MobyP

Last night's dinner I was proud of. Long-braised, rolled Gloucester Old Spot pig cheek, brushed with dijon, breadcrumbs, sauteed, and served with sauce Gribiche. Breast of organic squab and a slice of foie gras, wrapped in a cabbage leaf and steamed, served with roast figs, and a squab sauce, mounted with foie gras butter. Individual Pear tarte-tatins.

Suvir Saran - Do you live in England? If you fancied a great holliday, you could do what I and the wife did - drove to the town of Villedieu-le-poeles in Normandy - the home of Mauviel - and go straight to the factory. The prices are much, much cheaper. And the surrounding countryside is beautiful. We loaded up the car, had a lovely weekend, and drove back. Alternatively you can look here: Mauviel...

Louisa - if you get any time at all - take notes! I'm sure it feel like too much to give a full weekly run-down after all your responsibilities, but for yourself as a writer, you have to figure out a way to store this stuff away. I really want to know what those lines of Bresse chickens looked like. Were they half plucked - except for the head - or unplucked? What color the plumage? The feet? In the hierarchy of Bresse, are they special? And the langoustines - do they come in daily? A cavalcade of colors, textures, sounds - I want to read it all... but I'll wait until the book/magazine article (I don't think there's enough room given on egullet for what you should do), so long as you promise you're taking notes.

Most of the River Cafe cake/tart (Rogers Grey) baking exercises you have to double the time given, unless you like your cake 'medium-rare.' And often the temps are a little too high.

(Forgive the off-topic-ness of this, but) Has anyone actually rested meat in beurre monte? What do you do - throw it in a bucket? Leave a thread hanging over the side like some meat tea-bag?

Sigh...

C'mon Louisa - spill the (blind baking) beans... How was your week?! Trip over any fat livers lately?

Does he have a web page? I haven't been able to find one.

Given the restrictions on the home cook, the solution I found was to reduce all of my stocks down to glace (a gallon of stock = 1 or 2 cups of glace). That way sauce consistency was much easier to control. You can always add more liquid if you want to steep some herbs or loosen it up - or even expand it into stock for a soup or risotto. But when you have a few pans on the boil, I found it difficult and a bit annoying to judge the reduction of a stock to sauce consistency - even more so, given the weak nature of most home cookers (who has three pans, or three more burners at home, to do that trick?). Also, it means I can store a few gallons of stock at a time, taking up only a few cups of space in my freezer. As Pepin says, you have to be careful in the last hour or so of reduction, or you can burn your stock (Impossible, I thought, until I did it). It also means that you have to take all the more time and care over your stocks, but that's always the fun part. And at the end, mounting with butter becomes a simpler operation too - you just get a sense for how concentrated the glace is, how much gelatin there is for body, salt etc. and what you need to do to make it into a sauce. It's like a culinary magnifying glass for any other flavours you add.

If I might suggest something a little more comfortable for sir... The Japanese Knife Company If you're in England, these are the way to go. Especialy the Artisan hand made knives - which are quite reasonable.

Bacon = Pancetta. Don't you have un-smoked or rolled bacon (Ayreshire cure) in the US? Pancetta affumicata (smoked) - is pretty common around these parts (London), as well as the dry cured kind.

Louisa, FatGuy - How come there isn't a regular front page Egullet update ("LOUFOOD GRINDS THE BRUSH TO THE BONE! - Turtle, that is..")? If Lousia had the time ("40 DAYS WITH 40 POUNDS OF HAUTE BUTTER!"), or inclination ("DUCASSE CAUGHT EATING FRIED EGG SANDWICH - LOUSIA SAYS: ALAN, LET THE WILD DUCKS GO!"), I'm pretty sure the rest of us would, as usual, vicariously hang on every word. No? FREE THE LOUFOOD 1! No more back-alley journalism! Front Page or Bust!

Forgive my presumptious foolishness, but... is there any way of collating this information? Possibly an Egullet Top 100? Top ten french? Top Restaurant cookbooks (i.e. Babbo, French Laundry)? I for one would be very interested, and possibly influenced, by the result. And I wonder what Amazon would pay for such information? Can anyone else spell 'group discount'?

I have a q. for the sourdough fiends out there... When I was feeding my starter 3 times a day, and it was growing so substantially, my major problem was how do I throw away the rest of it? Everyday it seemed I had a quart or two of grey, bubbling, disgusting slime to somehow get rid of. My question is: what does everyone else do? Pour it in the garbage? Down the toilet? Smuggle it late at night into you neighbour's flourbeds? Exchange it with Guido, the local "merchant", calling it the "Old Gold of Tenochtitlan?" Stories please...

Krispy Kremes are Krack - and - uh - if any one could lend me a few quid to uh (sniff) buy one - I mean - I'll pay them back 'n stuff... no no, I've just had a cold recently....

I'm quite surprised by some of the choices here. With one or two exceptions, many of them seem a bit, well, recent. The greatest Italian general cookbook I've come across is 'Italian Regional Cooking' by Ada Boni (hardback, Bonanza) - written originally in Italian (surprise), I have a version from the 70's with fantastic bleached colour photographs. The recipes - for breadth and depth - are phenomenal. It goes region to region. Alongside all of the usual classics you find everywhere else, she includes everything from roast suckling pig, to old Roman-esque sauces, to one fresh pasta recipe which incorporates pureed chicken livers and sausage meat into the pasta dough before rolling it out! My understanding is that she preceeded Hazan - who I think is very good if you're already an experienced cook, but all the beginners I know who try her recipes come up with something a little bland. For the old testament of Italian cookery, you have to go to Pelegrino Artusi. Some truly bizzare methods - it makes you realise how much shorthand - and how many short cuts - we use today. The Rogers and Grey 'The River Cafe' cookbooks are wonderful. They do simple things to simple ingredients with immaculate taste. Bugialli always seems overly fussy to me - in that Zen master "when you truly sniff the porcini like an Italian, and stuff it up your left nostril after turning three times counter-clockwise while keeping your ass pointing towards Rome" kind of way. But whenever I take the trouble to follow his recipes, the results are always worthwhile (not to mention that I like my ass pointing Roma-wards). Best of luck.

Just stopped in to Pinotxo for an unbelievable breakfast. The guy was fantastic. Seeing our confusion, he reduced life´s problems down to ¨fish or meat?¨ We said both, and from that point on, life was great. Thanks Tony. Has anyone tried El Asador d´Aranda? A great place on the outskirts of Barcelona that specialises in slow roasted milk-fed lamb in a big oak fired oven. Unbelievably tender. They bring you a quarter lamb to the table. I was sucking the bones until the early hours. For a starter, some home made black and red puddings, and great jamon. I´d definitely go again.

I don't know if this topic's dead and burried, or just left to slow roast for a while over the Hawaian lava pit, but I went to Fifteen on Sunday for a thoroughly regrettable experience. The high point was the meat cookery. All of it was done skillfully. The service was between well-intentioned and outright clumsy. I told three waiters on three separate occasions not to take my bread plate - containing said bread - but a fourth one was too quick for me and had it in the bus bin before I could utter an oi! They sat me in a slightly odd place - the room is essentially a corridor - and then every waiter, bus-boy, and wine guy proceeded to kick the back of my chair on the way past. Repeatedly. For the length of my meal. When I mentioned this to the hostess, she seemed immensely uninterested. Then embarassed. To his defence, Jamie himself wasn't in the kitchen that day, but then neither it seemed were the fifteen youngsters. Tell a lie. There was one. In the one episode of J's K I caught, she'd slipped out back for a fag on opening night, and gotten in trouble. To my defence, I came out of the closet about JO a while ago. I love what he's done. He almost single-handedly started me cooking. I've danced to his books, and read his tv programs. I went there with big, sloppy, Jamie love in my heart, and good intentions in my trousers. And I've regretted it ever since. Anyway. The meal. Frito Misto - a fair cop. This was a pretty good dish. Nice, crunchy batter. The squid was lovely and tender. Lemons were bitter. Sardines were a bit oily. A bit 'high.' A wonderful, heart warming yet tearful moment when I looked at my wife as she bit into one, only to see her wretch violently. Eyes bulging. I thought projectile vomit was definitely heading my way. Simultaneously realised I was completely stuck in my plastic molded chair and in for one of those "we'll laugh about this when we're old" moments. Luckily, she managed to extrude the offending fishy just in time with a "perhaps you'd like to finish this one" and plopped it on my plate. I finished it off with much aplomb, I thought. Bastard fishy. A tuna carpacio that was so salty as to be inedible. What's more, and I could be wrong, it seemed to have a mixture of fresh chilli but also chilli powder! It was actually grainy. Completely ruined the fish. Sent it back. A pasta of fresh 'strozzapretti' with a lamb ragu. The ragu was okay. Well underseasoned. No tomatoes or red wine, interestingly, which left it like a osso bucco bianco. Gentle texture. The pasta - apart from not being strozzapretti (which to my understanding is traditionally hand-made; this stuff I've seen at the supermarket under caserecci (sp?)) - came out of one of those extruder machines. Like a sausage grinder with a disk fitted over it. It means using more semolina rather than 'oo' flour. The result was pretty bad. Tasteless. Gummy. For the mains, my wife had rack of lamb, with seven hour roast shoulder/leg with cannelini beans, and I ventured the roast pork. Both meats were cooked beautifully. The lamb racks were (again) vastly underseasoned. The pork and seven hour lamb were lovely and moist. The cannelini beans were - well - okay. I've had them cooked similarly at the River Cafe, and they'd been done with more care. The portions were stupidly large, and stupidly expensive, at between 25 to 27 quid (that's about 40 dollars for the US-ies out there). One of them would've almost fed the two of us. And I would have gladly taken two thirds the portion, and have been less unhappy about spending two thirds the cost. In fact, the whole thing struck me as enormously accomplished (if really poorly seasoned) pub grub, at Ramsey prices (and lest I be thought of as griping unfairly over the sponds, I just shelled out 750 Euros for two meals at Ducasse and Gagnaire - so believe me, it ain't the money). I was looking forward to desert. Really. And I'm a pretty big eater. But that main course completely finished me off. I couldn't even consider it. Which was a shame. Anyway. The above, with a couple of coffees, one glass of wine, some water, and a couple of diet cokes managed an unfortunate £111. Without desert. Now, take off the third appetiser we'd had at £10, and that still leaves £50 a head. And I just flew to Bologna for 40. Sorry Jamie. It's just too much.

What's the address of this place? i.e what town?

Louisa - apart from my perpetual congratulations - that was a seriously well written piece. Your best yet. Fingers crossed (and remember the little people)!

Are we allowed to help you in the exam? Can you get a sattelite feed? Can we back-seat brunoise? What are provencale stuffed veg? Best of luck.

SM - fantastic review. Circeplum - bold rebuttal. MobyP - stupid comentary.

Or vice versa.Can you give a vice versa example? I'm not seeing it.

Jonathan Day - yes, I think that's exactly right. It's almost an axiom. The insides have to be louder, more colourful, than the outside. Thinking back, that's exactly why the FL one didn't work, and oppositely for Thyme. Which is to say - the pasta and sauce are always the frame, no? The filling is the picture. Since we now have almost an axiom, it's interesting that the Batali ravioli of braised beef cheeks with a chicken liver/black truffle sauce goes against this (well, no point having rules if you can't break 'em). In my memory, they are both as loud as each other. Anyway - enough about chickens - Louisa - tell us more!

I had those strange knife-spoon implements on several courses at Gagnaire - I just presumed they were there for self-defense (someone from another table tried to attack my foie gras, but I repelled him with couple of quick thrusts of my spife... ) Thanks for the ravioli. My reasons were more to do with the nature of 'gourmandising' stuffed pastas. I know everyone does it. I'm not just not sure I get it. I had a capon one at the French Laundry which really didn't work. Then I had a ham-hock one at Thyme (a new London restaurant) with a truffle-broth sauce that really did. So - I'm just not sure where that line is. Any thoughts? Louisa - Write more! Faster! More intricate adjectives! Quick!