John Whiting

We're back to best seller lists again. You don't want a writer, you want a banker! I'm going to bed with Root's _Food of France_ to get the taste of money out of my mouth.

Perverse. They had only a passing interest in haute cuisine, principally as a symptom of decadence. They were not limited by their knowledge, they were liberated by it.jaybee, I didn't respond to your first paragraph because it seemed to embody a cynicism so profound as to be, by its own dim light, unanswerable.

Wilfrid writes: Thank you for that! I quote that chapter so often that I hesitated to bring it up again. Here's my favorite bit of it:

If you are seriously comparing the "thatched cottage" painters to the writers I've mentioned ... I'm sorry, I can't finish that sentence politely.

Nope. I imply -- nay, insist -- that they have chosen to write about the food which is simply the most interesting to write about. This is food whose roots go deep into the soil of human culture, not food invented to appeal to the baroque sensibilities of those whose endless quest for a dubious perfection has brought them to the edge of boredom.SteveP writes I'm reminded of the book review written by Abraham Lincoln: "If this is the sort of book you like, this is just the book you're looking for." An oversight. Certainly he belongs with the other three. And he fits the generalization.

If that really is a serious question, the answer is that I've attempted to demonstrate that postulate no. 1: which has been ardently defended by some, is transparent nonsense.

Shouldn't that question have a smilie after it? My wacko emoticon at the end should indicate my own opinion of the logical dead end some of us have been following.

We should be able to clear this up once and for all: 1. The most interesting food to discuss is the most complex, made from the best ingredients by the greatest chefs, and is therefore the most expensive. 2. The best food writers in English are generally considered to be Elizabeth David, MFK Fisher and Richard Olney. Among living writers, John Thorne is probably the principal contender. Not everyone would agree, but I think more knowledgable readers would accept this list than any other list one could come up with. 3. All these writers devoted almost all their attention to what they called simple food, provincial and peasant dishes from France and Italy. (John Thorne has gone further beyond this, in the direction of ethnic foods, than any of the other three.) What they *rarely* wrote about was elaborately prepared meals in expensive restaurants. Instead they wrote about ordinary cuisine, well prepared from good local ingredients. 4. Therefor, our greatest food writers have perversely chosen not to write about the most interesting subjects. Now that we've cleared that up ...

Again we've touched lightly on the subject of economics. My preoccupations are with food which I can readily, even constantly afford. I enjoy an occasional splurge, especially in France, but I would not direct the major part of my attention to food which is usually inaccessible. As for what is most worthy of attention and most interesting to discuss: There are many people (I among them) who consider John Thorne to be America's best living food writer. Last year the James Beard judges seemed to share that opinion. But John writes almost exclusively about food which he cooks at home. He rarely writes even in passing about restaurants, and *never* about expensive ones. He has said in so many words that he can't afford them.

I can see why! Don't bug him, he's busy recapitulating phylogeny.

Equating quality with price is a fallacy to which the wealthy are particularly prone. They prize most highly those foods which are the most bland and the easiest to eat. Fillet steak, for instance, which has a very mild flavor and which you can cut easily with a dull knife. Lobster, whose tail is much easier to empty than the convoluted body of a crab. Foie gras, which takes no more effort than lifting it to your mouth. But there are those who regard a slow-roasted brisket on the bone as having a much richer flavor than prime rib. Who regard the succulence and complexity of crab, including the brown meat, as more interesting than lobster. As for steaks, there's a rule of thumb that, the tougher the meat the stronger the flavor. You just have to be prepared to deal with it, both in the cooking and in the consumption. During the season, my wife and I have a crab between us every weekend. There is minimal preparation in the kitchen -- just cleaning, extracting the block of white meat, chopping it down the middle, removing the brown meat, being sure to avoid the poison sack behind the eyes. Then crack the big claws and that's it. All the pieces come to the table, together with the necessary tools, a simple salad and a bowl of aioli. We do the time-consuming work as we go along. Pound for pound of meat, a dressed crab is much more expensive than a whole one. Is it better? Only for the lazy. Buying a whole crab, you know as soon as you open it exactly what condition the meat will be in -- how moist, how plentiful in the shell. Ready dressed crab can contain anything they choose to put in it, from a mixture of sources. This is only one example of what people will pay in order to avoid, not only labor, not only an excess of sensory stimulation, but most crucial of all -- thought.

That's not what Adam Smith had in mind. He assumed a market based on free competition which was not manipulated by monopoly.

As I posted on the new "most hated food in Britain" topic, it is illegal here to sell unbleached tripe for human consumption. This makes consideration of "quality" totally irrelevant. It's like asking "what is the best steak?" if all steak had to be boiled before it was grilled. If You're British and want even acceptable tripe, go someplace else.

For a glimpse of the extraordinary richness and sophistication of American Colonial cuisine, see Chapter 3 of John and Karen Hess' _The Taste of America_ and Karen Hess' critical edition of _Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery_. One thing that emerges is that skill, complexity and sophistication of cuisine are qualities that are most likely to emerge when societal change is slow and allows for a gradual evolution rather than constant dramatic changes. The very idea of "food fads" would have been unthinkable during much of human history. Even the revolutionary changes that took place in Europe as a result of the burgeoning Spice Trade were slow by modern standards.

But on those rare occasions -- Oh boy!

StevenS is a self-professed conservative who thinks undogmatically. Wish there were more.

Another clue when you're in a pub: real ale "on tap" is brought up from the cellar with a large hand pump, not raised by gas pressure. Many pubs have fake hand pumps, but you can tell them apart easily when the beer is being drawn. There are bitters on the market which are in fact pasteurized/pressurized and are not real ale. And yes, St. Peters is utterly supurb, especially their Organic Ale. It's a blessing that there are now so many fine bottled beers, so that you needn't live near a good pub in order to enjoy them.

I was talking about an *indigenous* English tradition, not an imitation of the French. Dorothy Hartley's _Food in England_, Jane Grigson's _English Food_ and more recently, Laura Mason's _Traditional Foods of England_, among others, make this quite clear. Nina puts her finger on the most important factor in the "value", not only of diamonds, but of stocks and bonds, which are bought, not because of their inherent worth, but what the buyer thinks others will value them at in the future. The dot.com bubble showed us how this operates.And I wish that correspondents would stop talking about a "free" market. Everyone who follows economics, whether of the Left or of the Right, knows that this hasn't existed for decades and becomes ever more distant with every corporate merger. Occasional spasms of pseudo-competition immediately subside into the managed status quo. With a single country dominating the world as never before, the pattern has been set in stone (or some more modern, shiny, superficially flexible material ) Please understand that this is no longer a "left wing" opinion, but an observation shared, at least in private, by all economic observers. I only mention this, not to start a political argument, but to point out that we just can't talk about modern culture, including gastronomy, in terms that were appropriate a generation or more ago. But they no longer are. Ever.

Because, as Colin Spencer has demonstrated, the roots of British culinary tradition were destroyed by a combination of the Enclosures and the Industrial Revolution. The Yoemanry (the solid prosperous peasant population) lost their homes and therefore their kitchens, where mothers taught their daughters. Those who joined the urban labor force lived in squalid conditions in which any but the most primitive cookery was out of the question.

I haven't seen mentioned in this or the previous thread (perhaps I missed it) that, so far as French cultural and gastronomic influence on England is concerned, it came by force with the Norman invasion in 1066 and continued during several hundred years in which England ruled much of northern and western France. French was the language of culture in England up to Chaucer, who was the first to write serious literature in the East Midlands dialect of Middle English. Chaucer's cultural models included the mediaeval French romance and the Decameron of Bocacchio, which served as the model for the Canterbury Tales. And remember that port was invented by the English as a byproduct of their effort to produce, in Spain, a substitute for the claret lost to them by the 100 years war.

The defining difference for me is between what was composed in order to communicate (for whatever reason) and what was put together for purely commercial reasons. (Not that commercial necessity never played a part even in what Mozart chose or was compelled to write.) In the angry words of Ezra Pound, "Nothing is made but to sell, and to sell quickly."

Or on persistence?

Heresy indeed. But I've seen the risotto expert Valentina Harris do it and have tasted the result. I wouldn't want to be required to spot it in a blind tasting. A cassoulet is a perfect example of this. The various bean and meat stews which make up the separate components are simplicity itself. Anyone can make a good cassoulet who has time on their hands and is prepared to pay attention. Most of the questions Steve asks are those which a businessman would ask if he were about to launch a new product, while others are asking questions which are primarily aesthetic or historical or even philosophical. (This isn't meant as a put-down.)The Rev Sydney Smith was once walking with a friend down a narrow London alleyway in which the upper floors of the buildings leaned towards each other so that they were only a yard or so apart. Two fishwives were leaning out of their respective windows, shouting at each other and shaking their fists in each other's faces. "Obviously they can never agree," Smith remarked, "for they are arguing from different premises."

I am sure the very same thing can be, and has been, said about haute cuisine. Perhaps, but hardly correctly. After all, haute cuisine is technically demanding if it is nothing else, while conceptual art, by its own proclamations, is more about ideas than actualities. Every individual work requires an explication, whether by the artist or by a critic. Haute cuisine, on the other hand, like the Cellini saltcellar, makes its own statement. Much may be said about it, but nothing is required.

There's poetry passing through these pages. It's clear that there is so much more at stake than the quality of individual dishes. Here's a restaurant in Arles that stands out in my memory: The rain has let up enough for me to close my umbrella and enjoy the misty drizzle. I stroll along, idly looking at the displayed menus. Many seem acceptable, but none are compelling. Then across the street there emerges out of soft focus a brightly lit Hollywood set of a hotel, a monumental entrance with a pillared porch, flanked on one side by an imposing chapel with a stuck-on Grecian façade, and on the other an enormous restaurant, glowing with crystal chandeliers. It could be the vestigial remnant of a monastery. Close. It turns out to be a 17th century Carmelite convent, converted [sic] in 1929 (just in time for the Wall Street crash) into the Hôtel Jules César. The menu of the Lou Marqués Restaurant—posted at the street so that the plebes might salivate in baffled frustration—announces that it is a member of the august Relais & Chateaux chain, which includes such gastronomic shrines as Robuchon in Paris and the Hotel de France in Auch. It takes only a moment to decide on an experiment. I look like Santa in mufti: shapeless cotton slacks, a turtle-neck shirt, and a loose-fitting Suffolk fisherman’s smock. I stroll up to the young maitre de at the front door who is taking reservations. —Bon jour. When does the restaurant open? —Bon jour, monsieur. At seven thirty. —Do you have a table for one? —Oui, monsieur. What is your name, please? The details are exchanged without a single haughty glance at my clothes, my beard or my floppy leather hat. I’m off for a half-hour’s walk. When I return at seven thirty the maitre de greets me immediately by name without glancing at the reservation book. As he takes me to my table I apologize for being inappropriately dressed and explain that when I set out I had no intention of eating so grandly. If he would prefer to hide me away at a little table in the corner. . . . —Not at all, monsieur. He leads me to a table immediately next to the entrance where I can see—and be seen by—everyone who comes in. I choose the menu du terroir at 300 francs (five courses of local specialties) and a bottle of Domain Tempier Bandol Rosé. I’m then free to turn my attention to the evening’s guests. Most of the room seems to be booked for a large party of Americans on a Grand Tour. They’re all clamoring for attention and shouting across from table to table. —If you get a waiter, hang on to him! Don’t let him get away! They’re scarce as hen’s teeth! They’re all ordering a la carte, demanding translations, deciding with difficulty, and then changing their minds. In the midst of all this confusion my courses start arriving at exactly the right intervals and the right temperatures; my wine is replenished from the chilled bottle as soon as I’m within an inch of the bottom. The young waiter is dignified but affable, stopping for brief exchanges with such unhurried poise that the restaurant might have been empty. Halfway through the meal he asks politely as he tops up my glass, —Is the restaurant too noisy for you? I can’t help laughing. —That’s the wittiest thing a waiter ever said to me! He smiles at our little joke and turns to the next table, where a tipsy American stockbroker is loudly demanding attention. It’s been a thoroughly enjoyable meal, but in a few days I won’t easily remember what I ate. Everything was perfect, nothing was surprising. It was like a speech by a great statesman on a grand occasion. When you’re serving a clientele such as this, who are paying this kind of money, you don’t mess around with lemon grass in the fois gras. So am I disappointed? Not in the least. I’ve eaten an expertly prepared dinner and witnessed a great performance—as absorbing as David Story’s fine play, The Contractor, in which a crew of workman erect a wedding marquee on stage and then take it down, chatting as they work. At the end of the meal I’m invited to have coffee in the lounge, where for 20 francs there’s a small cafetière of superlative coffee and a lifetime supply of delicious petits fours. If I had appeared in evening dress wearing the Legion d’Honeur, I could not have been entertained more graciously. Which is exactly what I tell the maitre de. Hôtel Jules César, Restaurant Lou Marquès, 9 boulevard des Lices, 13631 Arles, Tel 04 90 93 43 20, Fax 04 90 93 33 47 From _Through Darkest Gaul with Trencher and Tastevin_