John Whiting

In other words, he has the writer's necessary gift of modesty -- the ability to focus attention on his subject rather than on his own perception of it. He looks through a lens rather than into a mirror.

For a start, given Robb's fascinating speculations on the sacred aspects of diet, we should distinguish between foods which are ritually prohibited because they are unclean, those which are the exclusive right of an elite, such as sacred mushrooms, and those which have been outlawed in modern times on humanitarian grounds, such as ortolons. About to fall into the latter category in both Israel and the EU is traditional foie gras. The force feeding of geese is to be outlawed by around 2010 or thereabouts; I state this vaguely because the dates presently set by both legislatures are likely to be extended. So far as I know, nothing has been said of ducks, which is ironic inasmuch as they can be factory force-fed under extremely cruel conditions which are fatal for geese. It may have something to do with the fact that duck foie gras is so much cheaper and more widely accessible; no doubt the rich will continue to have a source of supply for goose livers, as with Havana cigars in Washington D.C.

Anyone looking for more thousands of words on the subject than they would ever want to read should do an eGullet search on "Compromised food critics". (Sorry, I've had no luck creating a hyperlink.) EDIT: Pete Ganz to the rescue, below. Thanks.

That's the key to the word "boring", and I've never seen it put more succinctly. But even "flavor" is a graded word. For a small minority it could be provided by an appropriate Latin quotation. It's certainly true that a popular newspaper must be written with a different audience in mind than a group of specialists or enthusiasts. I've seen popular authors write on eGullet with an unadorned seriousness that their publishers (or their public) would never accept.

Insects are an underrated source of protein. There's a book written in 1885 by Vincent M. Holt, called Why Not Eat Insects?. It explained, for the Victorian reader, that insects are the most efficient -- "green", one might say -- method of producing food energy. An ironic footnote is that there have been a number of instances in America of serious illness and even death from malnourishment caused by a macrobiotic diet, but none in Asia. The reason is that in Asia, the rice is so infested with insects as to provide the necessary protein.

It's a more extreme version of market-driven cuisine, in which the chef at the village bistro goes out early in the morning and bases the day's menu on what he finds in the market square. But the market has to be there in the first place; without it, you're forced to treasure hunt.

For me, "just another encyclopedia entry" is fine, providing it's a good encyclopedia. I like entertaining writing, I like informative writing, but I don't demand that they coexist. There are whole pages of Robb's book where he deserts entertainment and just gets down to business. Schwabe's Unmentionable Cuisine, which I've already mentioned, is as po-faced as you can get, and is (I think) all the more effective for it.

Although I spend a great deal of time advocating "a better standard of ordinariness", honesty forces the confession that my most memorable meal was a menu degustation last year at Arpege. Marlena Spieler has written it up supurbly and her review is forthcoming, so I won't comment further except to say that, course by course, it was a meal of such perfect simplicity that each element would have been appropriate to a great restaurant of any class whatsoever, from star-spangled Michelin down to simple bistro. Robb, the ferme auberge system is indeed wonderful. Our approach is to arrive in our VW Westfalia camper and ask if we can eat dinner and then spend the night in their parking area. The answer is invariably, "Oui, monsieur!"

It's got to be John Thorne. I said it all in a previously published essay:

None whatsoever. I wonder if the shrimp I ate there several years ago also came from Louisiana? They certainly didn't shovel them out of a local snowbank.

Only that it is gradually becoming popular in India, as are Patak's spices and prepared condiments. There's a fascinating book on the gradual absorption of the various Indian cuisines into British life and their reexportation in altered form to an India which is now beginning to face the same social and economic pressures as Britain. It's Shrabani Basu's Curry in the Crown: The Story of Britain's Favourite Dish, and it's published by HarperCollins in New Delhi (ISBN 81-7223-347-7). The author is an attractive (and very well-informed) young lady who lives in London.

Two of the best books about rural France are by transplanted Englishmen: James Bentley's Life and Food in the Dordogne and Peter Graham's Mourjou: The Life and Food of an Auvergne Village. Both lived in the center of their respective villages (Graham still does, Bentley died last year), intimately involved in local life and speaking French as fluently as their neighbors. They knew from older natives the poverty that prevailed before WWII and described in detail the gradual breakup of tradition now taking place through semi-urbanization. Their books were addressed to intelligent readers seeking information and enlightenment rather than titillation. They could hardly be improved on.

On tour in Sweden in the dead of winter, we had a concert in a school/community center in the middle of a snow-packed plain with not another building in sight. A hundred people showed up out of nowhere and afterwards in the dining hall there were half-a-dozen huge steel bowls set out full of fresh shrimp, thousands of them. Shrimp, bread-and-butter and mugs of cold beer. Basic.

Since 1966.

Quite. Which is ironic, considering that Jonathan Williams, the publisher, was a poet of substance and integrity. I suspect that he regarded the book as a colossal joke and never dreamed it would take off.

It's interesting to consider (well, I think it's interesting) that most of America's major literature in the 20s and 30s was written by expatriates living in Paris.

That's why we're getting on so well!

That is in fact a pretty accurate description of mediaeval scholarship, back when travel was arduous, monks were cloistered and their only reference point (apart from talking with God) was their library. There's a beautiful anecdote about Gallileo. He is said to have addressed an assembly of Papal scholars with a question: "Why is it that a fresh egg placed in water will sink to the bottom, while a boiled egg will float?" They argued at some length, citing various learned authorities. At the end Galileo gave the answer: "Gentlemen, it doesn't."

The problem is, I think, that so many recipes are written as if they did indeed consist of pure truth. The telling point that John Thorne makes is that they so rarely acknowledge each other's existence. (There are some honorable exceptions.) My wife Mary, who is looking over my shoulder and who has taught resident cookery courses for years, has just pointed out impatiently that most authors of cookery books have not had the experience of teaching large classes, and so are not able to anticipate exactly what is likely to go wrong and when. The best cookery books she knows, as sheer teaching mechanisms, are those that came out of the English Cordon Bleu school. The recipes were taught year after year and were based firmly on trial and error; for instance, instructions on how to flip a pancake begin, "First cover the floor with newspapers."

In Simple Cooking, John Thorne writes vividly about how a recipe is an upside-down approach to cooking, inasmuch as it starts in the mind of the author as a finished product and works backward to retrace the process, but minus the uncertainties and ambiguities of creation. He takes as his example rice and peas, in the making of which he let his cookbooks "rub against each other. And when I did," he continues, "what had previously seemed the most ordinary of dishes sprang suddenly to life." In my own case, it was living over several years with cassoulet, trying one classic recipe and then another until they fell together in a fashion which made me comfortable with an organic process not dependent on the availability of specific ingredients. I've made a cassoulet that satisfied a French chef, using ordinary materials from a neighborhood grocery store on the north coast of Scotland. I've even made up a vegan cassoulet for a table of a dozen guests who included a couple of vegetarians; the carnivores at the table tried it along with the conventional version and came back for seconds. Now, Robb -- is there any single dish which served for you as a magic entrance into the world of cooking, a dish the mastery of which made others come more easily, like the first successfully ridden bicycle that makes all the others controllable?

It just shows how alike people are everywhere. In Texas also you might be invited to drop by for a bit of grub.

A great answer. It's the sort of visionary response I'd hoped for. A simple observation, but it makes bells ring.

Robb, you might not like the moniker, but you've functioned in the kitchens of outer Houston as an anthropologist of the best sort, bringing a sophisticated analytic mind to bear on societies and cuisines unaccustomed to self-analysis. In fact, you've applied the principle which Claude Levi-Strauss wisely took with him into the jungle: "Primitive means complex." Now -- if Santa came down your chimney and you had as much money to play with as Jeffrey Steingarten, is there another country or cuisine in which you'd immerse yourself with the curiosity and patience you've already learned?

I'd happily sign my name to what Russ has just written (though he may not do the same to what I add to it). One of America's big problems is the lack of a common tradition that really holds everybody in the country together at the grassroots level. The so-called "melting pot" has been an uneasy substitute. When you're building culinary traditions from scratch, it's necessary to "keep it simple". When America was attempting to learn French cuisine overnight, it had the benefit of Julia Child, who set out, in her own words, to cook French with ingredients she could buy at the PX. These days the emphasis is more on the "home-style" cooking one associates with down-home folk. OK, it's easy to eat, but to cook? Not necessarily complicated but often very time-consuming -- look at barbecue. Such recipes came from families where time was the only thing they had got lots of, and where the wife was supposed to be on call in the kitchen and everywhere else 24 hours a day. You don't do barbecue in ten minutes when you get home from work and then slap it in the micro. The first book I encountered that brought down-home-cookin' to the attention of the highbrows was Ernest Matthew Mickler's White Trash Cooking. It was published in 1986 by The Jargon Society, a "high-falutin'-cum-demotic writer's press" begun by poet Jonathan Williams at Black Mountain College in 1951. (For the benefit of those not as old as I, that was the amazing educational institution in Ashville, North Carolina which, under the enormous wing of poet Charles Olson, brought together John Cage, Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, Robert Motherwell and many of the other writers, artists and musicians that gave shape to America's avant-garde from the fifties to the present day.) Jonathan Williams' preface set the schizophrenic tone of the book which, beginning with its title, both celebrated and made fun of its subject matter. Senator Fulbright commented, "How did you know that Trashin Cookin is my favorite of all cuisines?" Mark Holburn, editor of Aperture, called it "the funniest book I have seen in years." Very few of its recipies (if any) found their way into fashionable restaurants or domestic kitchens. Most often quoted was the It was reportedly a favorite of Elvis.Russ: Indeed.

I suspect that our argument is more semantic than philosophical. Of course there are differences, and they are very interesting, or we'd all be out of a job. What is important is how one responds to these differences. The danger lies in chauvinist aggression. Such people won't be talked out of their prejudice by telling them that those funny people are just like they are. Obviously they're not! Ultimately nothing works except a mental reconstruction that sees difference as an object of interest rather than as confrontation or a threat to survival.