John Whiting
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Posts posted by John Whiting
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The weakness of canard a l'orange as usually served is that the recipe originally called for sour seville-type oranges, which provided a tartly acidic contrast to the rich fatty duck. When made with modern oranges, it merely adds sweetness to the fattiness, which ultimately becomes cloying.
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Increasingly it's the way that young chefs are taught in certain schools. In London, the Guild of Food Writers were "guests" at one such trendy establishment. The report I wrote for our newsletter deals, I think, with the question you raise:Maybe this is an effect exaggerated by the competitiveness of the Manhattan food scene, but I often have the impression that almost every dish on a menu has to have some new combination of ingredients, a new twist, even just an unusual garnish or presentation. If the cooking is then not up to sctratch, I find myself wishing the chef could demonstrate a mastery of the established repertoire before attempting to improve it.GFW workshops should be educational experiences. Last night’s Evening at Butler’s Wharf Chef School with British Meat fulfilled this obligation, exemplifying as it did the commercial hype and conceptual emptiness at the heart of London’s trendy restaurant scene.
The core of the evening’s exercise was “Inspirations”, a glossy little handout designed to sell fresh British meat to the typical housewife. The recipes were “inspired” by three minor “celebrities” – not even celebrity chefs, but obscure media figures who were handed their recipes on a platter by three students from Butler’s Wharf. Last night, it was these trainees who proceeded to give their grandparents a lesson in egg-sucking. In the course of it we learned where London’s top restaurants get their endless supply of budding structural engineers who are prepared to raise British cuisine to ever-greater heights. It’s the Leaning Tower of Pizza – if you can’t stomach it, then climb it.
Gymnastics aside, the second great lesson we learned was that British meat must be cut into tiny slivers and cleverly disguised as the product of a whole gazetteer of exotic countries. The list of ingredients must read like role call at the UN. Is there some tiny Pacific island that has been neglected? Then back to the spice rack!
Integral to such a randomly eclectic approach is an educational philosophy in which the would-be chefs learn, not a repertoire of essential foundation techniques, but a set of ultimately predictable improvisations in which a repertoire of briefly favoured ingredients pass like the little figures on the face of some curious clock. (Oh no! Not lemon grass again!) We leaned that this school has the closest of ties with some of London’s most trendy restaurants, who can rely on it for trainee staff who will be faithful followers of fashion.
Having been shown in tedious detail how to construct these student concoctions, we were then ushered into a dining area where we were invited to sit down and eat them – at a cost of twenty pounds a head. Thus, another valuable lesson, this time in the ineffable art of chutzpah. Twenty quid, plus wine and coffee? To eat advertising?
Someday this pretentious tower will collapse of its own weight. Out there in the world, those faithful few that still purchase raw ingredients are mostly using them for traditional meat-and-two-veg dishes, not to play Lego games with. Who really believes that the sales of British meat will be materially affected by a handful of confusion recipes dreamed up by the distasteful in pursuit of the gullible?
A couple of years ago, in Auch for a concert, I and the other musicians were taken for lunch to a local Ecole which included a training school for the catering professions. We were received, seated, cooked for and served by an earnest assemblage of 13- to 18-year-olds. The food was unexceptional but perfectly sound bougeoise cooking – the sort you’d happily eat in a decent local bistro. The service was solemn and self-conscious, but perfectly disciplined. They did their job well and we, as diners, did not feel in the least uncomfortable.
Perhaps after graduation only a tiny handful of those conscientious conformists will make names for themselves. But if they do, it will be on the solid foundation of having roasted, braised, stewed, parboiled and fricasseed before they stir-fried.
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I assume that the "tilty-ring" mixing bowl is the sort which comes in nested sizes with a loose ring attached on either side. I've had a stainless steel set for forty years that I bought from Sears and which hang at eye level from a single hook under a shelf above the work surface. Convenient and instantly available, they're the ones I always go for -- I wouldn't be without them.
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Steve, you've succeeded yet again in reducing culinary creativity to a capitalist model, a sort of mirror image of dogmatic Marxism in which every aspect of human interaction is redefined as a monetary transaction.
Wilfrid, you're in danger of being consigned to the scrapheap of history. (Along with me. Kindly move over.
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Jason, I'm delighted to hear you say that. A few years ago when I was working regularly in Germany I always came back with the subfloor of my van loaded with cases of wine which I had bought directly from the vineyards, which I selected from the recommendations of the recognized authorities. When I tasted and selected, I ignored the figures in the right-hand column and bought whatever appealed to me. Relative to the entire list, some were expensive, some were cheap. The average I paid was less than five pounds a bottle and my wine bill for the trip never came to over a few hundred pounds, even when the allotted space was filled to capacity. If I had followed that practice in the Bordeaux or Burgundy regions I would have had to take out a second mortgage.
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Miss J -
It says something about the biases and preoccupations of eGulleters that no one has responded to this thought-provoking essay. I only wish that Mr. de Winter wrote better English. (It's also strange that a web site devoted to design should lay it out in two very long parallel columns which necessitate scrolling back to the top to finish reading it.)
Some parallel thoughts in the area of music are set forth in Richard Taruskin's _Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance_. He demonstrates that performers of early music, in their attempts to achieve authenticity, only succeed in creating a totally new tradition which stands or falls on its own merits.
In the area of cookery, food historians such as Rachel Lauden have demonstrated that, up until well into the 20th century, "authentic" peasant cookery frequently meant crude combinations of cheap and plentiful ingredients and "seasonal" food could mean, for instance, a winter diet consisting principally of wormy chestnuts. "Cuisine du Terroir" has in some instances required the creative reshaping of history.
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Are you the guy they call Three-Finger Adam?Yes, the chap at Dehillerin tried to sell me a guard, but I pooh-poohed the idea. -
If it's indeed occupying the front formerly housing Hujo's, it's at 11 Berwick Street.
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Instructions for richly flavored non-vegetarian crudities: Use a Bron Mandoline without the safety guard.
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Did they leave any food? Was it good?My wife and I couldn't decide whether we were sad or glad that they'd gone.
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After all that kafuffle, jaybee came up with the most rational response to his own anecdote. The lady in question was lucky to have had him at the next table, and not the whole eGullet managerie; she'd be in analysis for the rest of her life!
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Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't imagine such a witty anecdote being told without laughter, both by the teller and by the audience. It was, I suspect, the wryly comic incongruity between the ashes of the diseased and the ashes of the cigar that the woman found particularly upsetting.This evening I was telling our table-mates a story about an acquaintance who asked that his deceased wife's ashes be buried in our rose garden (don't ask). I said the idea made me uncomfortable, as it would disturb my reverie lying in the hammock, smoking a cigar and sipping piña colada thinking that someone was buried under the roses.Now, this is not to justify her course of action -- that is a separate question. However, this graphic detail makes me rather more inclined to accept the sincerity of her request.
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A word in qualified exoneration of Books for Cooks re their elevated price for the Bras (shows a lot of brass?). When they first placed an order it had to be through a Spanish distributor whose mark-up was extortionate. Subsequent shipments will be more moderately priced.
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How long can l'Astrance resist the temptation to expand/ put up prices/drop quality control? If, in the face of such notoriety, they can resist all three, then they will show themselves to be the posessors of such supernal modesty and integrity as the restaurant trade rarely exhibits.
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My own favorite, for both intrinsic and extrinsic reasons, has to be a '92 Chateau d'Yquem which I was able to supply -- through the generosity of a friend -- for a small celebratory dinner given in honor of two of my favorite food writers, John and Karen Hess, who presented the world with _The Taste of America_, now out again in a U of I reprint.
And here is an answer from Philippe de Rothschild, the man who rescued Mouton-Rothschild in 1926 by "inventing" (i.e., normalizing) chateau bottling. This is from his autobiography, _Milady Vine_, written in 1984 with the help of Joan Littlewood.
"To tell the truth and shame the devil for once, the best wine I ever tasted was in a snow-bound chalet in the Pyranees in a large double bed in a room with a blazing log fire. Yes, there was a pretty girl beside me. Oh, sweet mystery of life, of wine, of time. I don't remember the name of the wine."
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That's the classic aligot, made with floury mashed potato (dry, not moistened), beaten with warmed cream, butter and crushed garlic, and then fresh cantal. (The weight proportion of potato to cheese is about four to one.)The potato/cheese dish is a must, but keep room for it. It will set up like cement in about two hours!There's a lot of leeway here. First, you can make it quite satisfactorily in a food processor. The sticky consistency that the latter produces, which makes it yucky for normal mashed potato, is precisely the object when making aligot -- at Ambassade d'Auvergne the waiters pull the wooden spoon high out of the bowl so you can see the long string of goo that follows it. Second, unfermental cantal is mild and neutral, so that just about any young cheese could be substituted -- not authentic but nevertheless delicious.
Finally, those peasants up in the hills put in a lot more crushed garlic than does a respectable restaurant -- I find Ambassade d'Auvergne's version a bit bland. This is one area where I'm a fervent advocate of "fusion". The dish is great with olive oil instead of butter (or along with butter), or fat-reduced by using yoghurt or smetana instead of cream. Any way you make it, if you're not beating away with a wooden spoon, it's so easy -- if you have a negative weight problem, this will get those extra pounds sliding easily into place.
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Tony, that French restaurant in Herne Hill wasn't by any chance the one at the end of Guernsey Grove? I once had duck confit and broad beans there which were so drastically oversalted as to be inedible. The (indeed, camp) waiter loftily informed me that the heavy salting was "authentic". I was with a friend who lived next door and loved the place, so my hands were tied.
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I too was favorably impressed with his Masterchef interaction with both contestants and guests. There was encouragement for the understandably nervous contestants, intelligently leading questions for the guests, and solid information coming across every minute. He also has the unusual record of being one of the very few telechefs who have actually improved on camera rather than yielded to ego and deteriorated. (A certain A W-T comes to mind -- the gross becoming grocer.) My guess is that he'll give you an easy time doing your feature.
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Bernays was not a sociologist, he was a self-professed -- and highly effective -- market manipulator. If we don't start with the verifiable facts we're wasting our time.
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Read Bernays. That is *precisely* what he accomplished.No amount of market manipulation (either on the supply side or the demand side) will make the public buy something if they don't want it. -
Supply and Demand ceased to be an even remotely equitable mechanism for distribution when Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew, taught those who controlled supply how they could also manipulate demand. (Take up any book by Stuart Ewen, open it at random and start reading.) Without an understanding of this most basic fact of the 20th century, any discussion of economic justice is meaningless waffle.
My apologies to Tommy - go back to sleep!
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I simply took it as a truism, like the preeminence of Petrus. Goose fat makes *everything* taste good!
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Indeed. In every shop, Perigord is so full of foie gras that the sheer weight of ducks and geese necessary to produce it must seriously disturb the earth's balance. And the number of tins whose country of origin is ambiguous makes me wonder how many poor birds have lived a terrible life to keep the supply endlessly coming. For years there have been reports from Eastern Europe of cropping ducks' beaks to facilitate the mechanized forced feeding. How long will the conscientious French farmers -- and there still are a lot of them -- be able to resist the economic pressure?Foie gras seems pretty common these days and I can't be as sure about it as I can about Petrus. -
Perhaps it's best not to pursue the question of merit on a site such as this. On a bad day it might make the foie gras taste a bit off, the Petrus a mite acidic. . .
Originality, copying and inspiration
in Restaurant Life
Posted
Steve P wrote:
I may be fat, but I'm not Arafat. Sorry I annoy ya. But don't let it turn into paranoia!