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John Whiting

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Everything posted by John Whiting

  1. Bux, you mention the db burger. This is another move up-market of a formerly unpretentious dish. As with lobster in the bouillabaisse, it may elicit an ambivalent response. This is Marlena Spieler’s reaction, as posted to the Guild of Food Writers’ private Sparklist. (I have her permission to post it on her behalf; she’s working to meet a deadline.)
  2. Put that paragraph where you can find it later for a book -- good stuff. And check out the chapter "Counting the Cost" in A.J. Liebling's _Between Meals_.
  3. I will back off and admit that this is my personal objection to what has become an excuse for doubling the cost. Spiny lobster is in fact listed as an *optional extra* in the Marseilles Bouillabaisse charter. http://www.starchefs.com/bouillabaisse/htm...omponents.shtml Alan Davidson gets the point when he includes among the ingredients, "maybe some inexpensive crustaceons". If Alan is also silly, then I'm delighted to keep him company.
  4. Exactly! There are certain peasant dishes that have been tarted up with more expensive ingredients to raise them to the luxury level. For instance, lobsters in a bouillabaisse are as unnecessary as foie gras and truffles in a hamburger.Cassoulet is another. (See my "Bouillabaisse, cassoulet..." http://www.whitings-writings.com/essays/bouillebaisse.htm
  5. Or if you're in Paris and want a very decent bouillabaisse for around fifteen bucks, try Au Petit Niçois, 10, rue Amélie, 7th, 01.45.51.83.65.
  6. Without question, cassoulet. My ingredients are perfectly standard, but I've spent several years fine-tuning the method to the point where I've never tasted better. (Nor, if they are to be believed, have my guests.) Every January I cook it for my own birthday party, for as many people as the dining table will accommodate. It takes five days and involves, first, a large pressure cooker, and finally one or more of a set of cassoles I brought back from Languedoc, where they are still made by the Not family.
  7. A perfect example of a review that totally convinces, both in tone and in detail. And your take on Bacon clinched it. Many thanks!
  8. Charles Shere of Chez Panisse has summed it up neatly: The art form of our time, the final thirty years of the twentieth century, has been the preparation of food. What the sonnet was to Elizabeth’s London, the Lied to Schubert’s Vienna, the easel painting to Impressionist Pontoise, the movie to the Nineteen-Thirties; that, to many of us, is the meal.
  9. Seymour Krim was a fine essayist of the 70s, who invented the phrase "beat generation", though he's not usually credited with it. _Shake it for the World, Motherfucker_ and _Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer_ have some penetrating insights into his contemporaries. His style is not unlike yours - shrewd intelligence often masquerading as drug-addled ravings. Edit: I see I'd written "drag-addled". I must have been wearing my Freudian slip.
  10. It's generous of you to say that. When I sent Sal the first draft of my history of Chez Panisse, he wrote back that that was what he'd been trying to do when he set up his own place in 1962, a decade before Alice, in accordance with the same ambitious principles of respect for staff, ingredients, diners and the planet’s ecology.
  11. Is the Dreadnaught the Flagship? Is Mario's Ciro & Sal's? Do you know Sal Del Deo? A fine cook, a good artist and a great man. Your portrait of Howard Mitchum is generous and properly respectful of a man it's so easy to make fun of. His Provincetown Seafood Cookbook is, as you so rightly say, a book to keep going back to. (signed) An Exiled Ptowner
  12. Wow! I just threw a switch and profundity rolls out. If only there were a modern radio or TV food program equivalent of the old BBC Brains Trust. The discussion of cassoulet and cholent is fascinating inasmuch as there are food historians who suggest that the cholent was in fact the ur-version of the cassoulet, brought into southwest France by migrating Jews. Another thought: it's well established that the broan bean (i.e. lima-type) would have been the basis of the casoulet until the haricot was introduced and gradually took over from the 16th to the the early 19th century. This fact is cited by one French food guru as proof of the theory that there is progress in cuisine, inasmuch as the haricot-based cassoulet is obviously superior! Steve, your dogmatic statement about the self-evident superiority of paella, risotto and cassoulet is open to question -- but not by me. Logic must give way to pragmatism.
  13. Nina, you've posed a question which is more important than mine and deserves its own thread. I'll hope you'll post it as a separate topic.Steve, count on you to make the answer an inner struggle! But you're quite right -- one's maturing food preferences are often tied up with one's growing ambivalence over cultural loyalties. I've Jewish friends who have agonized over their love of Schweineshaxe and bratwurst. I have to sign off. My wife says I must stop playing with my toys and cut the hedge.
  14. The graduate English Department at Cal Berkeley used to have a Fairy Queen Club, consisting of those who had read it through to the end. There were, I was told, certain other prerequisites....At Berkeley's incorrigibly highbrow FM station, KPFA, I once produced a two-hour adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It became an annual Christmas feature: "Sex and Violence in Middle English! Only on KPFA!"
  15. The first South Indian vegetarian restaurant in London was Diwana Bhel Poori in Drummond Street, still serving much the same menu to the same standard (and at virtually the same prices!) for a quarter century. Some insist it's not very good, many others (including me) find it most enjoyable and extremely good value. When I first went there shortly after it opened, knowing nothing of such food, the range of flavors in their cold starters was a revelation to me.
  16. It fascinates me that a country so overwhelmed by sheer numbers can maintain this emphasis on individuality.
  17. There's a sequence of American literary figures (Nelson Algren, Calvin Trillin, Jason Epstein et al) who have waxed lyrical about their food memories. Mostly they're simple foods, even bland commercial products -- the American equivalent of nursery or boarding school fare. Even a sophisticated American restaurant such as the Union Square Cafe is famous for its burgers, whether meat or tuna. Relatively few American authors or journalists who turn to food (such as Waverley Root, John Hess, W.R. Apple, Jeffrey Steingarten) celebrate tastes which are sophisticated. In other words, most writers echo the modern American experience of food as nourishment at an infantile level. (The notable exceptions tend to be regional and ethnic in origin.) There's a party game in which a series of questions is asked about one's eating habits. They are so structured as to determine what are one's favorite foods and at what point in one's life they were introduced. Statistically the answer is overwhelmingly, in early childhood. But I suspect that eGullet members would provide exceptions. For instance, one of my favorite foods is cassoulet, which I'd barely heard of before I'd reached my half-century. So -- How many of us have, as it were, been liberated from our childhood? (It's a deliberately loaded question.) Although the topic is cast in American terms it will be interesting to see how others respond. [This topic was prompted by Jason Epstein's nostalgic NY Times elegy on the hamburger.]
  18. If you haven't read it, a good way to prepare for an extended stay in Florence is Ross King's _Brunelleschi's Dome_, the story of the city's cathedral and an extraordinary evocation of the intellectual ferment and political intrigue of renaissance Italy.
  19. After waiting for the boiled water to cool, the process takes about fifteen seconds. How simple must it be?And French press coffee, though the aroma and flavor are less intense and complex than espresso, is exactly what I want for normal everyday drinking. I do not refuse all wine other than Grand Cru Bordeaux; neither do I shun all balsamic vinegar at less that sixty pounds a bottle. Finally: Choose your beans, decide on a method, and experiment. Keep experimenting until your coffee is exactly the way you like it, and then stop. God forgot to add his coffee-making instructions as an Eleventh Commandment.
  20. I imagine that Steingarten's fans (include me -- the guy can write) would shell out to have him between covers even if his essays were handed out free on the NY subways.
  21. Steve, don't you mean the guy that only wrote for Pravda?
  22. Suvir, thanks for the offer, but I don't have fax facilities. My technology made a quantum leap straight to broadband. I tried to find Steingarten on the Vogue website, but it appears they're smart enough to know that if they made him available on the net they might lose half their subscribers.
  23. I haven't yet read Steingarten's latest Vogue article, since a US friend photocopies them and mails them to me, thus saving us the expense and the disgrace of Vogue accidentally appearing on our coffee table. However, balance of sweetness and acidity has always been the secret of Germany's finest wines. It's what can be accomplished between these two sensations that leads Jancis Robinson to declare Riesling her favorite wine grape.
  24. Judy, I was about to mention the Richard Olney Good Cook Series. This was one of the highest profile, highest budget food series any publisher ever launched. (I'm told that the extravagance was due to its being used by Time/Life as a tax write-off.) It was bold of Time/Life to entrust the series to Olney, a relative unknown in America. Many of the great cookbooks of the time were drawn on, with the unfortunate exception of those published by Knopf, who, I'm told by a friend who worked on the project, refused to cooperate because one of their authors wasn't given the job of editing it. Sigh. The essense of the series (though not all the detail) was boiled down into a single volume, _The Good Cook's Encyclopedia_, published by Quadrille. It's sad how many of the books mentioned here are out of print. It's almost guaranteed that a very high quality food book will be remaindered within a year. Edit: Steve, the Chamberlains' books are indeed remarkable. They are documents of their entire historical period, not just the food. And those photographs! In spite of having grown up in New England, my memory of those photos, going back so many years, makes me think of it as existing in a sepia twilight zone.
  25. I did neither. I said I would never call you a nazi and I said don't use tactics which echo them. A typical tactic was to put words into another's mouth and then condemn what was in fact their own invention. This you do continually. It is the tactic of a person who approaches a discussion, not as an exchange of ideas, but as a battle to be won, by any means necessary. I did not want to continue this exchange, but I cannot allow you to misquote me.
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