Bill Klapp

I would be happy to have Indian food brought into my office right now! I missed lunch, posting on egullet again.

First, Camille and Tonyfinch, thanks for the first real progress in this thread in a while. If that had been Steve's point (and I'm not convinced that it is), some progress could have been made. A couple of thoughts-it is true that the full monte experience at most serious Italian ristoranti will include the pasta course. In the Piemonte, the custom is three antipasi, pasta, a secondo (entree), possibly with contorni (side dishes), maybe a cheese course, and dessert. If the portions are large, such meals are absolutely punitive. However, the best restaurants often keep the portions to a size where the overall effect is no worse than any comparable menu degustation, and in the very best, you can have a taste of everything and not even be particularly full. Also, I have noticed that most Italians rarely request all of the courses, even in fixed price situations, although I have not observed a tendency to skip the pasta course, which often exhibits lightness and a good deal of creativity. It seems to depend upon what the restaurant does best, and how hungry the diners are. I also notice that, for dietary reasons, many of our Italian friends will eat pasta only at lunch (sometimes only with a salad and then maybe a little cheese, since many Italians prefer dolci only with coffee mid-morning or mid-afternoon) , presumably on the theory that it will be worked off in the afternoon. A final thought-there are many Italian restaurants where the secondo never seems to measure up to the quality of the antipasti and the pasta, but after some reflection, I suspect that this problem is common to many cuisines. I certainly find that to be true in the U.S.

Claude and Wilfrid, you are both right. There are too many people with too much worthwhile information to share on eGullet to keep beating this dead horse. I participated primarily to hold Steve accountable for some of his more outrageous and least supportable statements, but at at the end of the day, "Chacun a son gout." Steve seems to crave whatever will succeed El Bulli, which, as nearly as I can determine, is the finest and ultimate expression of FRENCH technique in the world today (at least since Freddy Girardet closed shop in Crissier). He just does not appear to be able to seek that out without doing so at expense of cuisines and styles that he either does not like, does not understand, or both. I actually sent Craig a private e-mail addressing his original subject today, because I decided that posting it here would be a non sequitur at best on this thread. It's a free e-country, but it's time to return the Italy segment of eGullet back to the discussion of Italian food, accepted on its own terms. It is far more valuable to discuss the good, bad and indifferent things about Italian food than it is to try to measure it against a mythical (or at least, ever-changing) standard of a single person who doesn't seem to appreciate the genius inherent in the simplicity of the best Italian cooking. To be sure, I do not think Steve is a bad person, and I will be happy to rise to the bait from time to time, but in another forum, not this one.

Escoffier? Sacre bleu!

Aquitane: Another twist on cugna for you: I saw a passing reference to a Piemontese cugna made with quince, pears, hazelnuts, walnuts and grape must.

Claude and Robert, in my experience, it is shaking out this way: Burton Anderson overstated the case, but certainly not the problem itself. Both the Italian government and the EU are applying standards that are driving many small producers out of business, since the standards are calculated to develop European cross-markets and export markets in totally safe, totally sanitized, totally useless food products. You need only contemplate the difference between prosciutto in Parma and the over-aged, dried-out crap exported here (with the USDA's irrational standards further screwing up the product) to realize the potential severity of the problem. However, at the local level, for artisanal producers who can make a living by selling everything they produce locally, both the government and the EU are ignored. (The Italian government has virtually no enforcement capacity over its citizens in any human endeavor other than true criminal activity, and even there, there is that Mafia problem down south. The thing I love most about Italy is that politics is an entertainment medium, and as such, endlessly discussed but not taken seriously!) The biggest threat at the local level is the failure of the new generation to continue the family business. Fortunately, restaurants are not facing that threat, but the priesthood and prosciutto are!

I stand corrected. It is merely a pleasing restaurant, and it doesn't have to be authentic to be good. Authentic northern Italian restaurants are not possible in this country, for the reasons Craig discussed above. But a little food for thought-why do French restaurants seem to fare at least somewhat better in America? Less reliance on hard- or impossible-to-obtain ingredients? Technique, perhaps? And good point, Claude. Let people scoff at the little gambero rosso himself, Carlo Petrini, but Slow Food is waging war against the EU food censors and winning a hell of a lot of battles, if not yet the war. The only upside is that, in Italy, the EU-sanctioned stuff in the supermarkets is STILL better than the crap on America's supermarket shelves. The good stuff is still there, but it takes more work to find it than it used to. I am blessed with dear Italian friends who are retired restauranteurs, and to the extent that they don't grow it themselves, they can generally source anything my wife and I might covet.

Craig, right on. Don't forget the raw-milk cheeses that probably wouldn't be imported even if it were legal. It should also be noted that even in Italy, the quality of prosciutto available at retail 100 kilometers from Parma is often of dramatically lesser quality than that at the best locations around Parma. When you compare that with the product that the USDA permits us to import (with one or more month's extra aging, usually dry and a little tough and usually having not enjoyed its shoddy treatment during its journey), you might as well not eat prosciutto in the U.S. (I still do, of course!).

I hate myself for doing this, but I have to cop out on this one. I agree with Peter-due to the lack of equivalent quality ingredients, some of which are only available within a few kilometers of some small Italian town, and also due to the need of most U.S.-based chefs, whether Italian by birth and/or training or not, to pander to the American concept of what great Italian food should be, true Italian cooking cannot be replicated here. And not just in restaurants-I am a pretty fair cook of the Piemontese classics, but try as I might, I'm always better in the old country. While I think that someone like Molto Mario may fare better by adapting Italian recipes and techniques to ingredients available here than a transplanted Italian chef would, I find Mario to be making up with enthusiasm and showmanship what he lacks in real grounding in the best Italian culinary traditions. A lot of the recipes in his cookbooks fall flat on their faces, despite superficial appeal when you first read them. Still, I applaud the effort on his part. I find most New York Italian restaurants to be parodies at best. You can dine very well, to be sure, but rarely authentically. Galileo in Washington comes as close as I've seen. Strangely, a restaurant called Il Palio in Chapel Hill, NC is probably number 2 on my list (amazingly strong Piemontese-driven wine list as well). I,too, have not eaten there in years, but Il Mulino was my favorite in NYC as well.

Schonfeld, I'm getting a little tired of your evenhandedness, pragmatism and fundamental fairness. If you cannot contribute something more offensive, or at least absurd, maybe we should end this thread!

Steve, you're right-I'm absolutely vanquished. You keep the gold medal and give me your grandmother's recipe for kreplach, and all will be forgiven. If she's that good, I can probably find a Michelin-starred kitchen for her in the Piemonte. Thank God I didn't describe the technique involved in some intricate Italian pastry, only to have it called your grandmother's rugelach!

Okay, Steve, a modest example of brilliant and well-established Piemontese technique, particularly good, I think, because it is at odds with an equally well-established French technique. Classical (note that I said classical, not nouvelle) French haut cuisine relys heavily upon butter-, or egg- and butter-based sauces. We all know them-beurre blanc, beurre rouge, hollandaise, bearnaise, Nantua, the list is endless. Are they good in context? Of course they are. For the Italian palate, however, those sauces are heavy and bulky, adding richness and some interest, to be sure, but useful only if the underlying ingredients have a depth of flavor to withstand them. Like the French, the northern Italians often strive to add richness and complexity to a dish. (The Piemontese use what seems like billions of quail eggs a year in that quest.) But here is an example of their technique: the dish, agnolotti dal plin. In essence, plin is a tiny raviolo which is made by hand, and by pinching the paper-thin pasta dough shut rather than by producing the traditional square ravioli in bulk in little squares. Most of the ravioli and tortellini we eat in this country may start with a raw meat, or meat and cheese, or vegetable and cheese filling, because the filling will cook quickly enough in the boiling water. Not good enough for plin. Plin usually starts with a complimentary assortment of ROASTED meats, each of which has been appropriately seasoned to maximize its potential in the final dish. Often, a little chicken liver is added, not so much to give the dish a distinct liver taste, but to add richness and contribute to the overall effect of the roasted meats. To this is added a mix of eggs, vegetables, herbs and cheese. Each recipe is unique to the chef, even though almost every Piemontese ristorante serves plin. The final pasta result is often so moist and tender that it is served without saucing, in a linen napkin, to highlight (perhaps arrogantly, for some tastes) the perfection of the finished product. But back to the issue of sauces: as noted above, the French butter sauces are generally too heavy for the Italian palate. Likewise, the Italians reject the French use of long-simmered stocks, the use of which, while they are rich and flavorful to be sure, risks masking or supplanting, rather than enhancing, the delicate flavors of the underlying food if not used judiciously. Thus, plin are usually served, not with tomato sauce to be sure, but rather with sugo d' arrosto, the seasoned broth of the roasted meats (rather than a stock or sauce), whose function is to moisten and delicately season the agnolotti. There is no pasta dish (other than its Piemontese stablemates, of course) that can compare with it. The perfect marriage of ingredients, technique and creativity. And certainly on a par with anything French haut cuisine has produced, both in complexity and labor-intensive technique.

Scarpetta, I defer to you and withdraw the assertion. I can, however, get it to hang together without gelatin in Piemonte, but not using typical U.S. cream. The author of the cookbook I cited above has had the same experience. Likewise, there is little evidence of gelatin in the best examples I have eaten in Italy, without being able to say that there is none. I think where this is coming out is use only as much gelatin as you need to get the desired setting. Where do you come from in the Piemonte?

Better approach, Steve-YOU go back and re-read your posts and figure out what you have said over time, and then summarize it in a new post. Sadly, I am a lawyer by training, and I make my living by being precise with language and carefully examining the substance and nuance of what others write. Empty rhetoric only goes so far with me. Consistency goes much further, and as Craig rightly points out, it is appropriate to hold you to some standard of consistency. I am amused, however, by your insistence that chefs must create new flavors. It makes me want to chop up a few kiwi fruit and throw them in my coq au vin! I recall the late pop astrologer Jean Dixon, whose statements were so general and uttered so often that her readers could ALWAYS find some application of her "predictions" to their lives. Professional chefs read what gets posted here, as well as other serious foodies. We are going to take this to the next level, one way or the other...

Good posts, guys! You appear to be pros, and I'm only an amateur! Let me suggest this, on the issue of cooking-like anything else, the flavor of cream will be changed by cooking. However, I think what you are looking for in panna cotta is the concentration of the flavor of the cream, as well as the setting, as is the case in almost any reduction of a liquid. I'm guessing that, if there were not added sugar, the most noticeable effect on the cream would be concentration of naturally occuring sugars. I can't say for sure, because, due to the fact that the thing must be refrigerated in order to set it, and given that it is served chilled or at room temperature, you have to add more sugar than would otherwise seem necessary, since sugar loses its effectiveness when cold (as in ice cream).

Steve klc: My statement re: gelatin is strictly experience-based (Piemontese ristoranti), and not the result of any research. I am not prepared to refute "fish glue", nor to make a big point of "authentic" versus "inauthentic". I will say simply that, for my taste, gelatin makes a real difference in texture. Good example: imagine how the best creme brulee you ever had would be changed by the addition of gelatin. It would hold its shape better, if you had reason to mold it, but at some cost to creaminess. That is my only point. Re: vanilla, it certainly would not be blasphemy, but I think that the Italians perceive it as unnecessary. The sin of American cooking is this: toast is good, buttered toast is better, buttered toast with cinnamon sugar is better still, and since we all love strawberry jam (or peanut butter, or bananas, or both), what could be better than slathering THAT on my cinnamon toast? You can't get too much of a good thing, right? Certainly, none of the flavors I mentioned are offensive, but at what point is the flavor of the bread, or the butter, or the cinnamon sugar, irrelevant? The Italians think otherwise. If you have wonderful, farm-fresh thick cream, which starts with a delightful taste and texture, why do anything other than showcase those qualities by the addition of a little sugar?

I haven't said it's an end in itself. I said that better technique produces better cuisine. It's true for every culture and every style of cooking. Now there's a statement I'd like to see you refute. It just so happens that the French have an entire level of technique that the Italians can't seem to figure out how to create. And that's where it begins and ends. Saying that the technique doesn't matter is like saying that ballerinas being on their toes doesn't matter. It's a false statement. That is why one goes to the ballet in the first place. To say it doesn't matter is a telling statement about the speaker, in that it demonstrates that they don't understand what the ballet is about. And your statements about French cuisine are the same. You can't possibly understand haute cuisine and make the statements you are making.

Peter: NOW you show up, while being AWOL during the heat of battle! I had to take the fight to Steve, aided only by Craig, who, although he seems to be a nice guy, insists on abiding by the Geneva Convention of polite posting! Listen, having read the earlier posts between you and Steve, I am going to suggest a plea bargain on the Chiasso thing: you should cop to littering once a week in Ponte Chiasso, so that Steve can jump to the conclusion that you, and you alone, are responsible for the deplorable condition of Ponte Chiasso streets! We can then move on to the great issues of our time, such as the role the coalition is likely to let the French play in the reconstruction of the culinary traditions of post-war Iraq! Thanks for weighing in! (Suvir-more on lavender and other Piemontese eats later! I am going to try to get the lavender creme brulee recipe from Flipot this summer, but it is probably easier than we think. I'm guessing it starts with a lavender-infused simple syrup, but it would be nice to know the proportions.)

Suvir: Gelatin is NEVER used in the Piemonte, simply because the cream (even the run-of-the-mill supermarket variety) is more of a solid than a liquid, and does not need the introduction of a clotting agent to set up. The slow cooking out of a little water, the body added by the sugar and the refrigeration does the trick. Panna cotta with gelatin is a wonderful thing, for sure, but the addition of any quantity of gelatin is noticeable in the texture. The no-gelatin version has a smoothness and mouthfeel (as Ben and Jerry used to say about ice cream) that adds immeasurably to the pleasure. Experiment, and try to use as little gelatin as you can get by with. If it sets up like Jello pudding and jiggles when you shake it, you have more gelatin than you need. If it is the slightest bit runny when you serve it due to low or no gelatin, it does not detract from the joy (ice cream melts, too!). Buona fortuna!

Steve-Do you actually read my posts? Forgetting about laws of averages, can you not believe that the proverbial chimpanzee might not stumble upon balance, harmony and texture, given enough time and the right ingredients? Absurd though that may be, it is been my experience that technique is essential, but can be had any number of different ways, and technique remains only the point of departure, not an end in itself. Beyond that, the individual must understand the ingredients, the interaction of ingredients (both positive and negative) and how best to maximize their flavors. There are those chefs who are whizzes with knives or pastry bags, but spend their lives in sous chef purgatory because they have no sense of the possibilities of ingredients. I am not aware that any group is down on white truffles, by the way. I just needed to test how jaded you are!

Matt Kramer's A Passion for Piedmont cookbook has the authetic recipe, which is, strangely enough, 1 quart heavy cream to 1 1/4 cups sugar. He suggests that you soften 1 envelope of unflavored gelatin in 1/4 cup cold water, heat the cream over medium-low heat to a near-simmer, whisk in the gelatin and then the sugar, and cook until the sugar is fully dissolved, about 5 minutes. You first cool the mixture to room temperature, then refrigerate it until it sets. The gelatin is inauthentic, but presumably necessary because American cream lacks the thickness of Italian cream. If you can find a non-industrial cream that is locally produced and very thick, skip the gelatin and cook down the cream until you think it will hold its shape when cold. DO NOT boil the cream, or it will separate. I like it plain, or with a sauce of pureed strawberries with fresh berries on the side, or plain. Less is more with this dessert, but it depends entirely upon top-quality cream. For my taste, adding liquor, caramel, etc. does very little for something that can be so perfect in its simplicity that it doesn't even need vanilla.

Jim, apparently you have been to Norcia! I should have added that Norcia is also the pork capital of Italy, with more salumere per capita than any other place on earth, and also known for the skill of its butchers, such that any butcher elsewhere in Italy who thinks he has made the grade may hang a sign declaring himself to be a "norcino".

Steve, sorry to disagree, but the best cooking in Italy is NOT going on in home-style restaurants. Surely you can't be so provincial as to believe that, at the top restaurants in Italy, the chefs have not received training and apprenticeships just as rigorous as those in France. It is true in both countries that, due to the extraordinary quality of the raw ingredients, chefs that have not been professionally trained can produce brilliant and innovative cuisine. It is equally true that most professionally trained chefs in both countries never hit the heights of the very best. I have to give it up for tonight, but I do want to throw you this bone-the French do invest infinitely more time in presentation, and if that floats your boat, fair enough. I much prefer great food on the plate and great art on the walls, but to each his own. I can appreciate, but cannot taste, technique and presentation. I leave you with a question-are white truffles interesting to you?

And now to the wine question: neither country's wine can be said to be superior to the other's. There can be no meaningful debate about the greatness of the first-growth Bordeaux, but like any other wine-growing region on earth, the quality goes downhill (albeit slowly, over a huge number of wines) from there. I am not a big fan of Cabernet and Merlot-based wines, but only because they are not food-friendly. Sauternes, Barzac, Loire and Alsatian wines all have a place in my cellar. I give France the edge on sweet wines. White burgundies have no equal among Chardonnays, and great red burgundies are to die for, but entirely too few and far between. I am much enamored of Rhone wines, both north and south, because they are so food-friendly and because so many classic French dishes were created with them in mind. On the other hand, Beaujolais and most of the non-Rhone southern wines hit incredible heights of mediocrity, cheap though they are. Champagne is largely a matter of personal taste, but for me, it is vastly overrated. And that's French wine in a nutshell. On to Italy: Barolo and Barbaresco are the equal of the best French wines, especially in the hands of the masters, such as Gaja, Giacosa, the Conterno brothers and even that new wave guy, Sandrone. You have the long aging issue of Bordeaux, but if you wait, you get to drink something that is more reliably pleasurable than, and shares many characteristics with, the best red burgundy. I am also a fan of Brunello from the best producers. Although they deliver near-term pleasure, I am sceptical of the so-called Supertuscans, most of which were fashioned for the American need for big fruit and instant gratification, and are grossly overpriced. As Craig suggested, the real edge for Italy is in the incredible diversity of its wines, both white and red, virtually all of which are vinified to complement the foods of their regions perfectly. Italy beats France hands-down on the everyday drinking wines-Barbera, Dolcetto, Arneis, the best Soaves and Pinot Grigios, Chianti Classico, the list goes on and on. The lesser Italians are also among the greatest wine values on earth. And in addition to all of that, you can grow high-quality Cab, Chard, Syrah and Merlot in Italy, and while there may never be an Italian Bordeaux, there are many which are better than their California cousins. On balance, I have situated myself perfectly in retirement-in the middle of the Barbaresco vineyards, which access to all of Italy's wine and food bounty, but only a few hours from the best French wine regions as well. It should be noted that both countries produce vast quantities of truly dreadful wine, and on a per capita dreadful bottle scale, the French probably win this dubious contest. I like to think that there are a fair number of unscrupulous French wine producers (history certainly bears that out), whereas bad Italian wine is more often the result of the producer simply not knowing how to make wine!

Suvir, thanks, and I'll try to post some of my home cooking finds for your benefit from time to time!