Wilfrid

Thanks rozrapp. This is definitely on my to-do list.

Steve Klc? What's wrong with me and Tommy?

It's TV, for god's sake. Of course it's bullshit. Look carefully, Nina, there was a wink.

La Varenne was clearly important - according to Mennell his book was a bestseller for decades. At the same time, other writers were denouncing him as "rustic" and "vulgar" within just a few years. Mennell does credit the La Varenne school with moving away from mediaeval spices and developing bouillons/stocks as the basis for a range of soups. The next major development does seem to have been in the 1730s and 1740s, when there was actually talk of a "nouvelle cuisine". Writers like Menon made the important advance from bouillons to fonds and laid the foundations for modern saucing. So it's a long story. Steve, we can certainly do a library trip, maybe in the second half of September? Let's PM. In the meantime: Mennell cites two articles by the Hymans. There isn't a book by the Hymans too, is there? The story of French cooking up to 1789 is tackled in a lot of detail in Barbara Wheaton's Savoring the Past. That may be the quick way to answer some of these questions. I hadn't referred to it much on the French cuisine thread, because I was interested in how French cuisine got exported after that time.

Ruined it for me.

Oh you remembered. I can't remember which recipe I last tried. It all starts to go wrong at the stage where you slowly drip in the oil. But I expect you guessed that.

You mean scones, right?

The voice of reason returns.

Good stuff, Dave. Personally, I think there's room for "fun" shows on the network as well as informative programming, but it does seem to be a one-way street right now.

I read the Mario piece last night. I thought the substance of it was very interesting. I didn't know anything about Mario's background, and was amazed that he'd worked in a London pub kitchen with Marco Pierre White. Conjures quite a picture. But I didn't like the extended episodes about the author, Bill Buford, doing the George Plimpton thing in the Babbo kithcen. I know that the amateur in the professional kitchen is something of a recognized genre, but he could have beenin any kitchen anywhere. It felt like the article had been padded, and I ended up skipping most of that.

I wondered why I fancied him.

Fox News: We report, you decide.

A couple of days browing through this lot might help too. Oh and here's the Academy of Medicine collection: "Margaret Barclay Wilson Collection on Food and Cookery Over 5,000 volumes and approximately the same number of pamphlets which document the history of cookery, gastronomy, nutrition and dietetics in the Western world. The materials appear in over 20 languages and range in date from A.D. 900 to the present. " Steve, have you thought of endowing a research scholarship in the subject? You could make yourself the first fellow!

Yes, I cited the publication of La Varenne in English on the thread about French cuisine - which is maybe where we should be discussing this. Two questions. Although La Varenne was a milestone, my understanding is that the foundations of a recognizably modern French gastronomy were laid in the 1730s, when writers like La Chappelle (actually published first in English) and Menon established basic building blocks like the fonds system. Did that develop not consign La Varenne to the status of a historical curiosity? Second, why do you think important things were happening between 1540 and 1653? I just don't quite follow. I agree, La Varenne-ian cuisine may not have sprung fully formed into existence as his book came off the press, but why wasn't it a recent development? Why must it have been developing over the previous century and a half? This is all interesting factual stuff, but I'm a bit vague about what, if anything, we're discussing now.

We've left peasant cookery, of course, but let me just summarize where I think we are: Steve, if I understand you, you're saying: forget about techniques and ingredients and all the details, the simple reason why French cuisine became pre-eminent among important classes in British society in the nineteenth century was that it tasted good. I say that's wrong. It may have tasted out of this world, but the reason it achieved pre-eminence as Britain's high class, professionally produced, fine dining cuisine, is that the whole notion of this style of dining came from France, along with the food. The availability of French chefs to work in Britain gave huge impetus to the process. There was no alternative fine dining tradition, either home grown or available from overseas - Mennell is quite explicit about this, and he argues further that the success of French cuisine "decapitated" British cuisine; it removed any incentive to develop a high fashion version of indigenous cooking, at least until the late twentieth century.

That's not a theory. It's an obvious fact - as long as you don't spoil it by saying everyone liked the way the food tasted. What it's not, however you dress it up, is a convincing historical explanation of how French food achieved its professional dominance. If that's what you think it is. insert puzzled emoticon like this

Do you mean they weren't or do you mean you've already forgotten how they came to be?

I was lured into this thread only by the brutal bathos of its title. What a double whammy*. The tawdry, party's over, mock-celebratory fart of the word "Smollensky's", holding all the promise of a 3a.m. lap dance at La Cappanina, followed immediately by the grim, impoverished, doom-laden crump of the word "Wapping". If I had five minutes, I'd write a brilliantly wry novel with that title. Any advance available, Simon? * A voodoo curse, as any fule kno; forget Chris Patten.

A utility drawer = a junk drawer with aspirations.

Talking of being knocked out by Cafe Boulud, I was knocked out last night by ravioli of wild mushrooms, with summer truffles and summer truffle sauce. I don't order pasta too often in restaurants, and have a conservative habit of choosing meat and fish ahead of vegetables, even for starters. But this was outstanding - deep, clear flavors. My Beloved, who is not stupid about these things, stole half of it and fobbed me off with the remainders of her okay country pate. I was just picking myself up, when I was knocked out a second time by tender rare veal medallions - more like torchons - garnished with a series of lovely suprises - some crunchy sauerkraut, a little cake of what I think was fennell-flavored polenta, some smoky pieces of tomato, and a remarkable tender/crunchy lattice of zucchini slices. Everything working together. Then they clobbered me with an odd thing they called almohadillo - sort of panache, if you like, of fresh peach flavored with cilantro of all things. Terrific, and with plenty of wine it was around $120 a head before tip. Think of some of the ordinary meals you might have paid $90 for. Book me in again. (There were some other vaguely familiar faces about the place who may care to comment further...) Edit: Blimey, that was pineapple, not peach. Just shows how puzzled you can get when it's scented with cilantro: "ALMOHADILLA Cilantro Flan Wrapped in Caramelized Pineapple Cactus Pear Sorbet"

Unless you believe Chairman Mao. That's what I thought John, but I try to avoid being dogmatic about such things - gives me a better chance of being right.

Night before last, in fact: Tiger prawns flamed - and big flames they were - in pernod, finished with cream and tossed in angel hair pasta.

"I was always of the understanding that the French revolution took place because the peasants and commoners were getting a raw deal from the monarchy. The royals were coming onto what commoners felt were "their land" and poaching game etc. Whether they actually owned the land, or had some type of sharecropping or landlease type of agreement I don't know. But I do remember reading somewhere that they were unhappy with the split, and that is one of the main things that propelled the revolution forward. To the contrary in Britain there wasn't an uprising against the enclosure laws. For some reasons the Brits who had traditionally farmed the land on a sharecropping arrangement queued up to live in the slums of the big cities without kitchens." As ever, your understanding is wrong, and thank you for another rude remark about the British History 101: The French revolution was fomented by the bourgeoisie, not the urban poor or the peasantry (a fair summary of the sequence of events can be found here. The British landowning and mercantile classes had overthrown their absolute monarchy more than a century before the French revolution, first in the Civil War of the 1640s, and for good in the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. Thereafter, and to the present day, Britain (or the UK) has had a government of king or queen in parliament with lords and commons. There was massive social unrest in Britain during the period of the industrial revolution, culminating in the bloody years under Lord Liverpool's goverment in the 1820s. But a cohesive national revolutionary impulse never developed - the "bourgeoisie", and indeed many among the lower classes, were not doing so badly. You'll search far and wide to find examples of genuinely agrarian-led revolutions. The reforming governments of the 1830s and 1840s expanded the franchise, ensured a degree of civil liberty, and in effect created conditions in which Britain was one of the few European natons not to experience a revolution in 1848. As we have seen previously, France remained under the domination of repressive, absolutist monarchs and emperors until around the 1870s, and only much later made significant expansions of the franchise.

Just to live up to the promise, John means that the most dominant cuisine will of course be the source of most dishes on such a list. By definition. That doesn't tell us anything other than that it's the most dominant cuisine, and certainly nothing about its merit. One day, American cooking may occupy such a position, maybe because it's great, but perhaps more likely because of global Americanization, whether you think that's a good thing or not.

Oh. Good. Where you is wrong, old chap, as you surely is, is as follows. Accept for the sake of argument that French food is being considered and evaluated during the 19th century by the serried ranks of wealthy, intelligent, sophisticated British palates from their superior vantage point. Your model is that they made a rational, considered judgment in favor of professional French cuisine, and all else followed. The truth is that there was only one horse in the race. And this was spelt out in some detail on the thread about how and why French cuisine arrived in Britain. No British tradition of haute cuisine had developed, for the reasons we explored before. And if there were courtly cuisines in Italy, Spain or Germany, these were not on offer (maybe a few aberrant exceptions) in Britain in the nineteenth century. There was no contest. In a hypothetical world where the British connoisseurs had been able to pull up their chairs to fine Italian, Japanese or even Persian dining, and compare it to what the French chefs had wrought, who knows what the conclusion would have been? "I'm not using best as in superior, I'm using best as in the cooking technique that was the most dominant." So, in countries where French cuisine is not dominant, another cuisine is the best? "It is not to the exclusion of other cuisines and other techniques as you proffer, but to the inclusion of those cuisines. So it isn't that there wouldn't be any dishes from other countries, on the list, it's that a large percentage of the dishes would be French in origin." Well if the list is great dishes of the world, I think we all agree with that, but ... er ... so what?