project

Ben Hong: For your post of Jul 14 2004, 02:29 AM I have few differences. Nearly all the points you are disputing there are not mine. I do like much of the food in the Chinese carryout restaurants in the US and would like a book that would tell me how to replicate those dishes. Indeed, I find it curious how similar the dishes are.

sequim: "This guy must have skipped out on taking humanities classes in school." Took them? Yes. Liked them? No! My view is that there really was a good writer in England in the 17th Century: I. Newton. hzrt8w: We are in essentially full agreement. Positions you are disputing are not mine. I want to reproduce what's in the local restaurants simply because I can taste it and it's pretty good -- generally better than US fast food.

Ben Hong: "Most would not ever purposely make a separate sauce to be poured over the finished dish." What I have seen and have been attempting is consistent with what you are saying. Commonly I have seen steps (1) put stock in a wok, boil, blanch vegetables, drain, set aside, empty wok, (2) put quite a lot of oil in wok, heat, quickly cook the other solids, possibly breaded, drain, set aside, empty wok, (3) with a little oil in the wok, say 2 T, heat, add some flavorings, possibly some of garlic, ginger, scallions, crushed pepper flakes, mushrooms, black beans, Szechuan pepper corns, cook a few seconds until 'fragrant', add liquids, possibly some of stock, soy sauce, oyster sauce, chili sauce, Hoisin sauce, vinegar, rice wine, sugar and then heat, (4) add corn starch slurry, heat and thicken, (5) add drained solids, toss, serve. The result is solids coated with a sauce thickened with starch. For "Your statement about lack of precise documentation of techniques and ingredient proportions indicate precisely why Chinese cooking is an art, not a science. Please stop thinking like an engineer", thinking like an engineer is common in the West, goes back to airplanes, electric power, railroads, steam, steel, and Roman stone work. For "In an earlier post, I mentioned the words harmony, balance, yin and yang, heating and cooling humours, even fung shui. You can learn all the techniques and procedures and use of ingredients and become a good cook. Understanding and paying heed to the terms just listed would make you a great sifu. Seek it and you can't see it, reach for it and it can't be grasped, meet it and it has no head, follow it and it has no rear. 'IT' is ephemeral, it 'IS'" I don't have a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue what you mean. First, there is a language problem: While I know a little German and enough French to read restaurant menus and wine bottle labels, mostly I just know English and there, except for specialized topics in engineering, mostly based just on words in a dictionary. Likely I do not really understand even a single word of Chinese. Second, even given a good translation to English, I have weak abilities getting useful meaning from poetic, paradoxical, or puzzling explanations. Last, I notice that 'reductionism' and 'rationalism' with mathematics and physical science have done well explaining, with accurate powers of prediction, from the interior of atoms to the first second of the big bang 14 billion years ago and do believe that dishes in Chinese cooking can be formulated and documented so that they can be reproduced reliably a continent and a decade away. In particular, in my own notes, for what little I have that does work and is edible, my notes are reliable for me months later. Sounds like there is a terrific business opportunity developing a series of DVDs on teaching clueless Americans how to cook dishes, reliably with high quality, in Chinese cooking, as in the inexpensive Chinese restaurants in America, as in inexpensive street stands and restaurants in China and fully authentic, and possibly as in high end restaurants in China. If rationalism conquered the atom and the big bang, bacterial infections and space flight, computers and the Internet, then it's little enough to ask that it conquer Chinese cooking. That I have yet to master some field of knowledge is poor evidence that it cannot be mastered with rationalism, measurements of weights, volumes, times, and temperatures, and clear documentation.

hzrt8w: Thanks for your comments. The Chinese food I know is only from restaurants, all in the US, and I've been eating in the restaurants for over 30 years. I started near Washington, DC, continued in the US Midwest, and now am in New York State out in the country 70 miles north of the southern tip of Manhattan island. Of these restaurants, two stand out: One was the Peking in DC on the west side of Connecticut Avenue just south of the Maryland line. They opened in 1947 and served staggering food unlike anything I have seen anywhere else. Except for Peking Duck, the only dish of theirs I have seen elsewhere was a shrimp dish similar to Love Bird's Shrimp in Jason Lowe, Deh-Ta Hsiung, and Nina Simonds, 'The Food of China', ISBN 1-55285-227, Whitecap Books, Vancouver, 2001. At the price of shrimp now, that dish I ate so often while in graduate school would be over $100! My guess is that their food was 'authentic' Chinese from one or several regions of China of a relatively high order. Once I went to a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown in Manhattan. There I got a steamed fish. I believe that the style was Cantonese. Here I would guess that the secret was a very good raw fish, good skills with some delicate flavorings, and a good steamer. Except for these two restaurants, all the Chinese restaurants I have eaten in -- in DC, Midwest, NY -- have food that is surprisingly similar and, I believe, mostly not in the Chinese cookbooks. And I don't believe that it is what is done on 'Yan Can Cook' or any of the common TV cooking shows in the US (K. Hom's shows for the BBC may be an exception). It would be easier to work from the books and TV shows if I could eat samples in restaurants, and it would be easier for me to reproduce what is in the restaurants if the same was in the cookbooks. I will mention some exceptions, that is, where the cookbooks and common restaurants do similar things. For the books, we can see Joyce Chen, 'Joyce Chen Cook Book', J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1962. Rose Cheng and Michele Morris, 'Chinese Cookery', ISBN 0-89586-088-0, Berkley Publishing, New York, 1981. Ken Hom, 'Chinese Cooking', ISBN 1-55366-270-9, Stewart House Publishing, Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada, 2001. Ken Hom, 'Foolproof Chinese Cooking', ISBN 0-7894-7145-0, Dorling Kindersley, London, 2000. For the similar things, there is the Moo Shi Pork from Chen, dumplings from Cheng, and Hot Sour Soup from Hom. Where I live, Chinese carryout restaurants are common, larger in number than the total of the usual fast food franchises McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, Dominos, and Pizza Hut. Amazing. Generally their sauces are better in flavor and in greater proportion than what seems to be in the cookbooks I have. While I agree with you that these restaurants are drifting from what is 'authentic' in China, here I believe that the restaurants are making sound business decisions because (1) the sauces are an inexpensive path to a lot of good flavor, (2) the sauces, boiled, may help keep down food poisoning, and (3) the sauces are good for flavoring rice. So, what I have done in my trials so far is to read from the books, eat from the restaurants, and try to improvise sauces as good in flavor and as large in proportion as those in my local restaurants. For the soy sauce proportion, I am not far from a general purpose stir fry sauce recipe in Martin Yan, 'Chinese Cooking for Dummies: A Reference for the Rest of Us!', ISBN 0-7245-5247-3, Hungry Minds, New York, 2000. I keep trial notes, and sometimes find something a little better than just edible. For anything as good as in my local restaurants or anything as I can easily do with American, French, Italian, or German cooking -- no. For someone with a background in American culture, engineering, and Western cooking, I make three surprising observations about Chinese cooking: (1) The flavor balances are commonly astoundingly delicate. Small changes in the balances can yield wildly different impressions in the final dish. (2) Chinese cooking is far behind on a tradition of clear written documentation to achieve accurate reproduction of results a continent and a decade away. (3) For high end Chinese cooking, the range of flavors available from combinations of really strange or novel ingredients and small variations in techniques is staggering, nearly beyond documentation. I conclude that in the end, being even passably good at Chinese cooking means understanding the ingredients, combinations, and techniques well enough essentially to improvise well. In this, competing with a talented restaurant chef that has stood there cooking for maybe 10 hours a day for six days a week for 10 years -- getting repeat business while he does it -- won't be easy.

hzrt8w: Thanks for your comments. Yes, the books I have on Chinese cooking call for comparatively small amounts of sauce -- 1 T here, 2 T there. But, it seems to me that the common Chinese carry out places in my area commonly include much more sauce, and I have been trying for more. Generally it seems to me that what is in the Chinese restaurants and what is in the Chinese cookbooks are quite different. That chicken and green bean dish ended up with two quarts (four pounds) of food, twice the common 1 quart Chinese carryout portion. The sauce volume started out at 3 C with 1/2 C of soy sauce. So, while that is a LOT of liquid, the soy sauce proportion was not as high as might be guessed. Yes, a common mistake is to include too many ingredients, and I did make that mistake. In some earlier efforts, I had in orange rind, Chinese black mushrooms, and more. It was a disaster. So, I worked back to something simpler to get something easier to analyze and hopefully passable and possibly a base from which to add more flavors cautiously. Yes, on the proportion of meat to vegetable, I was looking for a meat dish with vegetables as a 'garnish'. That dish was edible, but I'm not thrilled with it and have not returned to it. The clear fact is, I don't get Chinese food. For American, French, Italian, or German food, I'm MUCH happier with my efforts. E.g., tonight I stirred up an improvised salad with an improvised Caesar 'plus' dressing, and the results made my notes as a keeper. Either the dressing or the salad are better than anything I ever did with Chinese food. I described what I did in http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...30entry658076 I'm sure I can reproduce the results reliably. That salad dressing has a LOT of ingredients and a LOT of strong flavors, yet it worked (for me anyway) -- right away, first time. The last time I combined oil and vinegar for a vinaigrette was years ago, but this trial worked fine. That salad dressing is near the boundary of the most strongly flavored salad dressing at all common; it's pushing the envelope; yet it worked. The salad itself had more ingredients and more strong flavors and it worked, too (for me anyway). Times I have tried to combine so many ingredients and such strong ones in Chinese style cooking, the result has always been a disaster. To me, what might work in the salad dressing was clear but what might work in Chinese food remains a mystery. Again, on Chinese cooking, I don't get it -- I don't see how it's done.

With good Romaine lettuce in the grocery stores, got hungry for Caesar salad. Traditional Caesar or not, I wanted some noticeable flavors. For something fast, I tried a bottle of Caesar dressing from the grocery store. It was wimpy; baby food. After two more brands were essentially the same, decided to make my own version of Caesar dressing. Page 63 of Dale Brown, 'Foods of the World: American Cooking', Time-Life Books, New York, 1968. has Caesar Salad. Starting with their recipe and then making modifications, in a 1 quart stainless steel bowl with a small wire whip, combined 2 eggs, boiled 10 seconds 1 1/2 T finely minced garlic One 2.0 ounce can flat anchovies packed in oil, minced, with oil 2 T Dijon mustard 1 T Worchestershire sauce 1/2 C olive oil 1/3 C wine vinegar 1 t dried basil 1 t dried oregano 1 T dried parsley pepper Combined all ingredients. Whipped until smooth. Noticed that the sauce has good viscosity, holds together well, and actually has some flavor! For the salad, started with a 3 quart bowl full of Romaine lettuce that had been separated, rinsed, torn, spun dry, and chilled. Tossed with dressing, just enough to coat thoroughly but lightly. On top added slices of pepperoni, grated Pecorino Romano cheese, rings of scallions, grocery store croutons, and imitation bacon bits. Have been adding chunks of tomato, but need a new supply! Might add artichoke hearts marinated in 'sauce vinaigrette' of some kind. Exactly traditional Caesar salad? No. "Noticeable flavors"? Yes! The anchovies do not seem 'fishy' at all. Instead, the anchovies and the Worchestershire sauce provide a complex center of flavors that are noticed first. The oil holds all the flavors together. The vinegar pokes through to give some nice contrasting bright sharpness. The eggs bind the sauce all together and provide a relatively neutral background. The wine flavors from the vinegar are noticeable as is the garlic. Some home made croutons could be better. Just before posting, did notice here on eG Recipe #914 - Caesar Salad Dressing at http://recipes.egullet.com/recipes/r914.html and see that my effort is closer to the eG version than the Time-Life version. Comments?

tarka: For your "2. Reading the entire thread over dinner on Friday night (which took A WHOLE REAM OF PAPER...we need to sort out the font size for printing things out)" You are correct: It is long! We've written a book here! Just to confirm the length you saw, I used some software to get all the Web pages and from them just the text. At 65 lines per page, that would have been 193 pages -- definitely a book!

cdh: "You appear to like heavy heavy food" -- pretty much, sure. Want the food to light up the neurons, want a lot of flavor, enough to pass the KFC FLG test! My mother emphasized discretion, decorum, demeanor, and presentation and knew Emily Post and apostles word for word, but when my wife and I took some Maryland crab meat, added S&P, moistened with Bechamel, wrapped in crepes, warmed in the oven, covered with Sauce Parisienne (fish stock, white wine, shallots, reduced, roux, heavy cream, egg yolks, S&P, lemon juice), browned a little, served with some white wine from somewhere near Macon, at the end of the course the main serving dish was still in the center of the table and apparently the course had gone over the top with her because suddenly it did pass the KFC FLG test! This was still a seafood dish; with red meat or game, can have much more flavor, still! It's easy enough to get a Porterhouse steak, S&P, fire up the charcoal grill, bake some potatoes, get a pot of sour cream with chives, and dig in. So, this is a benchmark, and for me a high end place has to be better! In the summer, can spring for a fast bowl of Vichyssoise while waiting for a rack of lamb, a filet of venison, some grilled NY Strip with Bordelaise, etc., each with enough highly flavored sauce to keep the French bread wet! Cheek meat? Gee, that stuff has a strange market, and once a player in that market had a lot of relevant data that I analyzed! Gee, "lobster carpaccio with hyssop oil and baby pea shoots." Yup, while there are a lot of lobster dishes I do like, your example sounds like something I wouldn't! Maybe my date, in a petite size 4 simple black dress, would really like it, in which case there could be some benefit! For "just the people with the money today are deathly afraid of fat/salt/carbs/whatever so the public presentation menu must take those irrational phobias into account." yup. That's an explanation, an addition to understanding what CT does and why. But, as one contributor to this thread mentioned, there are still plenty of high end restaurants willing to serve more classic dishes. Yes, I can believe that the chefs at CT would enjoy being able to tell their suppliers to deliver appropriate quantities of heaviest whipping cream, low moisture sour cream butter, lots of red meat and game, etc. I believe that once I heard J. Child remark that some of the dishes served today look like someone had their fingers all over it, or some such! Maybe she had some similar remarks for dishes with no salt, fat, or carbohydrates, little flavor, maybe raw. Food has changed over the past 10 years. It can change again over the next 10 years, and the direction of change can be influenced by the comments of those who eat it!

xyz123: "Project, your arguments really dont make sense. Especially since you have not dined at Charlie Trotter. Its like trying to tell someone not to eat/like apples because oranges are better. What is your point and what are you trying to say. All I'm getting is that you don't like to eat food in its natural state, if that is the case then that's fine but, why would you think that there is something wrong for those that like it. By the way nouvelle cuisine has been over for at least 15 years now. Alice Waters never served nouvelle cuisine, She served simple natural food" Naw! I'm certainly NOT trying "to tell someone" anything! I WAS trying to get others to post to this thread so that I could read what they said and, thus, use this thread and eG to overcome my own ignorance, to see better why others like CT and what I might be missing. I'm trying to understand. I explain my thinking so that others can either point out where I'm wrong or where there are just differences of 'taste' that cannot easily be 'resolved'. For the second, one remark was that clearly I like traditional bistro food for which there are many excellent restaurants; it was a good remark. Right, I have not dined at CT. Still, I was trying to understand. There is terrific food in France, China, Italy, Germany, Spain, and in most or all of the 50 states of the US, and I can't go, and no one could go, to all of the associated restaurants, but with eG I and nearly anyone can still get some significant understanding of what we can't visit. Moreover, we can get understanding we could not get just from a visit -- the thoughts of others. There was a LOT on CT on this thread before I discovered it; my hopes to learn about CT from eG are not hopeless. Also, I've eaten tons of food and guzzled gallons of wine, over decades in some of the best restaurants in the US, have a huge stack of cookbooks, regard food and cooking as important interests, and, thus, do have a background for some understanding even when I can't visit. For "What is your point and what are you trying to say.", I'm trying to understand what others see in CT, to see if I was missing something, to see where I 'didn't get it'. My goal was neither praise nor condemnation but information and 'illumination'. I was trying to understand. Such understanding is a small drop in a huge stock pot of possible progress in cooking. Or, the 'global information exchange' that is eG can enormously raise the level of understanding of individuals and, perhaps, even cause a noticeable upward blip in the quality of food in the world. Trust me: I won't be nearly the only one in the world trying to understand CT, El Bulli, Memphis BBQ, the food of some high end restaurant in Hong Kong, some of the food of Mexico, etc. While basically I do understand Memphis BBQ, it is easy enough to see on eG that many others, who didn't spend 20 years in Memphis, know much less and would like to know more. For "All I'm getting is that you don't like to eat food in its natural state, if that is the case then that's fine but, why would you think that there is something wrong for those that like it." There's NOTHING wrong. I'm just trying to understand. For "By the way nouvelle cuisine has been over for at least 15 years now. Alice Waters never served nouvelle cuisine, She served simple natural food". Gee, 'nouvelle' is over? Are you sure? I didn't get the memo! As I watch some of the TV cooking shows, I do get the impression that essentially 'nouvelle' remains alive and well. Your distinctions among 'nouvelle', CT, Alice Waters are more detailed than my knowledge! I learned something! Summary of what I learned here on eG about CT: Broadly, Trotter's a terrific chef. In more detail, we can see (1) how some people see CT and (2) how I would: (1) For others, I learned that Trotter does very well at many things, and in total at CT he does create a significant dining experience that many people like. Further, the US has people that are willing to be adventurous and try and like new things if they are done with astounding care; there are enough such people to let a place like CT be successful. Broadly the idea that the US, the Midwest, or Chicago has only people that want only pot roast and mashed potatoes, deep dish pizza, a slab of ribs, or bistro food is just not nearly true. (2) For me, I learned that some of the dishes I would like but, if only for the quail eggs, caviar, etc., some of his dishes I wouldn't like. And, to the extent that he is close to 'nouvelle', I would prefer the more classic French traditions. In total, for me, for CT, there is too much chance of dishes I wouldn't like. I would almost certainly be happier in a good bistro. In part I supported my liking of bistro food by mentioning the common traditional ideas of French and Chinese cooking of sauces with a lot of flavor. Further, at a bistro, I'm ready to go for the butter, cream, eggs, red meat, fried breading, etc.; otherwise I might be more interested in seeing how 'nouvelle', Waters, or Trotter can get good food with less emphasis on these traditional ingredients. Seems to me, these explanations "make sense".

Occasionally find some terrific cheese, and then go for long periods and don't. Thanks for participating here; I am sure many of us will learn a lot on how better to enjoy cheese more frequently! Near 1970 in Georgetown, DC, we were able to buy a cheese Chiberta said to be from Basque. I liked it. What is the 'cheese making secret' to such flavors? Are there other cheeses that are similar?

xyz123: "I think the point of Charlie Trotter and other fine dining chefs across the country is that they find the freshest ingredients and not mask their flavor. How could one know how fresh a piece of fish or vegetable is if its cooked in a sauce like a stew therefore taking the flavor of the liquid that is it being cooking in. One could not define a piece of fish for its natural taste when their natural taste has been masked/overpowered by other flavors." Yup, that sounds like what they are doing. It seems similar to much of 'nouvelle cuisine', Alice Waters, etc. I didn't like 'nouvelle cuisine'! I guess my most defensible position is that I want the food to taste good and then move on to a tradition for how to do that: China for maybe over 1000 years and France for over 200 years largely independently came to very similar conclusions about how to make food taste good. One of the main secrets, at least in recent decades of the tradition, is to coat the food with a sauce that is thickened with starch and has a lot of flavor. The flavor comes from stocks, wines, mushrooms, smoke, browning, and 'aromatics' such as garlic, scallions, chives, onions, carrots, celery, green beans, and bell peppers. The flavors get balanced with salt, pepper, sugar, and acid, especially acetic and citric. The sauce typically has fat which helps hold the flavors. The French added truffles and reductions and emphasized butter, cream, olive oil, and pork, beef, and duck for the fats. The Chinese added soy sauce, lilly pods, Szechuan 'pepper' corns, and maybe 500 other strange things they found flying, swimming, walking, growing, etc. and concentrated on peanut oil and pork and duck for the fats. With this tradition, it is fair to say that sauces 'mask' some of the other flavors. At times it has occurred to me that the people that stirred up Worchestershire sauce 100 years or so ago understood this tradition quite thoroughly. Some of the food I really liked growing up in Memphis was a sandwich of chopped pork shoulder BBQ with coleslaw. Then, looking at what the Chinese and French worked out, that BBQ is not so surprising because it makes heavy use of smoke, browning, fat, salt, pepper, sugar, and vinegar with coleslaw for contrast. And there can be some Worchestershire sauce. No wonder I liked it. For deep fried scallops, can have some salt, pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder in the breading, get browning of the breading, get oil, and at the table get lemon and butter. The hushpuppies have more oil, browning, onion, and butter. Coleslaw provides some contrast. No wonder it can be good. Scallops 'Maryland style' can have garlic, shallots, butter, olive oil, white wine, lemon juice, some browning, and some reduction -- hitting hard on some of the most important points of the tradition. No wonder it can be good. The simplest tossed green salad can have oil, vinegar, garlic, herbs, salt, pepper, likely some mustard, and that is already enough points of the tradition to get something decently good. Now 'nouvelle cuisine' and Trotter are heavily setting aside this Chinese-French tradition. Seeing Trotter on TV and coming to this thread to learn more, I wondered what I was missing, where I failed to 'get it'. If Trotter comes up with something really good, then fine. But, I am concluding that I will just stay with the Chinese-French tradition. "As far as the vinaigrette, I think what Trotter was trying to say is that one should follow a recipe as a guidance but adjust it to your taste. Some like a lighter vinaigrette and some like it stronger. In the case with the scallops a lite vinaigrette would be equal to using a white wine for its acidity. There are many wines to drink that would not be overpowered by such a vinaigrette." Well, there is traditional point in French cooking that we should not drink the wine during the salad course because the vinegar will tend to make the wine taste like it has turned to vinegar. For Trotter's TV scallop dish, his mixing error was on the side of too much vinegar; my guess was that he still had too much vinegar after he added more oil, but then I was only watching and he was tasting. Since Trotter seems to be trying to go for the really most delicate flavors, I used this traditional point to question if we should drink wine with such a dish. Still, he used so little vinaigrette in the dish that mostly it should not much hurt the wine. If I really liked his scallop dish, then I'd eagerly dig into to two dozen of the scallops and wash them down with Macon blanc and forget about the delicate issues! No doubt I would like the scallops better if they were masked with a sauce of a stock and white wine reduction with butter, cream, lemon juice, salt, and pepper! Heck, I'd even like just a side of lemon butter! Busboy: "Declaring an inability to enjoy a formal dining room because of the linens and floor staff can be as pretentious as a Frenchman's turning up his nose at a good slab of ribs." Naw, mostly I don't like pretense, but I've been in plenty of super-stiff high end triple fancy places, and the atmosphere didn't hurt my enjoyment at all. If the Baccarat crystal, sterling silver, and Irish damask linen come with a good slab of ribs, then so much the better! "The days of the brutally arrogant maitre d' have largely passed, as have the days of endless, overwhelmingly rich tides of fat-based sauces (dammit!)." I put up with plenty of such maitre d's; just remember: money talks. You have it, and they want it. You are fully correct about the sauces! "Last winter I journeyed into the belly of the beast and went through nine courses or so at a Micheline two-star in France: it was practicaly spa cuisine, except for the three desserts." Right! Chow down on all that fancy stuff but make sure use a lot of butter on the bread, put a lot of cream in the coffee, and get three desserts, hopefully with a lot of whipped cream! Else, a hour later will be looking for a sundae at a Dairy Queen. "A linen napkin is not a challenge to one's masculinity, and a tasting menu is not a trap. As we used to say at Le Pavillon, just sit back, relax and enjoy." Nearly did that, long after Soule was there: Went to La Cote Basque twice. Once saw an ashtray on the table that on the bottom said Le Pavillon. I relaxed and enjoyed. They had oceans of perfect raspberries for dessert; I just made sure I got a lot of whipped cream! FoodMan: "The main thing that does not add up in your statements is that you seem to be basing your whole opinion on a dishj he prepared on TV over a period of what...15 minutes." I tried to make clear that I'm judging what might be in his restaurant from the descriptions of the CT food on this thread and the one item I saw on TV. This thread is the more important for what might be in the restaurant because the TV dish was in homage to another chef and not necessarily in the restaurant at all. "And you keep saying that he did not cramalize, or use stock and so on and so forth." He just made a dish with really simple approaches to the flavors. While he may have achieved a special delicate balance, and while the awesomely high quality scallops may have been better than I could guess, he was mostly in the 'nouvelle cuisine' tradition where he didn't mask the food with a thick sauce. While clearly some people would be pleased to have the scallops, the whole scallops, and nearly nothing but the scallops, I have to conclude that he didn't achieve a lot of flavor. "As far as I know Trotter and all French disciplined fine dining chefs do use stock, sauce, butter, and the Maillard recation quiet extensivly. So the lack of these items/procedures should really not be a concern in your decision to eat a CT." Trotter is clearly a highly expert chef, and I am fully sure that he could be sent into the kitchen blindfolded and stir up anything from a random cut in any top book from Escoffier to the present. From the descriptions on this thread, I got the impression that I would not like his food because of (1) too much in the 'nouvelle' tradition, (2) not enough in the rich sauce tradition, and (3) too many ingredients that I would find weird. "As far as the pampering, stem ware et al. that is totally a personal preference. So if you do not like this sort of 'fussy' stuff, then I guess Trotter will never be right for you." I don't mind $10 K table settings, as long as the food is at least as good as a Memphis BBQ sandwich! "The food is also a personal choice and some dishes will be very simple such as the scallop dish and other will be very complex and for a lack of better term 'comlicated'. A slab of ribs is great and a 4-hour tatsing menu at a fine dining etsablishment is also great, each has its place and if done right is worth the cost." If he has some "very complex" dishes that would stand up well to a big Chambertin or Barolo, GREAT. Make one of those the main dish, hopefully with a lot of good sauce and some French bread to soak it up, and forget all the rest but then bring the salad, the strong cheese, and the three desserts with lots of whipped cream! If he just wanted to bring a slab of ribs and a pitcher of beer, then that might be pretty good! I believe I got my questions answered: Trotter's a terrific chef. He is working hard and trying to do new things past 'nouvelle' and away from the older traditions. Even for people that might prefer Coq au Vin, due to the many things he does do well, he does create a significant experience that people like. For me, I drool over the traditional dishes like Coq au Vin ('where we are adding MORE butter than Julia calls for!') and didn't like 'nouvelle'. Trotter is close enough to 'nouvelle' that mostly I'd like the traditional dishes better. If he ran a traditional bistro and made Coq au Vin, etc., then I'd like to eat there. As it is, I'd like some of the food he serves but likely too little. I'd rather go to a good bistro. I bet he could run a TERRIFIC bistro! Thanks to all for the comments. eG worked great!

adrober: So, it's all about the 'experience' of being made to feel 'special'. I'm reminded that for a few months 10 years ago, I worked far too hard, clinched my teeth, and cracked the tooth on the lower left second from the back. The crack meant that the root of the tooth got infected, which hurt. So, I had a root canal procedure. The procedure was done by a very serious and expert 'endodontist'. While I was reclined with my mouth open and he was on my right drilling away on one of the worst 'experiences' there is, on my left was one of his assistants doing something to help in the work. She was young, gorgeous, in a beautifully pressed spotless white uniform, with pretty, tiny, gentle hands, and voluptuous. She made the 'experience' MUCH better, and I nearly totally forgot about the guy on the right and the root canal procedure! So, maybe with enough TLC, even I could keep down raw eggs from some strange primitive fish! In Hester's story, I can sympathize with Tad: He reminds me of the father in the original Disney movie 'The Parent Trap' where his reaction to an attempt at a romantic dinner was "You know I hate that glop". Disney did have some insight into American culture! More generally, one of the stronger 'great American' themes is men that concentrate on the practical and suppress the emotional. For me, essentially all of English literature with its attempts at communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion with passion, pathos, poignancy, and poetry was worse than that root canal procedure, really, REALLY offensive smoking, flaming, fuming, glowing, bubbling, reeking, sticky, chunky, industrial toxic waste barf. This is a particularly American division of reason and passion. In particular, American men can begin to conclude that they have gotten into the wrong place, and are about to spend important money on some really offensive purposes, as soon as the 'environment' begins to suggest some contrived 'total emotional experience'. Things French, and particularly French food, can be especially suspect for such American men: For at least 100 years, American men have regarded the French as ineffectual emasculated effeminate effete esthetes. However, there is no question that we must eat; and there is little question, even among American men, that some food tastes MUCH better than other food -- including as carryout on a paper plate. And, among things that taste good, the leading examples come heavily from France, China, Italy, Germany, and Austria. So, even many American men can like such food. Some of the 'secrets' of why such food tastes good include browning, aromatic vegetables, stocks, reductions, fat, and good balances of salt, acid, pepper, and sugar. Okay. Within such secrets can come many of the classics of French cooking, but Memphis chopped pork shoulder BBQ also tastes terrific and also makes heavy use of browning, fat, salt, acid, pepper, and sugar. There are good reasons such BBQ tastes good, and the scallop dish Trotter did on TV will not compete. There can be a point to Tad's "... I never feel good after eating it". I've long since concluded that the US fast food restaurants have long since concluded that much of their success depends on serving food that lets people "feel good after eating it" and, to this end, include enough fat, protein, and complex carbohydrates. E.g., when US fast food made a recent move to salads, they kept the fat, protein, and complex carbohydrates all plenty high. That is, people come in hungry and in a big hurry to satisfy their appetite; if two Whoppers, complete with mayo, works, then people will get 'conditioned' to return. A restaurant that serves no fat 'soy-burgers' on a low-carb bun without mayo or serves lettuce with strips of carrot and celery with no-cal no-carb dressing will soon find their parking spaces occupied by used cars. This lesson will hold for a high end restaurant: No way do they want to learn that their customers left and an hour later went for a Whopper at Burger King or a sundae at Dairy Queen. At one high end restaurant that had worked really hard to 'cut the fat', I did notice what Tad did, sometimes left weak and hungry, and then made sure to eat enough fat from sauces, beef, cream in the dessert, and butter on the bread. If lunch is two Whoppers and the rest of the day is spent drenched in sweat and with a high heart rate loading 100 pound sacks of cement, then there should be no obesity problem. If the rest of the day is spent typing legal briefs, then the person should likely get a better job -- say, loading 100 pound sacks of cement so that they can live to enjoy more nice lunches! Hesser's story illustrates another point going back to the French Revolution: There Western Civilization got the idea that any difference represented unfair inequality. In particular, men and women were to be seen as identical to the greatest extent possible or more so. One reaction is "men and women deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same" (extra credit for knowing the source!). One major difference is that women are MUCH more emotional then men. Another difference is, among American men, emotion is regarded as a source of dangerous and irresponsible loss of crucial control. For having "six waiters fluttering around them, giving them a new napkin every five minutes", an American man would sense the emotional trap and quickly feel that he was being expected to do something really foolish. In the story, notably it was the woman Amanda that was saying "Some people like to be pampered or need to feel special ... Or they feel that the food demands such formality, and they see it as entertainment. What do you think?" and the man Tad that was objecting to such things. The story has Amanda and Tad failing to agree: Of COURSE they can't agree. That is why Tad might agree with me that a lunch in Memphis of two BBQ sandwiches, some hot sauce, a side of BBQ beans, some beer to wash it down, and some chocolate ice box pie would be quite good, much better than the scallop dish Trotter did on TV, even if Trotter had "six waiters fluttering". However, if Amanda were like the girl at the root canal procedure, then either Tad or I might spring for the $1000 for a dinner for two at CT's if that might suitably impress her! Of course, before I went, I might want to drop by Burger King and get a couple of Whoppers so that I wouldn't be too hungry for the 3 1/2 hours of barf bait "glop" I wouldn't eat! A girl that could get me through a root canal procedure might even get me through CT's! For all of this, Amanda would have to be really something; but, as ALL REAL American men know VERY well, there are MANY such women in the US, some with long bouncing blond ponytails tied up with yellow ribbons, including 100 miles or more from Chicago in a circle of radius 600 miles with center at Chicago (Indiana, Minnesota, Iowa -- WOW!), although the total count would not fall by even one if all the 'feminists' left for France! Yup, American MCPs know what we like and REALLY like blond ponytails and BBQ! So, here we have the first lecture in American Esthetics 101 or "How an American man can enjoy dinner without being foolish or losing his manhood."

tammylc: "Different strokes for different folks. I quite like many courses and combinations of weird ingredients. Caviar and quail eggs would elicit cries of joy from me, not a call for a barf bucket. 'Better' is in the eye of the beholder. You know what you like. You can get what you like in plenty of great restaurants. Eat at those, and leave the multi-course tasting menu restaurants for those of us that appreciate them." Yeh, mostly I do know what I like! That's one of the pros/cons of many cases of been there, done that! On my list of really good KFC FLG items (where KFC doesn't make it!), I haven't added anything in a long time! But, Trotter is trying hard to be new; there is no question he is working really hard; and I'm wondering if what he has is really better. So far, I'm guessing that too often, I wouldn't like his results. Soooooo, it's a "multi-course tasting menu" restaurant. Right away, I see lots of time waiting between courses, some courses where I wouldn't like the food, and other courses where I did like the food but didn't like the tiny portions. For 'tasting', once at Harrald's (about 60 miles north of Wall Street), at least 14 years of five stars from Mobil, Harrald brought me an 'experiment' from someone in his kitchen. It was quail in pieces roasted with oriental flavors, likely soy sauce, etc. Harrald asked for my opinion: I said that it was good but not up to the main items he served. Although the work was clearly done with great care, and although there was a lot of flavor, still, the dish, as a whole, seemed too dry. E.g., there was no KFC FLG sauce with cream! And, just as an oriental dish, the flavors were not exceptional; commonly good Chinese chefs do better (although I don't have a clue how they do it). Here on eG I did just see the link to "Bresse Chicken Fricassee with Garlic Cloves and Foie Gras Georges Blanc's Recipe on The Worldwide Goumet" While I'm no fan of 'foie gras', what Blanc has there sounds better to me than some novel 'oriental fusion' quail or the strange combinations this thread describes for CT because Blanc has aromatic vegetables, a reduction, some white wine and/or consomme, and some heavy cream. Also Blanc pays careful attention to getting a moist result. If I were at a tasting menu restaurant and they brought the quail dish, then it would be a step down but not the barf bucket. But, quail eggs or caviar in the bottom of the soup -- good chance of my losing all the earlier courses. Soooooooo, for me, lots of courses with lots of 'novelty' increases the chances of some really disappointing courses. One really bad course could seriously ruin the dinner for me. So, you essentially always like, at least enough, all the different items, like the novelty, like, and don't barf, at unusual ingredients such as quail eggs or surprise caviar in the soup, and don't mind the time between courses? Gee .... M65: "I am sorry my friend but just ' GET IT', my best dining experiences ever have come from there, and I am an industry professional. Hope I did not hurt any feelings." Naw, no hurt: It's certain that some people do very much 'get it'. And there's no joke that Trotter is working hard. I knew these points before I posted. I am having a tough time 'getting it'; that's why I posted. In those famous words from Iowa, I'm "reticent, yes, I'm reticent". I was wondering mostly just about the food itself. At least from tammylc, it is clear that some people would really like quail eggs and caviar. Not I, but okay. On the PBS show, I was disappointed in the way Trotter mixed his vinaigrette -- looked like he should borrow the bottle I got with Good Seasons salad dressing mixes so that he could use the little horizontal lines to get the proportions of vinegar, water, and oil correct "each and every time"! Sure, from this thread, it's easy to see that Trotter has worked hard to create an 'experience'. There are many ways to do that: I used to go to the Rive Gauche at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street in Georgetown, DC, and there the owner worked hard to have all the customers feel like European royalty with lots of severe discipline in the room, with several 'classes' of staff, some that could never speak or even communicate at all and could only do very limited tasks in precisely specified well practiced very stilted ways, up to people that spoke to the customers, only gestured, never spoke (like the supervisor at the Baccarat table in 'Golden Eye') to the lower staff, and never touched anything on the tables, a hostess that insisted on being the maintainer of a social pecking order in all of Washington, DC, and an owner that just observed. Harrald's had an 'experience' of a rustic country inn, where some of the customers might imagine they would go for a romantic interlude. 'La Cote Basque' in NYC, which had been Soule's place after the Fair, had bright lights so that everyone could be seen by everyone else and staff that worked with great speed as if they were serving impatient business people. Lutece had their white painted diagonal wooden lattice work as something of a New York City desperate attempt to make their half flight down basement location suggest a patio surrounded by a garden while the space was crowded, the lights were bright, the staff worked very quickly, saying nearly nothing, and Soltner came out, a little tired but friendly and without pretense, to greet people. Clearly at CT, before the dinner is over, the customer has had a few thousand dollars of plates, stemware, and flatware placed in front, some expert very attentive staff, etc. There are various ways to create 'experiences'. Mostly I was wondering about the food itself. But, so far, I don't 'get it'. I guess that the first gap I would have to cross would be the idea of a 'tasting menu' restaurant. I do like the idea of a big round table with eight people and 20 dishes at a Chinese restaurant. So, here is a really big 'tasting menu'. But, the dishes are commonly brought all at once so that there is no waiting between courses and no delay for a dish that doesn't seem, look, smell, or taste good. Also there isn't the problem of trying to find a dozen or so wine 'parings' -- and I would have a tough time paring at all with a dish with prominent vinegar such as the scallop dish Trotter did on TV. For weird ingredients, no one can compare with the Chinese, but the Chinese have some of the most tested traditions -- even though they are nearly never written down clearly enough for me to understand them! Good to learn that serious knowledgeable people can like CT, and that is a stake in the ground. I haven't been with 100 miles of Chicago for years and don't plan to be near there soon. So, starting with the stake in the ground and this thread, I'll try to see WHY people would like such a restaurant. If I had been the 'venture' investor, I would have taken a 'pass', so CTs is a good lesson on the challenge of evaluating 'ventures'! Early in the planning of FedEx, some of us went to a good restaurant in DC. One of the party, not I, insisted on ordering off the menu -- he wanted a hamburger. Period. Mostly he just wanted to refuse to become 'part of the experience'. My list of KFC FLG items is long and has no hamburgers, but I'm not jumping to become part of the CT thing without more evidence!

On PBS on Saturday, saw a 30 minute program by Charlie Trotter on a celebration in his restaurant of a chef from France. Since this program was the first I ever heard of Charlie Trotter, I came to this thread to learn more. eGullet comes through again: There is a lot here on Trotter. On the PBS program, Trotter essentially reproduced a dish in a book by the chef from France. Here is how it went: He made a vinaigrette of vinegar, soy sauce, oil, and a few other fairly standard ingredients. He tasted it and added more oil; no wonder: He mixed the vinaigrette just by dumping and clearly had more vinegar than the standard 1:3 ratio of vinegar to oil. He steamed some clams. As a step in 'spontaneous creativity' emulating the French chef, he added some minced steamed clams to the vinaigrette. In a skillet, he browned some scallops lightly on both sides. He took some strange stiff greens and added some vinaigrette. With a large white plate, he put maybe one square inch of greens in the center and arranged about four scallops mostly on top of the greens. He put a few pieces of clam meat and some clam shells and a few pieces leek around the outside. As decorative garnish, he added some stalks of chives to the center. This thread described some of the dishes at his restaurant. From the program and this thread, it is clear that a dinner at CT is a special 'experience'. Okay. Here I question what Trotter is doing. I'm not criticizing, I am questioning. I'm not asserting; I'm asking. I'm not trying to put down Trotter's efforts; I'm asking others to provide reasoned support. My goal is to better understand Trotter's direction in cooking. I'm skeptical but eager to learn. I do come with some positions: I don't like raw fish or raw meats. I don't like fois gras or caviar. I can like the flavor of truffles, but I am offended by the prices and believe that terrific flavors should be available from other much less expensive means. I welcome things that are better and, thus, necessarily new, but I don't value newness for its own sake. I hate fads, pretense, and elitism. I can like top quality table settings and room decorations and even like some 'total dining experience' but, really, want to concentrate on the food itself -- I would want the food to be good even if taken out on paper plates and eaten in the car. I do like classic cooking from France, Italy, and Germany. I believe that browning, stocks, reductions, butter, cream, salt, acid, aromatics, etc. have yielded some of the best tasting dishes ever. While ingredients of very high quality from careful attention to variety, cultivation, and handling are a great help, I rarely find that such ingredients alone or nearly so make terrific food. That is, I don't find a slice of a fresh tomato as good as a good tomato sauce with olive oil, garlic, onion, parsley, etc., even from canned tomatoes. Generally I thought that nouvelle cuisine was not good. I'm not big on subtlety: Yes, there are some dishes with very carefully balanced subtle flavors, and the effort required is amazing. But, being amazed is not my main interest. Instead, to me a good dish really lights up the neurons, and subtly is a really sweet, pretty, darling, adorable six year old girl in a floral pastel print dress outlined with satin ribbons at bat in the World Series -- doesn't work. I like three wines: Red that is dry and has a lot of flavor -- e.g., Cote d'Or, Barolo, Chianti, Haut Medoc. White that is dry, crisp, and clean -- e.g., Macon -- to go with a light seafood dish while I'm waiting on the main course with red wine. And sweet wine for dessert. Missing a good sweet dessert wine, I'll just take a Coca-Cola -- been there, done that. For a good meal, mostly I want one really good course and, then, a good dessert. I am willing to entertain a bowl of soup, a slice of pate, or a light seafood dish while the kitchen gets the main dish ready, hopefully beef or game with a red wine from the Cote d'Or. Good to have French bread and sour cream butter on the table. Okay to have some simple greens, I recognize, and none of the greens bitter or tough, with a simple vinaigrette, no soy sauce, no Balsamic vinegar, no EVOO, while the waiters cut some slices of strong cheese, e.g., Basque Chiberta, to go with the rest of the red wine. Other than some such classic bistro meal, it's easy enough to like (1) a Maryland seafood house where they bring a large basket of deep fried scallops, a large basket of deep fried strongly flavored hushpuppies, along with plenty of coleslaw, lemon, butter, and beer, (2) a Maryland seafood bar where they bring a huge plate covered with a huge broiled flounder along with a lot of lemon, coleslaw, French fries, bread, butter, and beer, (3) a Maryland seafood house where they bring steamed lobster and lots of lemon butter or lots of scallops sauteed with shallots, garlic, butter, oil, and white wine, (4) a really simple Memphis BBQ joint with chopped pork shoulder BBQ on a white bread bun with hot sauce, BBQ beans, and coleslaw washed down the cold beer and followed by chocolate ice box pie and Coca-Cola, (5) a huge thick Porterhouse steak cooked with lots of black pepper over charcoal in Shenandoah with potatoes baked by being wrapped in foil and placed on the coals and then served with sour cream and chives, maybe some cold three bean salad, washed down with red wine or beer, (6) an Italian restaurant with a red and white checkered tablecloth, some just terrific red sauce lasagna, and a good Chianti. For dessert, I want it good: This means at least as good as my family's apple pie or strawberry shortcake. I have had coconut cream pie better than the desserts in many high end restaurants. In food, I don't value 3D food 'art and architecture': I don't want to admire, paint, or photograph a framed artistic 'still life'; instead, if it's good, then I want to eat it; else, let the dishwashers do their work. Here are some questions about Trotter's directions: First, I don't think I would like the scallop dish he did on TV. Sure, this dish was in homage of another chef, but it looked to me like a waste of some really terrific clams and scallops. The problem was, there just couldn't have been nearly enough flavor there. That there were some beautiful quality raw scallops quickly browned and some clams just steamed and very little else just is not enough in flavor. Sorry, but I would very much prefer any decent version of any of the traditional good ways to cook scallops, including deep frying in a Maryland seafood house. My personal favorite is poaching in fish stock, white wine, shallots, and mushrooms and served with a sauce from the reduced poaching liquid, cream, egg yolks, and lemon. Where am I wrong here? Why have a dish with terrific quality scallops and clams served with nearly no flavor? For the vinaigrette and greens, mostly I would just move them to one side. In particular, should I taste the vinaigrette, then I would believe that the vinegar would threaten to conflict with any white wine 'paring' I would try with that dish. Why am I wrong here? How the heck are we to get a white wine paring with a dish with noticeable vinegar? I might like some Chinese sweet-sour scallop dish, but I can't discuss such a possibility because, while I often like Chinese cooking, I flatly don't understand it at all. To me, Trotter's track record at scallop cooking has started off poorly. Otherwise from his cooking, I hear about strange combinations of weird ingredients. I ask, for Trotter's other scallop and seafood dishes, the ones he serves in his restaurant, are they any good? Or are they just 'different'? Second, if I were in Trotter's restaurant and he brought me a plate with five or fewer scallops, then I would be torqued that I had to wait on such a small portion and have one of two reactions: If the scallops were poorly done, then they would go back to the kitchen and I would demand a course with a big serving of beef or game ASAP. If the scallops were good, then I would ask for six more servings ASAP, a big fork, some cold beer, some French bread, combine all seven servings on one of the huge plates, dig in, using the French bread to soak up the sauce, and say get the salad and dessert ready and forget the rest. Waiting for the other six servings, I would be lusting for the big basket of fried scallops in a Maryland seafood house -- brought all at once, right at first, ASAP. If the dish is good, then let's eat it and call it the main dish in a good meal. If it's not good, then let's get a dish that is good. I am eager for the chef to hit one over the fences, but the idea of 12, 15, or 20 swings at the 'plate' to do so seems like the chef needs some batting practice or someone to show him where the fences are. I have another issue: To me, the worst time in a restaurant is between seating and the arrival of the first food. I'm hungry and forced just to sit there. It makes me want to pick up a cell phone and call for a pizza delivery, to my table! After that initial torture, the worst times are between the courses where I have to 'synchronize' my eating with the 'supply chain' of the chefs, waiters, and path to my table. Agony. I doubt I would really like many of those strange combinations of weird ingredients, and all the waiting, especially through a course that I didn't like, would be torture. Instead, if the restaurant is any good at all and I order Coq au Vin, roasted chicken with morel mushroom sauce, fried scallops, charcoal broiled Porterhouse, steamed lobster, BBQ ribs, or lasagna with tomato sauce, then I know that the dish will at least be okay. At CT, behind the curtains, do the waiters keep some barf buckets handy? If they brought me something raw or I found some caviar in the bottom of a soup bowl or a quail's egg, I'd likely need the barf bucket. So, I ask, what's all this stuff with so many courses, with so much waiting, for tiny portions of strange combinations of weird ingredients, with risk of the barf bucket, instead of just a good quantity of a good main dish? Lessons I draw from decades of eating are that food can be terrific but does not have to be astoundingly expensive and spending a lot more risks food that is much worse, not better. Am I the only one drawing this conclusion? Is Trotter really going in a better direction, or just a different one?

Four questions: First, yes, sugar is hydroscopic, and that is the usual reason given for why high concentrations of sugar can act as a preservative where bacteria cannot grow. In particular, we can believe that if a yeast dough has a lot of sugar, then the sugar can desiccate -- 'dry out' -- the yeast. So, it would seem that one solution would be to include not just more yeast but more water? Second, for "Were one to mix a dough that does not contain sugar, such as French bread, with 5% yeast, it would blow up in no time--loads of gas and no flavor.", the "loads of gas" is clear enough by why "no flavor"? Third, it is sometimes said that as dough rises, the yeast can become 'spent'. How can this be? I would guess that the yeast could continue to grow as long as there was a good balance of temperature, water, starch or sugar (as 'food'), and not too much accumulated alcohol or vinegar. So, for 'spent' yeast, what is going on? Fourth, what is the difference between yeast and common bread mold?

Examples of what I had in mind for "brands" include: Coach Farm goat cheese -- Columbia County, NY, US. Donnybrook Dairy Farm, NY. Gotten some super good heavy whipping cream from them. Quattro's Game Farm, Dutchess County. Have gotten stewing chickens there and used them to make stock. Partly that use was a waste because the chickens were better than just for stock and could have been roasted, etc. The farms on Martha earlier this week selling special figs and special Asian pears. Most producers that sell in farmer's markets and known by name -- their personal name can serve effectively as a 'brand' even if they do not paint the name of their business on their packing crates, etc.

My wife eagerly tried a Cherry Clafouti recipe decades ago. She tried once. The results were a disaster. She was a person of astounding care, precision, and excellence (Valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa, 'Summa Cum Laude', Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D.), and the failure was very painful for her. She had long been fully successful in music (piano, clarinet, voice), 4-H, county fair cooking, sewing, and chicken raising competitions, etc. so didn't know if the Cherry Clafouti failure was her fault or that of 'world famous French cooking'. She never tried Cherry Clafouti again. I believe that the responses on this thread are a vivid illustration of the thinking that nearly anyone must go through going from a failing recipe to a successful one. The process can be a LOT of work. So, this thread illustrates a really big sore point, pushes a really big hot button for me: When we read a recipe, the implication from the writer is that they have been there, done that, gotten the T-shirt, gone through the process from failure to success, achieved success, understand how the success was achieved, and are making a clear presentation of the results of their work so that others can benefit. Instead, from experiences such as reported in this thread, it is far too easy to conclude that nearly all recipes presented on TV, in books, in magazines really are just tossed out there, are hardly more than vague suggestions of poorly formulated research projects -- invitations to waste time, money, effort, resources, calories -- and nothing like real results. In particular, for any recipe that so easily fails, it is a real strain to believe that the writer of the recipe EVER did the dish successfully, even once! REALLY tough to believe. Or had they been successful, then they, too, unless astoundingly lucky, would have gone through many of the failures, seen many of the problems, found solutions, and presented all the crucial things that they had so learned from so much thought and effort. If a recipe for Cherry Clafouti doesn't discuss the issues raised on this thread including how to tell if there is enough flour, what the real purpose of the flour is, what kind of flour to use, how to handle canned fruit, how to handle fresh fruit, how to check for too much or too little moisture in the fruit, how to make adjustments for acid level in the fruit, how to keep the sugar from hurting the eggs, how to select an appropriate baking pan, how to get the product puffy, brown on top, done in the center, not burned on the edges, what the result is like when it cools, what to expect at various points in the work, what the final flavors are supposed to be and how to ensure getting them, what the final texture and appearance are supposed to be, etc., then it is REALLY tough for me to believe that they ever did get good results or deserve the T-shirt. For such recipes, I feel manipulated, deceived, lied to, ripped off, and fooled. Perhaps in the past the fiction devotees in the media could pretend to provide information on cooking which was really just fantasy 'entertainment', ignore the details, smile, claim it is all terrific, "add 2 T of white wine -- 'glub, glub, glub, splash, slosh'" and be confident that the thousands of wasted kitchen efforts would never see the light of day in contradiction. Media editors, producers, directors, and writers, those days are ending! The Internet and eGullet are here, and the real quality of your work is being revealed! Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me. I'm long since done being fooled. Now, before opening a can of cherries, measuring an ounce of flour, pouring 1 T of soy sauce to follow some recipe, I want rock solid evidence of astounding care, precision, and expertise. Else, I can work from recipes I already have perfected, and where I have good notes, or just get basic nutrition from peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with glasses of milk! Recipes that really do work really are possible: My wife's cooking was mostly from 4-H in the US Midwest. That stuff really actually really worked. Of course, 4-H wasn't a huge media empire. Hmm ....

mnebergall: "To the contrary, there is generally more game today than there was 100 years ago. Market hunting and habitat loss nearly wiped out the waterfowl flocks. There are more duck and geese today than there were at the turn of the 20th century. Also, the deer herds were depleted as well. I think we all understand that there is plenty of deer today, they are a traffic hazard. Also, the wild turkey was nearly extinct. Today, there are hunt-able populations of wild turkeys in most every state in the continental US. I think bobwhite quail is one of the only game birds I can think of where the populations are down in many states, mostly do to fescue (provides no cover for the birds)." Well, I see some evidence that you are correct, but "generally" I still wonder: For wild turkey, there are two flocks in my neighborhood. Letting the grass in the backyard grow to seed brings the turkey flocks to my house. Deer and red foxes are common in my neighborhood, and overpopulation is a problem for deer in my county (Dutchess, NY, US). My backyard has the happiest, biggest, fattest ground hog ever seen. Last time I cut the grass, he was way up on his hind legs enormously enjoying some foliage at the edge and ran only as I got within about 20 feet. Somewhere around here is at least one skunk. There are plenty of possums and some raccoons. There are lots of rabbits and squirrels. I don't have a chance of identifying even 5% of all the birds. If I leave out some leftover chicken skin, the crows get the message and act soon enough. Occasionally there are ring neck pheasants, likely escaped from a local pheasant farm. Lived on Quaker Hill in NY, and that area was farmed and then abandoned for farming. Then the trees took over. So, for some decades, it's just been nature to be free. So, from snowmelt to snowfall, each week brought a new crop of flowers, insects, and birds. The variety of birds was staggering. There were lots of bats to eat the insects. Deer would stand on our back porch, just in front of our kitchen window, and turn to eat the grasses on the hill. In much of NY, the land is hilly and rocky, quite poor for farming. For housing, much of the land can't be used and, thus, is left to return to patches of woods. Then, many birds, small mammals, some upland birds, deer can thrive. Clearly the easy way to afford to live and have a family in Westchester County, NY is to die and return as a Canadian Goose! For ducks -- really, migratory water fowl -- when we were in Memphis we often went to the Ducks Unlimited meetings and learned what they were doing about helping habitat in Canada and stopping commercial hunting in Mexico. It may be that some 'organic' farming practices will let some wildlife do better on farm land. US lakes and rivers have made great progress in the last few decades. Apparently the most severe remaining pollution problems in the lakes and rivers are PCBs and mercury. People boating on Lake Erie remember when the bow waves looked muddy and the boats got layers of scum, and now the bow waves sparkle and the boats stay clean. Yes, 100 years ago there was a lot of commercial hunting and fishing. Still, my father found hunting for migratory water fowl and upland birds and fresh water fishing much better in the 1920s and 1930s than in the 1950s through 1970s. When he grew up, hunting and fishing were good, productive activities. For me, I haven't pulled a trigger or wet a line in decades. When I lived round DC in the 1970s, it was common to lament the loss of fish, shellfish, and migratory water fowl on Chesapeake Bay. The old claims were that during the fall on the Chesapeake Bay, the migratory water fowl on the Atlantic Flyway would darken the skys and form huge rafts on the water. When I lived in Memphis, similarly on the Mississippi Flyway. I doubt that that is the case now, and it may still have been the case in 1900. Curiously, it appears that, as intensive agriculture destroyed so much of the habitat, some of the wildlife discovered that they could do better in some of the (less dense, more forested) suburbs than in farming areas! Yesterday I caught a Martha program: She did a program on a bakery in NJ, Coach Farm in Columbia County, NY, an orchard of Asian pears, and a fig farm in CA. The bakery looked terrific: They have a new 14,000 square foot place that makes tons of handmade (really) breads a day. The program suggested that the staff of a dozen or so was getting some emotional highs all day handling puffy fragrant yeast dough and smelling the aromas of the yeast, baking, etc. But, sounds like they are making some first class handmade breads. Martha was in ecstasy handling the dough and seemed quite good at it right away. I had missed how significant Coach has become: They have about 700 acres (rough guess from memory -- didn't take notes) and 1000 goats and are the largest US supplier of handmade goat cheese. Their Alpine goats energetically run and jump and are a riot. The pears and figs are special varieties and are picked and packed by hand one at a time, and the packing treats the fruit like eggs. Coach explained that they learned their cheese making from a French woman that just had a few goats and made cheese at home. Likely by now Coach has made the work quite practiced and polished, and they age some of their cheese and flavor some of their fresh cheese with herbs, pepper corns, etc. Can't say they aren't sufficiently 'traditional', but well within tradition there may be room for many more variations. Martha's cameras showed the fig farmer bringing his crop to a farmer's market where he met the customers one by one, many of whom were quite eager, and sometimes got hugs and kisses from the quality of his figs. We're taking some REALLY special figs! So, this fig farmer has followed the path of farmers and markets in Italy. So, at times, it can work in the US. Although he was just one fig farmer, his figs looked terrific -- he might compete well with anyone around the Mediterranean! Between his fig trees he has some other crops including some Rosemary -- he has a LOT of really TALL Rosemary! With that bread and cheese, some of those pears and figs, could put together some world class flavors. With one rustic rye loaf, Martha pigged out with thin slices with soft butter! Martha suggested half a fig (perfectly ripe, soft, sweet, fragrant), a leaf of basil, and a piece of cheese. Gee, what wine with that? Pears over ice cream for dessert, maybe with some Asti Spumanti? cdh: "I've never been to anything like the 'state fairs' that exist in the popular psyche, so I don't know how the blue ribbons are awarded... anybody know whether it is quantity (size of item, profusion of item) or quality ( flavor of item, or look of item) that is the judgment criterion?" Well, the classic state fair competition was the mince meat pie judging in the movie 'State Fair', but that was just a movie! That movie, with Jeanne Crain, also had a great image of a pretty girl, but that was just a movie, too! As the county fair was coming, my wife's father took his daughter out to the chicken houses and picked out 20 or so baby chicks. These the daughter was to raise as her entries to the chicken competition at the fair. The daughter took these chicks aside and completed the raising. I don't know if she just gave them the usual feed for the other 40,000 chickens in that flock or used a special mix with an excess of, say, fish meal (Chilean anchovies?) known to do phenomenal things for growth! A day or so before the competition, the father picked one or two of the best of the 20 chickens, and those made the trip to the fair. The daughter often won! Mostly the judges just wanted a really healthy chicken. However, having been raised outdoors, 'free range', walking through tall grass pecking at seeds and insects wasn't part of it! For your remarks on quality in farmer's markets, the subjects on Martha's program are likely good examples: The bakery and Coach Farm just produce their products and ship the results. Sure, if some loaf of bread just doesn't look right, then it may end up as input to the bread crumb sideline or as lunch for the staff. For Coach's cheese, I suspect that the process is so well refined that very little needs to be 'rejected'. For the pears and figs, these are selected and picked by hand. So, likely lots of the fruit that doesn't ripen quite correctly, that doesn't look just right, that gets damaged by birds or insects, etc. just doesn't make it to the farmer's market. So, with pears and figs, there is a lot of selection but not much in 'second quality' product to bring to market. The bad fruit may get sold for livestock feed, plowed under, or some such. When my wife's father was raising flocks of 40,000 chickens, part of the work each day was walking through the chicken houses and picking up the chickens that had died the previous 24 hours. A tractor was used to dig a trench for the dead chickens. At the farm, the chickens that were sold looked healthy, lively, the appropriate size, etc. For some of your comments on commodities, I have a friend that used to kill 5000 hogs a day. Of course, live hogs, as well as pork bellies, are traded commodities. One of his standard complaints the pork industry 'yellow sheet' publication that 'reported' on prices per pound. There has been a change in the pork industry -- it really did convert to leaner meat. But, otherwise, yes, from the farmer, kill and cut operator, and butcher case, it's a 'commodity' product. The usual solution to such a thing is to establish a brand, to sell branded meat in the meat case. There is movement in this direction. If we want really good food, then we can get it. eGullet is likely helping. That Martha could put on programs with the same theme is encouraging. In many businesses, there is a pattern that goes: "Of course we could do better, but you have to understand, our customers are idiots. We have tried special products, and we just discovered yet again -- our customers are idiots. Sure, we know how to do better; the problem's not us; the problem's our customers. Did I mention, our customers are idiots?"

No asparagus -- instant up-chuck. Fresh spinach is nice; cooked spinach has a horribly bitter taste. Raw oysters -- occasionally, when really fresh, really cold, with a lot of spicy sauce. Otherwise, no raw meat. Will eat shrimp, lobster, and meat from crabs -- otherwise, no bugs. No 'softshell' crabs. For meat, mostly just skeletal muscle tissue. No reptiles. No felines or canines. Offal? Mostly awful. Like Indiana Jones, no "chilled monkey brains", not for dessert, not ever. And, no dung, even if soaked in alcohol -- sorry China. But, some biochemists might clarify just what really is and is not harmful to eat.

Craig Camp: "In other words she cooked like an Italian. I would disagree that the poor quality of American food today is based on the past. In one generation the time and care my grandmother invested in her cooking disappeared in a rush to convenience foods. One hundred years ago the United States was rich in wonderful, distinctive home/country cooking. The last 50 years has seen the devastation of that tradition in a wave of fast food and chain restaurants like TGIF. While I remember my grandmother's fried chicken kids today will remember KFC. Today we are trying to reclaim this rich cooking tradition and that is why places like eGullet exist." No way would I suggest anything but the best for the fried chicken of your grandmother in Illinois! Mostly my comments have to be for generalities because clearly many US farmers 100 years ago had terrific gardens and a river of fresh produce from their garden into their kitchen. And traditional methods of raising fowl, cattle, hogs would solve some of the worst of the problems with modern US supermarket commodity versions of such meats. Yes, 100 years ago, the US still had rich supplies of game, and at times L. Diat at the Ritz-Carlton in New York City was asked to prepare game brought to the hotel by guests; the game was the result of the guests' hunting. Would have been a good time to have been in New York City (assuming could have afforded a table at the Ritz-Carlton!). But I read the comments on Italian cooking in this thread differently: With my reading, Italy was and still is far ahead of what was common (speaking in generalities) or even what was reasonably doable in the US 100 years ago. A key reason is your "One hundred years ago the United States was rich in wonderful, distinctive home/country cooking." which, however, just didn't have the decades or centuries or the geographical density for critical mass that had been common for decades or centuries in Italy. Take cheese: First-cut, people made cheese just to preserve milk. Soon, people notice that a huge range of flavors is possible. First-cut, mostly these flavors are YUCKY, but, in time, with a LOT of selection and refinement, we can get Chiberta, Port du Salut, Parmesan, Emmenthaler, etc. Once some cheesemaker discovers some good version, it might take some decades for that version to get a collection of devotees, critical mass, etc. My father's experience was that in 1900 this process was underway in the US but got truncated by the uniformity of the nationwide cheese companies. Similarly for wine: No way would I say anything but the best for the wines of the New York Finger Lakes region, the islands of Lake Erie, Long Island, or California, but it took decades for them to get to where they are at present. You know much better than nearly anyone how long it took to get Barolo, Chianti, Valpolicella, Chambertin, Meursault, etc. -- years, decades, centuries? Take morels: I had an uncle that was terrific at gathering the things. Sometimes he sent big supplies! Gather them in the fields? Yes. Do really good things with them in the kitchen? No! I included them in a cream-based deglazing sauce for roasted chicken, and I learned this from French cooking. For French cooking, my uncle and his wife just didn't get very well exposed, and they certainly weren't in a position to reinvent classic techniques, or comparably good techniques, from French or Italian cooking for themselves. In the US in 1900, there wasn't time: There wasn't time enough in the day to get very far inventing things as good as Parmesan or Barolo. And there wasn't time -- the decades -- in place for the culture to invent such things. There wasn't time to find the best parings of vegetable varieties and 'terroir' as in Italy and so emphasized in this thread. There wasn't time enough to develop really good tomatoes for really good sauce for really good pizza, with really good crust, in special pizza ovens, with really good topping of cheese, meats, and vegetables or anything comparable. Instead, in the US, mostly flour was flour. A recent TV travel show covered present Berlin and showed a pastry shop with a long display of great variety. Bet you can find many comparable shops in Italy. Gee, in the US, in a few big cities we get some pastry shops and otherwise we get doughnuts, each day millions and millions of doughnuts. Pastry making is taught at the CIA, at Cornell, etc., but mostly US customers are content with doughnuts. For the current -- poor -- state of US cooking (a generality), I do blame "the past" in the US. The really 'good stuff' just didn't have time to get developed, accepted, treasured, established. Thus, we -- in the US -- were and are suckers for hundreds of supermarket 'Italian' food products that are poor as imitations of good Italian food or as good food in any sense. E.g., they still sell that sawdust they call 'Parmesan cheese' don't they? For some decades, the standard high end US restaurant appetizer was shrimp cocktail. Sure, it could be good, especially since US shrimp can be excellent. But from Italian cooking I learned about an 'antipasto' that might have shrimp but also could have a huge variety of other meats, cheeses, vegetables, sauces, etc. Learning from that example, when my wife and I were giving dinner parties, we eagerly shopped for whatever might be interesting and covered a large tray. Guests were surprised and thrilled. In the US for decades a standard salad was lettuce with some dressing. The lettuce might be a wedge of head lettuce, and the dressing might be, say, half bottled (US) French and Thousand Island. From Italy, we learn that a 'salad' can have a wide variety of leafy vegetables and a wide variety of other vegetables, meats, cheeses, seasonings. capers, anchovies, varieties of vinegar, varieties of olive oil, etc. -- the variety, inventiveness, creativity, flavors, excellence are unbounded. Once in the Midwest, I was told not to use wine vinegar in the salad dressing because of 'wine' in the label and that I should use distilled white vinegar instead. At least they didn't insist that I replace the olive oil with motor oil! Nearly any dry Italian cheese I buy and grate is magnificent, and the best of it is one of the "few good old time flavors left to enjoy", one of the crown jewels of civilization, and in the US our version is sawdust!

Pan, Bill Klapp: You mentioned "Alaskan salmon, Lousiana crawfish, wild rice, some native shellfish (scallops, clams), turkey, Maine lobsters" and "blue crabs". Right. Yes, the US was pristine, the waters were full of fish and shellfish, the fields and forests were full of game, berries, and herbs, the skies were full of birds, and then the Europeans came and tried to 'improve' the place! In my "Yes, we have maple syrup on buckwheat pancakes. Can anyone name 9 more as good?" I was being a bit facetious. Also, I was thinking of 'dishes' and not just ingredients. Of course, we could consider all the fish and shellfish and all the ways to cook it: Broil the fish and soft shell crabs, boil the rest, and serve one of two ways: (1) butter with lemon juice and (2) lemon juice with butter. Immediately people from Louisiana will mention all the incredible things that they do with fish and shellfish, and I will mention that Cajuns were bringing French ideas! cdh: Thanks. Yes, for explanations for the lack of interest in flavor, we could bring in the 'Protestant work ethic', Puritanical austerity, etc. My explanation is simpler: They just worked so hard that it was considered frivolous and wasteful to concentrate on flavor. I am sure that there were kitchens that did pursue flavors, but as a whole in that hard working and rather isolated culture, interest in flavor just didn't get 'critical mass'. Your family was from a farming area near Princeton, and my father was from one in western New York -- in both cases, somehow, likely essentially from being further east and less isolated, there was more interest in flavor.

Date of French restaurants: Yes, as the royals of Europe traveled, they needed places to stay, and hotels were invented. Guests were served food, commonly in the dining rooms of their hotel suites. Then it was natural to have a central restaurant for the hotel instead. As I recall the dates, Escoffier and Ritz came along about the time the hotel restaurants were opening. Date of Italian-American restaurants: While in college in Columbus, Ohio the 1930s, my father ate at family run Italian restaurants run by Italian immigrants, e.g., with the mother in the kitchen. Gee: So, they came from Italy knowing only home cooking and not knowing about restaurants and successfully got into the restaurant business on their own? Enterprising of them. And common. Date of Chinese restaurants: As I understand it, in China, most of the real art of Chinese cooking is practiced only in restaurants. Given the age of Chinese civilization, I have a difficult time guessing that restaurants in China started only after the Western or French examples. Are there any more details on dates of restaurants in China? One reason French, Italian, Chinese, and Mexican restaurants do well in the US: The food is good, and the competition from food that is native and unique to the US is not very strong. Yes, we have maple syrup on buckwheat pancakes. Can anyone name 9 more as good? Yes, the US has been very slow to take flavor in food seriously. One result is that, essentially, there is too little in demand from customers and too little in supplies from vendors for an Italian restaurant in the US to serve food as good as in Italy. Here is some 'participant observation' of why the US has been so slow to take flavor in food seriously: My wife's father served in WWII and at the end of the war decided to be a farmer on his 88 acres of his father's farm of about 440 acres in NE Indiana. The father with 440 acres was the first farmer to farm that land, likely starting about 1900. So, we have a farmer that went to NE Indiana about 1900, got 440 acres, and started farming. Clearly we're talking about a guy a very, very long way from influences of white truffles, porcini mushrooms, special varieties of tomatoes, hundreds of varieties of cheese and wine with exquisitely developed flavors, etc., likely all of which had long been common in Italy by 1900. Really, this farmer was just working himself 18+ hours a day just getting the basic work done to grow the row crops, handle the livestock, put up the buildings, etc. One guy on 440 acres without an internal combustion engine or electric power was a very busy hard working guy. Compared with most farmers in Italy, the 440 acres was likely more land, and generally more productive per acre for corn and wheat, but the surrounding culture -- 'cultural capital' -- for flavor in food was far behind. By the time my wife's father started farming after WWII, there was electric power, internal combustion engines for tractors, other farm machinery, trucks, and cars, telephones, good paved roads, good public schools, decent medical care, and good supplies of building materials, home furnishings, ready made clothing, etc. But, there was still nearly no progress in cultural capital for flavor in food, certainly nothing that would permit accurate reproductions of food in Italy or even approximations of the level of quality. In the 1950s, he worked with the local USDA Extension Agent and learned that suddenly it was possible to be much more productive in raising chickens. There were three reasons: (1) Better breeding. (2) Better understanding of nutrition. (3) Antibiotics. So, suddenly it was possible to raise a flock of 40,000 chickens all indoors. Time and feed from egg to market were cut enormously. The chickens were fat, meaty, and healthy. Soon he was clearing $5000 a month on his 88 acres. By 1964, that chicken business was no longer very good. It was more efficient to raise chickens in the South where chicken houses needed much less heat in the winter and where soy beans for feed were plentiful. So, he mostly left the chicken business, tried turkeys and hogs, and then mostly just grew corn, wheat, or soy beans and got a desk job in the local town. When I talked with him for hours starting in 1966, he was a walking encyclopedia on details of raising chickens. Soon I was reading and cooking from Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck, 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking', Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1967. and, with his daughter, eating in the best restaurants around DC, including ones with all French menus that served wines from the Cote d'Or, getting French wines and cheese in Georgetown, etc. So, I was getting interested in flavor in food and asked him about flavor in chickens. He was offended. He quickly asserted that he didn't have any idea about flavor. His goal was just to raise a healthy meaty chicken at low cost -- he was good at it, and did, in flocks of 40,000 at a time. I mentioned to him that some restaurants might pay high prices for, say, pheasants and that, therefore, he might consider raising pheasants. He wondered why higher prices for pheasants that likely have much less meat per dollar of cost and per pound of bird than his chickens. I mentioned flavor. He was offended. The whole idea that flavor should be a consideration was offensive -- unproductive, silly, effete, etc. When I had first met his daughter, I had quickly taken her often to the best restaurants in Bloomington, Indiana, a college town with relatively cosmopolitan culture -- including a world class music school, a long list of professors from Europe, and students from all over the world -- and, for the US, relatively good restaurants. So, as soon as we got to the farm, she reciprocated by taking me to the best local restaurant -- the Spanish Hot Dog place. Here you drove up to a gravel area and walked to a window and placed an order. The result was a hot dog on a hot dog bun topped with essentially salsa. For a hot dog, it was okay. But, that was the local version of a four star restaurant, both in concept and actuality. Note: It is not a matter of intelligence. Both her parents had had excellent records in college. And she was Phi Beta Kappa, 'Summa Cum Laude', and Woodrow Wilson, which is not just good for Indiana but world class academic excellence. Also, she was, in a word, brilliant. For all that is desirable about good flavor, actually it is NOT necessary for intelligence (i.e., can have brilliant children fed only very bland food), but intelligence can help in working with flavors: When we were exploring wines from the Cote d'Or, she could remember and compare flavors across years, one Nuit St. George two years before to one Chambertin in front of us then. Astounding. Actually, in the 1950s, he sponsored a couple from Latvia. The man from Latvia was a great guy and a very hard worker but from the working classes and, likely, not conversant in French wines, etc., but the woman was from the upper classes and an excellent cook of Central European foods. Her pastry tray looked like something from a shop in Vienna. Her idea of what to do with a chuck roast was to make a stock out of it and then grind the meat, mix with minced salt pork and onions, and make dumplings -- which were terrific. Still, such influences were essentially like water off a duck's back there in the Indiana farm country. So, as of about 1970 in the farming parts of NE Indiana, it was common to know essentially nothing, and, really, care less, about food flavors as pursued so strongly in Europe (China, India, etc.). In simple terms, a main reason was that the parents of the people farming then arrived in the area about 1900 when there was essentially no contact with the outside world, where there were a lot of acres per farmer, and where the farmers worked very hard just on basic productivity and ignored everything else. There is also a second big reason that has to do with timing: My father grew up in dairy farm country in western New York State. He explained that there were local cheese factories dotted all over the countryside with a slightly different cheese from each little factory. The reason: There was only horse power for transportation and little in refrigeration so that the farmers needed to get the milk to a cheese factory in a big hurry -- so, there were enough cheese factories for each farmer to be close to one. So, so far, likely the situation looked much like Europe, but that situation lasted, mostly, for only a few decades, and a few decades is not long enough for a really solid industry of unique cheeses to develop. The situation ended due to good roads and refrigerated trucks that permitted many fewer large cheese factories run by nationwide brands -- Kraft, Borden, etc. So, there got to be Kraft cheese. That was one. Then there was Borden cheese. That was two. There were also a few more. And that was it. There seems to be a third influence: It is clear from the discussions that commonly in Italy, one can do their shopping at a 'market'. So, I suspect that here the producers come to town and set up their stalls, and customers visit the stalls, talk directly with the farmer or someone in the family, and select the products. So, commonly the customer will know the name of the farmer. Then, the farmer has a unique 'brand'. So, the farmer is no longer selling generic least cost per pound chicken of no particular flavor. Instead, a farmer with a better tasting chicken can get known for that chicken and get happy repeat customers. Why not in the US? Well, likely those markets in Italy went back hundreds of years while the US, a very young country, got nationwide supermarket chains before the farmers markets could let the farmers get any local 'brand' identity. The supermarket chains sold only generic chicken -- a farmer with a better tasting chicken that cost $0.10 a pound more to produce just lost $0.10 a pound. Losing $0.10 a pound on 40,000 chickens a few times will make anyone give up on working for better 'flavor'! Sure, at any time, there in Indiana, some farmer could bring special quality products to some farmers market and start to build a local brand and reputation for special quality. But, with the supermarkets already well established -- with spotlessly clean floors, well managed staff, nice carts, nice parking lot, courteous teenagers to carry groceries to the car (common in Indiana) -- such an effort in a farmers market is an uphill battle where the customers are not yet thinking very hard about flavor and getting critical mass will be tough, REALLY tough. The accepted local social norms will hold that all the 'best' people buy their groceries in the best local family run supermarket, which is a center of local gossip, and only 'strange' people -- esthetes, foreigners, and people that smoke funny stuff -- bother to wander on wood chips among buzzing insects in a farmers market. Eventually, the word will get out about better products from known local producers, each with essentially their own brand and selling direct from producer to consumer. So, for pheasants, fine, but have to come to Joe's Pheasant Farm stall only on Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings. Then, the farming regions of the US will try raising the best fruits, vegetables, poultry, etc. they can, and the quality can quickly become world class. If really good Italian tomato sauce needs tomatoes with special acid, sugar, texture, flavor, etc., then farmers, seed suppliers, plant breeders, etc. can get to work and, for each relevant farming area, provide a suitable variety. It can explode. One bottleneck is getting the information out to the customers, information about how good a tomato, a piece of cheese, an onion, some olive oil, some basil, can really be. Here the Internet and eGullet can circumvent the TV and book publishing media run by fiction devotees with scorn, contempt, and cynicism and high inertia for anything new, and the customers can get the information, patronize the farmers markets, and start a revolution. It will be more fun to have the family work on such better eating than watching network TV 'prime time' entertainment's great wasteland.

It's been years since I did a souffle. When I did them, they all went 'poof' up very high, no problem. I did chocolate a few times; cheese more times; and orange most of all. But, I didn't really like the results and quit because I had three questions with no answers: (1) Cap. A common trick is, just before the souffle goes into the oven, to dig a circular trench in the batter where the circle is horizontal, the center of the circle is on the vertical center line of the souffle dish, the diameter of the trench circle is maybe 1/2" less than the inside diameter of the top of the souffle dish, and the trench is about 1/2 as deep as the depth of the batter. Then, during the baking, the batter is supposed to form a split (crevice, canyon) and leave the inside of the circle an especially high cap. The interior of the trench is mostly not browned and, thus, makes a contrast in color with the browned parts of the cap. There is a good photograph on the cover of 'Foods of the World: The Cooking of Provincial France', Time-Life Books, New York, 1968. When I tried this trench trick, my batter was never viscous enough; the trench didn't stay formed; and I got very little cap effect. (2) The best restaurant souffles I had had interesting interior texture. The interior texture of my souffles was not very homogeneous and was more like clumps of curds surrounded by wetter egg foam; the best restaurant souffles had a more homogeneous texture that was more a very light custard. My inhomogeneous texture was not as attractive. (3) However good my souffles looked coming out of the oven, served on a plate they were not very attractive. For the orange souffles, I did coat the inside of the souffle dish with butter and sugar, and this coating mostly stuck to the batter and tasted good. Also the Grand Marnier aroma was good. Otherwise, the dish as served on a plate wasn't so attractive. In all the sources I consulted, I never saw any discussion of getting the batter thick enough for a cap to form or how to get a desirable texture or appearance on the plate. I gave up. Any ideas on thick batter for caps, texture, or appearance as served?

This is quite a thread: Some of the ambiguity in the original point has led to some surprising clarifications. The point by babyluck about what might be the effects of flavors from laboratories in New Jersey is an interesting caution -- we could be left liking only New Jersey artificial chemicals instead of real food, and giving up real food in this way would have risks. One reason to avoid Miracle Whip: As we strive to learn to cook, what we learn is more solid (long lasting, more under our control) if it is based on more standard ingredients and less solid if it is based in part on proprietary ingredients, e.g., bottled secret sauces. So, we could be a little happier if the eggs with Miracle Whip could be just as good if made with homemade mayonnaise. If this point is true and we have established it and if, then, a restaurant for reasons of cost observes that with Miracle Whip they can save some cost and effort and get good results, then bring on the Miracle Whip use the time and money saved for something else. One reason to avoid margarine: Mostly we suspect that using butter would make the dish taste better. But, I have nothing against Miracle Whip. It is close to mayonnaise, and I doubt that it is in any way dangerous. Moreover, the people that make Miracle Whip may actually have made some progress in some respects over homemade mayonnaise; if so, then good for them. Also, it may be that somehow Miracle Whip can do some really good things for texture as in the eggs, maybe even do some things that homemade mayonnaise could not. If so, then very good for Miracle Whip. E.g., in my souffle trials, the mixtures always rose very nicely, but I never got an internal texture I really liked. Maybe some Miracle Whip would be the cure? Maybe similarly for Vichyssoise. I do vaguely remember that my (late) wife once had a recipe, that sadly I don't remember, for something that tasted marvelous and based heavily on Miracle Whip. Fine. Good for Miracle Whip and whoever invented the recipe.

Chef Hill, Many thanks for your masterclass on cooking. I am hoping that you can provide some guidance on how to select and balance flavors. I am able to get salt and pepper to my taste easily enough, but sweet and sour are more difficult for me, and all the rest from wine and mushrooms, garlic, shallots, scallions, yellow globe onions, carrots, celery, green beans, bell peppers to fruits, nuts, herbs, tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, other vegetables, milk, butter, cream, bottled sauces, etc. often escape me and leave me just guessing and making blind stabs. To me, in desserts, that apricot can work well with chocolate is one of the mysteries of the universe. Of course, a good musician can look at sheet music and 'hear' what the music would sound like, and the best composers did at least much of their composing in their heads. Maybe a good cook can do something similar, but so far I'm not there yet. So, when I try something and it doesn't taste very good, I am a bit lost on what changes to make for improvements, and blind stabs at changes can take a long time! E.g., would ratatouille -- blended into a 'sauce' -- work poorly or well as an accompanying sauce with roast beef, grilled beef steak, grilled chicken, baked chicken, seared and then baked fillets of cod, steamed lobster, roasted lobster, etc.? I wish I could say without just trying them all. The main technique I have is to reduce the number of flavors back to something minimal, get a balance there, and then try adding back omitted flavors one or two at a time. On how to select and balance flavors, what approaches can you suggest?