Wilfrid

Wilfrid, are you making an elaborate English/German/Yiddish(!) pun at the expense of your tablemates? Of course, of course.

I wasn't sure whether we should have had the Ting decanted? Thanks for reminding me of the panna cotta. It is one of my preferred dsserts - Odette Fada used to serve a killer panna cotta with a balsamic reduction at San Domenico in New York, but recently she has bowed to convention and served it with a fruit coulis. And of the subject of New York, yes, M. Bergougnoux, and I think L'Absinthe, despite its bumpy service, is an underrated restaurant. The big, lemon-coloured bean was called a "dragonhead", for no apparent reason, and it was crisp and sweet. I did remember the corn shoots, but not which dish they accompanied! Finally, I could kick myself: I typed "tuile", then deleted it because I thought I was probably wrong. You see, Steve, you did intimidate me!

Brands: the two dominant brands in the Dominican market are Brugal and Barcelo, and they compete fiercely. You should be able to sample their regulars line for about 30 cents a glass US. They each have deluxe styles, too. I sampled a very expensive Barcelo from the rum trolley at Alain Ducasse NY - not for drinking, you understand, but for pouring over the Rhum Baba. I can't give you the deluxe brand names from memory, and sadly the company web-sites are uninformative - but I bet someone else here can help out.

Thanks for the suggestions, Toby, which certainly sound quicker than my approach and therefore worth trying. I found the excess liquid problem in all the balls I have, er, handled - beef and lamb as well as bison. Is that sponginess, innit?

I looked it up too, of course, just didn't do a thorough job. Good old google.

Nobody likes a whole roast duck any more?

Try cleaning a hare some time - blood city. You wouldn't want the local constabulary knocking at your door. Glad you liked the rabbit liver - a tasty delicacy.

I see we have spread ourselves a little further than essential classics, so let me mention Elisabeth Luard's European Peasant Cookery. This kind of food is not for everyone, though surely everyone will recognize the roots of some dishes they like here. But it captures reasonably comprehensively a certain kind of very important attitude to food and cooking, it's very well arranged, the recipes as far as I have tried them work, and the anecdotal introductions are well written. It has its uses as a reference work too: it provides a handy guide the charcuterie of several countries, has a lot of information of ways of preserving food, and I also frequently have recourse to it for basic offal-cooking techniques.

Picked up a bag of cuchifritos last night from the Puerto Rican corner cafe at Houston and D. The highlight was thick sliced pork tongue, cooked to tenderness in a thin tomatoey broth. Small, glistening black, non-spicy morcillas. Couldn't face the pig's ears.

Thanks to a recommendation from Steve Klc, I had dinner at the Elysium restaurant on Saturday evening, and was delighted to be joined by Steve and his wife and Malawry. Elysium is in the Morrison House hotel, a Relais and Chateaux property designed in the style of an eighteenth century mansion, with some period furnishings, and a maze of public spaces - parlor, library, bar and two restaurants, Elysium and a more informal grill room. Elysium is a small space, which makes it practicable for the chef, Gian Piero Mazzi, to offer bespoke meals. He comes to the table, describes the produce available in the kitchen, consults on preferences, and then retires to send out dishes tailored to each diner. This presents considerably more flexibility than tasting menus which must be taken by the whole table, and might be difficult with larger numbers of covers. We received eight courses each, by my count, and with the exception of the amuse bouche and the desserts, each diner received a different dish in each course. Even Cabrales would have had trouble noting all this down, especially as each dish was intriguingly garnished - so I'll only attempt to describe my own menu - it goes without saying that Steve and Malawry can, should and probably will correct me: A pair of amuse bouches of raw tuna and raw escobar Filet of escobar with English peas Seared foie gras with sun-dried tomatoes and frisee salad Buffalo flank steak wrapped in maple smoked bacon, peas and black beans Salad of corn kernels and crab meat, wrapped in a strip of cucumber Peach sorbet with pieces of fresh white peach *** A tray of chocolates and petits fours, including a spong cake coated with coconut, star-shaped lemon jellies, and a delicate version of what the Brits call "cream horns" I have forgotten a bunch of ingredients, but worse than that I have not written the main dessert in my notes - hence the ***. I remember it came with a delicious syrup - someone help me out. Those of us drinking took a wine pairing with each dish - and I was surprised and impressed that different wines came out with the salad -a Riesling - and each of the dessert courses - Sauternes, port; New York wine-pairing menus usually give up at that point. The wine (and water) service struggled to keep pace with the food. The young matire d' and sommelier is a fairly recent arrival - I spoke with him the next morning - a nice guy from South Africa who is still feeling his way. Highlights: the pairing of foie gras with sun-dried tomatoes, a nice change from the sweet fruit garnishes ubiquitous in NY; the explosive crab flavor in the salad; I liked that dessert too - what the heck was it? And presentation was thoughtul and colorful. Manhattanites might regard it as a steal - the chef-designed menu priced around $67, with the wine pairing $30 plus dollars more - for seven or eight small tastings. And the conversation piece, which momentarily distressed and bewildered the chef when he saw it, was the bottle of Jamaican Ting soda which Malawary brought for me and which I proudly placed in the center of the table.

If you want to roast a whole duck, the best tip I can give you is to take the time to score the skin all over. Try not to cut the actual flesh, but make deep, criss-cross grooves which will let the fat run out and help the skin crisp as the duck cooks. This being your first duck, I would try a long, slow, low-termperature roast - checking it periodically - as not much can go wrong that way. If you try it quick and hot, it can toughen up on you. Rub plenty of salt into the skin too, and you may need to drain the roasting pan (your duck will be on a rack, otherwise it'll stew), occasionally and carefully. Keep the fat - it's great for cooking.

Outrageous favoritism.

Ooh, I missed the part of the question about '70 - hope that didn't disqualify me. But I may still be ahead with the Baron: note Bourdain says to cut them on not with a baron - although if he does mean cutting board, it's fairly superfluous advice.

Batonette is a standard term for vegetable chopping, and I always assumed it meant a small baton. Which would make sense. GPOD is a company which ships Idaho potatoes (as any fule kno). Baron, I think, is slang for a cutting board - the only derivation I can think of, and it's pretty obscure, seems to be from video "cutting" boards. Maybe it's a Bourdain-ism. I look forward to me dram.

The Carlyle Restaurant, where Jean Drumonet - previously of Trois Jean - has taken over the kitchen, is offering a stuffed duck neck salad in its Bastille day menu. The rest of the menu is less adventurous.

You should be able to get some spinal cord, if you keep your eyes open. I have forgotten the Italian name (although I had it memorized once for a trip to Rome).

That would have been most desirable. I have been commending these useful terms to Plotnicki for some weeks now, with little success.

Pain in the ass? Not at all. One of the free services I provide here is to point out when statements are so broad and unqualified that they are almost certain to be false. A good sprinkling of words like "many", "some", "certain" and "a few" always give positions a greater chance of validity. (Come on, you were just taking a trendy knee-jerk slap at academia, weren't you?)

And I'm sure tommy will agree that merely wearing black is not sufficient to make you part of the crowd he describes. Waving a big cigar around helps.

Heehee. Don't worry, Cabby, I am thinking very hard about the boiled chicken too!

Any news on Rodriguez's upscale Cuban-themed eatery which was scheduled to open last fall (or was it even longer ago than that)?

Nothing equivocal about it. When you say that "inderdisciplinary" is a code word for all that bad stuff, you generalize without qualification. I respond with two true statements: interdisciplinary means what it says, it's not a code word; you find the bad stuff in non-interdisciplinary courses. If what you meant to say was that interdisciplinary courses tend to lend themselves to politicization and low standards, we could have discussed that. But you didn't say that. There's no point protesting against evolution of the faculties. The purist impulse to recuperate food studies for anthropology (or media studies to literature) is no more than that - a purist impulse. The important question is whether good research and good teaching emerges, and I have no basis to contradict your assertion that, thus far, it hasn't. I was just trying to restrain the broad sweep of your brush.

I agree. Ignore the other customers. Some of the waitstaff are - erm -personable, though.

Thank you, Steve - I like to think so. I did decide to remove my outer plumage before retiring to the piano bar on Saturday night. Worried about getting stomped by operatic rednecks.

For New Yorkers, pig spleen sandwiches are still available at La Foaccacceria on First Avenue. Nina: on the New York board, you mentioned marinated goose intestines at Funky Broome. Did you sample? Or did you at least get a peek at them?