was a little old lady who didn’t take any crap at New York's 21, she felt free to return elderly oysters, demand that tepid soup be reheated and coach the waiter on the amount of cheese to add to the Caesar Salad. When Mom went to the Four Seasons she lived large and loved life -- and so did her daughter. “My mother could be difficult, but when she was happy she was uniquely capable of abandoning herself to the moment. In becoming her I had shed the critic, abandoned the appraiser who sat at a distance, weighing each bite, measuring each dish.” An outing to Le Cirque disguised as Molly Hollis, a retired schoolteacher from Birmingham, Michigan, in an outdated Armani suit in the company of another lady of a certain age got them an excellent dinner, a tiny back table and invisibility -- the service ran the nasty gamut from arrogant to zilch. When Warren Hoge, the assistant managing editor of the Times took Ruth and her husband to lunch, Sirio Maccioni gave them a better table and swapped out the raspberry tartlets: "Anyone with eyes could see it: the new raspberries were twice the size of the old ones . . . " On another visit she made a reservation under an assumed name but went undisguised. The silky Mr. Maccioni wasn’t fooled twice -- he kept the King of Spain waiting in the bar and swept her party to a front four-top. Tender at the Bone is Reichl's bildungsroman: her childhood with her bi-polar mother, her schooldays in Montreal, (once my city) and Ann Arbor, and her fateful move to California. In Comfort Me with Apples she confides about her marriages, love affairs and maternity -- a food writer channeling Colette. Garlic and Sapphires is subtitled “The Secret Life of a Food Critic in Disguise,” and it’s a personal peek into the alternate lives she invented while trying to foil the sharp-eyed restaurateurs who taped up her picture in their kitchens. Like a master spy or a good actor she didn’t just pull a wig over that glorious bedhead -- she prepared for her parts with makeup, costume and back story. She inhabited the roles, and then discovered that the roles inhabited her; she even found that her signature on the credit card slip had morphed into another woman’s handwriting. Reading about these other women is like discovering that your sister really is a modern-day Mata Hari, the Cate Blanchett of restaurant writers. Ruth Reichl, a few years older than I, is my pick for coolest big sister ever -- one who lets you sneak a long look inside her diary. My husband opened the door; I put him in charge of dinner without looking up. I remember him handing me a glass of wine as he checked out the cover of the chronicle that had entranced me all evening. "Any good?" he asked. I handed him the book in order to answer a phone call ("Yes, we need new energy-efficient windows. No, I'm not interested.”), then had to pry it from his paws. I turned off the pan of water I'd started for skinning fresh tomatoes and told him it was fine to use canned for quick-and-dirty pasta putanesca. Four hours and a dinner break later I'd finished. I guess you could say Ruth had me from Garlic. Ruth Reichl will be featured in an upcoming eG Spotlight Conversation, 28 November to 2 December 2005. Margaret McArthur, aka maggiethecat, is host and Dark Lady of the Daily Gullet Competition forum. She writes, cooks and tends her garden near Chicago. Photo by Brigitte Lacombe.

<img align="right" hspace="5" src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1130070208/gallery_29805_1195_24817.jpg">In the long-awaited final installment of our three-part interview with Santi Santamaria of Can Fabes restaurant in Sant Celoni, Spain, Pedro Espinosa talks to the three-Michelin star chef about the impact of the guides on his business, the current state of Catalan cooking, the role of the media, and cooking as living heritage. Click here to read the first part of this fascinating interview, and here for part two. by Pedro Espinosa Pedro: How are the hotel and Espai Coch performing? Are you happy with the results? Santi: I’m very happy. To me the important thing was that this change would fit well with our customers and that people who came would get good vibes. We’re moving in the right direction. We had to give it a modern face for a basic reason: the restaurant cannot distance itself from the new generations. This is essential to me. And part of the theater is how the stage is decorated. Then, the important thing to me is the play. But the scenery has to be there. Pedro: The hotel has been open for a short time. Santi: Since October last year. And in July 2003 we opened the new restaurant zone. Step by step. I had planned to tackle the project in phases, but when I started I said to myself: you have to complete it at once if you don’t want to be doing this for the rest of your life. When you’re so far from the city, you have to be able to renovate to attract customers. You must give them an incentive. Years ago, I did gastronomic workshops. Now I feel very much like devoting a year, I don’t know which, to the Sent Soví [the first Catalan cookbook and one of the oldest in Europe, circa 1324; see part two. -Ed]. No matter how I’m criticised, making a year of Sent Soví. With my vision, evidently. An interpretation of its recipes through my vision. I tested and did some things some time ago. The issue is that I have to stand behind what I do and this project requires a lot of rigor. I understand that one can be criticised by the results of a work. What can’t be said about us is that there’s a lack of rigor. If there’s rigor, I don’t mind the criticism. If I were accused of lack of rigor, that would hurt me. I can’t make a work out of one of the great classics, let’s say Apicius, and present it in public, without content. I have to put all my personal effort behind it. This requires time, making a break and doing this work for a whole year. I feel like doing this. For some time I’ve felt like doing this. Pedro: Is that type of cooking recoverable? Santi Yes, it would be my cooking, but going through a process of looking for tastes and affinities. Pedro: Do you have any new projects in mind? We’ve heard of a new restaurant near Barcelona. Santi: We’re on it. It’s a new building, with the Hesperia group, located in Hospitalet. The architect is Richard Rogers and the structure is already built. The restaurant will be on the top with a dramatic view of the area of 15km of visibility. It will be a gastronomic restaurant. Pure and simple. It’s going to be a tough challenge, because Hospitalet is not an easy place. Though I believe in five or six years lots of things are going to happen in Catalonia. At least, that’s what I think. Today, for instance, an important tourism announcement has been published about a third runway in El Prat’s Airport and the campaign by travel operators for direct transoceanic routes to Catalonia without stops in Madrid. La Vanguardia’s director said in his editorial that in Catalonia half a million overnight stays are lost each year because of this lack of international connections. Barcelona is an important, renowned city and I think Madrid will have to ease its congestion. This madness of megacities has no sense in Europe. Naturally, decision centres, power centres, don’t give way. We all know of the strategic importance of communications. Without a doubt, the AVE and the third runway will make it so that Barcelona occupies the place it deserves. Pedro: Are you thinking of doing something outside Catalonia? Because Sant Celoni’s results are very good. Santi: I’m very happy with Sant Celoni. Very happy. We were extremely well received from the very first moment. It’s the restaurant profile I like. We don’t have to be in fashion. That’s something I love, not being in fashion. And to be labelled as uncreative, that’s something that I’m crazy about. After so many years of repeating this, I’m not forced to do anything. I don’t have to come up with foolish things each year and I focus on what I enjoy. This helps me a lot. It’s not mandatory for me to come up with new foolish things so people will say I’m very creative. Pedro: And people keep coming. Santi: They do, and since they took that label from me, it leaves me at ease. It takes away a lot of pressure. When I return to any classic cooking theme, I gave you pigeon yesterday? Pigeon with foie gras? Pedro: Yes, I was going to ask you about the sauce. Santi: Well, it was a sauce made with its carcass, making use of the cooking juices and some, just a little, touch of cardamom on top. This so classic pigeon, that we’ve been cooking for so many years… Pedro: With a precise and accurate cooking point. Santi: Well, it leaves me completely at ease that I’ll be able to do this all my life. Because it’s wonderful. This is good today and it will be good in 150 years if there are good pigeons and good cooks to cook them. What do they want me to do to this pigeon? Torture it, make it a purée? To me, this is cooking: first not to ruin good products, and if they’re good we can improve them. A little, not much. I find this very easy. Sometimes, my friends tell me: it can’t be, don’t fool us, that’s very difficult. It’s not, it’s very easy. It’s common sense. Having common sense. There are things that I wouldn’t mix. <img align="left" src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1123620128/gallery_29805_1195_3585.jpg">Sometimes I tell to my stagiares: come on, let’s see what dish you can prepare. And many times I find myself telling them: how did it occur to you to mix this with this? It’s difficult. How could you come to the conclusion of mixing some elements? What more natural than a pigeon sauce made with its bones and blood? There are some things I like, from time to time, that are savory-sweet contrasts. In Catalonia we’re making an excessive use of them, though there’s a historic component behind it. But fruits can saturate. Pedro: It looks like it’s become fashionable to add them to fish dishes. Santi: Me, I don’t even serve lemon with fish, I take a stand on it! When I see a citrus fruit in fish, I think that it’s adding acidity to it to mask the raw product. I’m not saying that there isn’t any preparation which requires a touch of acidity. But an excess of citrus, I don’t know. The spiny lobster I gave you yesterday, it had a little curry, but almost nothing, very subtle. You sensed the seafood’s taste. The other day, I was at Barcelona’s Central Market and I stopped at a store to see some spiny lobsters. We were three or four people; one of us was my son. I told them, "These spiny lobsters are from Africa." "How do you know?" they asked. "Well, they aren’t from the Mediterranean. They’re different. I believe they come from Africa. Perhaps they come from the Indian Ocean, but they’re not from here." I approached the store’s counter and the person in charge said, "Dammit! Santi, how are you? Look, look who’s here!" His brother, his wife and his partner came: "Look, Santi, my compliments. Amazing, what spiny lobsters we had at your restaurant -- nothing to do with what I’ve got here. With these, you (wouldn't have been able) to cook the spiny lobster I had in your restaurant." This is fantastic. "With these, you won’t cook that spiny lobster I had." I’m telling you, those lobsters came from South Africa. Pedro: To wrap up, what the heck did you serve with the eggplant last night? Santi: Slightly smoked cod fish’s eggs. I remove all its eggs, make a paste and add a touch of cream. The cod fish is a thing, but the eggplant… There’s this Japanese restaurant in Barcelona, Shunka, behind Hotel Colón in the Cathedral’s Square. If you want to go there is great, very simple, I think they’re closed in August. Very well known, very cheap, they treat everybody great, they work with wonderful products. You must go to the bar. Ask him to prepare a menu for you. Unconventional. They give you this eggplant (I’ve checked some Japanese books afterwards and it’s a classic dish). It’s a whole fried eggplant and they add some miso sauce. You eat it with a spoon. When I ate it, I enjoyed it so much! When I came back here I took an eggplant, fried it and started playing. I didn’t like the sauce they presented the dish with, so I started to look for a twist. It was like doing an eggplant mousse. The taste of cod fish, the smoked work very well with the aubergine. This is what I told you before, you find something you like and you adapt it and reinterpret it according to your own principles, to your own thinking, to what you’d like to propose. This is the third of three parts. Part one is here; part two is here. <i>Pedro Espinosa (aka <a href="http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showuser=10675">pedro</a>) is an eGullet Society manager, and host of the Spain and Portugal forums. Pedro wishes to thank Víctor de la Serna (vserna), Steven Shaw and Andy Lynes for their help with this interview. Photographs copyright 2005 Can Fabes Gastronomic Leisure Center.</i>

<img align="left" src="http://egullet.com/imgs/golden_gully.gif" width="185" height="290" hspace="5">The winners of the eGullet Literary Smackdown are back where they belong: above the fold at the Daily Gullet. It’s more cost-effective than self-publishing your stuff: thousands of connoisseurs pull it up with their morning mug of joe, your mailbox will be clogged with offers from agents (if there were any justice in the world!), and you can e-mail it to your tenth grade English teacher, your parents and your entire address book. But there’s more! The First Prize Winner receives a fabulous prize in cookbook form. This Smackdown topic, New Orleans, Mon Amour, was conceived during the dark days and nights of Hurricane Katrina, and asked for memories of our experiences in the Crescent City -- every trip a honeymoon. To read all the entries click here. <hr align="center" width="50%"> Third Prize: Pam Claughton It was almost fifteen years ago that I visited New Orleans. I was 25 at the time, young and excited to be going to Mardi Gras for the first time. I'd met Nicole a few years earlier, when we'd waitressed together at a lobster house on the Cape. She was a Louisiana girl, and when her relationship with a Cape native ended abruptly, she moved home. By the time I visited her, in her home in Crowley, LA, a few hours South of New Orleans, she was 22 and an old married lady with two kids. Everywhere I went with Nicole, people asked me, "where's your husband?" It was assumed that I had one. In Louisiana, to not have one, at age 25 was quite shocking. Nicole had a grandmother who lived in a tidy area on the outskirts of New Orleans. While her husband babysat, Nicole, her cousin Mary, and I drove into the city, and fell into the magic of New Orleans and Mardi Gras. We had no plans, other than to eventually make our way to Grandma's house to sleep. Fortunately, Grandma was away for the week. She would have been less than enthused to find her house full of people, which it was, by the time we ended up there. In the meantime, we explored and savored the city. We drank multi-colored tall hurricane drinks, and walked from bar to bar, collecting strings of beads, and laughing at what some people would do to get them. We watched in fascination as people in front of us stopped at one of the many helium vendors, and paid money to essentially do drugs on the street. We ate red beans and rice out of little paper cups, sold from street vendors for a few dollars. We danced, and sang along with the band, and met people, and somehow they ended up following us home to Grandma's. The next day, when everyone went their separate ways, we returned to the French Quarter, and started anew, energized by rich chicory coffee and sweet beignets from Cafe Du Monde. Mardi Gras, and New Orleans was a blur that lasted for several days, and etched itself in my mind forever. The music, the food, the comraderie, and the feel and smell of New Orleans is indescribable. I've been saying for the past 15 years that I couldn't wait to go back. But I haven't yet, and that is something that I truly regret. My heart goes out to this city, and I wish them a speedy recovery. <hr align="center" width="50%"> Second Prize: Carrot Top A Fabulous Prize. New Orleans as it stood was a Fabulous Prize all in itself. In running through the city of New Orleans in memory, I see streets. New Orleans. . . more than any other city, is made of streets. Streets that demand attention, streets that co-operate with each other in a secret plan to lead a persons feet onward and onward, round and through the city. Streets with distinct personalities, each one. Wide boulevards link medium size thoroughfares which link cobblestone paths which tie into paths through green places. Streets that either burst at the seams with music, life, smells of food and laughter. . .or streets that are just ready to burst with life should the right moment be found. <img align="right" src="http://egullet.com/imgs/golden_gully.gif" width="185" height="290" hspace="5">The streets of wealth in New Orleans do not hide their face from the poverty so very near by. . .and the streets of poverty have a richness of their own variety. What made it so in New Orleans? The music? The bars? The idea of Mardi Gras all year long? It could be the aromas of the foods alone that made of New Orleans a place that nobody would or could ever help loving. The boulevards, the roads, the paths, the avenues, they all sang with the aromas of food. Rich food, spicy food, food that caressed the soul in the same way that the sultry sweat of the heat on the sidewalks would melt one almost in place while wandering those streets. You walk slowly in New Orleans, unless you are crazy. There is too much to see, smell, feel, hear. Can you taste the coffee? Can you smell the pastries and breads? I can. I even imagine that I can smell the steamed crawfish, their shiny little heads nodding together in a chiascuro brightness, dumped out rolling out in a rosy gathering of happy jollility on that battered wooden picnic table covered with its generous swath of thick brown paper, the yeasty toast of smell of the pitcher of beer literally making my tastebuds seem to jump right out of my mouth. . . at that small shack alongside the highway out of town. The place that was New Orleans is still there. It is there in our tastebuds, our minds, our songs. The place that is New Orleans is still there, for it was a sort of magic that made it. It grew from that particular place on earth to be what it was, and what a Fabulous Prize it was, too. And soon, when the land reclaims its own after the floods, when it heals as it does after a field is burned, the seeds that are New Orleans will push up from the blackened soil again. Strong seeds, seeds as vital as they were before if not more so. For how could it be otherwise? For New Orleans has the magic of Singular Place, and it is a place that will always be one magnificent gift, one Fabulous Prize. Just wait and see. <hr align="center" width="50%"> First Prize: Priscilla I think about New Orleans often. I think about walking from the streetcar to the Audubon Zoo and being lucky enough to see the white tiger sitting up on his elbows all perfection in Sphinxocity, and then a moment later he was crouched like a cucaracha, convulsively horking up a hairball just like any old kittycat. <img align="left" src="http://egullet.com/imgs/golden_gully.gif" width="185" height="290" hspace="5">I think about happily slogging through otherworldly humidity, drawn into the Old Absinthe House by the music coming out its open doors -- blind Brian Lee and the Jump Street Five! They were incredible! The nice cocktail waitress hustling to bring vodka gimlet after vodka gimlet and Old Fashioned after Old Fashioned. I learned in New Orleans that if it is humid enough and you keep moving, you can drink vodka gimlet after vodka gimlet. Course I was high in other ways too. We grooved on Brian Lee and Miss Maggie and his incredible musicians a long while but eventually hadda go, and I learned in New Orleans that one can get her last vodka gimlet to go in a plastic cup if she do desired. I think about getting in on the train and running straight to the Central Grocery for a delicious muffeleta, because of having ripped through Calvin Trillin's food-related books shortly before. I don't know what it's like nowadays, but the guy made our sandwich right before our eyes, plenty of olive salad, and we pulled a Dixie beer outta the machine, and it was all so good. We found we liked Felix's better than Mr. Trillin's beloved Acme for oysters, although nobody's gonna be kicking Acme outta bed for eating crackers neither. We just found it so comfortable to sit at Felix's and accumulate a tippy stack of dented bent aluminum trays, from dozen after dozen after dozen. And maybe a soft-shell crab po' boy in there, too. Like Chris, I remember the oysters being ridiculously cheap. And also like Chris, I had gone deep into Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen before getting the chance to go to K-Paul's, and, (like Chris) once there, against all expectations, it was the bread basket that blew my mind! I love the jalapeno cheese, but I sat there at the table extra happy, because I knew, I knew, at home in my copy of the book was the recipe for those rolls made from Paul Prudhomme's Mother's White Bread in our bread basket, which were something like the Platonic ideal of white bread rolls. Ineffable. Sharing our table (all tables were shared, and no reservations accepted, at that time at K-Paul's) was an American girl and her French boyfriend who lived together in Paris, where we had recently visited, and so conversation flowed, even though they insisted on informing us about some pesky self-imposed dietary restrictions I can't remember clearly, but which the Old Man and I did not let rain on our parade. Turns out over there in Paris this girl was also cooking wildly through CPPLK, which was why she brought her boyfriend there this evening. And, our sweet young very-pregnant waitress told us her husband was one of the Neville Brothers. I ate mirlitons with andouille and Cajun béarnaise, and the Old Man feasted on blackened prime rib, a dish we'd seen Chef Paul prepare on PBS sometime earlier and which had sorta seemed like a dream, and was now a dream come true. One day we had arranged to meet a friend of mine from school who worked for the museum there on Jackson Square, and he emerged wearing a by-God blue seersucker suit, and took us to Mr. B's where I think I had soft-shelled crab and I think it was fabulous. Before we got back on the Sunset Limited to go home, we bought Zapp's potato chips and the Central Grocery's olive salad and another sandwich for the trip, and garlic-vapored up our small compartment like mad. <hr align="center" width="50%"> To catch up on New Orleans, visit the Louisiana forum. To catch up on your reading, follow the link to Smackdowns Past. Pour yourself another cup of coffee. Heck, bring on the bonbons, brik or bacon -- it’s dangerous to read on an empty stomach.

<img width="380" height="300" align="left" src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1128905960/gallery_29805_1195_9018.jpg">by Margaret McArthur “You’ve got a great-looking colon.” A woman in her very very late forties can’t be picking and choosing when it comes to compliments from hot younger men. This couldn’t compare to the time, decades ago, when a Chicago squad car pulled me over and asked me if I had a license for my legs, but Dr. Goldberg was right -- I strained to see the ultrasound of my large bowel. It floated on his monitor like a curl of immaculate sausage casing, one clean digestive machine. He instructed me to roll onto my stomach, then onto my back, to raise my left thigh, then my right. This was no easy task, hitched up as I was to a barium delivery system via a lump of plastic in my rectum, its attached tubing and an IV bag. But if he’d asked me to juggle watermelons, talk like a dog and dance the Macarena, I would have barked, bounced and jiggled. When the perky radiology tech chirped “Squeeze your butt cheeks tight, Sweetie. Gotta keep the air in there!” I squeezed. Tight. I’d been the helpless victim of a few painful and embarrassing gastro-intestinal episodes in the previous month, and my internist had written me an order for a barium enema. The outlines of the colon are very difficult to read in a regular x-ray, but a bath in barium shows them crisp and clear. Barium (element 26 of the periodic table, discovered by Sir Humphrey Davy in 1808) is impenetrable to radiation, so it’s used to sharpen the image of the digestive tract. I’d never been on the receiving end of an enema in my life, but I was assured by folks who have had to drink the stuff before an upper GI series that I had won the lottery, been blessed by my Maker, and escaped a fate far worse than death. “That stuff is so nasty, I was actually crying when I tried to get it down. I’d gag, and it would come up on me. Then I had to drink more of it. I’d rather have a baby. Honest.” Doctor Dreamboat removed his lead apron, telling me he was heading off to the White Sox game, and expressed continuing concern about Frank Thomas’s ankle. “Now, hang in there, Margaret. Krystal is going to take a few more X-rays and you’re outta here.” A few more X-rays? The last time I’d been as thoroughly captured on film I was wearing a veil, carrying a bouquet of gardenias and barely legal to drink. The wedding photographer had been intrusive, but he hadn’t 1) posed the shots as strictly as Krystal did, 2) instructed me to clench my derriere, or 3) call me “Sweetie.” And, bless him, he hadn’t stood between me and the hors d’oeuvres. But I was putty in Krystal’s hands as she clicked away: Dear God, she was the only thing standing between me and my first solid food in thirty-two hours. “You did great, Sweetie! “ I felt her unhook me. “The bathroom’s through there.” I gathered my paper gown about me and hit the porcelain throne. The air I’d so faithfully trapped in my large intestine released in a series of tiny put-puts, I discharged some milky barium, washed up and took the hospital corridors at a race walk, ignoring the floor-to-ceiling aquarium, the pianist in the lobby, and the Zen Serenity Garden. In twenty minutes I’d be home, tearing into six slices of bacon, three pieces of toast and two eggs, sunny-side up. It seemed like an appropriate meal for someone breaking her fast, her very first fast. I disapprove of fasting; I disapprove of it on principle. It’s morally frivolous to deliberately starve oneself, unless the food sacrificed makes its way directly into the stomach of someone who needs it. Yes, remember the starving children, and their parents, in Africa or Asia or across town. The world is teeming with people who live on a forced fast because they don’t know when they’ll eat again. These millions aren’t embarking on a kelp-tea diet for a couple of days in order to cleanse themselves of the toxins they’ve been brainwashed into thinking are poisoning their well-toned bodies. If the skeletal population of Sudan had a full stomach for a few days in a row, I guarantee that toxins would be the least of its worries. These people aren’t giving up food to mortify the flesh or to gain spiritual enlightenment. So I was torn with shame -- and the dread of missing the three meals a day and the assorted snacks and nibbles that have been fate’s gift to my unworthy self. When I made the appointment for my test, the voice on the other end of the line asked me for a fax number because it was “too long to read over the phone.” She got that right: the fax spat out three tightly-typed pages, plump with advice, lists and downright scary admonitions: if my bowels weren’t empty enough for the photo shoot, I’d have to fast again, until my colon passed the white glove test. I’d have to get it right the first time -- a repeat was unthinkable. I settled down with my fax, a cigarette and a bag of Cheetos, and read for comprehension. Forty-eight hours before my appointment, I was to embark on a low-residue diet. That I could handle: it’s the food pyramid turned topsy-turvy: white bread, meat, Special K. No whole grains, no raw vegetables, no raw fruits, no legumes. Sure, cocktail hour would be sere: no cheese, popcorn, garlic or olives, but this was hardly starvation. Cut off at the gut on day two: no anything. Clear juice, coffee, tea, Jell-O, bouillon. Popsicles. I tried to bury my guilt about the babies in Niger, to whom a cup of bouillon or a glass of apple juice might be their first nourishment in three weeks. I couldn’t bury it, because atheist that I am, I still float a prayer into the void every night: “Please feed the hungry.” But, you must be kidding, really. Jell-O? On day one, I decided the regime was Atkins perfected: meat and all the white bread I could eat. I forgot about the proscription against bacon and cheese, and ordered a McDonald’s Bacon Egg and Cheese Biscuit at the drive-thru. I figured that I’d abandon myself to the low-residue qualities of fast food and risk a little roll above the waistband -- because tomorrow, I would starve. The McDonald’s biscuit isn’t bad. In fact, it’s good, and I’ve skipped lunch on occasion when I’d succumbed to its dollar ninety-nine charms on the drive to work. A McDonald’s biscuit a day in sub-Saharan Africa would save millions of pagan babies. And because I’d decided that I would be a slut for meat and white bread, I ordered a double cheeseburger at Burger King for lunch. No fries, no pop, but mild anxiety about the cheese. What the hell. That slimy orange sheet of American should slip straight through. We roasted a chicken for dinner, and I checked to make sure that mashed potatoes were permitted. Cool. Likewise “well-cooked vegetables,” so I threw some so-called baby carrots around the chicken, stirred up a stellar pan gravy and savored the high-meat/high-carb, low-roughage meal of my dreams. My tummy and taste buds tickled, my greasy breakfast and lunch clinging to my hips, I prayed for the hungry everywhere, and slipped into medication-aided, Merlot-managed sleep. I woke up low as a tub of tapioca pudding. Good lord, no Cheerios? No bagel and cream cheese? Just a glass of cranberry juice and my meds? At least: lots of coffee. I brought up my e-mail at work and saw a directive from my boss: “Maggie can’t eat today. Please be thoughtful and don’t bring any food into our cubicles.” My boss is a Goddess. By eleven o’clock, I was raging hungry. I wailed. “Why didn’t I make some Jell-O last night?" I’d gone off the stuff when Mother decided that lime Jell-O, tartened with a little white vinegar and brightened with slices of red cabbage and radishes was just the thing for a refreshing summer lunch. Back then, I quite liked the suspended fruit cocktail version, but my siblings and I drew the line at radishes. The department admin looked at me as if I’d just regretted climbing into my hoop skirt. “You can buy little containers of Jell-O in the case near the Pillsbury biscuits and the chocolate pudding. Hey, I thought you knew about food!” I realized during my lunch-hour raid on the grocery store that I’d been blind to an eight-foot chunk of the dairy case smack-dab between the butter and the orange juice for at least twenty-five years. Raspberry Swirl Pudding -- who knew? Two-fifty for a six-pack of tiny plastic cups of jewel-toned, artificially colored, artificially flavored jiggly water: commercial genius! I tore the lid from the cup of “lime” and scarfed it. Yes, once again, Mummy was right: oh for the crunch of some cabbage, a sliver of something its natural color, something raw! Maybe even a radish. (Can I eat radishes today? Nope, bad move.) There’s a reason why Jell-O is a feature of invalid diets: only the weak and wobbly would eat it. But that was me. I decided that I liked the orange better than the strawberry and washed them down with a Diet Pepsi. It scared me that the low-cal cola tasted like real food. By three o’clock, my stomach was calling an audible, and I felt as floppy as the fronds of three-week-old cilantro disintegrating in my vegetable drawer. At four o’clock, my knees buckled: someone had bought a package of Act One popcorn from the junk machine and nuked it. I must have turned pale, because Jayne asked “Maggie, you OK?” I said: “Get me a plastic garbage bag and a long twist tie.” I work with nice people, and Jayne held my hand and told me not to jump. “I won’t,” I assured her. “But please tell Catherine to stick that popcorn in an airtight bag, or I’m going to bitch-slap her, eat her popcorn, and flunk my test.” By five o’clock, I was really, truly faint with hunger and ravaged with guilt. Kids in Darfur -- their tiny guts clean as a whistle -- wouldn’t eat tomorrow, but I would. On the way home, I swung by Walgreen’s to pick up my prescribed purgatives: Dulcolax and a bottle of magnesium citrate, which comes in fizzy flavors like cherry and lemon-lime. I was rapt and horrified, checking out the laxative aisle -- like the Jell-O section at the supermarket, this was terra incognita for me. It made me crave green leafy vegetables. My instruction sheet told me to drink the purgative pop at five o’clock, so I did: it tasted like schoolroom chalk dissolved in original Fresca. I didn’t dare open my refrigerator. There’s nothing like two Pom Manhattans on the patio to cheer a girl up -- not only clear liquid, but the pomegranate anti-oxidants made them count as a health drink. Then I saw hours stretching empty before me: the hours I use to plan dinner; to play fridge hide-and-seek with the one indispensable ingredient hiding behind the hoisin sauce; to cook and plate and eat and talk. A Hummer had driven through the nicest part of my day. And God, my mouth tasted bad: cigarette tar and metallic traces of citric acid. I craved a poached egg on toast, roasted rutabagas, corn pudding, Rocky Mountain oysters, haggis -- anything with substance to it. But the list from the doctor’s office had planned the daily special for me: beef bouillon. I didn’t have those frozen cubes of homemade demi-glace all baggied up in my freezer, and haven’t faithfully since Meatloaf topped the charts. I was too hungry to even consider starting a pot; I feared I might lose all control and eat the mirepoix two-fisted, or slip in some onion confit, croutons and gruyere -- fatally gunking up my guts. I side-stepped a daydream featuring the classic French garnishes: a l’ecossaise, with barley, carrots and leeks. Aux oeufs poches. Aux quenelles. Aux tasty bits. I heated up the contents of the red and white can, and tried a sip. How can a soup whose first ingredient is beef stock and second is tomato paste taste like warm tap water? In my weakened state I almost burst into tears, cursing my household ban on MSG. But a hungry woman is inventive: I slopped a half-cup of vermouth and a couple of tablespoons of sherry into the pot. I tasted. Not bad, but not there. I turned to the racks in my fridge door and grabbed three bottles: oyster soy, Worcestershire and Tabasco. The fragrance, in a pas-de-deux with starvation, almost made me swoon. I poured dinner into a teapot and pulled out two of my grandmother’s shell-thin teacups. Madame est servie. Madame poured and sipped and savored her umami. Then I downed my Dulcolax, pulled The Pursuit of Love from the bookshelf and wallowed in a bubble bath. I sat on the bathmat, waiting for nature to take its course, and it did. I brushed and flossed, and spread my face with something expensive that promised to restore it to the color and texture of a baby’s rump. I went to bed. Hungry. The descent into dreamland is easy if one’s consumed more calories from alcohol than from food. I pushed two comatose cats off my pillow, slipped between the sheets and planned tomorrow’s dinner menu. The only obstacle between me and a full belly was a good night’s sleep and an hour on a stainless steel table. I didn’t even feel hungry anymore -- I felt as if I had faced the worst and won. I felt small and spoiled and cheap. And I prayed, for Mummy and Daddy and daughter and husband. For one friend’s son-in-law, wounded in Iraq. For another friend’s pain and loss and confusion. For strength. For everyone in the world who can’t count on a good meal tomorrow, or even once before they die. For my shallow empty self. Margaret McArthur, aka maggiethecat, is host and Dark Lady of the Daily Gullet Competition forum. She writes, cooks and tends her garden near Chicago. Art by Dave Scantland, aka Dave the Cook, after Le Grande Odalisque, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

<img align="left" src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1127943846/gallery_29805_1195_7302.jpg">by Doug Psaltis with Michael Psaltis A little more than a year after the Paris trip, construction had begun on the new restaurant, so I began focusing on that project and moving out of ADNY. But by early spring the new restaurant was still in the planning stage and there was little that I could do. So, to fill my time until I would be working only on the new restaurant, I started helping out with the bread team. If I was going to be on the sidelines until the new place got going, at least I would have a chance to learn something new. After the concept for the new restaurant was established, the next step was to write down ideas for the food. Ducasse wanted a restaurant that served refined comfort food, deriving from both French and American cuisines, in an elegant but not intimidating environment. It would be a place people could go to often to enjoy the quality of Ducasse in a fun, affordable place. Didier and I met often to work on the cuisine. I wrote down lists of comfort classics, dishes that we could refine and revitalize, things like clam chowder, pot au feu, and barbecue. Within a few days, Didier and I came up with a long list of possible dishes. I cooked a few of the ideas for Didier as we were working through them, like barbecue and homemade pastrami. It was a challenge to develop a Ducasse interpretation of such homey dishes. Like his Spoon and Bar & Boeuf restaurants, the new restaurant was going to be a place that would change the way people thought about Ducasse. Working on these dishes was the most fun I had had in a kitchen in a long time. I was taking everything I had learned about cooking during my reprogramming in the Ducasse style and applying it to many of the things I had loved to eat all my life. Within a short time, we had a very solid list of possible dishes. Then we had to present our ideas. We started by cooking for Ducasse. Just Didier and I working together at the stove at ADNY. The result of my training in an environment that was the equivalent of the military’s basic training was that I was very sure of myself. I knew I could cook and I knew I could create. The rigidity, intimidation, and competition of working at ADNY had driven away many cooks. Some moved on to other restaurants in the city, where many of them excelled based on what they had learned at ADNY; some went back home or left to cook in less competitive cities; and some got out of cooking altogether. But the cooks who did make it in that kitchen were changed. If nothing else, I was confident that I could cook with the best under almost any circumstances. Sitting in the Aquarium with Ducasse after he had eaten everything I had cooked, listening to him evaluate each dish (larger noodles for the macaroni and cheese, more black truffles for the elbow pasta, cleaner presentation for the pork barbecue), I was certain he was as confident in me as I was. At the end of his evaluations, he looked down at his empty bowl of clam chowder. He adjusted his glasses with his left hand and then, holding them slightly off his face, by the side of the frame and looking over them at me, he said, “Très bien, Doog. Now we get to work.” Didier and I cooked for Ducasse again and again. Then we cooked for him and some guests on several occasions until there was a strong menu that fit the restaurant’s concept. Finally, we cooked for Ducasse along with his business partner on the new restaurant and his partner’s family. By that time, I was confident in just about all of the dishes. We had developed something I was proud of and the partner was sold on the idea. Even his kid loved the chicken and shrimp gumbo. With smiles and handshakes, this was the final green light on the food. When I met Didier in the Aquarium a few days later, Ducasse was already out of New York. Didier had a whole bunch of papers spread out on the table. They were the construction plans for the front of the house and the kitchen. There was work to do, he said, nodding his head and then closing his eyes for a long pause. He seemed overwhelmed by the prospect but assured me that the restaurant would be ready by the end of the summer. <img align="right" src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1126207539/gallery_29805_1195_7908.jpg">It was only April and I would continue to help out on breads at ADNY for the next month while attending meetings for Mix, as the restaurant would be called, with people from the other side of the venture. Ducasse’s partner on Mix was one of the biggest restaurant groups in the U.S. They were known for successful, money-making operations, but their restaurants were as much clubs as restaurants. The young, beautiful, and elite gathered at their restaurants to drink expensive drinks in hip modern rooms -- and sometimes they ate the restaurant’s food, which by design was flashy and simple. The management knew how to run a profitable operation, but not necessarily a restaurant where food was the principal priority. The partnership between this group and Ducasse, the master of haute cuisine, was odd, but it wasn’t untested. They had already partnered on a Spoon in London, which was successful but considered by people in the Ducasse world as an outcast in the organization, not on par with any of the other restaurants. “I hear it has a great burger,” they’d say when asked about it. Initially I wasn’t thrilled by the company’s involvement -- I had spent much of my career steering clear of restaurants like theirs -- but as we started to work together, they let us control what we knew best, the kitchen, while they controlled what they knew best, the front of the house. <i>Doug Psaltis is the Executive Chef of Country Restaurant, which will open soon in New York City. He has cooked in some of the world’s finest restaurants and with some of the most acclaimed chefs. Michael Psaltis is a literary agent in New York City. He works with both fiction and nonfiction authors through his own literary agency, and also heads up a division of Regal Literary that is dedicated solely to food writers and cookbook authors. Copyright © 2005 by Doug Psaltis and Michael Psaltis. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.</i>

<img align="left" src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1127711774/gallery_29805_1195_14949.jpg">Special to the Daily Gullet, by Steven Shaw A few days before the closing of La Côte Basque, Steven Shaw discussed at length the future of dining with Jean-Jacques Rachou, its chef-owner; Georges Briguet, owner of Le Perigord; Bob Lape, the long-time restaurant critic for CBS radio and Crain’s New York Business magazine; and Shelley Clark, longtime publicist for, among others, the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and an aficionado of historical restaurant properties. The scenario of this conversation was, as you’ve guessed, the dining room of La Côte Basque. We’re pleased to offer you an excerpt of the chapter “The Future of Dining”, from Steven Shaw’s book Turning the Tables, based on the discussion held that night at La Côte Basque. The word came down from Jean-Jacques Rachou, the chef-owner: La Côte Basque was to close its doors forever in early 2004. This news was almost immediately followed by the announcement that Lutèce was to close, leaving the number of traditional French fine-dining restaurants in New York City at just three: La Grenouille, La Caravelle, and Le Perigord. In May of 2004, La Caravelle threw in the towel as well. Such a turn of events would have been unimaginable to a New York restaurant consumer in the 1960s or 1970s. Bob Lape, the long-time restaurant critic for CBS radio, recalls “dozens” of formal French restaurants dotting the city during that era, and the former New York Times critic Bryan Miller reports that his research through old restaurant guidebooks and articles reveals at least twenty-five such restaurants operating in New York in 1975. In the postwar era and into the 1970s it was a given that fine dining was all about classic French cuisine. “It wasn’t about creativity or inventiveness,” explains Lape. “It was about who could cook the classic repertoire of Escoffier the best. You could go to a restaurant and judge it based on the execution of classic dishes.” But all that started to change in the 1980s and 1990s, when American cuisine came into its own. Though as a typical New Yorker I always assume my city is the center of the universe, the reality is that the earliest stages of the new American culinary movement came out of California, which was traditionally less captive to European cuisiniers. A generation of California chefs, most notably Alice Waters, developed a focus on ingredients, seasonality, and regionalism that today is the predominant way of thinking among the most popular chefs and food writers. This movement in California paralleled the movement toward lighter nouvelle cuisine in France, but it had a unique American spin, a sense of freedom and possibility. Rachou, Briguet, and their ilk, whose culinary roots go back to the era before nouvelle cuisine or California cuisine, were largely unaffected by the new aesthetic, though they did benefit from the increased availability of better ingredients. To begin with, Rachou suggests, there was the education of great American cooks and the birth of great American chefs. Indeed, Clark comments, “In the 1960s and 1970s, almost nobody knew the names of any working restaurant chefs.” It’s difficult to imagine, in the era of Food TV, a time when chefs were largely anonymous, but a restaurant customer in the 1960s was more likely to know the name of the maitre d’ than the chef, and to focus on the front of the house as the driving force in a restaurant. The whole concept of the “chef-driven restaurant,” while the norm at the apex of dining today, is something very modern. I consider, as I dine with the chef while eating his food, the role of the chef. Surely the romantic notion of the chef as an individual artist who personally cooks all your food cannot be sustained when he is right there at the table with you while waiters are bringing hot food out of the kitchen. Yet many people nonetheless feel that chefs should be in their restaurants, should have only one restaurant, and should at least be involved in every meal service. Throughout the food media and my e-mail inbox, people can be heard decrying the “absentee chef.” To my way of thinking, however, all chefs are absentee chefs. The only variable I have been able to isolate is the extent of their absence. At nearly any restaurant, the chef cooks a very small percentage of the food, if any. He is essentially absent from the cooking process, even if he is in the kitchen. As a supervisor, he can only see so many things happening at once. Likewise, in most restaurants, chefs have days off. When a chef ascends to the level at which he has more than one restaurant, his level of absence increases. But it is simply an increase, not a fundamental shift in what he has been doing all along. The people who ran the kitchen on his days off now need to run the kitchen more often, and do more. The same cooks are cooking the food, however, and it is the same chef at the top of the organizational pyramid—the pyramid is simply larger. Some chefs can pull it off and some can’t. If a chef’s kitchen slips when he’s away from it for a couple of days, that is his personal failure as a chef. The modern chef, who is likely to operate more than one restaurant in a corporate fashion as opposed to a standalone family business, is neither cook nor supervisor, but is rather an executive. Like any executive in any industry, the chef is judged in large part by his or her ability to make the big decisions and delegate the rest. Just as Escoffier brought the modern industrial concept of the assembly line into the world of the restaurant kitchen, chefs like Vongerichten, Matsuhisa, and, of course, Alain Ducasse have been the leaders in bringing modern management into haute cuisine restaurants. To me, the test of a restaurant is not the presence or absence of its chef, but the quality of its food. And given all the effort, by so many people at so many stages of a beautifully elaborate process, that goes into making that food, I believe it deserves to be the focus. Rachou continues our discussion of the evolution of American cuisine by pointing to the increased availability of high-quality domestic ingredients. “Forty years ago,” he says, “you couldn’t get nothing here!” “Besides high-quality meats and a few things in season,” recalls Lape, “back then even at the finest restaurants you ate worse produce than you can get at any supermarket today.” At the same time, traditionalists like Rachou and Briguet have never embraced the California-derived attitude that “the ingredients should speak for themselves.” Surely, ingredients should “speak,” but they believe, and I agree, that often what makes cuisine something special is the added human element. It is, after all, the job of the chef to do something with ingredients. <img align="right" src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1121034075/gallery_29805_1195_11679.jpg">I particularly reject the notion that “fresh, seasonal, and local” ingredients are always best. Objectively, they are not. And rarely does a restaurant advertising the fresh-seasonal-local formula actually get all its ingredients locally. It is more likely that a few prominent elements of a few heavily advertised chef’s specialties will come from the local harvest, while the rest of the menu will be built on a base of trucked- and flown-in products. And if the majority of products on a menu are to be transported from afar, I think it makes sense not to live in denial but to embrace the wonders of modern shipping and to focus on acquiring whatever is best in and of itself, not whatever is simply being offered up by the nearby soil at a given time. Ingredients alone, then, have not propelled American cuisine forward—there has also been a human element. In this respect, traditionalists like Rachou and Briguet have something in common with the most cutting-edge chefs in the fusion and avant-garde movements. They focus on human intervention in the flavor and texture of ingredients, rather than letting the ingredients speak for themselves. Such a discussion involves a small subset of restaurants, but they are the restaurants that drive cuisine forward. As in any art, there is a vanguard of tastemakers whom the rest look to for inspiration. There are a few restaurants, perhaps a handful in every generation, that transcend mere dining and become a part of culinary history. Listening to Briguet and Rachou, I marvel at how far we’ve come since those days of frozen vegetables and kitchens that all seek to emulate the same dishes. Yet there are many in the food world who are against change, or who take positions that effectively place them in opposition to culinary progress. Represented in part by the Slow Food movement, but also by mainstream food magazines like Saveur, they advocate traditional recipes above all others, oppose most internationalism in cuisine, and tend to scoff at the avant-garde. They advocate, to use the popular buzzword, “authenticity.” Despite allowances made for some evolution, authenticity as commonly understood refers to the preservation of “original” recipes, presented with some historical and cultural context. In the language of Merriam-Webster’s first definition, authentic means “conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features.” While I’m all for preserving traditional recipes, the authenticity brigade has gone too far. Preserving tradition and allowing for progress are not mutually exclusive, and both are important to progress in the arts. Yet, in the food world, the authenticity police are everywhere these days. Have you ever dined in an Italian restaurant with friends who have just returned from Italy? “Oh, in Italy they never serve pasta as a main course,” they’ll inevitably say. This attitude stands in stark contrast to the basic facts of human history: Italian cuisine did not spring into existence as a fully formed entity. There was no tomato sauce and there were no sun-dried tomatoes until centuries after the tomato first reached Europe from the New World, thanks to Christopher Columbus. When that beloved red fruit first appeared in Italy, did the local food cognoscenti protest, “We don’t use these things in authentic Italian cuisine”? If you dug really deep, you’d probably find that at some point in prehistory the very notion of cooking beasts over a fire instead of eating their bloody haunches raw was scorned for its inauthenticity, too. Since everything in the world of food likely had some precursory experience, wouldn’t it be smarter for us to make allowances for what “authentic” really means? If you ask me, such tolerance is necessary when you dine out in America. Many of the top chefs seem to collectively scoff at the maintenance of traditional cuisines. Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Gray Kunz run roughshod over culinary borders with the audacity of international arms dealers. Nobu Matsuhisa blends Peruvian, Japanese, and even seemingly extraterrestrial flavors together. Wylie Dufresne of New York’s WD-50 presses oysters into paperlike sheets. Mario Batali cooks his pizzas on a griddle. I believe these cooks demonstrate that authenticity isn’t a repetition of history. Real authenticity, to me, is grounded in being faithful to oneself. This is the last definition given by Merriam-Webster, but to me it is the most appropriate for cuisine: “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.” That’s why, despite their breaks with tradition, there’s nothing inauthentic about the cuisines of the fusion chefs or the avant-garde chefs. Change for its own sake is phony, but true originality is authentic. And what great chefs eschew in terms of historical fealty, they make up many times over in originality. Will the twenty-first century be the American century for cuisine? It’s too early to tell, and it would be foolish to count the French out prematurely. France is still the dominant force in Western cuisine, with more of the world’s best restaurants than any other nation and with stronger representation in fine dining than any other nation worldwide. Though classic French restaurants are a dying breed, virtually all of the top restaurants in major American cities are still very much French-influenced, and most still have European-born chefs. Still, one cannot help but think that if there is a future for fine dining it will have its epicenter in the New World rather than the Old. If the opening of the Time Warner Center in New York does not herald the dawn of the American century in cuisine, at the very least it represents one of the most significant moments in American restaurant history, a moment of critical mass. It is a changing of the guard, and a potential renaissance. The culture reinvents itself, in newer and, we hope, better ways. Steven Shaw will be a panelist on the upcoming eG Spotlight Round Table on The Future of Dining, 26 to 30 September 2005 This is the last of five parts. Part one is here, part two here, part three is here, and part four is here. <i> Steven Shaw (aka <a href="http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showuser=1">Fat Guy</a>) is executive director of the eGullet Society. He has been known to do other things on occasion. Copyright 2005 Steven A. Shaw. Reprinted by kind permission of the author and HarperCollins Publishers. Edited for eG Spotlight by Pedro Espinosa.

Fixed. Thanks, rhodegirl.