Bill Klapp

Schielke, send me a check for $1,000 and a bag of fresh Doritos next November, and I will make your dream come true! Loufood, I have a Piemontese soul, and thus, an irrepressable bias in favor of fresh white truffles. Not to be effete about it, but I find even the best black truffles to be no better than vaguely truffle-like by comparison. White truffles are eaten only raw, while black truffles must be cooked in order to give up their aroma and flavor. And a tiny bit of either in a dish seems to me to be a pretentious waste of time, effort and money. I am in Marcella Hazan's camp. She said, and I quote, "Why would anyone eat a black truffle unless there were no white truffles available?" And I cannot disagree more strongly with your statement that artificially flavored products are fine as long as they are labelled as such. That smacks of the official USDA/FDA position, those fine bureaucrats that brought us the famous, and ultimately genocidal, "food pyramid". Artificially flavored, overly processed, carb-laden food, created in laboratories rather than gardens or kitchens, is why we are the most obese people on the face of God's earth, and also why we lack an indigenous cuisine that anyone could seriously compare favorably to the world's finest. We have let systematically allowed corporate America to destroy the quality of our food for their profit. I am a child of the 50s. I can remember what real, natural, properly aged beef tasted like. Your average twenty-five-year-old today would spit it out, either because the taste was too strong, or worse, because they would think it was rotten. Sure, there are pockets in this country where fresh, heirloom produce is grown, and Nieman Ranch meats, and good restaurants that capitalize on the availability of such ingredients, but those remain minority phenomena. As nearly as I can tell, among major American foodstuffs, only the Snickers bar remains more or less the same as it was in my childhood, and frankly, I would be afraid to subject one to chemical analysis. But other than that, I have no strong opinions one way or the other.

That black truffle oil is even more useless than synthetic white truffle oil? I don't know about you, but I seldom see "black truffle oil" served up as a calling card on restaurant menus. Instead, black truffles are alleged, and what you get are a few slices of flavorless black truffle "carpaccio" out of a jar. I could make the case that black truffles themselves, even fresh ones, are a fraud, but that would just piss someone off...

Everywhere I turn, including an article on truffles in yesterday's NY Times, makes the claim that all truffle oil is totally synthetic. While I am not a big fan of truffle oil anyway, since it pales so dramatically by comparison to the genuine tuber, I wonder if any of you have any evidence, pro or con, regarding the fraudulent nature of this widely used product.

My conscience is bothering me. I forgot to add that he called me from his office early Sunday afternoon, although I am at a loss to explain how he got there. Of course, Sunday, as they say, was another day. Actually, I love the Varmint, and I think less of myself for giving him such a hard time. Why, he hasn't done the same thing to me more than FIFTY or so times in the past year!

We are getting closer to the truth all of the time. By the way, do Lianda and Ben miss me? I can make myself available for dinner soon if so. I am also beginning my search for an apartment in Raleigh soon. Aren't there apartments across the street from their house?

I don't know about this. Do we have any pictures of his head in the ragu? That does not strike me as the kind of thing that I would make up. The Varmint's story does have a certain plausibility going for it, and the GI part of it plays to the sympathetic side of all eGulleteers, but the contrite "I need to eat and drink less" thing at the end somehow just does not ring true to me. Even when I do eat and drink less, it is not something I am proud of, and certainly not something that I would be comfortable posting on this website, for fear of the chilling effect that it might have on our hard-core posters!

"Al", do I detect a mocking tone in your post? Surely, after I charged some hapless client $500 an hour to write that drivel (just kidding, in case any of my law partners are reading this!), you would not stoop so low as to mock me? I'm fairly certain that the Varmint will want to reserve that right for himself...

"I want the truth!" - -Tom Cruise to Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men; Dean McCord to Bill Klapp on February 10, 2004 (more or less) "You can't handle the truth!" - -Jack Nicholson to Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men; Bill Klapp to Dean McCord right now Regarding last Saturday night, there follows the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Mostly. As long as the truth doesn't get in the way of a good story. (Something like when Norman Mailer wrote his book on Marilyn Monroe. He employed what he called "factoids", that is, those bits of information which, if not confirmable as true, at least OUGHT to be true.) Look, this may get a little sappy, and I apologize in advance for that. But life is sometimes a little sappy. Take comfort in the fact that every sappy moment in life, however brief, is completely neutralized by a half-hour episode of Donald Trump's The Apprentice. First, to establish my credentials as a Teller of Truth, a personal confession: Like the Varmint, I, too, drank a gallon and a half of wine Saturday night. Unlike the Varmint, I did not buffer my consumption with 2 1/2 pounds of pasta. (Although I DID get to taste the delightful rosemary-grapefruit sorbet at the end, and was even able to drizzle the honey on the accompanying grapefruit sections without mishap. But that is another story...) In fact, for some time prior to Saturday night, I had been on the most powerful weight loss program known to humanity-the Atkins (or South Beach, if you prefer) divorce diet. (Those of you who have divorced, or have friends or family members who have divorced, will be familiar with that regimen. It begins with the Atkins "induction" phase, wherein you cut out carbs and eat massive quantities of protein and fat. After a while, you stop eating altogether, and live on pure adrenalin, while you purposefully set about correcting all of your faults that your ex complained of. If you find that you do not have as many faults as you were led to believe, you then begin to correct lesser character flaws that you SUSPECT that your ex would have eventually complained of, had you remained married! And so it goes. By the time that I showed up Saturday night, my body had ceased to produce adrenalin, so I was living mostly on adrenalin FUMES at that point. Just kidding (mostly)!) I choose to believe that none of the rest of you knew that I was drunk because, unlike Varmint, I was able to walk away from the party under my own steam. In fact, I remained in denial myself until I got on the Wade Avenue access road to I-40, when it became painfully apparent that what I had previously believed to be a two-lane highway in the westbound direction had miraculously become a FOUR-lane highway during dinner. Even worse, as I surveyed the traffic ahead in the lane (two lanes?) that I seemed to be travelling in, there were TWO identical tractor trailers! Thankfully, I had the foresight to do what I always do in such situations- -set my gaze on the RIGHT-HAND pair of white lines (to the exclusion of all other lines, regardless of how many pairs may have shown up between Raleigh and Chapel Hill), set the cruise control at the speed limit (statistics reveal that you are more likely to get arrested for going 25 than 65 while DUI) and continuously monitor my appetite for succumbing to the conventional wisdom of pulling off the road and sobering up. I arrived safely in my bed at about 12:30AM, still wondering what in the hell had happened to Varmint. But, as they say, enough about me. (The last sentence is, of course, a stock literary device employed by self-absorbed authors to give the reader false hope that the author may soon curb his or her self-indulgent ramblings and write something actually worth reading. No such luck. As the sign said above Hellmouth in Dante's Divine Comedy, "All hope abandon ye who enter here"! And I suppose that, for those of you who are not familar with my posts on the Italy board (presumably all of you but the Varmint, based upon the number of recent hits!), fully half of every post I write is parenthetical, and, as a general rule, if I write anything funny, it will be found in parentheses. This enables the time-challenged reader to skip over the bullshit and maybe enjoy a chuckle or two. Of course, as in all other dealings with lawyers, there can be no guarantees.) But I digress. To the meat of the matter: frankly, I lost my eGullet offline virginity Saturday night. I suppose that I knew that eGulleteers were sponsoring such events around the country, and of course, I knew about the Varmint's pickin' last fall, but for me, eGullet had been largely a cyber experience, probably because it took all of the free time that I could devote to it to keep up my responsibilities on the Italy board. (I hope that I did not disappoint anyone when you learned that I was a middle-aged man and not, in fact, a precocious 13-year-old bilingual Italian girl who goes online to mess with the minds of a bunch of obsessive American foodies. I must warn you, however, that "Sam Kinsey" is, in fact, a precocious 13-year-old girl, and quite the opera buff to boot!) I did not even read the pasta party thread before I came, nor was it clear to me that the group would be mainly eGulleteers. In short, I came totally unprepared for what I discovered there. (Whatever his other shortcomings (and we will inevitably turn to those later), at least the Varmint had the good sense not to ask me to bring a pasta course!) And what I discovered there was a source of considerable amazement to me, beginning with the warm greeting of a total stranger from those four pizza-nibbling kids and Marcella, to the comfort that the Varmint is actually O.K. (for a lawyer, I hasten to add), to Lianda and Ben (who are such wonderful people that I still refuse to believe that they are ANYBODY'S in-laws, much less the Varmint's), and finally, to all of the rest of you, who, although I sensed that most of you had done this before, seemed a lot more like family than mere food enthusiasts. I spend a lot of time in Italy, and the most appealing thing about it is the dominant importance of the table, both for eating and for rhapsodising and philosophizing about food and wine. Saturday night was the only time that I have ever experienced the same feeling in this country. And that has caused me to examine anew just what eGullet is about. As a co-host of a board, one of the most profound personal benefits (there being, of course, NO economic benefits) I enjoy is getting to share the insights of those giants in the industry, Jason Perlow and Steve Shaw, about this enterprise. (As you might imagine, those moments are not unlike gazing upon the face of the Almighty herself!) They seem to treat it as a franchise sometimes (I think they still harbor the notion that eGullet will make money someday), but mostly, they treat it as a really gifted child who needs equal measures of discipline and encouragement. The offline experience of Saturday night leads me to view it as a family, large, to be sure, but also much less dysfunctional than most. I was impressed by two things Saturday night: how much the group knows about food, individually and collectively (ingredients, technique, equipment, the whole shooting match), and how much more intelligent you are than our fellow Americans on the whole. (To my latter observation, I quickly "Duh!"ed myself after it occurred to me that the only reason I do this is because there are so many bright, articulate, passionate people online, but it is worth noting that I rarely feel the same way when I am in a room full of UNC professorial types and such in Chapel Hill. Said another way, I felt that we could have had a rousing discussion of almost anything Saturday night, had anyone been inclined to talk about anything other than food and wine. Thankfully, we dodged that bullet!) I have a pretty big head about my own cooking skill, but as I watched you guys go at it (and let us not forget the Varmint with his cook's knife crafted exclusively for him by a samurai master!), my first reaction was that I would graduate no better than in the lower third of our class, were we a culinary school. I based my estimated ranking on the fact that Lianda had a rolling-pin rack with eight, count 'em, EIGHT different rolling pins in it, while I have only two of the eight personally. (I am working to overcome that inferiority complex. I have talked myself into the 50th percentile, and realized that, were white truffles in season, and had I had a large one in my pocket Saturday night, I coulda been a contender. Either that, or I could have had a pack of dogs and pigs follow me home!) Thanks for letting me serve as busboy! I did get the sense, though, that the group needs a full-time sommelier, and thank God I have the credentials to at least submit a resume for that job. I suppose that, if eGullet is a cult, I drank the Koolaid (metaphorically speaking - -actually, I drank a gallon and a half of wine, as indicated above) Saturday night. And now the moment that we have all being waiting for: the Varmint's unceremonious disappearance from the dinner table! Wassssup with that? At first, as he dozed off at the table, I thought that maybe he had just worn himself out with all of the preparation, which has happened to me on occasion, but then I realized that the rest of you did most of the cooking (and prepping, and bussing, etc.). After he buried his face in what was left of the duck ragu on his plate (that is to say, precious little - -he was never at risk of suffocation) and I concluded that he was asleep and not just being overly appreciative of the quality of the dish, I sensed that he was in real trouble. I was giving due consideration to slapping him around a bit (something I am inclined to do only when someone his size is THAT drunk - -you other short guys know what I mean), or perhaps enlisting the aid of four or five of you to help me dump him under a shower. But by the time I began serving dessert, he had disappeared altogether! (He claims to have been asleep in the living room, but I must confess that I did not see him, with single or double vision, on my way out.) My mind was racing - -could he have had a bad reaction to the rotgut Barbera I brought? Or could it be something darker, like a serious alcohol problem? I paused for a minute to mull over the latter, and wondered whether, with Marcella, the kids and his in-laws, the disparity of the perfection and happiness of his home life, when measured against the fact that he is a lawyer in his professional life, had created such a disparity between the two that it had driven him to drink. In the final analysis, I reached no firm conclusions, and now, I choose to try and block the whole ugly episode from my mind, choosing instead to remember that beautiful plate of penne and duck ragu BEFORE the Varmint ruined it with his face! Suddenly, I have recalled the old Forrest Gump line about life being like a box of chocolates. How about this instead - -life is like a box of Lucky Charms, where food, wine and friends are the cereal, and everything else is just so many dried-out, artifically colored marshmallow bits? I believe that this strikes at the heart of the eGullet philosophy. Take it from a guy who pushes dried-out, artifically colored marshmallow bits from one side of his desk to the other, and then back again, for a living!

I take the posts above to be a clear mandate from you kind folk to tell the truth as I remember it, without fear of contradiction by Varmint, who had no recollection whatsoever between 11:00 Saturday night and some yet-to-be determined time after sunrise on Sunday morning! I will post later tonight or tomorrow morning. I think Saturday night was worthy of a brief essay, and I must give it its due...

I can't post on this until later, but since I was sitting near the Varmint just before he unceremoniously lost consciousness for the night, I want to reserve the right to tell that story!

Check out my post "Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History" on page 2 of this board. And I join Russ in issuing a minority opinion on Root: as good as Waverly Root's books can be at times for both Italy and France, and while few overviews as ambitious as those books have been undertaken, I think both do no better than cruise the surface, and both are seriously dated at this point (which is a bit of a slam on my part, considering how little French and Italian provincial cooking has changed over the centuries). The richness and infinite variety of the foods in each province or subprovince simply are not captured by Root's books. The books seem based upon random personal experiences, with little evidence of any scholarly effort to discover the essential dishes of a region. They are the alphas, but alas, not the omegas.

In Pollenzo, it is in the same complex that houses one of the two new Guido ristoranti. I posted a review of that restaurant here recently.

Had the good luck to do the 1945 and 1961 HBs this year. Both were stunning, with lots of life left. I cheated myself on the 1945, by decanting only for sediment just before serving. It had a foresty nose and was absolutely delicious, but I could not believe that it actually needed longer decanting at that age. We couldn't resist, and sucked it down before its full aromatic potential was realized. The 1961 was just the opposite-it showed enormous aromatic power and complexity from the minute that the bottle stink blew off, and was as least as delicious as the 1945. In my opinion, the 1961 is probably the better bottle...

And don't forget Faith Heller Willinger's Eating in Italy...

Jeffrey, a response well worth the wait. In its many facets, it recalled for me the broadly fashioned horoscopes of Jeanne Dixon, wherein every reader (lawyer, in this case) could find grains of truth applicable to his or her particular situation!

Menton 1, nothing surprising at all--Roma is a pretty crappy restaurant town for its size and prominence, while Italian food is a big growth industry in Paris while the French envy the Spanish for all of the attention they have garnered lately and plot the next new thing in French cuisine. Tourism does incredible and perhaps irreparable damage to most local cuisines in Italy.

Just kidding (maybe)!

You cannot imagine my relief at learning that I am more or less immune from prostate cancer! Thank you, Jeffrey!

A risk, I suppose, but probably not much of one. With Taylor ports, early drinkability does not necessarily mean early deterioration.

Porkpa, worry not. That Katz's is the best is a fact. Any other conclusion is merely an opinion, however well-informed or well-intentioned. At all other delis, pastrami should be eaten with a schmear of chopped liver, in order to add extra richness and flavor so that you may be fooled into thinking you are eating Katz's pastrami!

hathor, not only hard enough, but dense and heavy enough to be used as a doorstop, too?

So, you can have an illicit dalliance with a white truffle, but it is a black truffle that you want to bring home to meet your mom and to be the mother of your children. Interesting...

I am a vintage port dude. I concur that Graham's is generally the best choice, simply because it drinks well earlier than Taylor-Fladgate or Fonseca (although I popped a 1948 Graham's for a port-loving client last Saturday night, and the damned thing was almost too young to drink!). The 1985 Graham's is a thing of beauty, occasionally found at reasonable prices. The 1992 Graham's, Taylors and Fonsecas are also drinking well now, as that vintage was not equipped to age for a century as some are. That said, I believe that the best prices on older vintage ports will be found on Graham's.

To that fine and comprehensive response, I can only say: "Truth? Truth? Do I want the truth? I can't handle the truth!" (Apologies to Jack Nicholson.) But let us be clear--I was in fact probing YOUR commitment to the perfect pizza in a rather devious, backhanded way, but you must never, NEVER question mine, just because I had the good sense to attack the problem at the source and build a wood-burning oven! (That interlock thing is a bitch, though, isn't it?) I could have sworn that you were in the "making things better" school of writing, but now that you have assured us that you are not, I am reconsidering your "brain lesion" theory of behavior with renewed vigor (and as a personal first step, having my own cranial bumps read by a professional tonight)!

Jeffrey, I couldn't decide whether to comment here or on the Alba thread, but you need to try Combal.0 in Rivoli, near Turin. Davide Scabin, a classicly trained Piemontese chef, performs Adria-like parlour tricks (not quite so scientific and radical) on the local recipes and ingredients, to fantastic effect.