John Whiting

Canned foods indeed! Many if not most Italian cooks recommend canned plum tomatoes for sauces out of season when fresh ones are forced and hard as rocks. Here's a relevant news item I wrote up this evening for the next Fine Food Digest:

No, I'm the OTHER john. I know my place.

I hope you'll forgive a gentle reminder that for a large majority of the earth's population, food is indeed an end in itself, if only to avoid starvation. That's not just a pious observation -- we're talking about parts of the world where requirements are very basic indeed. This was forced on my attention tonight by a TV documentary in which an African raised in Europe went back to the tribe from which his family had originally come and lived with them for a month, doing their work and eating their food. He lost a lot of his 230 pounds and came away with an incredulity at the total poverty of their existence and how they were able to survive it. Most of the time, he said, the children were crying from hunger. I mention this, not to spoil the party, but to remind us that peasant cuisines everywhere, even in the midst of plenty, have been adapted from diets of scarcity. To forget this is ivory towerism indeed. Even in France, before WWII peasants lived through the winter on carefully hoarded basic foods; in much of the southwest it was nothing but chestnuts. John Berger's Pig Earth provides an insight into how the peasant mind works and how it enables survival.

You needn't ask me mine. My picture is attached -- I'm obviously prehistoric!

"People are fundamentally the same" is the sort of statement it is impossible to disagree with, but I don't think it tells us anything very interesting. We are indeed members of the same species, but it's the differences that are the most fascinating. In fact, the fine shades of culinary difference are what activate most of the discussion in eGullet. This applies even to as basic a dish as a bowl of rice. To bring discussion back to Robb's book, I was particularly struck by his ability to convey the strong feelings that exist between advocates of two different restaurants serving food which to the uninitiated might well be indistinguishable. Robert Parker once memorably remarked that in his opinion tasting food was much more demanding than tasting wine.

When I launched the phrase "sophisticated palate", I should have chosen another. I wasn't referring to American or European snobs, but to the practitioners of ancient and complex cuisines such as Chinese or Indian.

Indeed it is, as in almost every other topic. John Thorne chose the road he travelled because he was a writer before he was a foodie and couldn't bring himself to write the sort of prose that was required to be publishable in the foodie press, certainly as an unknown beginner. He has told me of experiences with publishers that made it obvious that in order to satisfy them he would have had to become someone else. Correspondence with him convinces me that his ethics and aesthetics determined his cuisine more than the other way around.Jeffrey Steingarten has established a persona as a gastronomic explorer who works just as hard in the kitchen as Thorne, but with a virtually unlimited expense account. He walks a tightrope that gives credence to his integrity but also provides lots of ammunition for the Frasieresque gastrosnobs. With at least one notable exception. Your chapter on Jeffrey and barbecue had me rolling about on the floor. Yes, and it goes back centuries. But some of England's best food writers have been aristocratic in manner but egalitarian in principle. The late Alan Davidson is the prime example. And there was Jane Grigson, who provided an observation to carve on the wall: "We have more than enough masterpieces. What we need is a better standard of ordinariness."

I didn't think I was starting an argument. Rejection of sweetness is very common in many of the world's foods which are deliberately sour. (I wasn't talking about total rejection of sweetness, but selective rejection in individual dishes.) On a relative scale, it's often remarked (correctly, I think) that sugar is added to savory dishes more freely in American than in European cuisine. It's also true that both sugar and salt are commonly used to make up for lack of flavor in mass-produced food, including those packages whose labels promise an intensity of flavor which their contents do not deliver. Those are the three I would have mentioned. If there are more, I'm happy.

Thanks for identifying the Houston Press as an "alternative weekly". It puts your "tone of address" in perspective. I think that Russ would admit (at least privately, so as not to offend his peers) that there are very few newspapers in America who, along with the LA Times, are prepared to treat food on a level above "lifestyle". (Not that London, with it's restaurant reviewers' free-for-all, is in a position to scoff.) But if I may offer an unlikely parallel between London and Robb's Houston, the really interesting food in my adopted city is not that which makes the headlines, but is what is available in the incredible polyglot of ethnic restaurants in the city's endless fringes, serving the local communities that have brought them into being. As in New York in the days of massive immigration, new restaurants spring up at a dizzying rate which makes it impossible for the cognoscenti to corrupt them all with instant success. EDIT Footnote on sweetness: It's interesting that, although a taste for the sweet is indeed universal, a rejection of sweetness is often one of the distinguishing charactaristics of the sophisticated palate.

This thread has dived straight into the most fundamental [sic] aspect of food aesthetics. Two taste preferences are generally regarded as being inherent: the sweet and the fat. (It’s no accident that these are the two sensations explored ad nauseam by the fast food industry.) Beyond these, Calvin W. Schwabe demonstrates in Unmentionable Cuisine that virtually everything not instantaneously poisonous is likely to be consumed with enthusiasm somewhere in the world. There is as much variety in the unlikely combinations of flavors as in the sounds that are put together into human speech. To work out a systematic analysis of whence taste patterns derive and how they function will be as groundbreaking a project as Noam Chomsky’s Generative Grammar has proved to be in the area of speech analysis.

Hi, Robb – Thanks for having the generosity of spirit to throw yourself to the eGullet jackals. As in the recent German cannibalism trial, you’ve let us off the hook by submitting voluntarily to vivisection. We panellists have been asked for an initial reaction to your fascinating book. I find this easiest to do in the third person: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Collected essays originally written for periodicals are usually published in a format implying that they have been written in a unified present that springs in magical simultaneity from the timeless mind of the author. But when the subject is popular food, and in particular food which has moved from the narrowly ethnic into the quixotic realm of the fashionable, essays written over a ten-year period are as inexorably tied to time and place as, say, political analysis or sports reporting. And so it is a welcome surprise to find that Robb Walsh, in Are You Really Going to Eat That?, has preceded each of his culinary reflections with the name of the periodical for which it was written and the date of its publication. (This also relieves the author of the dubious task of unifying the style and altering the text so as to disguise any anachronisms.) Such honest labelling suggests the mind of a scholar. This is confirmed in the essays Robb has written for Natural History, which reveal painstaking research that goes far beyond mere Googling. (Many of the essays date from the mid-90s, when an enquiring author couldn’t just glue his butt to a chair.) In subjects I know a little about, such as Gruyère and truffles, I finished reading them rather better informed than when I started. Robb tells us frankly that he had to give up his world travels and settle down to a more lucrative newspaper job, writing about food that was eaten locally by readers of the Houston Press. Because of his global experience, he has been able to place this provincial dining within a larger perspective which makes his local restaurant reviews interesting to readers who will never make the proverbial Michelin detour. Robb expresses particular admiration for John Thorne, another fine food writer whose horizons were circumscribed by economic necessity. John solved the problem by going within himself, adopting the persona of an introspective scholar whose world comprised his library and his kitchen. Robb’s culinary world is also intimate, but it is essentially social: he introduces us to remarkable characters whose idiosyncrasies give their food its unique identity. Authenticity? For Robb Walsh’s autonomous cooks it doesn’t come merely from tradition – it’s inherent.

In the early 60's the first fish and chip shop in San Francisco used to import old London tabloids to wrap them in. (They first wrapped them in wax paper; the newspaper was an outer wrapping.)

And it has to be a tabloid newspaper! Times ink isn't acidic enough.

But farmers and cattle merchants in the Northwest confirm that animals have moved back and forth across the border with such freedom that the identifying of this cow as having come from Canada is about as meaningful as determining what part of the ocean yielded a particular drop of water.

Some of my best dining experiences have been at short-lived establishments launched by fine chefs pursuing an ideal, but who had misjudged the market.

Strange. Clicking on the link in my posting above takes me to the same page as yours. Perhaps it relates in some way to the fact that I'm a Times News Tracker subscriber.

This op-ed piece from today's NYT makes as much sense as any single news item I've seen: Holstein Dairy Cows and the Inefficient Efficiencies of Modern Farming

There's the key, I think, and it makes our discussion largely academic. Remaining faithful to a diet is as quixotic as remaining faithful to a partner -- it depends on a whole sequence of ever-changing variables. Those with an iron will have no difficulty with either. Dietwise, it's necessary to find something that turns you on to being turned off.

Yes indeed. I wasn't leery, just surprised. I hadn't thought about it. My own advancing age gives me a reverence for all things ancient.

And best when all three are enjoyed together!

It's also not emphasized by Atkins that in ketosis, muscle as well as fat is consumed. But as I've already pointed out, Barry Groves' version of the low carb diet does *not* depend on ketosis. I find it an easy diet to follow because it emphasises the foods I most enjoy. Eating a variety of fruits and vegetables with reference to their glaecemic index avoids those which are most readily converted into starch, leading in turn to weight gain.

A big bread mixing bowl should be fine, providing it fits in your oven. You should still make January, providing you can find the bowl in time. Charles and Lindsey Shere's classic cassoulet recipe in the _Open Hand Celebration Cookbook_ takes a week, beginning with making the stock and the confit. (But Paula, I remember that you once told me that confit hasn't really reached maturity until it's six months old!)

If you're going that route and can't pop over to the Nots, I really recommend the large ceramic mixing bowl I mentioned earlier. It's almost exactly the proportions of a cassole (i.e. proportions of height/width at top/width at bottom) and it's one of the most easily obtainable of kitchen tools.

"This" comes up a stick blender, but I think I know the pot you mean. Glazed cast iron isn't really ideal, but for a cassoulet you're looking at a moderate oven temperature. I think that if you did everything correctly and served the result to an expert, you probably wouldn't get the response, "Aha! You used the wrong pot!" I was certainly happy with the result in a ceramic mixing bowl. Concerning the seven-fold breaking of the crust: one authority suggests that this was done seven times *before* the bread crumbs are added, and then left undisturbed after the final bake with crumbs and goose fat. Victoria Wise suggests a wicked enrichment: blend a generous amount of cooked pork fat and garlic and stir it into the final assemblage of beans and meat stews in the cassole. Ideal Alkins diet fare, if only one could come up with a low-carb substitute for the beans! P.S. My first girl friend when I was ten was a little French girl whose nickname was Fifi. Brings back memories! EDIT: The shape of the soup pot is very similar to a cassole. I think that with a dish such as this which is cooked uncovered, the porosity of the container is less crucial. The evenness of heat distribution which the clay gives is important, but a modern oven has this quality in itself, particularly if fan-assisted.

Paula, you're probably familiar with Georgia and Grover Sales' _Clay Pot Cookbook_, published in 1974. They identify the origin of the pot and the method as Etruscan.I knew Grover as a Bay Area jazz expert when I was working for KPFA Berkeley in the 60s. The intro is by the Bay Area literary light Herbert Gold; the illustrations are by David Lance Goines, one-time partner of Alice Waters who drew so many of Chez Panisse's posters and also wrote the definitive history of the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the middle 60s. Small world. I've found a very large pressure cooker to be equally useful for steaming, both meats and vegetables, providing the times are carefully controlled. A cup of so of water in the bottom, with a rack to hold the food out of the water, is enough. (A sort of cheaper version of a very expensive professional steam oven.)Last week I beat a tough old wild goose into submission which had merely been drying out in the oven. Forty-five minutes in the pressure cooker tenderized and re-juiced the bird; a few minutes in a very hot oven crisped up the skin. This derives perhaps from Emmanuel Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_: