John Whiting

Knowing nothing about who the authorities might be, I happened upon _Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking_ by Yamuna Devi. I have found it a fertile source of simple recipes which have in turn suggested variations on Western methods of preparing vegetables. Apparently she cooked for the Beetles, but I forgive her.

To state that I was comparing Mayle's book to those of Kurlansky just tells me that your attention was wandering. I compared it to four books which similarly -- and much more complexly and sympathetically -- set out to narrate their authors' coming to terms with an unfamiliar environment. At no point did I mention Salt or Cod -- or even salt cod. You'd better rehydrate. As for _Feeding Frenzy_, I suggest it merely as entertainment. Anyone who can stay glued to eGullet has a good chance of being amused.

There's a book which is far from being great, but which I enjoyed enormously and which I think would be an ideal summer read for eGulleteers. It's Stuart Stevens' _Feeding Frenzy: Across Europe in Search of the Perfect Meal_. Originally published by Atlantic Monthly Press, it's available in paberback from Amazon, apparently only in the UK. It's the story of a mad race to eat in 29 Michelin 3-star restaurants in 29 days. As the pace hots up, the plot becomes ever more breathless, but as the restaurants whiz by, Stevens succeeds in getting in a lot of shrewd comments. It's not unlike surfing eGullet on a good day.

Steve P has contibuted on this elsewhere at length; I hope he picks it up.

For whatever it's worth, jaybee's subjective reaction approximates my own. It's my experience that the English who have settled in the Dordodge - "la Petite Angleterre" - have on the whole made an effort to integrate, or at least have shown respect for the local community, whereas the Côte d'Azur has attracted a quasi-aristocracy who take more than they give. As for jaybee's father-in-law, there are such people; would that there were more.

Steve, you're on your usual diet of shoulder and chips. The four books I recommended had in common the fact that "their literary style embodies an integral relationship between a location, its people and its cuisine". Mayle attempts the same sort of mix, including food, although his treatment of the latter is anecdotal rather than analytical. I remained convinced that the contrast between him and the four writers I mention is illuminating. It's the difference between joining a community and imposing one's self as a sort of feudal lord. I've visited both Bentley and Graham: their houses are on the main streets of their respective villages and look exactly like everyone else's; Mayle's is a sumpuous villa surrounded by a wall with a locked gate, all paid for by the royalties on his amusing anecdotes about the country bumpkins and their village idiot. Is that "class warfare"? I would call it simple observation.

Which permissiveness was that?

I knew I could count on Steve to defend the crassly commercial as a matter of principal.

Or a nectarine, or a mango. It is from the Latin "uoluptuarius", devoted to pleasure. It may reasonably be applied to any mature fruit which, because of its roundness, ripe juiciness, sweetness, soft delicate skin and general vulnurability is suggestive of the female breast. (I didn't make this up; literature in all languages is full of it.)

As I've often said, I'm partial to those books whose literary style embodies an integral relationship between a location, its people and its cuisine -- in which "terroir" includes not only the land, the flora and the fauna, but also the native inhabitants who make distinctive foods out of what is around them. Four come immediately to mind, two from France and two from Italy. Peter Graham, _Mourjou: The Life and Food of an Auvergne Village_, 1998, Viking James Bentley, _Life and Food in the Dordogne_, 1986, New Amsterdam Patience Gray, _Honey from a Weed: Feasting and Fasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia_, 1986, Prospect Books Elizabeth Romer, _The Tuscan Year: Life and Food in an Italian Valley_, 1984, Weidenfeld and Nicolson These are all noteworthy for the ways in which they do *not* resemble the slick condescention of Peter Mayle's various Provence rip-offs. Each of the latter, of course, has sold many more copies than the first four put together, thus proving whatever you like about the great reading public and the infallibility of the market.

So did I, as I said at the offset. It's a wonderful read. But food historian Andy Smith -- who also likes the book -- says there are a number of factual errors that more careful scholarship would have corrected. I didn't have time to ask him to go into detail. That disappoints me -- it's a copout. As the author of such a wide-ranging overview, it was his job to make himself enough of an expert to deal with those disciplines which were essential to his subject.

That wasn't really intended as a criticism. One expects different things from a newspaper article and from a meticulously assembled book.

I have happy associations with l'Auberge de l'Ill going back to almost ten years ago. From what I've read more recently, I'm not about to shatter my dreams. "I couldn't go past Freiburg without dropping in on James Avery, the wonderful American pianist who presides over its Musikhochschule and who knows the region's food and wine with an authority born of long familiarity and enthusiasm. My last visit to him included a trip across the border with his wife and son to L'Auberge de l'Ill in Illhäusern for a menu gastronomique which lasted an eternity and seemed but a moment. Europeans know how to deal with small children: treat them as human beings. James and Ujo's four-year-old child came along with us and sat through the whole meal in total contentment. He was given his own little gourmet meal, which was not hamburger-and-chips, and a specially printed restaurant coloring book with outline pictures of the hotel, the scenery, the waiters, and the food and wine. He sat happily with us for almost four hours, filling in the spaces with crayon and adding some creative caligraphy of his own, getting up a few times to play quietly in a corner, and really enjoying the food. What a lucky child! But then family dinners have always been a tradition in Europe, whether at home or in a restaurant. In Britain, alas, I once overheard an elegant woman in a Swansea restaurant remarking dismissively to her companion, "They bring children out to eat now." She turned out to be the manager of a very swish (not Swiss) hotel in Belgravia. I'm glad she wasn't *my* mother."

Kurlansky's two books are a wonderful read, but they show signs of having been written by a journalist rather than a scholar. Now, that's a good thing when it contributes to readability, but it's unfortunate when it makes for incompleteness or inaccuracy in a work which is liable to become an authoritative classic. _Cod_ pays a lot of attention to Gloucester, Mass, which it should, but not to the exclusion of Cape Cod -- especially Provincetown -- and Martha's Vineyard. You won't learn from him that Provincetown was the principal whaling port in the early part of the 19th century, or that it was the principal cod port for many years thereafter. It's as though Kurlansky went to Gloucester, spent enough time to get a large body of material, and then closed his files. It's the pattern of a journalist with a deadline. I haven't read _Salt_ carefully, but I've seen enough to learn that, in bringing it up to date, he makes no mention of the part that excessive use of salt plays in various major world health problems. Now, I don't want a diatribe on its evils, but there should at least be an acknowledgement of the fact that it has become, for many, a harmful addiction. It would be like writing a book on the social history of alcohol without even mentioning alcoholism.

According to the chef who did the scrambled eggs for last year's smoked wild salmon tasting at Fortnum and Mason's, that's about the way he made them for thirty people, in a huge pan. It took him twenty minutes over a low flame. He looked as though he spent a lot of time sampling them, and no wonder -- they were ambrosial. This year there was a different chef. The scrambled eggs were dry little curds, no doubt cooked to an officially "safe" temperature. We left the eggs and had twice as much salmon.

Now that's the sort of info that's worth an hour's browsing of eGullet.

That was our experience in six hotels in the Dordogne in April/May. Prices were exactly or almost exactly as listed in the Alistair Sawday guide.

jaybee wrote: ah, finally, a truth I can wrap my mind around. Adam Smith couldn't have said it better. Are you sure you want to define value within such a narrow context? Bear in mind Oscar Wilde's definition of a cynic: "A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."Or have I missed a deliberately ironic intention?

And don't forget the long apprenticeship she served with Robuchon in his Jamin kitchen before collaborating with him on his first book. I've also found her Paris Bistro cookbook a regular source of simple but pleasing recipes that work in the home, not just in the restaurant kitchen. But bear in find that so many of the bistro classics *started* in the home, not in a restaurant.

I remember it from my last visit in the 70s as The Chatham Arms; I still have one of their T-shirts. Having been born in Chatham, I take a certain proprietary interest. My father was pastor of the Methodist Church, still one of the jewels of local architecture, and so I didn't get much early experience of the local bars.

Steve P writes: Steve, what would this suggest about the market value of your prose?

I wrote this in 1998. It was published in Dublin in SQ Magazine:SORBET DIABOLIQUE Serve it up as a tourment goule between the guacomole and the chiles rellenos, and get out of town fast. 1 ample garlic bulb, separated and peeled 1 tsp (more or less) Tabasco sauce 1 litre tomato juice 1/2 tsp sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 dash of Worcestershire sauce 1 splash of vodka or gin Liquidise. If your blender is small, reserve some of the tomato juice and stir in separately. Freeze in an ice cream maker and store in a lead-shielded container. Welcome to the club. Now there's one less of them and one more of us.

Steven S writes: Within the context of this thread you may call it corrective hyperbole.

SteveP writes: Ah. Thank you for that. It opens the way to a final solution of our exercise in literary criticism.Elizabeth David, MFK Fisher, Waverley Root, Richard Olney, John Thorne, A.J. Liebling – these are clearly and self-evidently among the short list of the best food writers in English. You need only open any of their books and read a brief passage to taste their superiority. They know how to write as surely as Escoffier knew how to cook. Just as a chef cannot produce his best work with inferior ingredients, so a writer cannot produce the best prose if he deliberately or inadvertently chooses subject matter of an inferior quality. If these writers concerned themselves primarily with ordinary food, it was because they realized that it was finally more interesting than the recherché and the grandiose. Much of the elaborate fare produced in the most expensive restaurants has always been a baroque extravaganza, designed primarily to impress those who can afford it and those who observe it. Gastronomic architecture is the equivalent of expensive jewelry – it is there to be admired and envied by others. It is the culinary equivalent of, say, the literary style of John Lyly, whose most famous work gave us the useful adjective Euphemistic to describe prose which is self-important, extravagant and overblown. No wonder that those authors who choose to write modestly and unpretentiously, using a minimum of carefully selected literary ingredients, have opted for the simple and the universal.

I think that the wrong questions are being asked here. The authors I’ve cited are great precisely because they could all subscribe to the closing sentiments of Paul Richardson’s _Cornucopia: A Gastronomic Tour of Britain_. His words could apply equally to the self-important gastronomic epicenters of the US: