John Whiting

Many will have advice on this. Everything depends on what level of expertise you start at and what you want to achieve. At the simplest level, Patricia Wells' _Bistro Cooking_ has a lot of uncomplicated but tasty recipes with solid tradition behind them. My personal favorite is Richard Olney's _Simple French Cooking_, which isn't quite as simple as it sounds, but is more demanding of time than of high skills. And it has the real *flavor*, not only of French food but of French culture. Pepin's old classics, _The Method_ and _The Technique_ are, I think out of print, but they're obtainable and are crystal clear in their exposition of classic practice. Diving straight into Robuchon could be a bit like learning to play the piano starting with Liszt. But perhaps you're already skilled in other cuisines.

Various dairy products freeze with various degrees of success. I've never had any trouble with butter. I've frozen several hard Swiss cheeses with total success. Soft runny cheeses such as a ripe Epoisse have come through it very well indeed. I also froze an entire wheel of biodynamic Danish blue, cut up into wedges. It was given to me illegally by a butcher because it had been delayed in transport and passed its sell-by date. On thawing it had gone somewhat crumbly but not dried out, and the flavor was sublime. Finally, cream in any form will go unpleasantly grainy. But I've never tried puting it through a blender. Edit: As for sell-by dates, no cheese in England is ready to eat until it is well past it. I heartily approve of sell-by dates, inasmuch as I can buy most of our everyday meat from Waitrose at half-price on the day of expiry. Our freezer stays permanently stocked with enough meat and fowl to open a restaurant. (And if you think a retired couple in Britain is going to buy all their meat from a top-price certified organic source, think again!)

Suvir's fame extends even to Benighted Britain! http://www.hub-uk.com/chefsbios/suvirsaran.htm

And then there is that wonderful French custom "a spoon with every course", which Mirabel Osler used as the title of her wonderful book about her culinary journey around France. To leave the last remnants of a great sauce behind is criminal, and one should not be required to eat unnecessary extra bread in order to finish it.

Now, that's in the real gazpacho tradition! How wonderful that would be with an old hunk of Poilane's pain levain.

I have more than once been in a formal French restaurant where a bone simply demanded to be picked up and directly chewed. On two occasions, without any fuss, I was quietly brought a finger bowl as if I'd been eating crab or lobster. Now, that's savoir-vivre!

Suvir, yes indeed. We've travelled this road together.

Providing one has found a good restaurant, the manner of service in an Indian restaurant makes a tasting menu entirely possible if you can get a few people together for a shared meal. Since the dishes come to the table in bowls to be shared rather than on plates which go to single diners, you can make it up yourself. In fact, it's like a traditional European banquet before "Russian" service became the norm. Basque restaurants in the US used to follow a similar fashion, with two sittings an evening and everyone seated at long banquet tables to which the food came in big bowls. I wish that modern European tasting menus would sometimes operate in this fashion.

Strictly following the Jainist principle of not taking life has certain problems in the face of modern science. My father once knew a medical missionary to India who had worked alongside a Jainist spiritual leader. Learning of the principle of reverence for all life, he showed the Jainist a drop of water under a microscope, thus revealing that he could not even take a drink without killing thousands of minute life forms invisible to the naked eye. The Jainist was fascinated and offered the doctor an enormous amount of money for his microscope. Knowing that he could buy several new microscopes with the money he accepted. Whereupon the Jainist took the microscope out into the courtyard and smashed it. It’s a common reaction to unpleasant information which persists to this very day.

Not a show-stopper, but a show-*starter*. And in conjunction with the opening salvo, it's doing rather well.

Tipping, whether societally approved or not, is inherently corrupt. In countries where it is customary in all interpersonal transactions involving the provision of services, including governmental, it is known as bribery.

Peanuts have become one of the most prevalent allergies. There is a growing number of children who can be killed by even a minute quantity. http://www.oma.org/phealth/peanuts.htm

Tony - I haven't eaten here, but I will the weekend of the Ludlow Food Fair. I was too late for Underhill's. The place belongs to relatives of a friend (who's a food writer) and she thinks well of it. Chef is Swiss-trained. It's about nine miles from Ludlow. I imagine it's a pleasant place. http://jolly-frog.com Edit: Of course we're at Merchant House and Hibiscus the other two nights.

Not to mention the protein . . .

This is a good explanation of what is going on biologically. Fortunately, adjustment to hot chili is *not* like becoming accustomed to loud amplified music, which gradually destroys one's hearing, beginning with the high frequencies.

We seem to have forgotten that all across Europe (and elsewhere), until well into the 20th century peasant "cuisine" was mostly a desperate effort to survive on what little food was available. Agonizing hunger was the norm. French peasants in the Perigord, for instance, often subsisted through the winter on mouldy chestnuts and little else. In a passage I've quoted elsewhere, historian Rachel Lauden points out that much of the "cuisine du terroir" that became fashionable a few decades ago had to be artfully extrapolated from the bare subsistence of peasant poverty, with a few bougeois flourishes added to make it more interesting. Only rarely and in certain areas was there enough plentitude to allow for the exercise of creative imagination.

There's an inbred yearning for fat that goes back to those pre-agricultural days when the human diet consisted of meat, fish, nuts and berries. (Agriculture only covers the last 20,000 years.) In those hungry days, animal and fish fat was the quickest source of energy and the quickest relief from the pangs of hunger. Fat was also the first part of the creature to go off, and so it was devoured in a frenzy of greedy self-indulgence. I can relate to that!

And I doubt if you'll be successful. There may be some tiny countries, but I know of no major ones.

Thank you, Wilfrid. I knew you could put it more accurately and succinctly than I. (No irony here)

If Courtine is dead, it's very recently. He edited the latest Larouse Gastronomique Edit: Steve, I'm saying that if your statistically-based assertion is true, it is what logicians call "trivially true". Wilfrid will immediately grasp what I'm getting at.

The assertion that "French cuisine is the finest in Europe" is on a par with "German/Austrian music is the finest in Europe". A case could be made that there were more great composers in Germany, writing music of extraordinary depth and complexity, than in any other country. But -- and I can't emphasize this too strongly -- this is the sort of assertion that *impoverishes*, not *enriches* the imagination and the palate. It allows you to narrow down the scope of your investigations, secure in the knowledge that you need know little else but what you have determined to be the *best*. Even if a statistical case could be made for French cuisine offering more great dishes than any other, it would still be true that, as you went down the scale, more and more dishes would rightly intrude from other cuisines, until your list, if it had any validity at all, would become a total cultural integration. It's as ridiculous as drawing up a list of the world's great ingredients, determining what countries they came from, deciding which was in first place, and then refusing to make use of all others. I am interested in lines of enquiry that *expand*, not *shrink* my horizons!

Indeed. He's probably the greatest living French food authority, successor to Curnonsky. And he adds wryly that the fact that haricot beans are now used is proof that there is such a thing as culinary progress. I agree.Steve, "Abe", along with Alibris, are the two collossal clearing houses for thousands of used book dealers in the US and Britain. Once you've registered yourself and your credit card details, ordering an out-of-print book takes only a few seconds. The URLs are: http://www.alibris.com/ and http://www.abebooks.com/ . But I warn you: if you become addicted, even your sizeable assets may begin to feel the strain!

When was that?! Steve, your quote from Davidson's book was so interesting that I've ordered a used copy through Abe. (He has lots.)

I've read about Berne's somewhere. Oddly, there's nothing I can find on the Web. It seems to be a rare example of a man pursuing his idiosyncratic compulsion without the slightest compromise and making it pay off. With such a cellar, I wouldn't be surprised if the restaurant paid for the wine list rather than the other way around.

I lead a simple life. I will eat any food in whatever way is the easiest. With a porterhouse steak I will happily gnaw on the bone after I've removed what comes readily with a knife and fork. Chicken? I always chew and suck on the bones, though I try not to do so noisily in public places. In a restaurant I'll wipe up the juices with a piece of bread in hand, not resorting to the "gentility" of breaking off pieces and then wiping them around with a fork. At home we clean up sauces with a spoon; if they're particularly tasty we then wipe the plate with a finger and suck it. (I don't lick the plate -- the juices get in my beard. ) We don't eat bread with a meal, including cheese -- it's unnecessary extra calories we'd rather assign to the meal itself. After all, it merely derives from the ancient necessity of making the meat go further. (Unless, of course, the meal is bread and cheese, which is another matter entirely.) Soup? If it's clear and thin, I'll happily drink it from the bowl. I'm told that the artificial gentility of extending the little finger while picking up a scone, for instance, with ones fingers derives from the mediaeval custom of reaching into the common bowl to extract the meat from the broth. If your pinky remained above the surface, it showed that you weren't diving to the bottom for the biggest, choicest bits. Suvir: I like your introducing topics with fictional fragments which give them a setting, like a frame around a painting.