John Whiting
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A wonderful companion volume is the late James Bentley's Life and Food in the DordogneThere is also a lovely book called "Mourjou, the Life and Food of an Auvergne Village:- Peter Graham I turn to... -
Hear! Hear! I heartily dislike hierarchical ratings--of anything. I'm convinced that, in pandering to those who want their decisions made for them in a hurry, the text is inevitably corrupted. Can you imagine an eloquent appreciation of a work of art--or a lover--concluding with "9.5 out of 10"? So what happened to the other .5?That means, roughly : Why don't we give out stars or numerical ratings in our guide? Because both cuisine and culinary criticism need, at long last, to abandon the infantilising schoolroom system in which they have been imprisoned. How can one compare, on the same grading scale, a wonderfully innovative bistrot against a magnificent "palace"? -
Even more to the point, Carlo Petrini was a campaigning radical journalist with the shrewd good sense to mask his politics behind his gourmet sensibilities.Slow Food started on a genuine concern for the quality of food, the integrity of ingredients, and preserving ways of life. Its objectives were clear and defined and have remained so. -
Old ways are best ways -- an infinite variety will serve. . See Jonathan Swift:How will you prepare them? Long slow cooking, I guess except for the very young...BBQ?I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance inLondon, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most
delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted,
baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in
a fricassee or a ragout.
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This brand new encyclopedia is edited by Andy Smith and it's superb. You won't find a more conscientious or less opinionated food historian.I just opened the door to find another package. This time it is the two-volume set of The Oxford Enclyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.A friend who is a brilliant multilingual translator of food texts tells me that the English translation of the newest Larousse is full of careless and ignorant errors.
Waverley Root's Food: Go to Mariani, p. 352 and you'll find:
I've been trying for years to find someone who knows where the original uncut manuscript might be, if it still exists....whose beautifully written and lavishly illustrated Food is an example to all food writers for style, wit, personality, and breathtaking scholarship. Sadly and ironically, Root's greatest work was cut by two-thirds [!] for publication, and its glaring omissions make the reader wonder what fascinating information he or she is missing by having only such an abridgement of what was clearly Root's masterwork. -
My own less than ecstatic minority report, as of August, is here.
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This, for me, is a very sad thread. My own experience, almost five years ago, was of history come alive. I went there on the recommendation of someone whose judgement I trusted (and still trust), and was not disappointed.
Was this a one-off disaster? The evidence of the wine bottle could not be refuted except by calling the author a liar. (My own Chassagne Montrachet 1978 could not possibly have been tampered with.)
Alas, when operatic sopranos can no longer sail the high "c"s, they are sometimes given a bit of technological assistance. (Kirsten Flagstad, in her Tristan with Furtwängler, had two of them interpolated by Elizabeth Schwartzkopf.)
I have incorporated a link to this thread in my ecstatic memory of Chez Gramond. Diners should not be led astray by nostalgia.
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According to yesterdays Independent, these are the top gastropubs:
The top 10 gastropubsThe Alma, Wandsworth, London
Black Boys Inn, Hurley, Berkshire
Bull's Head, Ashford in the Water, Derbyshire
Guinea Grill, Mayfair, London
The House, Islington, London
The Salisbury, Kilburn, London
The Star, Harome, North Yorkshire
Three Fishes, Mitton, Lancashire
The Waterdine, Llanfair Waterdine, Shropshire
Yorke Arms, Ramsgille, North Yorkshire
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What's made the news is of course Ronay's comparison of UK gastropubs with French bistros. The BBC reports:
Do a Google News search on Egon Ronay and you'll find half-a-dozen columns of gloating coverage. But strip away the rhetoric, and you're left with the not particularly controversial observation that some UK gastropubs are now better than some French bistros. Indeed--but unguided, in the UK your chances are excellent of paying restaurant prices for something that's arrived in a Brake Bros van. I'd still prefer to go treasure hunting for a decent meal in rural France, Italy or Spain; sound cuisine grows from the bottom up, not from the top down.Gastropubs serve better food than many traditional bistros in France, with customers also receiving a "warmer" welcome, Egon Ronay's 2006 Guide says.Food quality aside, I'm still looking for all those rude French waiters. Treated as equals rather than servants, I've found them rather more helpful and pleasant than most of the human race.
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Jan Moir is not exactly enthusiastic.
EDIT: In Paris the first two courses, which in London cost £17 plus service (£18.50), are 21€ (£14.10), service included. Be surprised.
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Charles Shere wrote, taking a longer view:My favorite quote so far:
Clearly the inspiration for (or origin of, rather) for the great line from When Harry Met Sally (which Ephron also wrote):Good food was young. It drank. It showed thigh. It probably rubbed elbows with the Beatles. "Food became, for dinner-party conversations in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties," writes [Nora] Ephron.Restaurants are to people in the eighties what theatre was to people in the sixties.The art form of our time, the final thirty years of the twentieth century, has been the preparation of food. What the sonnet was to Elizabeth's London, the Lied to Schubert's Vienna, the easel painting to Impressionist Pontoise, the movie to the Nineteen-Thirties: that, to many of us, is the meal. -
Plaudits to Columbia Journalism Review for making this article freely available. Molly O'Neill quotes the right people, including the virtually omniscient Andy Smith. I'm a bit surprised that she is so reverential to Claiborne, who was rather more intimately involved with the food industry than she suggests. (In writing his obit for the Guardian I turned up rather more nuggets than I could appropriately make use of.) It's also a shame that she doesn't mention John and Karen Hess, whose food columns were way ahead of the Times, in both senses. They're still in print after a quarter-century, which is more than can be said for most of the journalistic output of their contemporaries.
I hope that O'Neill's stimulating reflections launch a long and vigorous thread.
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In either case, it's all the way to the bank.Can't we all just get along? It's humor, folks. If you laugh, he's laughing with you. If you strike a defensive pose, he's laughing at you.
Ours, if we buy the book.Isn't all satire and most humor at someone's expense?I hadn't noticed anyone here getting particularly hot under the collar. Even in humor, it can be interesting to examine motivations--that is, if one is interested.
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We're talking about subjective personal reactions. For me, it's a matter of tone of address--what I gather of the writer's attitude. If I detect a snobbery equal to or even surpassing that of the object of scorn, it turns me off. I love good satire, even vituperation that is proportionate to its subject, coming from a mind whose quality I admire; if it's just a pot/kettle slanging match, I lose interest.Is it possible to take on the subject of pride and prejudice (so to speak) that sits at the heart of snobbery that is then displayed in the ways we choose to live our daily lives. . .without ending up in this trough?Or does the nature of the world make the trough just where one ends up in the doing of the thing.
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Rakoff (whose name invites a vulgar misspelling) chooses easy targets made easier by his indiscriminate lumping together of product and consumer. It's not inherently silly to prefer the taste of one water to another; it's ludicrous to pay large sums for it as an indicator of one's sophistication.
Chez Panisse was never intended to be a snob factory. In fact it was not even an end in itself, but a byproduct of a social movement. It began, not as an Alice Waters ego trip, but as a group effort which has become an extended family. It's financial structure is set up in such a way as to allow it to continue without its media-anointed figurehead; if Alice disppeared tomorrow it would probably be a long time before the diners noticed any difference.
“So many people misunderstand it because of all the hype,” says former pastry chef Lindsey Shere. “They expect it to be like a three-star restaurant, and that’s not what we are or ever have been.” Her husband Charles, still one of the directors, comments, “I think that the most interesting thing about Chez Panisse is how it works as a business, how the management is responsible to its workers.” Responding to a disappointed gastrosnob, he wrote,
The considerable attention given to Chez Panisse by the media has never been our idea; we don't go out looking for it. We feel it's unfortunate that people can't simply come to the restaurant for dinner and appreciate it on the two most important points: the ingredients, which we work very hard to find at their best, and the work that's expended on them in the kitchen, which we feel comes close to the best we can do. . . [T]hese two points are at the heart of our ambitions. . .
The quotes are from my brief Chez Panisse history.
When Rakoff makes a glibly saleable product of his own inverted snobbery, he ends up down in the trough alongside the other publicity hogs.
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In other words, a "menu suprise" that's listed on the carte is an oxymoron.I agree that normally quality follows trust. I think what Robert's asking about, though, is then on the carte they allow people to choose the words "menu suprise" from the carte. When you trust someone enough to say "oh just suprise me", a gesture completely aside from what is on the carte, you'll most likely be happy.
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Fascinating! We do live in exciting times. I must admit that, along with all the fashionable new restaurants I couldn't care less about, serious chefs are taking advantage of the no-holds-barred ambiance to launch dynamic retrograde establishments close to their hearts. The London prospect becomes ever more promising--perhaps Gourmet Magazine was right!
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Any music that's too loud to ignore is objectionable. If it's music I like (and want at the moment) then I would like it at a level that others would find objectionable.But John, my informal survey finds Miles Davis as the king of restaurant background music. Muzak must be out of business.Bad decor (an occupational disease in French restaurants at all levels) can be ignored if you choose--look at your partner or, if alone, read a book between courses. But loud bad music? There's no getting away from it; for me it spoils a meal as completely as if the chef had doused everything with catsup.
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All very true, but organic food in London is likely to taste just like organic food in New York. I'm depressed by world-wide predictability.... and we should not so dogmatic about our approach to a sustainable planet. -
Lee Ho Fook in Chinatown is still going. The offshoot on Macclesfield Street just off Gerrard St, signed only in Chinese, continues to serve the cheapest and best very fast food in central London. (Those who read Chinese may know of a rival.Who remembers Ho Lee Fook, in the Kings Road, ? )
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Several years ago, Chez Panisse did away completely with both tipping and service charges, attempting simply to pay a decent wage; but the tax structure was so biased against this that waiters suffered and they opted to go to the present system. Or so I'm told by one of the directors, who hasn't yet misinformed me.worth considering in the context of the French Laundry and Chez Panisse service charges. -
For a start--if I lived in Paris, the question would be not, what would I look for in a restautant, but what would I look for in a collection of restaurants? Put in an extreme form, I would be happy with twenty bistros, each one of which served only one menu, but always to a high standard.I wonder what you look for in a restaurant in Paris or anywhere in France, for one night at home or on vacation.I do not demand novelty for its own sake in my food any more than in the rest of my sensual pleasures. For me, the primary interest lies in the subtle variations from one realization to another, as in, say, differing performances of a Beethoven sonata.
Of course, living in the country, with perhaps only one or two good restaurants available, one's demands would be different. In fact, one might even be reduced to cooking for one's self!
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Was that in Auch?The day was saved with three kinds of foie gras and magret from the hands of André Daguin.
eG Foodblog: John Whiting
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted · Edited by John Whiting (log)
“Closed on account of cassoulet” is a sign that Prosper Montagné, author of the first Larousse Gastronomique, once saw on a bootmaker’s shop in Carcassone. Every year John Whiting follows the bootmaker’s example and cooks a birthday cassoulet for around a dozen friends. This Sunday will be his seventy-fifth—birthday, not cassoulet!—and his blog will document the countdown.
Greetings! The monumental ecclecticism of the preceding food blogs makes me feel like a one-trick pony. When, to my astonishment, I was asked to write a food blog, I suggested that it be the week surrounding my annual birthday cassoulet. This year is my three-quarter-century milestone (millstone?), and so I feel especially privileged to share it with the eGullet universe.
Over the years, cassoulet has become a dish with which I particularly identify. Like bouillabaisse, it’s a peasant dish whose evolution embodies the anomalies that arise when such a humble tradition is subjected to gastrosnob gentrification. In the south of France, conflicting traditions have given rise to vigorous regional controversy: Castelnaudary, Toulouse and Carcassonne all claim that they invented it. Prosper Montagné, compiler of the first Larousse Gastronomique, came up with a metaphysical solution worthy of the Nicene Council. He reinvented the Holy Trinity, suggesting that there were three equal cassoulets—the Father (Castelnaudary), the Son (Carcassonne), and the Holy Spirit (Toulouse).
Waverley Root, I suspect, got it about right. He suggested that it all began in a continuously simmering cassole on the back of the stove, “serving as a sort of catch-all for anything edible that the cook might toss into the pot”. In the modern tradition, he found that the lowest common denominator was “a dish of white beans…cooked in a pot with some sort of pork and sausage. After that it is a case of fielder’s choice.”
This is borne out by Anatole France’s claim that the cassoulet at his favorite restaurant had been bubbling away for twenty years. My father once encountered a similar phenomenon. Almost a century ago in Kentucky, as a circuit-riding preacher, he was served a delicious soup by one of his parishioners. When he asked her for the recipe, she threw up her hands and exclaimed, “Lor’! There ain’t no recipe for soup! It jes’ accumulates!” These days, only Aga owners can easily take such a long view.
Some suggest that cassoulet derives from the Jewish cholent, set cooking in advance to eat on the Sabbath. Modern culinary practice is indeed reminiscent of the observation that it only takes one Talmudic scholar to start an argument; if you go into an isolated Languedoc village and ask fifty housewives how to make a cassoulet, you will get at least fifty-one recipes.
Or sometimes only one tradition and one cook. In Wales a few months ago, Elizabeth Luard told me about the Languedoc village where her children grew up, in which no one made their own cassoulet, but took their cassoles to a woman who was generally acknowledged to be the best cassoulet maker in the village. In the words of Elizabeth’s wonderful _Classic French Cooking_:
The Escrieux family, subsistence farmers with the right to operate their own still, potted their own confit, grew their own beans...and kept and slaughtered their own pig. No woman, she told me, ever claimed to make her own cassoulet, but boasted that it came from Madame Escrieux.
Or consider Samuel Chamberlain on Lyonnais bouchon owner La Mère Fillioux:
Her secret was disarmingly simple: Instead of preparing a great many dishes, concentrate on a very few and do them to perfection, day in and day out. Her reasoning was logical. “It takes years of study and experience to produce a perfect dish. I have spent my life perfecting five or six dishes. I will serve only these, but I will be sure of doing them perfectly.”
Such people did not learn out of books, but by rote and repetition. Our literate society has inevitably become a superficial society. We are able to swat everything up instantaneously: compared with the days of apprenticeship, every modern home cook, however expert, is merely a practitioner of fast food. We may know a lot more than we did, but most of us don't know it as well.
Not that I would like to go back to such a cultural climate. The endless predictable repetition would send me screaming over the nearest cliff. Perhaps the Gadarene swine were simply modernists before their time.
For further reflections on cassoulet, gluttons for punishment may go to Bouillabaisse, Cassoulet... on my website. Later today I’ll take you for a short trip to the Borough Market, where on Friday I picked up the essential ingredients for next Sunday’s modest little peasant feast. It will include photos, as soon as I learn how to get them out of my image file! (NOTE: The problem is solved.)