John Whiting

Or may I suggest a wonderful book by Roy Andreis de Groot, _Recipes from the Auberge of the Flowering Hearth_. This is an inn in the heart of the Massif de Chartreuse, where de Groot was sent by his publisher to research an article on the monks and their liqueur. While there he stayed at the Auberge de l'Atre Fleuri, which was run by two old ladies who were superlative cooks. De Groot became so enamored of their cuisine that it totally displaced the liqueur he had set out to document. This book was a favorite of Alice Waters, who cites it as an important early source of her love for French food and culture.

Green Chartreuse has a very complex herbal bouquet and flavor. While it can be drunk over ice or mixed with other ingredients, to drink it any way other than from a glass which allows you to cradle it and swirl it is to lose some of that complexity.

I know that to be untrue. If you don't want to be called a Nazi (which I would never do), then don't use tactics that echo them.Edit: I have nothing more to add on the subject. This being an uncensored site, your alabatros will remain hanging about your neck.

This is outrageous. Has the bloodbath on your French site only taught you how to conduct a pogrom? Shame on you!

Larousse - yes indeed, certainly essential for anyone interested in French cuisine. And those with a historical perspective should have the first edition, edited and largely written by the great Prosper Montagné. As for the latest edition, the best translator I know tells me that the English language edition is full of errors, mistranslations, and maladaptations. Those who read French would be well advised to get the original.

Kyle runs a very good Italian food website and newsletter. Anyone who loves Italian should get on his list.Steve, I agree about the Wells Bistro Cookbook. I go back and cook from it whenever I feel homesick for a Paris bistro. Another remarkable anthology is _Cuisine du Terroir: The Lost Domain of French Cooking_ It is a collection of recipes chosen in 1984 by the Master Chefs of France and represent their personal selection of classic dishes which were in danger of disappearing. The editor was Céline Vence. As a book, how dated it is! The chefs are listed in the back of the book, in small print, and it would take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out which chef was responsible for which recipe.

In London we don't get the variety of either mangos or avocados that are available in situ. (Of course I don't know all the ethnic shops that are scattered around London, and I may be quite wrong.) [edit: I should have read the above post more attentively.] The problem with all fruit, of course, is now the fact that buyers demand perfect appearance, which can only be guaranteed by picking and selling them underripe. Sometimes at the Chapel Street market in Islington my wife can get cheap overripe fruit which looks awful and tastes delicious. We've had mangoes you could eat with a spoon straight off the seed. If you must have ripe fruit for a speciic purpose but can't buy it, one drastic solution is to take fruit that is mature but still hard and give it quick bursts of a few seconds in a microwave, checking for firmness after each burst. When the fruit is soft enough, put it in the freezer to stop it cooking further and take it out when it's no longer hot. It's not as good as the real thing but it's much better than rock hard -- after all, some of the changes that take place in ripening are like those that take place in cooking.

It's of no use to you whatsoever, but you should have eaten at the Hotel de France in Auch back in the days when Andre Daguin was still cooking. A dozen years ago or more I ate there with a company of eight which included two vegetarians. Andre came out of the kitchen and consulted with them at length about their likes and dislikes. They said they had never been treated so considerately or served such magnificent food.

The best advice I ever received on gifts was, if it's someone you know well, make notes on any enthusiasms they express. (Other than diamonds! ) It's easy to forget, a month later, the passing inspiration you were offered.

Suvir, when you come to London you must experience Hill Station ice cream. With herbal as well as fruit flavors, it's known as "ice cream for adults".

Irradiation gives the food industry carte blanche to relax its food safety standards at stages prior to the treatment. This is bad enough; however, there is a further danger which is not often discussed. Live bacteria can excrete poisons into foods in which they are active. Irradiation may kill the bacteria but it does *not* remove the poisons. And of course, irradiation is no protection against subsequent bacterial contamination, though manufacturers use the label as though it were a guarantee of purity. The move towards labeling irradiation as "pasteurizing" is a deliberate redefinition and falsification of an existing technical term. It's as misleading as if "genetically engineered" foods were relabeled "crossbred".

Steve, thank you for a posting with which I can agee wholeheartedly! Details to follow.

Suvir, I have finally visited your beautiful website and found music by the Master Musicians of Joujouka. I provided sound projection and recorded them when they came to London perhaps twenty years ago. It's wonderful to hear them again.

Enthusiasts will find a fine Provincetown Portugese Cookbook at http://www.capecodaccess.com/cookbook/index.html And you'll find a familiar face on the I Am Provincetown site: http://www.iamprovincetown.com/index.html

I said it was a hazy memory. As for South Pacific, perhaps I was thinking of the practice of eating from a protruding stomach, known as Belly High.

In the 19th century, the directors of the Regent's Park Zoo set out to amass the largest possible collection of animals. They were motivated in part by anticipation of their private dinners in which they corporately consumed the brains of every available species. I don't know whether they were still alive or how soon after death this may have been. I have a hazy memory of a South Pacific custom of sitting around a table through the center of which protrudes the open skull of a live monkey, from which the brain is consumed with horn spoons. But I have another hazy memory of this having been a hoax invented by a bored journalist. Russ, if it is the latter, perhaps this might be a good time to reinvent it!

My own experience suggests that by September there are very few areas where finding a good room is a problem. As for iffy rooms at high prices, bear in mind that hotels and B&Bs have the prices of their rooms fixed by law on the basis of an inspection, and the appointed price must be posted in the room. The system is under total bureaucratic control -- thank God!

Arguments over Bolognese sauces can split up happy families, but... One of my moments of total enlightenment was in 1966 when I first tasted Elizabeth David's Bolognese sauce as given in her Mediterranean Food. Another dimension was added by Alain Ducasse in his description of the ancient Liguria method of starting off uncooked pasta (it has to be the bronze die variety) in olive oil along with the elements of the sauce and slowly adding stock, as with risotto. A revelation!

To compare French press with espresso is like comparing milk with cheese -- they are such totally different tastes that one may state a preference, but a qualitative judgement? The most important factor with French press is not so much the size (within reason) as the approximate *evenness* of grind. A cheap electric grinder with a rotating blade will produce half grains, half dust -- it's useless. If you grind it yourself, the mill must put through similar grains of coffee, with almost no dust. If your grinder won't do this, you're better off having it professionally ground and keeping it tightly sealed in the fridge or freezer. (Even professional grinders are not always reliable -- you must know your shop.) I make mine in the smallest press, a mug at a time. Any method of keeping coffee hot enough to drink, including a Thermos, will soon burn it. I bring the water to the boil and let it stand for about a minute, then pour on just enough to wet the grounds, stir it, fill almost to the top, stir again, put on the plunger, wrap a towel loosely around the press, fill the mug with hot water, and wait four minutes. Pour out the coffee. It's at its height about a minute or so after it's poured. If the plunger is difficult to push down, pull it back half an inch and wait a few seconds. With a large press you may have to do this two or three times. Pushing it down by brute force is likely to leak grounds past the edge of the metal filter into the water above. If you're adding milk or sugar, forget all this -- make it any old way! This, at any rate, is the tradition that's come down to me from Peet's.

I [that is, the oversigned] wish to commend you [i.e. Cabrales] on your (startlingly) virtuosic use [i.e., employment] of relevent (indeed, essential) brackets (not to mention parentheses)!

This thread goes far beyond the merely culinary. If only the world leaders who are attempting to forestall armageddon in the Indian subcontinent could be made to read it! (And if only E.M. Forester could have seen it before writing _A Passage to India_. )

I think that Italy does rather better by those at the very bottom of the economic/food chain because prosperity has been around long enough to improve the peasant standard of living but not long enough to replace it with international anonymous pseudo-middle-class.

At St. James, London’s new Sofitel hotel, Albert Roux has lent his name to their “brasserie”. A typical plush hotel dining room, it bears about as much resemblance to an authentic Paris brasserie as one of Watteau’s shepherdesses to a genuine peasant. But the atmosphere is congenial, the tables generously spaced out and the cocktail pianist out in the lobby is scarcely audible. The brasserie-type dishes on the menu are listed in English, so it took an attentive reading to determine what they might be. Fish soup was straighforward enough and proved to be a perfectly respectable version with an uncompromisingly fishy flavor; but instead of a hot spicy rouille, it came with an aîoli in which the garlic had been carefully minimized. The end result lacked the kick of chili that gives a soupe de poisson its proper authority. (In all fairness, this often happens in Paris.) For a main course I chose a pig’s trotter, which arrived accompanied by good shoestring potatoes, plain French beans and a small pitcher of sauce bearnaise which was rather bland and slightly cooler than mouth temperature. The trotter was heavily breaded and deep fried, but cooked for such a short time that the small amount of meat could hardly be cut from the bone, let alone the cartilege holding it together. Knife and fork being useless, I tore it apart with my bare hands and chewed the bones one by one; but with so little cooking they yielded very little flavor and were hardly worth the effort. When a waitress came by and asked whether things were to our satisfaction, I felt compelled to tell her in the nicest possible way that the meat was drastically undercooked. She immediately offered me another course to replace it but I declined, saying that it wasn’t worth the trouble. No unpleasant words were spoken on either side. Taking note of my grubby fingers, a waiter brought me a finger bowl, ice-cold to the touch. It’s a small matter, but a finger bowl should be somewhere close to body temperature – a splash from the hot tap would have corrected it. For desert I requested a simple cassis sorbet. It was creamy and bland, lacking the mouth-cleansing sharp edge that I so look forward to at l’Ecurie, my favorite Paris hole-in-the-wall. Final verdict: A harmless, inoffensive place, not outrageously expensive (my share of the bill, including coffee and a third of the bottle of wine came to thirty pounds before my main course at £8.50 was deducted). But it’s a brasserie in name only, emasculated for the anonymous international market. I was reminded of the title which Samuel Hoffenstein once gave to a collection of his poetry: “Poems of Passion, Carefully Restrained so as to Offend Nobody”. Note: The most pleasant aspect of the evening was a long and entertaining conversation with Mr. & Mrs. Robert Buxbaum, but I mustn’t mention this fact, in case anyone might feel excluded. Brasserie Roux, St. James [sofitel], 8 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5NG, Tel 020 7968 2900

What NYC does so magnificently, that Pret will never match, are the gobsmackers that take six pallbearers to carry. I know only one such place in London -- Onion, on Sicilian Avenue, just up Southampton Row from the Holburn tube station. It's been there, unaltered in menu or decor, for at least a quarter-century.

Pret sandwiches are in fact pretty good. (How long they'll stay that way with McD owning a third is another question.) The sandwich scene in England has changed dramatically in a very few years. Not worth a detour certainly, but I'd take pot luck at any service station over the boring identical rows of dreary baguettes almost anywhere in France. No wonder that the Paris M&S was always crowded with workers buying sandwiches which had been driven all the way from the north of England!