John Whiting

My less than ecstatic reaction.

There's a picture here.

Slate has an interesting recent article as well.

Going back to my files, I find that only brie and camembert had separate categories for pasteurized and unpasteurized.

I also visited it in '98 after reading Steingarten. I disliked it so much that I didn't go back until John T recommended it strongly. I'm very glad I did. My original review is still posted with a cross-reference from the new; it's labelled "history". (like its author)

Some of the best ones are maison in individual restaurants and bistros, even modest ones. I'd opt for the sorbet cassis at l'Ecurie.

The British Tourist Board now claims approximately 450 native cheeses. There are indeed a lot of distinguished cheeses but, having judged for the World Cheese Awards for the past three years, I'm depressed by how many are badly conceived and badly made. This year there was a whole room off to one side categorized as "processed cheese with additives". None of them won any prizes but a lot of time had to be wasted over them. It would be easy to declare that "only real cheeses may enter", but that would be an arbitrary a priori rejection. Better to have a broad entrance and a narrow exit.

Steingarten discovered him in 1966?! He is ahead of his time!!! ← Whoops! Misprint--1996. Thanks, I'll correct it.

Most folks that I knew in the 80s didn't throw their Diners Club cards around quite that freely. Waverley Root wrote in 1969: A.J. Liebling said it very succinctly:

The short time lapse is significant. There have been experiments showing that in long-term storage there is substantial nutritional loss--the extended shelf life is dearly paid for. That's significant with mass-produced food eaten by a lot of people; where $300 dinners are concerned, no one is likely to eat them often enough to be malnourished. As to keeping the ingredients as close as possible to their natural state, this isn't necessarily an advantage. Have you eaten an olive straight off the tree recently?

Our enthusiastic reaction a couple of weeks ago is here.

I've communicated this privately to molto e, but I'll put it here for the benefit of others who may be interested. A sensational recent book of photos is bistrots brasseries & restaurants parisiens, ISBN 2-915337-09-8. It's available from Amazon.fr, which is where I got it. The photos are so great that you almost needn't eat the food. The most informative and well-illustrated book in English, by far, is the Everyman Guide, Restaurants of Paris, 1994. A translation of a French original, it's an unbelievable research job. Out of print, of course, but likely to be avalable on an ABE search. The ISBN is 1-85715-846-6.

I bought my first Good Food Guide in 1955 (which I still have) and have followed it intermittently ever since. Over the years it has gone increasingly upmarket and, as a guide to simple neighborhood ethnic restaurants, has become virtually useless. Yes, it is still an honest guide, but most useful for those punters with deep pockets.

This is from an article of mine a couple of years ago in Good Cheese. The entire arfticle is on my web site.

A fascinating thread! I still go to the market on Friday mornings for excellent cheap crabs (half the price of the very good fishmonger in Muswell Hill), French-type lettuce such as batavia from is-it-Booth's?, and excellent Irish cheddar, sell-by-date half-price. If I had to go on Saturday, I'd wear body armour. The tendency towards prepared foods is world-wide and results from a universal drift away from labor-intensive products of every sort. Rachel Laudan tells me that Mexican peasants don't make their own tortillas any more. Valentina Harris, at the end of a risotto demo, added the throwaway line, "Of course most Italian housewives use stock cubes." I can't resist adding the quote I've used before, heard on TV by my wife twenty years ago:

Hotel Baudy, definitely. And be sure to visit the garden behind, whose unpretentious informality you may find more agreeable than the one down the road where you have to queue up for half an hour to look at a water lily.

Yes indeed. ← I just wanted to say that I enjoy your writings on food. You and Mr Talbott manage to write about high end dining in an engaging way. Nice photo of the dog, btw. ← That's actually me in the photo. Another dog writes the reviews.

Yes indeed.

A determining factor, I'm told, is that French schools often have classroom "policemen" responsible for discipline, so that the teacher need only teach.

Precisely! Culture is indivisible, and the discipline in French primary schools would outrage most American child psychologists. I know which theory I prefer to live with the results of.

...and here's the report in the Guardian.

Tells you all you need to know about New York!!

Oh, that's alright then.

Here's an interesting response to Per Se by a widely published and excellent food writer, Clarissa Hyman. It was published this month in the Guild of Food Writers Newsletter; I reproduce it here with her permission. (She might have titled it Per-Se-flage

Here's an interesting response from a cookery book dealer: