David A. Goldfarb

And just to show how things never change: "The kitchens of holiday houses, whether cramped and larderless, or vast, bare, with a day's march between sink and stove, usually have a stony bleakness in common. However adequate the beds or satisfactory the view, the kitchen equipment will probably consist of a tin frying pan, a chipped enamel saucepan, one pyrex casserole without a lid, and a rusty knife with a loose handle." Elizabeth David, opening lines of "Improvised Cooking for Holidays and Weekends" from Summer Cooking, 1955.

After a few experiences of cooking with vacation condo cookware and my pocket knife, I now tend to bring a board, a couple of good knives, a large skillet with a cover, and with that and whatever's around I can make pretty much anything I'd want to make. I may bring a few other ingredients like spices, olive oil, and such, just to avoid having to buy them if it's a short trip. From there I like to cook local as much as possible, go to farmers' markets, see who's selling locally caught seafood when we're near the water, and find local meats if it's that kind of region. Since I don't get to grill much in New York, I try to grill a lot on vacation. Part of the enjoyment of travel for me is making things I can't or don't tend to make at home.

Skirt steak on the reversible grill/griddle tonight, accompanied with red cipollini onions tossed in olive oil, salt & pepper also on the grill, and I think I was imprinted by the mentions above of gratin dauphinoise, because I made that too. I agree that it's not a difficult dish to make in small quantities in an appropriately sized pan, and if you slice the potatoes with a knife--it's not enough to justify cleaning a food processor or mandoline.

Copper bottomed stainless is great stuff as well. I have a couple of Sitram Catering frypans, and stainless has "sticking" qualities not unlike enamel, and the copper bottom has better heat distribution than cast iron. I also have heavy copperware, some tin lined, which is slicker than stainless, and some stainless lined. I guess I like using the LeCreuset when I want that heat retention and the heavy lid, and then avoiding hotspots is just a matter of managing the heat more attentively than is necessary with heavy copper or stainless with a heavy copper disk. I do a fair amount of stovetop braising, particularly when I don't want to heat up the kitchen by running the oven or when I want the oven for something else. If I braised in the oven more often, it wouldn't matter as much, and in practice, I often choose between the 6 quart LeCreuset and the 10 quart copper rondeau on the basis of size more than cooking qualities. Sometimes I'll brown in a large copper saute pan or Sitram copper-bottomed frypan and transfer the meat to the LeCreuset to avoid crowding the LeCreuset, and then I'll deglaze the pan and add the liquid back to the braise (the alternative being browning in the LeCreuset in a few smaller batches, taking each batch out, and putting it back in the pot).

I haven't met an Asian family that doesn't have a rice cooker. It's a handy thing, if you make rice all the time, which we do. I'm dubious, though, of rice cookers with more settings than "on" and "warm." No commercial rice cookers have more than that or separate programs for different kinds of rice or fuzzy logic computers, and somehow, Asian restaurants all manage to produce rice that their Asian customers find satisfactory.

Every few years I have okra to verify that I continue not to like it.

It's not a matter of longer aged beef retaining the juice, so much as more of the juice being water in meat that hasn't been aged as long. If you're buying a whole fillet in cryovac, you can drain it for about three days in the fridge on paper towels on a platter, covered loosely in plastic, changing the paper towels each day, and it will be substantially improved. The meat will be denser, more flavorful, and will brown better.

Hasn't there been something in the news in the past year about the price of milk and dairy products being generally depressed, making it harder for small dairy farmers? Here are a couple of recent articles-- http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=187215 http://www.lancasterfarming.com/node/2748 Maybe we should be wishing for higher prices. When I can, I've been buying milk and cream from Milk Thistle (http://milkthistlefarm.com/), a small producer of organic milk from Jersey cows that is sold at the Union Square and other Greenmarkets in NYC. The milk is of higher quality than even organic milk from the supermarket, so they seem to be able to set their own price without too much regard for the commodity price of milk. I've made butter from the cream, and it was excellent, but at $14/lb, I don't think I'll be doing it very often. I just made a batch of ice cream from the cream with only cream, milk, raw cane sugar, eggs, a pinch of salt, and no vanilla or other flavorings, and that I might be making more often, even if it is a bit pricey.

I like my LeCreuset dutch oven. I've had it for about 10 years. Things are supposed to stick to enamel to make a fond that can be deglazed. If I don't particularly want that, I use a different pot. The enamel has held up well, and the lid is heavy and fits tightly. I don't need a heart-shaped one, but what says "love," after all, like braised meat?

Butter has been pretty cheap here in Queens, New York recently. Normally it's around $3.50-4/lb, but before Christmas one place had it at $1.50/lb (I had freezer space for 4 lbs), and another market this week had it at $2.50/lb with a customer loyalty card. I've seen ordinary supermarket butter get up to $5-6/lb occasionally over the past few years, and at some of those times, premium European butter has actually been cheaper. Usually European butter is $6-8/lb in New York, with the occasional fluctuation.

I used to have an Il Gelataio SC, which had a gel-filled canister that stayed in the freezer, and it worked pretty well. I think they stopped making that model, unfortunately, because the gel canister was integral to the main container, so it could function as an ice bucket and had fewer parts to clean than most ice cream makers of that type, but eventually the gel canister burst, and I had to toss it. I replaced it with the Cuisinart self-freezing model, which is more expensive, but it lets me make multiple successive batches, if I want more than one flavor at a time without waiting to freeze the canister, and it doesn't take up any freezer space. It does make a lot of noise, however, which can be annoying if you have other things to do in the kitchen while it's freezing (usually 40 min. to an hour). The ice cream from either of these machines should harden for a while in the freezer, but it shouldn't get rock hard unless you leave it in the freezer for several weeks. I usually make custard based ice creams, so this helps keep things smooth. Ice cream directly from pretty much any ice cream maker is usually soft and needs to be frozen, if you want it harder, otherwise the ice cream maker wouldn't be able to turn, at least not without an impractically strong motor. You can make ice cream with a stand mixer and ice and salt in a water jacket around the bowl. I think KitchenAid now makes an ice cream maker attachment with a gel canister for this purpose.

Caramelized onions and brie make a nice omelet filling. You can fold them into bread dough before the final rise for onion bread.

I remember that beer that came in the squat green bottles. They had it in the midwest as well. I thought about "Mickey Finn," but it's a different thing. "Antimacassar" is a word I use whenever the opportunity presents itself, so I like the idea of its extension to a large quantity of wine.

Macaroni & cheese, but maybe with some kind of interesting, hydrocolloid type "macaroni."

More onions and smaller cooking surface will slow things down, and it could be that this particular batch of onions has more moisture than other onions you've used or onions at different times of year. A wide flat rondeau or saute pan works well with a lot of onions. Give them more time. Eventually they'll brown.

I tried the twice grinding/freezing method with my KitchenAid for a batch of beef hot dogs, and it worked pretty well. The key is keeping everything cold through the whole process. Regarding the substitution of black pepper for white pepper in the duck prosciutto, Ruhlman recently made some remark on Facebook (or maybe it was a Twitter post mirrored to Facebook) about not understanding why anyone would use white pepper for anything, so he'd probably go along with it.

"Stand mixer method" doesn't quite tell the whole story, since it assumes a stand mixer with a grinder attachment. The idea is to grind the meat twice, freezing in between to get an ultrafine grind, and then the emulsion is mixed in the bowl of the mixer with the flat beater.

My grandmother used those wooden bushel baskets for the apples and plums from her backyard trees on the East Side of Cleveland. I Googlemapped the house to see if the trees were still there, and it looks like the apple tree is gone, but it was quite old as I recall, so it probably expired due to natural causes.

Thanks for all the gory details!

And when soaking fails, there's oven cleaner or lye if you can get it in your locale (but not on copper--it leaves a deep tarnish that will take a while to get out).

Elizabeth David has dessertspoon, liqueur glass, wine glass, coffeecup, teacup, tumbler, breakfastcup, and gill. A gill is a quarter pint, but of course she's referring to a quarter of an imperial pint, which is a bit more than a quarter of a U.S. pint. She was apparently adamant about not translating these measures into other units, which was part of the reason that these classic books weren't as popular as they might have been in the U.S. My grandmother on my mother's side has recipes calling for "a glass of oil" (by which I assume she meant those green juice glasses with the Grecian motif on them--enough oil to fill her square electric skillet up to about a quarter inch) or "three whiskey glasses," which I think means "three shots of whiskey," because the glasses could get a bit unpleasant ground up in her honey cake.

When we went, the Riserva wasn't on the menu. I mentioned an interest in a Riserva steak when I made a reservation on OpenTable about 3-4 days before our meal, but they didn't have any on hand when we got there. They seem to know about when they will have them, so if you want to try a Riserva steak, I would call in advance and ask when they will be available to be sure they will have some when you're in the restaurant. My impression is that they are offered as a special when they have them.

Maybe not everyone agrees on the correct seasoning level, and I don't think everyone would change they way they boiled pasta, if pre-salted pasta were suddenly to appear on the market. Pasta dough is also fairly stiff with just enough liquid to gather it together usually, so it probably would take an extra step, like dissolving the salt in the liquid, to get it to distribute uniformly through the dough.

Nicely done. Did the aspic layer just ooze out, or did you pour that in through the portholes?

Usually vegetables of some sort in season. I like the standards like creamed spinach, creamed onions, glazed carrots, steamed broccoli or brussels sprouts, corn in season, salads and such, baked potatoes, fries, or rösti particularly if I'm making a sauce. Sometimes I'll do caramelized mushrooms and onions as a garnish or maybe a relish with tomato, onion, olives, and sherry vinegar. I made a porterhouse yesterday ($5.97/lb yesterday at the local supermarket for a thick one was too good to pass up) with fries and baby bella mushrooms with a mushroomy sauce à la Laguipierre.