David A. Goldfarb

The explanation on this website reflects a common misconception about perspective and focal length. In the four examples shown where four trees seem far apart from each other when photographed with a wide lens and "compressed" when photographed with a long lens, this is because the distance between the subject and the lens has changed, not because the focal length has changed. If the photographer were to set up a tripod at the position where he was standing when using a 200mm lens, and then kept the camera in the same place and made a series of photographs with a 100mm lens, a 50mm lens, and a 28mm lens, cropped the photographs so that they all had the same framing and enlarged them all to the same print size, then they would all have the same compressed perspective.

No, I think we're using "subject" in the same way. Take a photograph of a person standing in a landscape or wherever at a fixed distance from the camera with a wide lens and with a long lens. Then crop the wide shot so the person takes up as much of the frame as s/he does in the long shot, and print the cropped shot made with the wide lens the same size as the uncropped shot made with the long lens. Perspective is the same, because the distance between the camera and the person is the same, even though one is made with a wide lens and one is made with a long lens. If you move closer to achieve the same framing in camera with the wide lens as you would with the long lens, rather than cropping the wide shot to achieve the same framing, then you are changing the subject distance, and that's what changes the relative size of objects in the frame causing big noses and such, not the focal length of the lens. Here's another way to think about it. Look out the window and hold your finger up in front of your eye. Think of your finger as the "subject." If you hold your finger a few inches away from your eye, it will appear very large compared to objects off in the distance. If you hold your finger at arm's length it will be considerably smaller relative to objects in the distance. You haven't changed the focal length of your eye (at least not significantly) or the size of your finger or the far off buildings or trees outside the window, but you've changed the subject distance, and that's what changes the relative size of the image of your finger compared to the objects in the distance.

That's sort of how I used to do it, but I think the key detail in Nick's version is to reduce the cream almost completely before combining it with the spinach, rather than adding the spinach and then reducing, so the spinach stays really fresh and green. This reminds me of another contender for the best creamed spinach in New York, which may not be in fact creamed, but serves a similar function and is really good, and that's the Super Green Spinach at Bar Boulud. I haven't had it in over a year, so I don't recall exactly, but it was a really fresh tasting bright green spinach. I don't recall whether it had cream. It may have just been lightly blanched spinach blended in a VitaMix, or it may have used something like chlorophyll extract to get that intense green color. Here's Florence Fabricant's theory of super green spinach-- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/dining/13pair.html?pagewanted=all

No, it's just subject distance. To put it another way, say you were to take a portrait from six feet away using a 35mm camera with a 28mm lens and an 85mm lens, and then you cropped the photo made with the 28mm lens and printed both to the same size with the subject the same size--perspective rendition would be the same in both photographs. Just to be clear on terminology, "perspective" in this context refers to the relative size of objects in the frame, so if you take a photograph of a near object and a far object together, the near object will appear relatively larger than the far object when you're standing close to it as compared to when you're seeing both of them from a greater distance. We tend to think of it as "distortion" when it looks unnatural, but really it just looks that way, because of the difference between normal print viewing distances and the actual distance from the lens to the subject, and our cultural expectations about perspective in two-dimensional images of all sorts. In portraiture you don't want to get too close usually, because it will make the nose look disproportionately large, but this effect is just due to being too close, and the fact that you need a wider lens to get the whole face into the picture is a separate issue.

Wow. I guess there's no more "saving money by going to the farmers' market" anymore, but it's great for the farmers that there's such interest in local produce these days. When I was there (1986-89), the farmers' market was a relatively new thing. Greenstar was on the ground floor of a converted house in town until they had a fire, and members really worked in the co-op for the most part. There was Moosewood, of course, and in Collegetown there was a vegetarian restaurant called Cabbagetown, which I noticed was gone last time we visited about a year ago, and there was an upscale restaurant just a bit out of town called "L'Auberge du Cochon Rouge," that also took an interest in local produce. As I recall, L'Auberge also had a fire and was rebuilt as a green building and has changed hands a few times. The Statler Hotel was under renovation at the time, so they weren't in a position to be much of a factor.

I tried a scaled down approximation of this recipe with fresh spinach, and it was excellent. The recommendations for reducing the cream until it's "almost burnt" and to use slightly browned butter were right on the mark, and the demi glace added some extra depth. I used cream from Milk Thistle dairy, which comes from Jersey cows and probably has a higher fat content than most supermarket cream, so that was a likely factor. I'd estimate my quantities were a half cup of cream for a 10 oz bag of spinach roughly chopped, maybe four tablespoons butter (two or three would have been adequate), and two tablespoons demi glace (one tablespoon would have been enough for this quantity of spinach actually). To keep the spinach green, I just wilted it in the butter in a saute pan, transferred the spinach to the saucepan with the reduced cream, reduced the remaining liquid from the pan with the spinach and mixed them all together, and left it covered with the heat off until just about ready to serve and then reheated on the lowest fire for about 10 minutes (i.e., while the steak was resting). Yield was about 2-3 good sized side servings. Thanks, Nick!

Yes, I think that would do it.

I recently noticed a good trick for making dry cured sausages where you might want to peel the skin before eating. My local Italian deli, Iavarone's in Maspeth, Queens, runs a string inside the casing of their sopressata along the edge, so that when you make the first slice, you can find the string and zip open the casing as the salami is sliced. I guess the way to do this would be to put one end of a spool of butcher's twine through the casing as the casing is fed onto the horn, and then you could pull the string through the casing as it is stuffed.

A longer lens would be a good idea; however, perspective distortion isn't caused by focal length but by the distance between the lens and the subject. Given the focal length Holly was originally using, I suspect that he was probably an appropriate distance from the plate to avoid too much perspective distortion, but the shot is too wide. A longer lens would have made it possible to fill more of the frame with the food from the same distance, without getting so close as to cause perspective distortion. If the plate looks a little convex, it may be because the plate is in fact a little convex. There is another kind of distortion that is very common in zoom lenses--barrel distortion at the wide end of the range and pincushion distortion at the long end of the range, and there may be some pincushion distortion going on here. Barrel distortion is a condition where straight lines at the edges of the frame bulge out, and pincushion distortion is the opposite, where straight lines at the edges of the frame curve in toward the center. Look at the way that glass that was eventually cropped out in the upper right hand corner of the frame seems to be leaning. That could be the result of pincushion distortion that is exaggerated a bit by the camera angle. In any case, when using a zoom lens for still life photography or copy work, it's a good idea to set the focal length in the middle of the range to reduce these distortion effects when possible.

All interesting. My usual ice cream base uses 6 yolks per quart. I suppose one of these days I should make some tests for myself and ruin a few custards just to see how hot it can go, but I've also found that, if I do it without a thermometer just going by consistency and then check the temperature, I'm still around 160 F.

I find puff pastry, croissants, and such satisfying for that reason, as well as things that get wrapped and garnished with pastry like Beef Wellington. I also enjoy doing things simply with a knife, even when it might be easier in some sense with a mandoline or a food processor. The knife is easier to wash. I also find knife sharpening very satisfying. There are things that take a long time like stock and braises and stews and slow roasts, but I don't think of those as things that require a lot of close attention. They just cook for a long time.

I think plantain, squash, pumpkin, sweet potato and breadfruit would work well, though they need to be cooked. A breadfruit can absorb a tremendous amount of liquid. I made a breadfruit soup one summer when we were staying on Moloka'i, and it seemed like we were eating it for weeks. Breadfruit trees drop a lot of fruit in a short period of time, so in some polynesian cultures it is traditionally preserved by fermentation to make a breadfruit poi.

Mango, papaya, strawberries, peaches, nectarines and avocado all have a thickening effect and work well in smoothies. As an aside, one of the things Melchi likes is when we make a banana smoothie, pour some of it into the glass, and then add some strawberries and blend it some more and pour add it to the glass to make a two-toned smoothie. He calls this, "the pink smoothie in the white smoothie." I also checked into the Waring blender question, and it seems that the smaller household ("retail" in Waring's terms, even though some "retail" items may have "commercial" branding) and restaurant ("commercial" at least on Waring's website) blenders like Fat Guy's and mine use motors of the same size--3.0 amps or 1/2 Horsepower. One would think a horse wouldn't even need half its strength to crush ice cubes. I think the difference between the retail and commercial lines must be things like NSF rating and details that would contribute to NSF approval. For instance, there is a rubber boot over the switch on the commercial versions, I suppose so the switch can be cleaned more easily without water getting into the switch.

I read about a method of making fries recently that involved putting the fries in cold oil and bringing them up to frying temperature instead of the traditional approach of frying twice, and I tried it last night, fully expecting failure, and it worked perfectly. I used beef tallow and yukon golds cut about 3/8" thick. The downside is that it's only convenient to do one batch this way. The upside is that if you only have one batch to make, it's more convenient than frying twice.

Ouch! HEPA air filter for a while maybe? I suspect you'll just have to ventilate and wait it out. Fortunately, we've been having good weather for leaving the windows open.

I tried to hunt down the specs on various Waring blenders, and they're pretty ambiguous about such information, making things even more unclear by using terms like "Commercial" and "Pro" in both their restaurant and household lines and describing some motors in amps and others in horsepower and others with even more vague terms like "commercial grade" and "professional grade." So it's possible that the Waring BB900, which is marketed to restaurants and costs around $140 is a more powerful or more sturdy blender than the 34BL87, which seems to have been marketed to consumers at about 1/3 the price of the BB900, but without testing, I couldn't say that for sure. I have noticed that the BB900 is a lot more powerful than the multi-speed household blender (I forget which brand, but probably Hamilton Beach or Oster or one of those) that my parents have.

I use a Waring Commercial BB900, which is a fairly standard two-speed bar blender, and it doesn't have any trouble making smooth smoothies. My xanthan gum experiments were more a curiosity to see what else I could do. When it works, it makes something more like the consistency of a fast food milkshake, which isn't necessarily more desirable, but Melchi seemed to like it. We've never taken him to a fast food restaurant, but he's probably been to one with the babysitter occasionally. Also, frozen fruit lets you use fewer ice cubes. When the bananas are starting to get overripe, I peel them, wrap individually in plastic wrap (much easier than trying to peel a frozen banana), and put them in the freezer.

Our 2.5 year old son loves smoothies and likes to help me make them, so we have them often. We usually start with yogurt, a banana, a little honey, flax, a little milk to get it to blend properly, about 4-6 ice cubes/2 cups total volume, and sometimes juice or other fruits if we have them and he's interested. I experimented with xanthan gum a bit to adjust the consistency and keep it from separating. Yogurt and xanthan, I found, creates a slimy mouthfeel, but without the yogurt, a very tiny amount (like 0.05g/2 cups) can make a smoother consistency and keep it together longer, if you're not going to drink it all at once, but in the end, I'd rather have yogurt than xanthan gum.

I've sometimes bought produce from Madura at Bleecker and 6th Ave., who is one of the Greenmarket vendors. He's not there every day, but usually has good produce and particularly mushrooms and specialties like fiddleheads when they're in season.

I'm not sure what's scarier, that or the Korean writhing octopus.

You might also browse this collection of historic American cookbooks through 1922, which are out of copyright, so they are available for download-- http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbo..._date.html#1919

An excellent recommendation. The classic account is Joseph Mitchell's 1939 story for The New Yorker, "All You Can Hold for Five Bucks," which can be found in his anthology, Up In the Old Hotel.

Yes, I just added it to my Netflix queue. Here are a couple more scenes-- [Oy! "It's/its" typo in my previous post, and I can't edit.]

That looks really good and isn't too far from me. Maybe in the next few weeks some time.

The Criterion Collection is hosting a cooking video competition to celebrate the release of the Criterion edition of Chantal Akerman's film, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Even if you aren't interested in such things, watch the clip. It's slow, quiet objectivity is a cleansing antidote to The Food Network-- http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1223