Jon Tseng

Finally got my greasy mitts on the book - thirty quid on slightly random mail order from The Times (the catch is 28 working days delivery - natch). very interesting - would be a fantastic coffee table book if not so heavy - plenty of ideas and combinations - will take some time to digest this one (still haven't quite got my head round the gary kunz book after five months - and that's only half as long). note that the book - and accompanying essays - does a better job than most at getting across the chefs overall philosophy. refreshing when many cheffy books are simply recipe compendia interspersed with "money-shots" of the end product. the french laundry book is another good one for getting across the whole philosphy thing. three gripes i guess: i) most of the recipes lack an introduction; prefer to have a couple lines describing the "why" behind the dish, not just the "how" its done (Charlie Trotter very good for this). ii) piccys of food on plain white background suitably contemplative but makes it very hard to put things into perspective. Need plates and other gubbins to give a sense of scale eg not sure if those artfully arranged prawns are half-inch shrimp to half-foot tigers. iii) most annoyingly, the translation is slip-shod; also the recipes don't seem to have been tested from the english versions. one example sticks to mind where a meat recipe talks about taking a lemon, rubbing it with sugar cubes, at which point said lemon vanishes from the page and is never seen again... i guess people tend to use these books for inspiration rather than cooking but it is still a bit annoying (eg thomas keller managed to inspire and still provide the best how-to-do guide to foie gras have yet encountered) cheerio j

the liver is in the book too. it works. it's fairly regular on the menu there. i gather heart is one of those things like squid or abalone - you either have to cook it low and slow or hot and quick. anywhere i between is a recipe for disaster (no pun intended). cheerio j

urk... ice cream... no, am a fan of the big man... and the foie gras parfait and the pumpkin soup is wonderful, just not every time...

oh no not another meal at st john - but what can you say? kitchen was in full swing, fergus was perched in the corner with his mates and with five of us there was plenty of sampling of dishes to be done... five starters, shared. salt pollack - ie pollack brandade. ox heart - a bit miserly with only two slices, stuffed with classic brit stuff and rimmed with bacon. deep fried plaice cheeks - battered (of course); ultra glam fried fish. bone marrow - of course; good thing it was shared as don't see how one person could knock off the starter portion - it's soooo rich. salted dried pigs liver with radish salad - excellent - hadn't tried this one before but really really good - liver both livery and crunchy but never dry. main had the veal heart - strips of heart flash-fried - also lentils on the side. very meaty. other mains going round: plaice with monks beard (some kind of grass/green), lambs liver and kidney, chitterlings and chips (chitterlings - as always - a triumph). for pudding the treacle pudding, blood orange jelly and eccles cake. all discussed before but - man! - dat treacly pudding damn good. toothachingly sweet, juicy, creamy (er, once you smother it in cream). next time am in the bar will see if can get them to bring it out for me. twelve quid for eggs, flour, cream, golden syrup (afterwards looked up recipe in fergus' book) but worth every sugar-sodden crumb. as ever perfectly executed food, done well. not a single duff dish out of the thirteen scoffed. go. cheerio j

ok, finally got round to committing pen to paper... hit the fat duck last saturday lunch, relatives in tow. third visit there spread over a couple of years... every time the place seems to get fuller and swisher... the interior now very david-collins-smart-restaurant-type. as mentioned below, cabrales was parked in the corner, easily identifiable by the impeccable timekeeping & various paraphenalia (typewriter to transcribe menu, ruler/protractor for determining circumference of salt caramel biscuit, studio lights for the photography &tc). cabrales may or may not have been "dressed up" - it was difficult to tell behind the false beard and the camoflage paint... lunch menu (still) a snip at twenty seven quid - a shame more posh places don't do lunch at weekends, although i guess the staff deserve the time off (notable exceptions: fat duck, waterside inn, manoir, capital, gr@c, not cliveden - annoyingly). bear in mind chez heston twenty seven notes gets you the full-on random-amuse shebang, although petits fours three quid extra. Started off with the green tea/lime sour (yes, discernable taste of green tea as opposed to proper tea. but then again as any good marxist knows: proper tea is theft) (!sorry!). then the mustard ice-cream on cucumber brunoise with red cabbage gazpacho poured round. mustard ice-cream both creamy (duh!) but also with a real horseradishy kick. For starters the snail porridge. excellent savoury mush - think olde english savoury porridges like frumenty crossed with snails and garlic butter. Nice bite to the porridge, parsley and hint of garlic without being overpowering. Just the right level of salting - savoury enough to bring out the oats without over-salting. then pork belly, which appears to be the modish cut at the mo (viz trouvaille, pied a terre, gordon ramsay). heston doing, one presumes, the slow-cooking thing again so skin gelatinous rather than crispy. very tasty - a real musky meaty flavour - almost offaly. only downer was that a touch dry in places - really depended on whether you got a fatty bit or not. accompanied by cabbage (i think) and black pudding broth (seemed generic dark saucing with bits in). then the red pepper lollypop things (qv), basil tarts (basily), beetroot jelly (blackcurranty). for pudding salt caramel with bitter chocolate sorbet. the sorbet was, actually, quite, er, bitter. the caramel was salty sweet (viz Sea Salt Taffy sweets you get in san fran). the caramel fan sweet. salt - bitter - sweet in one desert. all we were missing was the sour (had that earlier!). caramel nicely chewy without sticking to the teeth. polished off coffee with tobacco chocolates (peppery) and the bacon caramel things (tastes like chinese pork jerky). one thing to note all the in betweeny bits were identical to when last went - i guess occasionaly visitors don't notice but regulars must get a bit bored ("oh no, not the innovative take on bacon-flavoured sweets //again//..."). noticed the same thing at gordan ramsays joints (er, pass the white-chocolate-coated-icre-cream balls and the pineapple granita anyone?) overall great fun, technically excellent food, combinations which generally worked, and all for thirty five squids per head all in. which could just about get you a starter down the road at the waterside - if you had a discount. cheerio j

slightly out of the way but I think reubens on baker street is decent, though have never got round to visiting yet (royal china across the road always too tempting). There's also a salf beef bar in selfridges, but pricy the lack of decent SB is one of my biggest beefs (sorry) about london - when you do find it its generally an inspipid chunk injected with goodness knows what a la the worst factory-bacon. do any of the denizens of leafy north london know any good joints? cheerio jon

On the oversalting thing was this vs other places in London or places in the US (as kbecos the whole US vs Europe having very different preferences in seasoning levels springs to mind) Also St John sometimes suffers from excess NaCl, particularly on the bar food side. Remember some crispy chicken-necks were pretty mouth-puckering because of the salt level, also the welsh rarebit cheerio J

i) Have done RHR 8/8:30 before no prob - suspect it depends on how busy they are and how early you get the reservation in (phone first thing on T-30 [er, about 3am your time] and keep hitting the redial - much like what I hear about French Laundry, although not as bad) ii) If you can choose when you come July or even better August are traditionally very slow months as everyone's on holiday - bookings much easier (have gotten RHR a week in advance in August, although this was before the third star so things probably tougher now) iii) Can second comments on the Capital - best prixe fixe lunch in London iv) RHR and Petrus both very much have the Ramsay imprimateur on them - if you want some more variety try substituting one of them (eg Tante Claire, Gavroche as suggested above, or even the legendary St John) cheerio Jon

fire extinguisher? ;-)

Good to hear MB still going strong despite losing the star brings back memories of my trip there back in '96 - didn't have the chicken (on student budget at the time) but everyone else seemed to - plates of poached fowl with a little capsule of black truffle lodged under the skin of each (with so little truffle how much does the flavour go thru the dish?) had artichoke and foie gras salad - a poached artichoke heart and a slice of terrine with leaves and a nice, slightly thick dressing - the same dish is described in Liz Dav's French Provincial Cooking. Then the quenelle for the main course (yes a bit bland - all very old school but a rarity on the turbo-charged menus you see today). i think i had the same desert as above - certainly remember the galette bressane - seemed a bit briochy. suspect this is one of the places where the menu never changes. had a good chat with the proprietress (Jacotte Brazier) at the end, though my GCSE french wasn't up to much cheerio J ps saint-marcellin is yum, but very hard to get in uk (at least good quality ones - not the dry cakes of faux-brie you occasionally run into). saw it in harrods a couple of years back.

Cabrales - if you have Reuters Business Briefing where you are try doing a wordsearch on Hiramatsu - the articles in there J

>Jon-I do not understand your assertion that there were no >classes in England in the 17th and 18th century. England >was a class conscious society. It still is today. Er, no. If there's one thing three years of Oxford history drummed into me (apart from how crap hall food was) it was that the whole class thing never really took off until the C19. The idea that Britain was 'class conscious' at an earlier stage was largely a construct of mid-C20 historians who were trying to stretch the facts to suit their own class-centred theories. If you want to know more I'd heartily recommend Paul Langford's A Polite and Commerical People. Also see J.C.D. Clark and Roy Porter on C18 British social history, and Linda Colley's excellent Britons for some ideas on what really tied the nation together (largely hatred of the French ;-) ) Therefore the assertion that a "upper or moneyed classes" instigated certain social/agri reform to the detriment of the table doesn't stand, 'cos there was not class consciousness until well after 1800. cheerio J

nah, english edition (although looked like a translation from the stilted prose. its listed on amazon.com, but not shipped yet cheerio j

Just wondering if anyone's got any opinions on the new Michel Bras book. Ran across an import copy at Books for Cooks in London but at sixty quid (thats UK sheets) thought I'd wait til it popped up on amazon.co.uk... pretty pictures but the translation looked a bit ropey cheerio J

as ever arriving late to the thread... I'd normally eat street food if I'm going to be in the country for a while - if you've only got a couple of days its not worth risking spending the remainder of your time on the toilet, but if you're there for a while and have had time to acclimitise to the bugs go right on. Deep fried stuff also generally more sanitary cos of the temperature A useful tip in asia, much like the boiled water thing, is to swill bowls out with hot tea if you're worried ttfn j

Ooof. Somewhat at see amidst all these intellectual broadsides, but three main points to make 1) The idea of an upper class conspiracy is complete tosh for the simple reason there, er, wasn't any "upper class". The idea of "class analysis", particularly for C18 and first half of C19, has been pretty much discreted amongst historians ifor the last couple of decades. Studies show that vertical social bonds - eg between the labourers, the farmers and ultimately up to the local squires in a particular region (eg Yorkshire) had much more powerful ties than any putative horizontal "class" with and official mind or a particular policy. No one "agreed" to feed anyone anything because there was no one to agree anything. QED. 2) Steve's main argument is that socio-economic factors are the direct cause of the culinary environment ignores the fact that is if far from the only factor which operates. I'd highlight two other factors which are as - or more - important. Firstly, as Magnolia has already mentioned, cultural differences. Secondly the impact of the individual. What if there had been no Delia or no Albert Roux? No Liz David or (in the US) no Alice Waters. It is very likely things would have turned out differently. However simply suggesting the inevitability of socio-economic forces leaves no room for this. 3) The arguments that colonies had such an impact doesn't really hold water either for the simple reason that the French had colonies too. Two points. Firstly how can you claim the loss of the colonies was a major factor in Britain's postwar culinary/economic miasma and ignore the fact the precisely the same thing was happening in French Indonesia, the French Carribbean and above all French Africa? In fact I would argue the French experience of decolonisation, particularly in Algeria, was far more damaging than the British experience. But French food wasn't affected. Secondly If you say that Britain in lots of cheap food when it /had/ the colonies, didn't France do much the same thing (er, poulet au curry, rice, sugar from the Caribbean), but that doesn't seem to have had a particularly deletarious affect on C19 French chow... hope that's useful cheerio J ps steve, did the pres show you his art collection? i hear its quite good (although most belongs to the uni)

Mmmm. I suspect its very much about the channeling of energies; while the French were busy conquering the table, the Brits were busy conquering the world... ;-) as an aside there is an interesting theory about the Empire which runs thus: i) Brits tanked lots of tea from the C18 onwards. ii) Tea is made with boiled water, which led to a much lower incidence of waterborne diseases than other nations at the time. iii) Therefore British productivity was higher, the health of the population was better, and this was a contributory factor in Britains industrial superiority in the C19.

Reminds of of Malaysia House, another amiably chaotic student canteen in a basement somewhere west of baker street. i think the building (quite swish mayfair terrace if i recall) was some govt-sponsored dorm for malaysian students good curry, noodles, garlic chicken for under a fiver. i heard rumours the place was still running; shall have to check it out sometime...

Didn't Elvis used to eat squirrel when he was a kid? Seem to remember a tv doc a while back about all the stuff the chowed down - fried banana sandwiches, cheeseburgers, and squirrel when he was growing up in the country... also see Unmentionable Cuisine (Schwave - they had it in Books for Cooks last i was there) for more on rodent cuisine J

Yes, Mere Brazier (the original) was one of the first chefs to have three stars when they started up the system (and a woman too!), and had 2x3 at one point (the current place and some out of town joint) went to the place when i was in my "lyon-culinary-pilgrimage" phase after high school. good trad. food - pate foie gras, pike quenelles (skipped the poulet d-d as on budget). another olde star loses its lustre - what price paul b next? ;-) cheerio j

How has Cavalier settled in at Peacock Alley? J

Noticed another review on the Independent site. Again, "nice food, shame about the service" Hollihead doesn't seem to have shifted his stance re off-menu: "Rebecca, my vegetarian niece, doesn't like truffles. So she didn't want the cauliflower and truffle soup. She asked, ever so nicely, could someone please rustle her up a salad or something? No they couldn't. Oh well. Could she please have an extra side order of vegetables. No – and while the waiter was at it, one of the two vegetarian main courses was off. Which left Rebecca with the pea and morrel risotto with deep-fried rocket leaves – whether she liked it or not. When it came, it wasn't just the rocket that left a taste in her mouth." J http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/food_and_drink/reviews/story.jsp?story=118166

i) Too much competition - last year or two saw - what - four or five places open in the fifty-quid-for-the-carte category. Neat, High Holborn, Nahm, Mju, Claridges, Hakkason possibly. All competing for what is a strictly limited market - and competing for publicity (note how each had its four-week period as restaurant-du-jour and since faded into obscurity - or bankruptcy) ii) Limited market - for all the rampant foodism about, London simply hasn't got the broad base of eating-out culture in Paris or NY. Eating out is still an 'occasion'. The knock-on effect of this is at the haute level the base of punters for whom five courses and an amuese is /not/ a 'contact the bank manager situation' is also limited. iii) Lack of hotel backer - virtually all the major haute success stories in the last couple of years have had a hotel providing cheap rent and perhaps even subsidising the menu (Foliage most obvious example. also viz 1837, Claridges. Not only do they soften the blow when the recession hits, they provide an incremental source of punters (ie the hotel guests), which can only help. Note the major starred closures (with exception of oak room which i'm not sure if its for fiscal reasons or not) have all been non-hotel joints (Lettonie, High Holborn, Neat) iv) Recession. Lets face it, it can't have helped. Would also be interested in knowing whether the closure due to braserrie, restaurant or both - most of the above comments apply to the restaurant side; traditional brasseries are more of a money-spinner. ttfn j (Edited by Jon Tseng at 10:45 pm on Jan. 29, 2002)

But is GR good because he's famous or famous because he's good?

Ah Steve (and Simon) - i am not talking about technique (what you do with your hands, but the framework (what you do with your head before you start cooking). By 'systemised' I mean matching ingredient for an underlying reason (eg "hot" and "cold" foods in chinese, tart fruit to cut through rich foie gras in french &tc) rather than because "it has always been done this way", which is generally what happens in more 'recipe-focused' cuisines. This gives the chef a great deal more flexibility to experiment and develop dishes - they can swap the quince with the foie gras for the seville oranges operating within the framework and - voila - new dish opens up. in contrast. Compare, say, brussel sprouts with the christmas turkey which is always done that way because it, er, has always done that. If you were adopting a systematic approach you could say 'brussel sprouts = bitter = substitute for endive' but that is simply not done! er, getting poncy again now. anyway, back to the theme - the point is not that french &tc is not more or less sophisticated in terms of technique - I'm sure making baklave pastry for north african (if what I've read about strudel is true) is as more more complex as doing the finest feuilletage. It is that the /thinking/, not the /doing/ is more complex j