John Whiting

I don't expect anyone to see my point who didn't in fact see it before I made it. It's useless to argue it here. I'll only add that nothing would give me more pleasure than to be proved wrong by events.

The most important element in creative cuisine has become a sense of proportion. By that I mean a realization of its secondary importance. To eat without reference to where our food is coming from and how it is produced has become a luxury that we can no longer afford. And to ignore or reject such matters is to declare the bankruptcy of the human race. Even at the highest levels, such restaurateurs as Alain Passard and Alice Waters are looking beyond the single-minded gratification of the senses. “Balance” must henceforth go beyond our sensory perceptions, and even beyond the well-being of our own minds and bodies. On the eve of escalating conflict and economic collapse, I would guess that the number of correspondents who consider this pretentious may have substantially shrunk.

It hardly seems necessary to add that a "balanced diet", in nutritional terms, is something else again. Some attention to this in one's total eating pattern can determine how long one can go on indulging one's self in the detail. Fortunately, instinct goes a long way towards self-correction, except for those so unfortunate as to live where the food industry almost totally controls the supply -- and there are such places.

Robert seems to come close to saying what I believe most profoundly -- that the enjoyment of food and wine carries with it no higher obligation whatsoever. Careful discrimination, endless analysis -- these etiolated pursuits are for those who enjoy them as ends in themselves (which sometimes includes me). Where pure pleasure is concerned, the bear that reaches its paw into the beehive, licks it and grunts with evident pleasure is experiencing a sensual delight on as high a level as Robert Parker when he jots "98" on his notepad.

I remain convinced that, in eating as in sex, the theoretical balance among the senses is an empty academic exercise which should give way to whatever one happens to feel at the moment. A maitre d' may suggest a sequence of courses but, however skilled, he has no right to overrule or even to question whatever my whim of the moment may dictate. Sudden passionate urges, leading to a unique if eccentric pleasure, may come as readily to an educated as to an ignorant palate.

Perhaps - but can you rise to the occasion?

John Thorne wrote: To paraphrase Whistler: "They will, Oscar, they will!"

A profoundly felt second to that motion. John T apologizes for the unfinished state of his spontaneous remarks, but it is better to listen to a master musician just fooling around than to sit through the laboriously prepared recital of an an earnest but unoriginal drudge.

Anyone who is interested in the meat and muscle of original American cuisine, as opposed to the bloated excrescence that threatens to engulf the developing world, should read Chapters 2 & 3 of John and Karen Hess' _The Taste of America_. These are some of the chapters written by Karen, who is America's senior food historian. Her editions of The Carolina Rice Kitchen and Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery demonstrate that American settlers began with a fine cuisine to which both Caucasian settlers and African slaves brought their own rich traditions. Most revealing of all is the fact, verified by modern soil scientists, that the newly tilled soils of America gave fruits and vegetables an intensity and complexity of flavor so far beyond the depleted soils of Europe that visitors found them either a revelation or a challenge beyond their comprehension.

I must sneak in a reference to a photo I remember from a little book of Fernandel's facial reactions to various questions. One of the most politely equivocal was in response to the question, "Have you tasted our California Champagne?"

Gastronomically, those of us who have more discrimination than income live in two separate worlds. There’s the best, which we glowingly report, and then there’s what we can afford for everyday. John Thorne comes right out and tells us what he does with mass-produced American chicken thighs, which even the Chinese have now rejected. My own high-protein, high-fat diet would send us to the poor house if I did not pay regular visits to Waitrose in order to seek out the packages of meat, fowl and fish that have reached their sell-by date and have thus been reduced two-fold, often to less than half their original price. (When did you last see a slab of meat in an artisanal butcher shop with a sell-by date on it? Meats can mature like fine wines, gaining value with age.) I take comfort from MFK Fisher’s description of her first Dijon landlady, Madame Ollangnier, who was notorious in the local markets for buying their cheapest merchandise, however decrepit – and yet, in Mary Frances’s memory, “. . . she turned out daily two of the finest meals I have ever eaten.” I’m quite prepared to believe it. There are tricks of the trade to rescue foodstuffs which are ready to flee the kitchen under their own power. Years ago Mary and I bought a duck on the Grimsby market. Her parents in those far-off days did not own a fridge, but their neighbor across the street, Mrs. Broxholme, was happy to give us space until our return to London. Mary’s father warned us that nothing of Mrs. Broxholme’s actually worked, but we were young and foolish. We collected the duck – ominously warm – from the fridge and put it in the boot of the Mini. Halfway home the smell began to reach us, even against the wind, and by the time we arrived, the windows were wide open. Thirty-five years ago, newly-married couples in straightened circumstances didn’t lightly throw away a duck, and so Mary went to our local butcher on Bute Street, South Kensington, and asked his advice. (In those days, you didn’t have to be a rich Arab to live in South Kensington.) “No problem,” he said breezily. “Give it a good bath in washing-up liquid and then rinse it well – you don’t want bubbles in the sauce!” We took his advice and it worked perfectly. The duck was magnificent, with an opulence born of – shall we say? – maturity. We didn’t ask if this was in fact his own usual practice.

"My blushes, Watson." I'll pursue the Berkeley connection privately.

John Thorne writes: The real, the insuperable problem is that there is not, in the English-speaking world, a body of scholars/critics/essayists who are prepared to take food seriously as a seminal subject -- a paradigm, if you will -- from which insights may be gained into society as a whole. Massive projects such as that of Curnonsky in France just wouldn't have a chance. The outstanding modern works in England are the love-children of dedicated individuals such as Alan Davidson and Colin Spencer, both of whom first established their reputations in other areas. I think it is illuminating that John Thorne, arguably America's senior food writer, is holed up in a sort of defensive Alamo from which his messages to the outside world are often masked by a sort of cracker-barrel-philosopher guise which reassures the non-believer by its disarming diffidence. I'm reminded of the persona which Ezra Pound assumed in addressing a public which he knew had little interest in and even less knowledge of the classics whose cause he so bravely espoused. Ezra would have settled right comfortably onto a stool at the No-Name Diner and joined volubly in the conversation.

Stephen writes: This is as much a matter of style as of content. I have great admiration and respect for Behr, and devour his newsletter; but the recent issue on Britain reflected the biases and enthusiasms of the small group of food writers who showed him around, as well as the brief time they had together. It was very much a whirlwind tour, but with an ambience of long and careful examination.I say this, not to denigrate an author whom I admire, but to suggest that one must be especially careful of sources when, by their very nature, they *sound* authoritative. Elizabeth David is another example of a writer with many admirers but no successors. But no wonder -- out there in the wide open spaces of postwar British gastronomy, she was as lonely as Johnny Appleseed.

It's amusing to witness this sparring match between two culinary giants (or whatever the hell they are), both of whom I regard, in their respective ways, as indespensible: In this corner, John Thorne, the gentle miniaturist who nibbles the magic cookie and then, in his journey to the innermost recesses of a recipe or a cuisine, reveals "infinity in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour". And in this corner, Steven "Fat Guy" Shaw, the new kid on the block, who can sweep us up in his giant paw and transport us from city to city, zooming in on its gastronomic solar flexus and emptying its larders with one snap of his capacious jaws. Choose? I refuse!

Steven writes: Perhaps the only literal-minded one. But if that's your ball, then run with it.

Not a million miles from the No-Name Diner!

John Thorne writes: There are cookbooks written for a whole range of expertise, from Saulnier's _Repertoire de la Cuisine_, which gives the briefest of instructions to the chef/cook who already knows exactly how to finish in cocotte, to Delia Smith, who has surmised (correctly) that there is a whole generation that doesn't even know how to boil an egg. (Her books are doing very well in France.) In between, the bias is now towards an assumption of relative innocence, in which, above all, quantities must be precisely specified, even when such exactitude is misleading.But certain cookbook authors of the past are still allowed a certain latitude of precision, even in instruction. If Elizabeth David were writing today and told her readers to "cook the eggs with the milk", her peers would raise a howl of indignation. But she is remembered fondly as Britain's Gastronomic Liberator. Of course she could actually write and, towards the end of her career, immersed herself in painstaking scholarship.

In the education of succeeding generations of children, they have indeed become the driving force. TV advertisers have taken over the modus operandi of the Jesuits: "Give me a child until the age of six . . ." Are you speaking of your own vantage point or, through some curiously acquired inside information, of mine?

Those who write well often have strongly negative reactions to those who write very differently, whether well or badly. It's a phenomenon which extends to the other arts. The most extreme example I know: Sibelius spent his later years listening only to recordings of his own music. Among food writers, John has written thoughtfully and somewhat ruefully about Richard Olney's postumously published memoir, _Reflexions_. If the work had been published minus an index, food writing in England and America would have come to a screeching halt while his former friends and associates scoured its pages to learn whether they had been cut off at the knees.

To paraphrase Kipling, "What should they know of cooking who only cooking know?" Fisher wrote so well of food because she knew, as Paul Henderson wrote at the conclusion of _Cornucopia_, his take on British cuisine, "It is a hard thing to say, but fine food is far from the most important thing in the world."

Thanks, Jonathan, that's the sort of answer I hoped for. Fisher's oft-quoted story, "I was really very hungry", is as John Thorne says, a tragedy: a metaphor of the interrelationship of the reclusive artist, the academic apologist and the accidental public.

Impersonality in criticism, whether of art or political history or gastronomy, serves to pertpetuate the fiction that a human can write with a divine objectivity. T.S. Kuhn demonstrated that even scientists are writing from a personal perspective -- a point of view or paradigm from which facts are observed and assembled in a format which is radically altered when one observes them from a different location in space or time. I trust the critic or the historian who bares his prejudices more than the po-faced pretender to a neutral indifference -- or an overweening omniscience.

Steven's impassioned plea for the visceral reveals yet another Talmudic conundrum: Is food a metaphor for life or is life a metaphor for food?

In his introduction to this Q&A session, Jonathan Day offers the droll observation, Thomas Mann wrote a short story, "Disillusionment", which is about encountering a man in the Piazza San Marco who delivers a weary monolog about his early experiencing of life through art, followed by his ultimate disapppointment when one anticipated milestone after another turns out not to have measured up to his expectation: "So this is love. And is this all there is to it?"John, have your determinedly vicarious culinary travelogs been motivated by any such uneasy apprehension? [imagine emoticon depicting wry smile]