Bill Klapp

She was to Italian cooking for Americans what Julia Child was to classic French cooking. I had the very great pleasure of meeting her in Atlanta in the late 1980s, where she was opening a restaurant. I did the lease for it, and was presented with a personally autographed copy of "Marcella's Italian Kitchen" for my effort. (The restaurant was terrific but badly managed and ultimately sold, but is still going strong today.) I will remember her always for the quote to the effect that black truffles are something to be eaten only when white truffles are not in season. Amen and Godspeed on your final journey, Marcella...

Somewhere in Arizona, I believe. That info is on the ones sold in Europe...

I must say that I am not much in favor of licensing schemes whose sole purpose is to raise more tax dollars for politicians to squander, under the guise of public health and safety. Personal and corporate taxes should cover that, and licensing fees should cover the additional or special costs of administering particular programs. (And while a separate topic, query whether you really believe your tax dollars or licensing fees are making your food any safer or less adulterated.) If you accept that notion, then the vendor at the farmer's market is paying for an opportunity that probably would not exist but for the payment of a fee, and would not bother to come if there were not money to be made over and above the fee. The farmer's market generates waste, traffic management and other things that would not exist but for the farmer's market, and it is frequented only by a portion of the general population, so it is entirely appropriate for licensing fees to be charged to cover its administration. Those fees are passed on to the consumer through the pricing of the goods sold, as in any business. If the best tamales are to be found at the farmer's market, you will buy them there, even at a higher price, or maybe you will buy there out of convenience or impulse buying, or maybe you will even buy lousy tamales to support the vendor whose other stuff is good, or maybe just to support the farmer's market in general. Back to our door-to-door tamale man: could be that he cannot afford a stand at the farmer's market, at least not without growing a clientele. Could be that he delivers a fresher, more authentic product. Could be that he, too, makes lousy tamales, but he is trying to support a family of 8 and he needs your help without it appearing that he is begging. (Any of us ever buy things that we did not want or need just to help somebody?) You get my drift. The possibilities and motivations in both scenarios can be complex and completely unrelated. I am law-abiding, and certainly encourage others to be. It is, after all, the basis for civilized human society. On the other hand, the global economic collapse of 2008, brought on by a bunch of greedy banksters and their minions, tells us that the law-abiding are too often the poor saps left holding the bag. While I surely do not liken the two situations, I will say that, unlike the criminal activities of 2008, I do not see the harm, either to the vendor at the farmer's market or to the populace at large, of the door-to-door tamale man. You are free to support the vendor at the expense of the tamale man, or vice versa...

Tri2Cook, how about this: you are 100% correct that it is a violation of the law as written. The system, for better or for worse, is that, if we, the people feel that the law is unjust, we must rise up and force our elected officials to repeal the law. Failing that, we can disobey it and challenge it in court, but if the judges all the way up the line find the law constitutional (likely the case here), we are hosed to some minor extent. Here is the real point: the cub reporter who did this piece cannot yet be trusted with a real story, and is wasting time and stirring up merde for no good purpose. For that reason, and not for any legal reason, the reporter deserves all the abuse being served up. Just as there are more important laws to spend precious resources enforcing, there are real news stories that deserve reportage. This was not one of them...

Oh, I don't know...if a few New Yorkers want to risk poisoning a few other New Yorkers for fun and profit, what business is it of all of us rubes out here in the sticks? I mean, as long as the guests are not served soft drinks in quart cups...

You can probably take Raleigh off of your list, in the sense that Allen and Sons in Chapel Hill, Bullock's in Durham and a number of other places in the greater Raleigh area are known for classic eastern Carolina barbeque, but Raleigh itself has pretty much only The Pit and Clyde Cooper's, and the latter, like the legendary Raleigh hot dog joint Roast Grill, is not very good. The former is a transplant from Wilson, NC, which should be high on your list. It is home to several famous joints. What you really need is to scare up a guy who used to post here a lot under the name Varmint, who has forgotten more about barbeque than anybody's research will likely turn up, and also do some online research for books on the subject. Several good ones have been written. ""The Best Tar Heel Barbeque Manteo to Murphy" by Jim Early and "Bob Garner's Guide to North Carolina Barbeque" are two. "Real Barbeque" by Greg Johnson and Vince Staten isn't bad. One that you may never find, "Barbeque On My Mind" by Trey Pope, is good for Georgia...

Does anybody know if live mussels can be, and are, imported into the U.S.? My girlfriend imports oysters, smoked salmon and other fresh seafood into Italy for Eataly and the top Italian chefs, and I well understand why Franci misses the mussels, so to speak. The proportion of meat to shell is extraordinary, so that you get the tenderness and sweetness of smaller size, but without having to deal with penny-sized bits of meat for hours. My girlfriend imports those from the bay of Mont-St. Michel in season, which are far and away the best that I have ever eaten. I would have to think that if they could be flown in legally, Le Bernardin would be serving them. And while I am at it, do most people stateside know of the legendary mussels with Roquefort of the French coast?

For all of you Europe-based or traveling through this week, Friday, 9/20 through Monday, 9/23 is Slow Food's annual cheese event in Bra, Italy. One of the pleasant surprises there is always how much English and Irish cheese makes the journey. It also appears that a lot more than cheese has been added this year, making it a bit more like a mini-version of the biannual Salone del Gusto in Torino. Not a bad move, since hour upon hour of cheese tasting without a break can be a little daunting...

I recall my parents drinking coffee at breakfast and a gin and tonic before retiring, but I have no memory of them ever drinking anything with dinner. Worse, if my childhood meal was not something that screamed out for milk (God help me, my mother's spaghetti and meat sauce was perfect with milk!), I do not recall drinking anything myself! (I know that we had running water, I just do not recall anybody drinking it!) There was ice tea at every meal at my grandmother's house, and probably at my house, too, at least in the summer. I am guessing that I drank a lot more sweet tea than I am remembering right now, and also ate half or more of my meals at my grandmother's...

My ideal would probably be a package deal where you could get the book and an ebook copy for something less than buying them separately, so you'd have the book for when you preferred that, and the ebook to be used as a more portable reference. My ideal would probably be a package deal where you could get the book and an ebook copy for something less than buying them separately, so you'd have the book for when you preferred that, and the ebook to be used as a more portable reference. That makes great economic sense, too. Wine journals and no doubt other magazines do that, some with complete double counting (on the spurious theory that the two products really are different). It would be an additional source of revenue for authors and everyone else in the supply chain, none of whom expect that one person would buy both formats. Of course, cutting the other way is the number of publications moving away from the expense and trouble of hard copy as quickly as they can...

Wine or Aperol spritzes and sparkling mineral water, the latter ice cold and never with ice, and in 50-50 proportion with whichever of the first two I am drinking. By the way, I am a huge fan of German Riesling with most Chinese and virtually all Thai dishes, but the sweet, bitter and residual orange flavors of Aperol, as diluted by prosecco and water, are actually terrific with those dishes.

You want to smuggle some into Italy? There will be a nice bottle of Barolo in it for you! One more question and I will let this one go. There are conflicting reports on the use of fresh lemon verbena leaves as a substitute for lemongrass. One says use half the quantity of lemongrass called for to start and adjust upward as desired, the other says one-to-one ratio. Could some of you who have cooked with lemon verbena opine on which of these is likely to be right? (I understand that I probably cannot go wrong with the first option, but I could also end up playing around with the dish too much to its ultimate detriment, since many Thai dishes cook in reasonably brief times.)

I may be able to find the jarred product via mail order from the UK as a backup, and will explore the essential oil idea, too. I turned the Porta Palazzo market in Torino upside down yesterday, and was able to buy potted lemon verbena, but no lemongrass. Mjx, I also hit Torino's biggest Ipercoop, and no go on lemongrass there. I may end up having to go to Rome to get some damn lemongrass!

I am chuckling as I write this. I had to go to Torino yesterday, so I decided to go to the Porta Palazzo market and stock up on meats and vegetables for Thai cooking. I was in a hurry, so I ended up taking 5 cookbooks with me, picking the recipes and then making the shopping list during the hour-plus journey. The cookbooks were not available as e-books in any event, but after sudden stops sent the books flying at me a couple of times, I could envison having been able to do the entire exercise on a tablet...

Not battery, but I have various Peugeots collected over the years and a couple of bad plexiglas salt mills, but my faves are the Oxos for salt and pepper. The salt mill, in particular, has a terrific ceramic grinding mechanism. Very easy to use as well.

There could be something to this. There are some chefs who keep themselves in top physical shape, perhaps due to the demands of their jobs and perhaps due in part to the fact that the job, unlike most, involves caloric intake. (As I recall, Gilbert Le Coze, the original chef of Le Bernardin, died while working out, and made a point of keeping himself in shape.). On the dark side, there are biographies and other books covering famous chefs and their kitchens that reflect that performance-enhancing drugs (notably cocaine) are part of that often high-stress environment. (Chefs reading this: I point the finger only at the guilty, not at the noble profession, so please take no offense. I simply find that aspect of the sports analogy interesting, and I think that drugs are found in professional kitchens for reasons that must go beyond purely recreational use. And what I know of the guilty comes through their autobiographies in a few cases.)

Just do not think to include Charlie Trotter in this discussion! http://wgntv.com/2013/08/29/parents-students-accuse-famous-chicago-chef-of-odd-behavior-shutting-down-art-show/ We never really know how the mighty fall, but Trotter has been sued for selling a phony magnum of 1945 Romanee-Conti for $50,000 and his days as a famous chef may now be behind him...

I have tired of lugging and storing books like many above, and have disposed of far more than I currently own. I think many of us hang onto books as long as we can, and then perform triage, keeping the ones that are from loved ones, rare first editions, autographed or otherwise have sentimental or practical value to us. Of the books that I chose to ship to Italy, over 90% are food and wine-related, overwhelmingly cookbooks. I do not recall throwing out a single cookbook over the years, and indeed, bought duplicates of those misplaced over the years (or lost in divorce!) and before moving here, to have copies of the most important in both countries. Desire to read certain books in English has made me an ebook purchaser and reader, but cookbooks are different. Easy summer reading is one thing, and probably best served by ebooks, but cookbooks are reference books that provide more ultimate satisfaction than any others. Language per se is not the issue (my French and Italan are both good enough to use cookbooks written in those languages, and I have many), but rather, the extra hoops that I must now jump through and extra expense to have hard copies of things like Jerusalem and the new edition of Charcuterie. Thus, I bought both as ebooks. It will be a fair test. However, I wonder if I will end up replacing one or both with hard copies someday! Pastameshugana, you did make a point that resonates with me, the idea that you can use your cell phone to pull ingredient lists while shopping. As I have gotten older, I find that I make notes or send myself e-mails more frequently to avoid forgetting things that I need to buy or do, and access to recipes and even entire cookbooks takes that to a whole new level...

That has been my experience in France, but also in Italy. I have watched a counter help in a bakery being forced to sort through a bin full of hard rolls so that the 80-something lady gets EXACTLY the one that she wants for her dinner. Waiting in line while such dramas unfold can be particularly hard on the American psyche (and I suspect those of a fair number of other countries), but after you realize that, when your turn comes, YOU can take 15 minutes to pick YOUR hard roll, then you learn to relax and enjoy the cultural difference. The amazing thing is that you occasionally see someone in a hurry shifting from one foot to the other and/or sighing, but I do not think that I have ever heard a vocal complaint. Of course, it is impossible to make Italians stand in line, so you do have to defend your position!

Maybe they could even bring back Julia, the Galloping Gourmet and even Jeff Smith, The Frugal Gourmet!

I had that thought, too, sans horror, but those who point out that annotating an e-book is not worth the trouble make an excellent point. I would generate hard copy, do my annotating there and then put the used recipe in a loose- leaf notebook if worth saving. Anna N, great pro-and-con list! weinoo and maydd, I wonder if there would be any future in a splatter-proof, app-driven kitchen tablet...

I looked at the Polyscience products and decided that I am not serious enough about sous vide to make an investment of that size. We are now confronted with the option of buying two (or maybe three) comparably priced products for less than a Polyscience machine (no knock on Polyscience). If sous vide is going to catch on with a wide home audience, it seems to me that you have to make it work at around the $200 price point, and win, lose or draw, I applaud Sansaire and the others who are leading that charge...

I do not know that particular brand, but most European sour cherry varieties are some species of the French griotte (called "amarene" in Italy), and are marked more by a reasonably intense, round, full, delightful cherry flavor, rather than the level of tartness usually found in pie cherries in the U.S. I planted a bunch of cherry trees of all varieties here over a decade ago, and the Morellos, when fully ripe, are possessed of enough sweetness to be eaten right from the tree. (Of course, I climbed my grandfather's pie cherry tree when I was a kid and ate pie cherries, so it could be just me.) They are also used widely for producing sour cherry syrups, which can be mixed with club soda to make a refreshing drink or used in any number of cooking applications. I like the pancake and ice cream ideas. The classic amarene gelato in Italy is made with your jarred gift.

(Excuse me if this has been done before and I missed it.) I have a feeling that the answers may break down along generational lines (I go back to the days before the Commodore 64, when all word processing was done on manual typewriters with carbon paper), but maybe not. I ask because, since moving to Italy, buying books suddenly requires tactical decision-making. I have schlepped and shipped a lot of books of all stripes to Italy over the years, and I now have a lifetime's collection of food and wine books assembled here. The sheer lack of availability of English-language literature other than cookbooks more or less compelled my adoption of iBooks/Kindle books, and instant availability eliminates any sadness associated with the tactile joys of hard copy. I do have the option of buying from Amazon UK, and the shipping cost is not prohibitive, but between a lousy exchange rate and shipping, it is not always my first choice. My need for new cookbooks has dwindled, but giving up, say, a sauce-spattered copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 in favor of my iPad next to the stovetop is still not that appealing. This post is occasioned by having pre-ordered, and received while I slept, the new edition of the Ruhlman and Polcyn Charcuterie book, simultaneously on three i-devices. I am on the fence as to whether the "magic" of that little bit of technology will sustain me, or whether I will end up suffering buyer's remorse! I have used my iPad many times to call up one-off recipes for things, and I like that fine. I have also purchased food and wine books that are reading/reference in nature, rather than cookbooks, and I am good with those. I also understand that I always have the option to print recipes (if you have all of the right equipment) and cook from the hard copy, although that doesn't seem all that appealing or ecologically sound, especially if the e-cookbook is offering step-by-step illustrations or photos. And lastly, I suppose, if you do not drop your tablet into your sous vide pot, a tablet screen is easier to clean than a cookbook. What sayeth this wise and august assembly of foodies about e-cookbooks?

Absolutely Italy, from two perspectives: staple items like canned tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables are put up at the peak of the season, for quality but also out of frugality, but many friends also put up what in context are "specialty" items, often used as gifts. One friend has a huge apricot orchard, and is famous for her apricot preserves, which she serves in her bed and breakfast. Another preserves many things, but grows a type of antique rose that blooms only for a couple of weeks in May and whose petals are used for rose jelly and marmalade to be served with the cheese course (as well as rose-petal risotto!).