John Whiting

I have, and they're a notable exception. I was speaking of the 99.9% of dried beans that are readily available and affordable for most people.

Depth would have to be included as well. Before we got our cassoles, I made cassoulet in a custom-thrown pottery lasagne dish, rectangular to fit precisely on our oven shelf, and about four inches deep. It produced an *enormous* crust, which I love. Drying out was not a problem because I always check the fluid level regularly towards the end of the cooking time and top up as necessary. At a moderate oven temperature, there is less evaporation than absorption. Going down the outer edge with a flat spoon, I can check fluid level and consistency and also extract a couple of beans to see if they've reached the "explode in the mouth" stage.

I don't follow others' cassoulet recipes any more; I gradually adapt my own way of making a cassoulet, sometimes trying out single elements of other recipes. After eating at Hostellerie Étienne, I had no desire to try the recipe in Saveur. What we were served bore no relation to the pictures, the ingredients or the instructions.I place no faith in a magazine that states baldly, "Soaking beans really isn't necessary." Phytohaemagglutinin, a poison found in red kidney beans, can be fatal, and all medical authorities recommend soaking prior to thorough cooking. In this instance, of course, the article is talking about white haricot beans, but soaking is dismissed so unequivocally that the uninformed reader (and who else would be bothering to read such an article?) might well assume that it applied to kidney beans as well. As for salting the beans before cooking, there are so many possible sources of salt in the final recipe that it would be reckless. No matter if there's a bit more flavor in the salted beans as they come out of their first boiling; dried beans have very little flavor in their own right anyway, and virtually all dried bean recipes that anyone bothers to follow include lots of strong added flavors to make them more interesting. In a cassoulet, by the time they've bubbled away for several hours with all the other ingredients, they will have absorbed as much flavor as they need. From a health standpoint, these days there is a general inclination to use less salt than eight years ago when this issue came out--at least among those whose palates aren't conditioned by junk food (including the expensive varieties).

It was that Saveur article that put me on to the Nots. I had it with me when we visited the pottery, and Phillipe autographed his picture for me.I wish I had been as lucky at Hostellerie Étienne, which the article particularly recommended. We were served a thin, watery cassoulet with a minimum of meat. If Chef Rousselot were to serve up such a dish to LA Grande Confrérie du Cassoulet de Castelnaudary, they would stamp on his toque.

Damn! You've blown the cover!

As soon as you get into restaurants/bistros, the situation is complicated by the fact that these were for a long time dominated by migrants from the Auvergne and Aveyron, who brought their recipes with them.

It can be made in virtually any casserole whose top is at least as wide as its bottom. An old-fashioned pottery mixing bowl with a slightly hemispherical taper to the top works perfectly well and is near as dammit the shape and proportion of a traditional cassole, except for the slightly curved sides. Such bowls are not totally oven-proof, but starting with a cold oven and not going above a medium heat, there's no problem.EDIT: It will even work with a traditional bean pot, but you don't get much crust.

Was it the Not family in Mas-Saintes-Puelles?

Marlena Spieler’s Paris for Williams Sonoma is a good place to start. After acknowledging that Paris is a meeting point for the world’s cuisines, she goes on, And that’s just for starters. EDIT: And then there's Waverley Root's The Food of France: He goes on to cite local dishes to which non-Parisian names have been transferred, such as sauce bearnaise. According to Root, this was first made in the restaurant known as Pavillion Henry IV in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, just outside of Paris, and was named in honor of Henry IV, who came from Bearn. And there’s crepe Suzette, and a whole catalog of soups, including several varieties of potato and onion. The latter kept the porters at Les Halles going through the long working night. Since Paris attracted great chefs, there are many personal creations that must be at least circumstantially credited to the area.

Four months old is fresh from the oven. I've a wild goose in mine whose use-by date is in Roman numerals.

A good start was made with Take 5000 eggs: Food from the markets and fairs of southern France, by the husband/wife team of Paul and Jeanne Strang, with photos by Jason Shenai. You don't often get such touristy-looking books in which the writing is so literate and the scholarship so impeccable.EDIT: I realize that you wrote "not France or Italy", but this serves as an example of just how well it can be done.

I see no mention of food photography as instruction, as in the case of Jacques Pépin's La Methode and La Technique. The photos are in black and white, or rather grey and white, and totally inartistic, but they are very informative, having been taken from a vantage point where you can see exactly what the chef's hands are doing. Most of the photos I see in modern cookery books appear to have been included merely for decoration; a beautiful picture of an onion tells me nothing about how to make onion soup. Often they contradict the text, as though the photographer hadn't read it. But perhaps this is unimportant, inasmuch as the text itself is more likely to be read as gastroporn rather than as a set of instructions that will actually be followed. A food writer of my acquaintance includes a gross error (e.g. 1 lb salt) in an occasional book, just to see if anyone notices. No one ever does.

It's very interesting that this comes from the inventor of Cuisine Minceur, so often confused with the Gault-Millau-promoted Nouvelle Cuisine that followed him. It takes a hermit to know a hermit.

Bravo! I shall add his trenchant comment to my own unhappy encounter with an Allard chicken.

It's part of the profit-led penny-pinching of the Anglo-American media. Opinion is cheap, facts are expensive, and so we have more and more self-celebrating columnists and critics, fewer and fewer reporters and research staff.

May I suggest a two-grade alternative? + = read the review and make up your own mind from the evidence. - = stay away and don't even bother to read the review!

John, I envy you your life somewhat less after reading the above. It reminds me of the old joke about the restaurant reviewers' competition: 1st prize, a free meal in a new restaurant, 2nd prize free meals in two new restaurants, etc. You've saved me a lot of time in my July Paris visit: as usual, if your recommendations get a plus, you'll get credit; if not, I'll blame someone else. As you can well imagine, Les Symples de l'Os a Moelle will be a must, at least for lunch if not dinner. I presume reservations are adviseable; do you have a phone number?

I'm slightly biased in favor of bistros in unfashionable areas that have to survive on local patronage.

It's annoying when an ordinary dish is overpriced; it's infuriating when it's a bad one!

The fact that John Talbott is writing from conviction rather than necessity poses an intriguing proposition. Charles Shere of Chez Panisse once guided me to The Gift, a book by Lewis Hyde which puts forward the intriguing premise that the most fertile developments in art and science grow out of a gift-based economy in which ideas are freely given, accepted, modified, and passed on. (That doesn't necessarily mean that the creator doesn't get paid for his work, only that he holds no "intellectual property".) Even the barter system, based on equal exchange, constitutes a barrier. By the time you arrive at a profit-based economy of ideas, in which you hold back a segment of whatever passes through your hands, you have set up a system in which creativity, like a desert stream, diminishes as it flows, and ultimately disappears. You may disagree violently, but I didn't make it up. Go argue with Lewis Hyde. Is all this "on topic"? It strikes me as the central question behind all the postings on this topic.

Issues are being raised here that deserve careful consideration. The most reliable and encyclopaedic coverage of the Paris restaurant scene comes from our own John Talbott, who comments in a recent Bonjour Paris column that John Hess said much the same thing a quarter-century ago after attempting to review restaurants for the New York Times. If you're a salesman, you must be prepared to sell whatever your boss hands you.

If you Google paris bistros, year after year RudyMaxa.com is close to the top with a page beginning, I wish I could afford to keep my own site more up-to-date, but compared with most, including those with megabucks behind them, I'm hot off the press!

We seem to agree about the articles themselves; my apologies if I misinterpreted you.The more I think about it, the more disgusted I am with the conception and execution of the whole Paris section. I'm not surprised they didn't include any links for further reading; it would have put their own glib carelessness and ignorance in embarrassing perspective.

My link was to the entire issue. Are we into quibble time?

Aren't we talking about the same pair of articles in the Observer Food Monthly's Paris Special feature?