John Whiting

Fascinating that this man was able to put to work with modern communication and transportation what Gandhi had seen as the cornerstone of India's economic self-sufficiency.

If you go back to Wilfrid's original posting which began this discussion, you will see that Colin Spencer's new book, coming out the end of October, should hold a lot of answers concerning French influence on Britain. This is Colin's advance summary from another list. Germaine Greer calls him "the greatest living food writer", which may be over the top but not by very much.

Th argument raging everwhere over fusion/confusion conceals a simple fact known to food historians: namely, that the modern fusion movement is merely a commercialized and time-accelerated variant on what has been going on throughout human history. Or as Sri Owen, Indonesian author of _The Rice Book_ says, throughout Asia, "fusion" food is the only kind there is: (privately circulated paper, quoted with the author's permission)

But these were puddings in the manner of Yorkshire Pudding; i.e., starchy stodge to fill up the diners so that they wouldn't want so much meat.

Foreigners are accepteed as equals in any country after they gain substantial financial and political power. Prejudice against southern Europeans evaporated first in America in San Francisco, where Latins were rich and powerful from the beginning. The Irish were scorned in Boston until they took over the city. The Italians were looked down on in Providence RI until the Mafia made the city an offer it couldn't refuse. The status of Jews in England was greatly elevated after Disraeli became Prime Minister. African-Americans, at least the prosperous middle-class, have rapidly gained status as they have been elected to office. (Look at the ultra-respectable examples Bush was able to co-opt!) So, Suvir -- when will you be running for Congress?!

Within this context, I was referring to nothing beyond the atmosphere of the restaurant/bistro/dining establishment itself. No "feed the starving millions" here -- I was talking about the sort of dining experience that gives me the greatest pleasure. In another thread I described one of the most memorable meals I ever had, at the Restaurant Le Mas in Longuyon -- a menu degustation with musical accompaniment provided by a wind ensemble from the conservatory at Nancy. It consisted of ensemble pieces by Poulenc, Mozart and Beethoven, beautifully played and beautifully listened to -- that is, all the diners stopped talking during the music and paid attention. Very much *not* the historical treatment of Tafelmusic, which was designed, like any Musak, to make an agreeable noise and fill the silences.This is one aspect of what I mean by "generously communal" -- a gathering of appreciative people who make a restaurateur feel that his diners are paying attention. In my experience it does happen once in a while. (On this occasion the chef, Monsieur Tisserant, got a round of applause at the end along with the musicians.)

A quick read through the last few posts tells me there's much more essential agreement here than disagreement. Nothing here I wouldn't sign my name to, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. After all, relative to the multinational food industry we're all pretty much on the same side. And even with theoretical or philosophical differences, we'd probably accept each others' restaurant recommendations above any others.

It is not a popular opinion on this site, but there are those who believe that the incessant competitive grading of restaurants leads to the corruption of what can and should be a generously communal experience. I am aware that on a grand scale this is Utopian. Nevertheless I prize those chefs – and there are such people – who run their establishments as if such a world were possible. Alice Waters is one, and she is as resented for it by some as she is loved by others. I hope that those who disagree with me can accept this as a strongly and honestly held position and not as a personal attack. It is, of course logically indefensible, so I shall not attempt to do so. Call it, if you will, an irrational item of religious faith.

I'm happy to see this topic generating more light than heat. What led me into it was the seemingly irrelevent experience with which I opened. Having to balance the sounds coming from these great musicians was, in a sense, as if I were to be asked to guide the hands of a great chef. I had a degree of control over the music which would have allowed me to ruin it through insensitivity. I have never before or since been plunged into a very foreign culture with so little experience and so much power. I was on an accelerated learning curve which was both frightening and exhilarating. What it made me realize was how little we usually understand of exotic cultures which become superficially familiar. Of course I could have learned the same lesson by living in India, but I have never had that experience -- only the crash course in one limited aspect.

I'm not going to defend statements which I neither made nor implied. Nor will I bother to defend concepts which came straight out of those trendy lefties, MFK Fisher, John Thorne and Diana Kennedy. Having been assigned to the Commie contingent, I suppose I must wear my hammer and sickle with good grace.

In the early 1980s Varadarajan, a Minister at the Indian High Commission in London, organized a remarkable series of intimate recitals by some of India’s greatest classical musicians. These were held at the October Gallery, where my sound studio occupied the basement, and so I was asked to amplify, balance and record the concerts. I had listened casually and with pleasure to Indian classical music, but knew nothing of its intricacies. There were no scores; no books could tell me what I had to hear. And so I placed microphones where I was told and made adjustments as instructed by the musicians who left the ensemble one by one and listened to the balance among the others. Gradually over several concerts I began to feel the music as an entity. I was able to anticipate and adjust as one musician, then another emerged from the texture for an extended improvisation (which a jazz musician would call a riff) and then submerged again into the totality. A smattering of applause would often see him out, and I began to appreciate just what had given the audience pleasure. My proudest moment came when the great Ravi Shankar ended a pre-concert sound check after a couple of minutes with the comment, “It is good. Don’t change anything.” This is very much the way that children growing up in a community learn to understand the strange noises that float about their ears, gradually realizing that many of these sounds convey information. There is no instruction, only repetition, in which certain sounds accompany particular objects, events or emotions. These sounds become “words” and begin to relate to each other; gradually a “generative grammar” gives them a collective meaning. Children who grow up in a kitchen are apt to learn about food in much the same way. Step by step they may observe what takes place as what comes out of the basket turns into what goes into their mouths – in other words, they learn cause and effect. What they learn and the way they learn it will be conditioned by the cuisine that surrounds them, including the dishes, the tools, the pots and pans, the ingredients. These in turn will influence how the food is handled: whether it is chopped, cut or torn apart, whether ingredients are mixed by hand, by spoon, by fork or by machinery. What are the stages? Is there intermediary cooking or does everything go straight into the pot at once? Is there an effort to save time or are processes allowed to set their own inherent schedules? For occidental and oriental cuisines there are very different answers to all these questions. For instance, to watch an Indian cook pulverize and sear the seeds and spices before adding the other ingredients one by one to the pan is to enter another culinary world. Even the manner of eating may be foreign to us. As M.F.K. Fisher observes in her introduction to Shizuo Tsuji’s Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art: “Our physical habits are different [from the Japanese], so that we chew and swallow and sip and raise food to our mouths differently, with different tools.” In the West, our post-Beeton recipe-oriented approach to cookery assumes that any dish, no matter how foreign to our experience, can be created by measuring out the specified ingredients and following a sequence of instructions. But as John Thorne reminds us in his Simple Cooking, “[C]reativity is a one-way street: very few cooks are willing or even able to afterward evoke the ferment, the confusion, the groping before the moment that shaped the dish. What we get instead is a rationale that works backward from the finished dish, a rationale that makes everything seem as if it had all been clear and obvious from the start.” If this is the case with dishes from our own gastronomic tradition, how much more are we deceived when a brief recipe pretends to include the relevant input of an entire foreign culture? In an era which attaches a monetary value to every aspect of our existence, the creative impulse behind the food we eat must be established as someone’s intellectual property and quantified in relation to the competition. Thus the celebrity chef at the top of his profession must approach every new cuisine, not as part of a culture to be respected, but as a treasure to be confiscated. Sophisticated diners will come to his restaurant equipped with score cards on which they will rate his success in displaying his trophies so as to massage, seduce, astound or ravish their eager palates. So how, finally, can we properly understand a foreign cuisine? Few of us have the opportunity of absorbing it directly from its masters, even those living in our own country. Even fewer may learn it as Fuchsia Dunlop absorbed Sichuan cuisine, by learning Chinese and going to live in the province for a couple of years. Our most probable source will be books written by those who know – or pretend to know – the cuisines we want to discover. But as Thorne wryly observes, most cookery book writers cite few sources, speaking as though they had invented their subject from scratch. And so one is forced to consult a selection of the most plausible authorities and observe carefully the various ways in which they argue among themselves. Trying them out in the kitchen, one learns gradually what methods and materials are best suited to one’s own tastes and resources. In coming to terms with the foreign and the unfamiliar, we must above all approach it with humility. We can’t instantly transplant ourselves into an alien culture but neither should we attempt to force it into the straightjacket of our own culinary tradition. As Diana Kennedy constantly reminds us, we should never try to adapt one cuisine to another, but instead adjust the two of them to each other. This, after all, is what is happening throughout the world as the traditional barriers of time and place are broken down by migration and communication. Just remember – the ever-expanding and interlocking panorama of global cuisines is not solely the prerogative of the rich. The lowly Spam is now a native of Hawaii. ©2002 John Whiting

Some people are not reading carefully. My last post said goodbye. Plotnicki has won. He now has two notches in his pistol. I'll join Suvir and post occasionally in the Indian ghetto, but mostly I'm back to caring for my own web site again. Steven Shaw should do the same; the last time I looked at his prize-winning site the latest item was almost four months old. He's too good for that. This place is insidious. A thousand postings in a few months? That's ridiculous! So please don't ask me any more questions; they're blowing away in the wind. Just talk amongst yourselves.

After being compared to a mother who harms her child for attention I posted a very angry response. (Wouldn’t you?) It has been blocked and will be deleted with my permission. I regret it but I do not apologize. After a certain amount of abuse, which has been only mildly rebuked, one grows weary. So goodbye. Get on with your lives and I shall get on with mine. My thanks to those who understood.

I wouldn't even attempt it! I'd go nuts!

Cooking and serving skate on the bone, I think, makes a discernable difference in flavor. I find it one of the easiest fish to eat from the bone because the upper and lower fillets are not connected to each other and so lift away neatly. The bones, even the small ones, are large in diameter, very smooth, and easy to separate from the flesh. Try tackling a red or gray mullet; now there's a job for Job -- much patience required.

No. but you have to go round Robin Hood's barn! (I'll use an emoticon again just this once.)

Maybe I didn't quite make it clear that I think I am being overcharged *compared with what I am happy to pay*, and that this does not necessarily correspond to what the economic climate dictates. I'm making an inherently unfair comparison with France and Italy, which give me what I want at a price I like. It's inherent in the cultures of these two countries. To "blame" England for its lack of a living culinary tradition would be as unfair as to blame Dartmoor for being flat.

To get serious -- ha! -- Julia Child's _Mastering the Art_ has a whole section on "Lamb and Mutton" in which she states at the outset that mutton is almost impossible to get (that was over thirty years ago) and then proceeds to give roasting times for mutton and lamb as if they were interchangeable. I wonder if she ever got any feedback on that from readers with broken dentures?

One thing keeps coming out -- diners have not been overcharged if they are in possession of all the facts and still don't *think* they have been overcharged. (Of course they haven't necessarily been overcharged just because they think so.) It's not unlike buying an antique -- how much are you willing to pay for what the shop has to offer? My own admittedly personal response is that, on the whole, I think I am being overcharged, not by this restaurant or that, but by the great majority of non-ethnic restaurants in Britain. You could quite legitimately argue that this is my problem, not theirs. I'll buy that -- if the price is right!

It's not that complicated. I just like France and will sieze any available excuse for going there. If the food in Paris were inedible and overpriced, I would still pretend that I was enjoying it.

Apple pie with mature farmhouse cheddar is classic in England, and ripe pear with parmesan in Italy.

I should reiterate what I've already said -- that I wasn't accusing Henderson of a rip-off, but commenting sadly on the concatenation of factors which makes England more expensive than most of Europe for eating a good simple meal away from home. That's why I tend to save up my restaurant meals and take them together in France, thus getting the travel -- as a bonus from the less expensive dinners -- absolutely free.

"Mutton chops! They're not just whiskers!"

A note of realism is required. The GFW Newsletter is an in-house informational pamphlet, the folded equivalent of four A4 pages, mostly up-coming events and reports on past workshops with sometimes an op-ed piece thrown in for filler. There's a back-page "rant" where members get things off their chest (that wasn't me). There are no newsstand sales, no scoops, no "extras", no stop-presses. My little piece filled a page that was empty due to a lack of summer news; it came and went without a flicker of feedback. What do they care? They're mostly into print. I'm the nut that actually uses his computer for *reading*. Go on, somebody -- be the Mouse that Roared. After the laughter has died down you'll be patted on the head and given a cookie. In the meantime, the brouhaha that's been echoing across these pages has given my little piece a continuing readership of, so far, 1577. That's about five times the membership of the Guild. I couldn't buy PR like that even if I could afford it.

What it comes down to is that no guide is reliable as an exclusive source, but that all of them are useful when they're intelligently interpreted and compared with each other. I try to stay up to date with all the Paris guides, both books and periodicals (though not the general guides that happen to include a few restaurants), and every one of them has given me at least one piece of information that made its purchase worthwhile. I'd go so far as to suggest that a clever bedridden author could write a guide to Paris restaurants based entirely on printed sources which would not be worthless. (With a bit of help from eGullet, of course!) I suspect that the trickiest segment is the very top echelon, where apparently trivial things can make such an enormous difference. And it's not just league tables and who wins top marks -- unlike Formula One racing, getting there is *all* the fun!