Savoury meat pies are a well known, and sometimes much maligned, British tradition – the usual fare of your local pub. But Melton Mowbray Pork Pies are different. First, they’re really rather ancient things – even in their modern style, they were invented in the small village that shares their name in the early 1830s. But second, and rather more striking, they’ve recently been the subject of a high stakes law suit. I bet you can’t say that for beef Wellington.
As many know, the advent of the European Union has seen the development of something called PGI, or Protected Geographical Indication. The idea is that some foods are so tied to their locality that people making substantially the same food elsewhere ought to be barred from using the name. The magisterial French cheese Roquefort, for example, has a strong claim on such local ties – part of the strong blue’s distinctive taste comes from the Penicillium rogueforti, a bacterium that dwells only in the chalky caves of Combalou in Roquefort-sur-Soulzons. Other European producers are welcome to make any amount of strong, sheep’s milk cheese they want – but only the lucky farmers of one village in southwest France can use the famous, profit inducing name.

This all sounds very well, of course – what could be wrong with protecting ancient traditions of artisanal foodery? And so my initial reaction when I heard that the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Asociation’s application had been approved by London for PGI status was positive. But that’s when the story became interesting – for the very afternoon PGI approval was granted, an industrial food producer named Northern Foods PLC filed suit at the Royal Courts of Justice for judicial review.

It turns out that Northern Foods had a legitimate gripe. As one of the chief producers of Melton Mowbray style pork pies themselves, they relied on factories across Britain for the high levels of production needed to supply their customers. Granting PGI status to the Melton Mowbray name would instantly force them to disavow the mark – their Melton Mowbrays would henceforth become merely “pork pies”. But their chief competitor in the pork pie market, the equally large and industrial Dickinson & Wright, would face no such hurdle. Incidentally also the controller of the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association, all of Dickinson & Wright’s industrial capability was centered in the prescribed region. Once PGI status was granted, in other words, they would have near complete control of the market for the authentic product, at least so far as the supermarkets were concerned. The worthy artisans, ideological drivers of the whole protection enterprise, were nowhere to be found.

My usually dull sense of fishiness in uproar, I called Britain’s chief food regulatory body, DEFRA,
for information. The startled bureaucrat on the other end (it’s hard not to be to be startled when you pick up your phone to find a hungry sounding American enthused about Pork Pies) was helpful – and in half an hour I had my hands on a fax containing the relevant information. Melton Mowbray Pork Pies, it turns out, aren’t really dependent on their locality for any particular quality. It’s true that the unfortunate pigs who give the pie both its filling and name exist in the region because of Stilton cheese (also protected by Brussels) production – as the PGI application notes without much imagination, “A by-product of cheese production is whey. . . . Mixed with bran, [whey] is an excellent pig food”. But the real determining characteristic of the Melton Mowbray pork pie as opposed to its lesser cousins is the recipe – a true Melton Mowbray, the application flatly thunders, is made of fresh rather than cured pork, making the insides grey rather than pink, and is baked bare in ovens without support to give the pie a distinctive, bow walled, appearance. As far as I’m concerned, that’s not really something that ought to be protected geographically, but methodologically – if you want to make bulgy fresh pork pies in Northumberland, it doesn’t seem like anyone should stop you from calling them Melton Mowbrays. But in this age of sushi and tapas, is the inevitably stodgy pie worth protecting at all? That, I thought, I would leave my stomach to decide.

As a matter of culinary art, the pork pie is not all that complicated – the apparently dour managing director of Dickinson & Morris put it well – “There are three parts to a pie: rich, crunchy, pastry, succulent pork, and tasty jelly. It’s not rocket science”. But given my first effort at a Melton Mowbray, I’d submit that making one is a little more difficult than it appears. First, the dough is not neither short crust, nor puff, nor phyllo, nor any one of the pastries we’re most used to using. Rather, a Melton Mowbray is a hot water dough – to make it authentically, you need to melt your cooking fat (traditionally lard, of course, but butter seems to be fine) in water, bring it to a near boil, and pour the fatty liquid into flour that weighs twice as much as the butter. I haven’t worked out the chemical reasons for this method, but I can attest that you get a warm, pliable dough with an unsurprisingly rich taste. This dough then has to be rolled out by hand, as per tradition, and placed in a sort of mold-hoop, which gives it the pie’s usual shape, before being filled. Of course, being short one specialist pie-hoop, I made mine in a casserole, eschewing the traditional bulginess. If you choose to do that, though, there’s one additional problem to deal with. Since the dough has to be pushed out by hand, there’s real risk of unevenness – getting this right is likely to take a little practice, I think, and several over crusted pies.

The filling, which is well enough piled haphazardly into the crust, is relatively simple. Fresh pork, chopped finely by hand, a few cuttings of bacon for taste, thyme (or other fragrant herbs), salt, and pepper. But I will warm you that fatty pork is key – in my first effort, I made the mistake of buying avowedly “healthy choice” pork, and paid for it with a dry Melton Mowbray – “succulent” is indeed the watchword. Once you close up the top with another round of dough, remembered to put a cylinder of wax paper (or, as in my case, a spoon) in the middle to keep a hole for the jelly – otherwise the baking dough will expand, leaving no way to lubricate the pie. Once glazed with beaten egg and baked till golden brown, the pie should be ideally left to cool for a few hours – or, you can do as I did, and stuff it nonchalantly into the refrigerator. Sure, it’s no good for bacteria, but I don’t really care.

The final piece of the puzzle is the jelly – something that often frightens people into paralysis. But really, it’s simple enough. Just cook some pork ribs (and they have to be ribs, since you need both their unctuous fat and bony cohesion) with an onion, carrot, and a bundle of herbs, for three hours. Strain the liquid, and let cool overnight in the fridge. The next morning, skim the white fat that’s come to the top, melt in a pan, and pour using a funnel (or luck) until you can’t get any more jelly into the pie. Of course, at this point the jelly is liquid. To get it behaving properly, you’ll need to let the whole thing cool for at least 4 hours, and preferably more in the fridge. Made well, which I’m afraid I can’t say about my first effort, the pie reminds you of the common roots of European cooking – what, after all, are the various hams en croute of France if not pork pies? Though I didn’t have them at my first effort, I’m sure that eaten with a few tart cornichons and a formidable beer, the Melton Mowbray is every bit the kind of stout country food I like - a simple, honest, good, food of real tradition. But what happened to the famous law suit? Just last week, Northern foods withdrew its request for judicial review. Had they been battered into submission by a stinging legal case? Indeed not. Rather, in an effort to include an allied pork pie producer named Saxby Brothers, the Melton Mowbray PGI region had been expanded to some 40 miles around – also taking in Northern Foods’ nearest pie factory at Pork Farms. As the manager noted, that factory could be “upgraded” to make Melton Mowbrays at minimal cost, making their legal challenge all but moot. So, in the end, all’s well that ends well – unless you happen to have really been an artisanal pork pie baker 5 miles outside the zone. And in that case, you had better start thinking about moving.

Miyabi
Great Eastern Hotel, London
 
I'm able to talk a little more knowledgeably about Miyabi than about most places, because I've waited till I've been there three times to write. I hope that makes my snapshot better- I rather suspect it'll just make it more complicated.

The bottom line is that Miyabi is no Sushi Yasuda, the best of the New York Sushi temples. It doesn't have fifteen kinds of toro, escalating in price and fattiness, or four kinds of miso, or exotic actually Japanese desserts of bean pastes and curds. But this is London. And one would be very foolish to expect such achievement here.

But Miyabi is not a bad restaurant at all. The sushi is fresh and reasonably good, with decent variety. The thing to do with the menu, particularly, is to order the well chosen selection of 8 pieces of sushi for 14.50 GBP, which provides a pleasant base of salmon, tuna, and their usual accompaniments to work off, and then add a few of the more exotic offerings Miyabi does manage.  The hand rolled mix of eel and avacado, for example, is really very pleasant - and their rolls are always well (but not overwhelmingly)  spiced with wasabi.

The restaurant does also do a fixed price lunch for 17.50 GBP, consisting of some tempura, a little bottom of the line sushi, and some other sundries. Frankly, I wouldn't bother - this is a sushi restaurant, and I would treat it that way - in any case, if you get the menu you'll miss out on the intriguing desserts. No, I don't normally recommend desserts at Asian restaurants, and no, sorbet isn't that original, but my raspberry, guava, and passion fruit were of real quality.  And if you're more of a chocolate lover, they do a clever "roll" of green tea cake around chocolate cream, all dipped in black and white sesame seeds. I'm not sure they're the most congruous of flavours, but it is at least interesting. One final thing to note, , incidentally, is that miso is almost never included in Britain - if you want the salty, strong, broth (and Miyabi's is good), you'll have to order, and pay for, it seperately.

My one real complaint about Miyabi is the room. The tables are pleasant and Japanese looking enough - but the whole restaurant is almost unbearably small, making long waits common and reservations difficult to come by. I think I counted 8 tables today, honestly - hardly enough for a restaurant in the middle of London. I rather suspect that their presence in the Great Eastern Hotel, and the accompanying room service orders, make up for their inhibited volume. Otherwise, I can't imagine how they stay in business. They're clearly not skimping on ingregients, and the restuarant is expensive but not extortionate.  One hopes they've found a way to stick around.

 

 

St. John's
26 St John StreetLondonEC1M 4AY

St. John's is the first legitimately interesting restaurant I've been to in London. Located just outside the city's main meat markets, the restaurant makes no apologies for what it does. There's no artifice. No trendiness, no black clad waiters - just straightforwardly prepared meat from every part of the pig, cow, and the lamb.

If you're interested in hard to find meats particularly, St. John's is the place to come. Despite my relatively wide experience in hunting down exotic foods, I had never seen salted, dried Pig's liver, offered as an appetizer or anything else.  Sadly, I was somewhat suffering the aftereffects of an unfortunate dinner the night before (on which more later), and I felt that it would have been expecting a little much of me to have a go at it, but the dried beef with celeriac I had instead was delicious. Indeed, it was probably the high point of the meal for me - the slight tinge of mustard in the celeriac, combined with the delicious beef, somewhat like an unspiced pasterma in texture and color, was really great. Combined with some surprisingly good, and obviously house made bread (there is a bakery on site), this was just the kind of thing I needed after a steady diet of trendy but bad cooking. Honest, good, plain, food.

The main course of fava beans and rabbit was disappointing only because of its excessive saltiness. I suppose a little bit of inaccuracy is to be expected with a place like this, but the stew was so salty as to be a little unpleasant. Still, the meat was well cooked, and the fava beans, just in season, were entirely delicious. More of the crusty whole wheat bread served to mop up the juices - though I would entirely skip the side dishes. The potatoes particularly are simple boiled red potatoes - not worth bothering with at a restaurant.

St. John's continues its straightforward recipe for dessert. Cherry tart, chocolate cakes, trifles, pudding - these are all stalwarts of the British palate. I ordered the first of those, and it was good - really a sort of very short cake dotted with cherries more than the pie an american might initially think of. All the rest looked good as well - not sophisticated, of course, but decent enough. Given what the rest of my restaurant experiences have been like here (so depressing I haven't even been able to write about them), St. John's is a big step up. Of course, this shouldn't be a surprise. This is Britain's indigenous food, done with skill, and some bite. St. John's quality suggests that this is the best direction for anyone interested in finding good eating in London to go.

Back in the depths of time, Plainsman (of the blog Southern Appeal) asked the following question in the comments section of Mr. Poon's blog - "what does a "Triscuit" have three of that a "biscuit" only has two of? ".  Though at first it seems like one of those funny unanswerable riddles,  there is actually a sensible answer - or at least, the beginnings of one.
 
What a biscuit has two of, of course, is bakings. If you happen to speak French or Italian, this is relatively obvious, though I didn't notice the connection until someone pointed it out to me in passing - bis cuit literally means "twice baked". At some point in history, people figured out that if you baked a bread like cracker twice - once at high heat for shape, and then again at extremely low heat for a long time to drive the moisture out - you got yourself a hard, extremely unpleasant, but durable food. The "hard tack" of the US Civil War, embedded indelibly in my mind by a much read copy of Rifles for Watie, was exactly this sort of creature. With the advent of preservatives and so on, the Civil War ration morphed into the sort of salted cracker we eat today - no longer necessitous of dipping in hot water to soften, but still a distant cousin of its formidable relation.
 
But in England, Wales, Scotland, and the rest of the United Kingdom,  what we call cookies are called biscuits. As any suburban mother or gluttonous law student will know (ahem), the normal sort of cookies you make at home aren't baked twice, but once.  So are the British entirely off base? I suppose the first answer from any offended British readers of mine would be to point out that Americans don't follow very sensible naming practices either - what we call a biscuit (that is to say, a sort of salty scone) has even less to do with crackers than do cookies. But second, there's a clear missing link between the hard savoury cracker and what we think of as a cookie - the subject of my brief foodly digression for today is the glorious biscotti, a sweet but rock hard cookie of considerable longevity.
 
There's actually no specific recipe for biscotti. All are made of flour, sugar, and some sort of fat, but aside from that, things vary considerably by taste and region.  For example, I've seen recipes with heavy doses of butter,  little butter but egg yolk, and  neither of those but olive oil. Flavorings range from liquers to my (favorite) of high quality chocolate shavings, with some dubious innovations in between. For the more conservative among you, this recipe from Mario Batali is representative of the most sophisticated school, a far cry from the over-heavy concotions sold at many coffee shops. Regardless of recipe, though, what all biscotti have in common is a traditional baking method.
 
This consists of a double process very like what I describe above as to crackers. Once the dough is chosen, you first knead the ingredients briefly, and then form the delicious mess into a sort of log, or loaf. The proto cookie is then baked at relatively high heat, on a cookie sheet, until slightly risen but uncoloured. The point is to get the dessert substantively finished in the first baking - and if you're like me, much of the loaf won't survive past this point. But if you manage to keep some of it intact, you then slice the loaf into thick, half moon shapped cookies, and bake them again at low heat, until extremely dry, golden, and done. If you then put them in a relatively air tight tin, they'll last for weeks - though they're good enough to eat in the next few days anyway. I certainly have never had the problem of stale biscotti, though if you do, I've heard they make a nice addition to ice cream.
 
So having resolved the connection of biscuits to cookies to crackers, I'm not sure the Triscuit is baked three times. Maybe the name is a joke - or a meaningless play on words. And it's possible that the inventor meant to say that if a biscuit is dry and flavorless, a triscuit is even more so - believe it or not, Kraft's famous cracker is a product of the early 20th century's health freakery. But the Triscuit's age does suggest to me that the inventor was aware of the biscuit's double provenance, and thought to take advantage of it with a catchy name we still think kind of clever today. Not that any of this means I'm likely to make Triscuit bruschetta, but it's still good to know.

Sweetings
39 Queen Victoria Street, London

Restaurants like Sweetings should no longer exist. Tight communual seating, odiferous quantities of smoked fish, outlandish prices, charges for pre-buttered bread? These are all things I thought went out of style in the 1940's. But that is rather the point of Sweetings, I think. It's a restaurant for people who wish that decade had never ended.

That's not to say I found everything at Sweetings unpleasant. Not at all. I would return to the restaurant just for their delightful Pimm's - the traditional British summertime drink of flavored alcohol, lemonade (that is to say, a lemon-lime fizzy drink, like 7-up) cucumbers, orange, and mint, all served in a clever little tankard. And the bread and butter pudding was not altogether appalling - despite somehow burned bread (I didn't even know you could burn a bread and butter pudding), the custard was thick and delicious (custard, in the British sense, means a mixture of cream or milk and eggs, like the base of ice cream). But my "wild" salmon main course, for some $40, was both lame and overpriced - at that price, don't you think they could have managed something a little more sophisticated than a salmon steak (in other words, the cheapest possible cut of the fish) desultorily grilled? And while my smoked trout starter was quite good, I hardly think that saves the meal. I can get good smoked trout at a thousand different fishmongers in London. The unfortunate truth about Sweetings is that they serve nothing a completely unskilled home chef couldn't both buy easily and make in half an hour. That, I think, is a scandal.

UPDATE: I've been to Sweetings a second time now. The pre-buttered bread was still there. However, if you do find yourself there, order the following - gravlax or smoked salmon, followed by the grilled (not fried or poached) dover sole, and then the steamed syrup pudding, all washed down with a pint of Pim's. - I'm convinced, after eating pretty much everything they have, or at least tasting it, that these are by far the best things on the menu. The Dover Sole is still ridiculously overpriced at some 22 pounds ($40), given that it is just a piece of fish and nothing else, but it is at least tasty.

Tatsuso
City, London

London is a fabulously expensive city. I don't think I had appreciated it before, because I had always lived right on the edge of respectability when I visited - exotically crappy B&B's near Victoria, food from suppliers rather than restaurants, and so on. As I get more experience eating in London restuarants, however, the sad truth of London pricing is becoming more clear to me.

In case you don't believe it, Tatsuso is a bracing slap in the face. The least expensive menu at the Broadgate Japanese restaurant is a completely startling 48 pounds, almost $90 at current exchange rates. The menus only ascend from there, up all the way to a terrifying 97 pounds. And for what? Fancy barbecue and some decent, though not stellar, sushi. The starters in our menu, for example, were large tiger prawns and salmon, grilled on a fierce steel griddle - fine - they tasted good. But there was no skill to them at all. A third grader with some supervision to make sure he didn't burn himself would have done as well. The salad with Japanese flavoured mayonnaise was adequate, but no more, and the main course, some unctuous grilled duck with a sort of hoisin sauce, was delightful but standard. As for dessert, the less said about it the better. There's nothing wrong with chocolate chip ice cream, but for the kind of money involved here, anyone could do better.

So why is this place so expensive? I thought, perhaps, that it might have to do with the chef who grills the food for you. But that can't be it - he can't be all that much more expensive than a waiter, especially in a city like London where tipping is so minimal. And it certainly isn't the ingredients. I mean, meat is both expensive and a low profit item, but other people manage it for less. The truth, sadly, is that the owners of Tatsuso know that its clients are expense accounters, and couldn't care less. That might be true, but it doesn't really excuse this restaurant's outrageous excesses. Or maybe, it's really London I ought to blame.

Fishmarket
Great Eastern Hotel, London

The Conrad Group, which manages both the Great Eastern Hotel and its five restaurants, including Fishmarket, is known more for its design acumen than for its cooking. Certainly, the beautiful marble room which Fishmarket is lucky enough to enjoy is magnificent - neither garish or overdone, but simply elegant. What surprised me, however, was that Fishmarket's food was less objectionable than I would have expected. No, it's not quite Le Bernardin - but few places are.

My starter of dill encrusted gravlax (spelled gravadlax in the UK) was well cured (gravlax, of course, is salmon cured in salt and herbs, of Scandinavian provenance), and the sweet mustard sauce that came with it gave the dish a sophisticated tinge. I was surprised to see that no special bread was brought out for the fish, since I think some kind of hearty cracker or oatcake would have been perfect. Nonetheless, -the dish was actually quite good, and well priced for a restaurant that sits so high in the spectrum of London pricing.

For my main dish, I ordered a red mullet tagine. Now, normally, when you order a tagine of any sort the whole idea is for the restaurant to be able to present the dish in its dramatic clay pot - for that's what a tagine is, more than a style of cooking. The tagine, like a dutch oven, is supposed to create a certain kind of cooking environment for the dish - one that often provides a distinctive taste or texture. Here, you can see my description of a beef tagine, for example, that I had at the New York restaurant Django.

At Fishmarket, however, the dish arrived arranged simply on a plate, a perfectly aligned, thin square of couscous sitting underneath two obviously sauteed pieces of fragrant fish. This puzzled me for a moment, I have to say. The fish hadn't been cooked in a tagine - and it seems kind of odd to just do the couscous in a tagine and then not take advantage of the inherent presentation it affords. Still, the couscous was delicate and flavorful - both mildly spicy, and sweet with plump, well cooked sultanas dotted throughout. And it was small - finally, thankfully, I had run into a restaurant with a sense of proportion. Eating in New York for more than a month had fooled me into thinking that all restaurants served too much food - here, the portions were well thought out, and just adequate.

Dessert was fun, for a simple reason. My lemon tart arrived, adorned with clever sugar garnishes made in the shape of orange slices. I looked at it, and it looked back up at me, cringing. For, of course, it had obviously been ordered in from a bakery, and not cooked in house, and then sneakily disguised with its sugry finery. There's just a certain sheen, I think, to the ordered in tarte au citron - and even though I could be wrong about its capitalistic provenance, I don't think I am.

Anyway, I actually don't mind when restaurants order in desserts. I'd much rather they did that, and present me with a proper tart, made exactly with a slightly sweet shell of half french butter and half flour, than try to gin up some sort of graham cracker crusted lemon curd monstrosity slathered with whipped cream in their own kitchen. It's a real sign of the chef's humility, I think, to order food in when they know they can't do better, and as I crunched through the quite decent dessert, sipping gingerly at my hot coffee, I was glad for the master's virtue. In all, Fishmarket had impressed, even though I had expected little.

Le Bernardin

Bidding farewell to New York at the end of my seven week stint, I visited Le Bernardin, New York's premier fish restaurant. Unlike many of my previous visits to much lauded restaurants, I was impressed, though counterintuitively, my favorite dish hadn't a bit of seafood in it.

The meal was preceded by a sort of salmon dip - a distant cousin to the kind of smoked salmon pate one gets in the supermarket in a plastic tub. This version was made of fresh salmon, and creme fraiche, and some wonderful chives - while my table mates went for the admittedly good butter and relatively interesting sourdough boules, I went ahead and piled the bright dip onto the pieces of lightly oiled toast that accompanied it. I don't think it's my fault if no one else at the table notices what they should be eating, right? In any case, the early bird gets the worm, I think.

As I perused the menu, though, I was really surprised to see quite this much fusion in such an old standby - tandoori hamachi, for example? It's certainly clever, but I'm not sure whether that's quite what I have in mind when I go out to eat. My own choice was hardly more orthodox - a sort of tower made of potato, and vegetables, and crab, all topped with a spicy Peruvian mayonnaise. However un-French it sounds, I'll admit that the concoction was delicious - particularly impressive, if you haven't ever tried delicately stacking foods, was the fact that the dish never collapsed into a sort of all inclusive casserole. Each tiny layer remained distinct, different, and entirely identifiable - a real masterpiece of presentation, if not of cooking.

For the main course, I ordered a wild striped bass, surrounded like a sort of edible stonehenge by some brightly green, lightly steamed okras. That alone was delicious, especially since the fish was cooked so precisely - not quite at the quiver I tend to like, but at perhaps the even more difficult to achieve line between flakiness and dried disinterest. I've certainly never been able to achieve that in the oven, as Le Bernardin says they did. But additionally, as part of the elaborate table service favored by Le Bernardin (they go in for the synchronized waiter thing there, and I think it works), the bass was accompanied by the lightest fusion broth of lime and mango, adding a tiny sweet tinge to an already near perfect dish. The flavors weren't the strongest, and in a world used to powerful sensations that might be a problem for some people, but in my view there's a yawning gap between bland and subtle - this fell, (as I hope to. heh), on the latter side of that divide.

Good though the previous dishes were, however, dessert was outstanding, especially if you order wisely. My warm almond cake combined all the deep flavor of those runny chocolate cakes everyone (including me) likes so much, with the distinctive tinge of a dense almond base. This kind of cake should be like eating a miraculously light marzipan, I think, and Le Bernardin achieved that ideal precisely. But even here there was a little surprise, accomplished I think by lining the baking instrument (presumably some kind of ramekin, though I won't guess) with a thin layer of some delicious sugar, which provided a startling texture to the outside of a usually quickly softening sort of cake. In any case, with our without the shavings of surprisingly tasteless pear alongside (I think chosen more for its firmness than taste), I wish the restaurant was open for just dessert. It's not that I wouldn't like the rest of the menu again, but sometimes, a full meal isn't in the cards- but a striking dessert like this one might be.

Mr. K's

Whenever I write about Chinese food, I always preface my remarks with the caveat that my knowledge of that food isn't quite the same as my knowledge of Italian, or especially French, food. All I can do, really, is make a sort of guess as to whether what I'm eating seems right - but other people with more familiarity should always trump what I say.

Anyway, Mr. K's is a visually beautiful restaurant, everything a light shade of a delicate pink. The chairs are comfortable, the room airy and light - the physical plant of the place is completely unimpeachable. The same is true of the elaborate service - silver bowls are brought out for the rice. Starts are sauced and served at table side. Peking duck is handled the same way. All these things, of course, are positive.

Alas. For the food is entirely uninteresting, except for the decent enough duck (with thankfully crispy skin). The stir fried beef with orange was too soggy, for some reason, as were the seasame crusted shrimp. The lo mein was oil logged, in a mockery of the worst suburban chinese. Eggplant and chicken dishes were hardly spiced - though the former did go well with rice. As always with Chinese restaurants, the desserts were largely uninteresting - the peanut (butter) ice cream I had was tasty, but it could have well been from Baskin Robbins. I don't see why Chinese restaurants don't serve their own, admittedly esoteric, desserts. Anyway, Phoenix Garden is clearly much better, and I'm sure restaurants in Chinatown are as well. For over $40 a person, I wasn't all that impressed.

Better Burger

Better Burger promises to make exactly that. Air baked french fries, organic meat, wholewheat buns, fresh pesticide free lettuce. All, of course, for a healthy premium over McDonald's and its ilk. For example, the dinner of a sandwich, fries, and a drink I had last night as I sat around in my office cost $8.45 - but some of the more involved burgers, such as the tuna, go over $10 - rather too much for fast food, if you ask me.

In any case, the burger was perfectly adequate. It was juicy, well grilled, and obviously fresh. The bun hadn't gone stale, the various sauces available (no mayonnaise, unsurprisingly) were tasty, and there was enough of the 1/4 pound burger to satisfy. Of course, that isn't a surprise - their burgers are only "better" in the sense that they're made of organic meat. There's no claim of necessarily lower fat, and indeed at 17 grams bun inclusive, it's not the lowest fat meal available in New York. Additionally, if you want a top quality burger, this isn't the place - Better Burger isn't, say, a Bartley's Burger's Cottage in Cambridge - but it is decent enough.

The fries, however, do claim to be low fat, baked in what I understand to be high heat convection ovens (that is, fired by whirling hot air). A carton of them costs you just seven grams of fat, and as readers of this blog might know, I'm very interested in low fat french fries. That's for several reasons - first, I have a terrible weakness for fries slathered in mayo and ketchup, which means that I can't maintain the low quantity strategy that keeps me moderately healthy in their face. Second, making crispy potatoes without much oil is a fascinating challenge - the closest I've come is a recipe for baking potatoes cut into thirds that I wrote about a while ago. In any case, Better Burgers fails miserably on this score. Though the fries do taste like potato, which is a mark in their favor, they also have all the earmarks of baked fries -most distressingly, they're chewy rather then crispy - like mashed potato wrapped in edible leather. Back to the drawing board for Better Burgers, I'm afraid.

Ultimately, the dichotomy between the fries and the burger make me wonder exactly what Better Burger is after. If they want the high end gourmet crowd, as evidenced by the burger, they should change their fries. I'd add some organic potatoes double fried in high quality olive oil to the menu. If they're looking for the health nuts, the burger is far too fatty - and it's no good to say that lower fat burgers, such as the ostrich, are available. The beef burger has to be particularly healthy as well. I'd change the menu to include a burger made of, say, 96% fat free beef enlivened by generous helpings of mustard and other flavorings. At the moment, though, Better Burger just seems confused to me, and it's just too bad. The idea is sound.

Linguine with meatballs

I was so horrified by the Il Mulino debacle that my mind turned yesterday to Italian food. Not to real italian food, but to the Americanized version - even that, I thought, could be done much better than what I had seen at that unfortunate restaurant. Strolling around the Union Square Greenmarket on early Saturday morning, I found some fresh, young garlic, complete with bulb, some wonderful onions, bright red fragrant tomatoes, and good basil. Stopping later at Grand Central Station's in-house butcher, Cierello, I picked up some hot Italian sausage, and went home. The agenda for today would be the stodgiest of America-Italian comfort food; linguine with meatballs (yea, yea, so I prefer wider noodles to spaghetti- so sue me).

The first order of business in any kind of sauce like this is to prepare the meat. In this case, I tore the sausages out of their casings, and mixed them with basil chopped chiffonade, finely diced summer garlic, and freshly ground black pepper. You don't need to add too many more flavorings, I think, to sausage meatballs - the butcher has already done much of the the work. The other thing to remember, which of course I momentarily forgot, is that you need to be careful about the proportion of meat to other ingredients. Since you're going to be frying the meatballs, adding too much basil and garlic will cause those ingredients to burn in the hot fire of the pan - you can withstand some of that, but not too much. In any case, roll the mixture into small uneven balls - to me, too much perfection in shaping this kind of thing takes away the home-made rusticity of the dish- and fry them in extremely hot oil until crusty and brown on the outside. The way I make meatballs, they won't be done yet. That's fine - just pull them out of the frying pan, and dry them on generous swathes of kitchen paper on a plate. They'll come back into the game later.

Using the same oil, and hopefully some melted fat from the sausages, very slowly sweat some finely minced onions and garlic. It's key to sweat, that is to sautee at low heat, rather than fry - you don't want any coloring of the onions and garlic, and you want them to go soft. As far as I'm concerned, there's not supposed to be any crisp onion texture in the finished sauce. While that's happening, and it should take a good ten minutes, chop the tomatoes. As you can see from the picture on Waddling Thunder, the tomatoes should be reduced to a pulp - they way I do it is to chop them into squares, and then rake them back and forth with two large chef's knives, occasionally grinding them into the cutting board like one does garlic. By the time you finish the tomatoes (that bowl represents four carefully mashed fruits)the pseudo-sofrito (the traditional italian trio includes celery) should be ready. Add the tomatoes to the pan, water or red wine, and the meatballs. Let the mixture bubble away happily for some twenty minutes, adding some red chili flakes if you happen to like the sauce spicier than it would be from just leaching the sausage's heat. At some point before it finishes, remember to boil some salted water, and add the pasta - there's no reason to wait to cook the pasta later.

When you're ready to finish the dish, be sure to undercook the pasta slightly - as it's described in so many cookbooks, the pasta should still haev some "bite". Tip some of the sauce, without meatballs, into another pan on medium heat, add a ladlefull of pasta water, and then add the al dente noodles to the mix. Toss the contents of the pan aggressively, making sure to dress the pasta lightly rather than drowning it. The extra water will let the noodles cook to done in the pan. Remove the pasta to a bowl, add three meatballs per person, and sprinkle parmesan and more chiffonade basil over the whole creation. Eat quickly - preferably with some red wine, and if you're feeling decadent, with a bageutte stuffed horribly with butter and more garlic.

Il Mulino

I'm relatively comfortable being the odd man out at a table. Long years playing the devil's advocate with my European friends has made sure of that. It's not that I disdain people's disagreements - if friends I respect think I'm wrong, that's a clear signal that I should think again. Once I do that though, I've never been too worried about being alone. A lot of people I admire have been disagreed with.

I preface this snapshot with those rather too philosophical musings because Il Mulino has one of the most sterling reputations in New York. The bible of most amateur New York restaurant mavens, Zagat's, rates it at a stratospheric 27, raving about Il Mulino's "ambrosial" food. Critic after critic has kept the restaurant at the top of diners' lists. We were even joined at lunch, when I visited, by former New York Stock Exchange chairman Dick Grasso - if $150 million can't buy you taste, then I'm not sure what can. So when I found the food at Il Mulino barely average, I followed my instincts in having a long hard think about the restaurant in the last day or so - enough people of sufficient experience and intelligence disagreed to give me pause. But I trust my palate and my judgment. Based on those things, my verdict is clear- the food at Il Mulino is not worthy of a famous restaurant. It not only fails the test of value, but my baseline test of competence - given the same ingredients, can I do better at home? For Il Mulino, the answer is a shocking but clear "yes".

Il Mulino is famed for the antipasta that precede the meal, and even your menu. Once we sat down, the various bits of Italian mezze began to arrive, and they certainly looked like they ought to be good - a whole parmesan was brought to the table to be divided en place, plates of salami, fried zucchini, bread toasted in olive oil, bruschetta topped with fresh tomato sauce. But each item prophesied disaster, though I didn't want to believe it at the time. The meat was unaccountably tasteless - as if there wasn't any fat at all, though you could see the mocking cubes of lard right there. The thin slivers of shaved fried zucchini were so oil-logged that they were almost inedible. The bruschetta was inoffensive, if one ignored the mediocre bread, the parmesan could have been better (and it's not like one has to go far in New York to buy better parmesan), and most shocking of all, it was entirely clear that the crostini had been made the night before. If it had been any less obvious, I wouldn't have believed it - but there was no mistaking the soft crumble of left-over toast that day.

Things didn't get any better when the maitre d' arrived to take our orders. I'm not of the school that believes that chefs should accomodate the diner - if you want to have a restaurant where there aren't any menus, and the diner is entirely at the mercy of what's available and fresh, that's fine. Just tell me how much it costs, and I'll make a judgment about the quality of the chef at the helm. Similarly, I have no problem with specials - even the best restaurant has food it needs to get rid of occasionally, and it is true that sometimes the kitchen is privy to a shipment of something particularly delicious but in short supply. But in either case, I have to know how much it costs - I can't tolerate restaurants that force you to guess what they're going to charge. Il Mulino is one of the worst offenders on this score I've ever seen, because while there is a menu, many of the most putatively interesting dishes are counted out on the mysteriously pudgy fingers of the staff - "I can make for you", our waiter said, "this, and that, and maybe this, perhaps, and this - and I forgot, there was also the other". As for what it cost - who knows? Though the fact that the specials were at least 50% more expensive than the menu items became apparent from the bill of over $80 a person at the end. And that, to me, signifies a lack of respect for the customer, and a failure of the restaurant's duty as a servant rather than master.

When my plate of fried zucchini flowers arrived, stuffed with mozzarella and topped with a pungent sauce of anchovy and capers, I had a moment of hope. These, I thought, couldn't help but be good. And yet, Il Mulino failed me again. The flowers, so delicous golden and crisp, had gone brown and soggy. As for the excellent cheese tucked inside the delicate vegetable, that was entirely overwhelmed by an overpowering sauce. It's not that I dislike anchovy sauce - I like it very much indeed. But there's well done anchovy sauce, and its less accomplished cousin. And this, I'm afraid, was the black sheep of that particular culinary family, unbalanced, too salty, too strong. Given the kitchen's limitations, that dish would have been so much better with a simpler sauce of fresh tomatoes and the same capers, layered underneath the flowers. I don't know why they went with this recipe instead, aside from the carelessness borne of resting on one's laurels.

I ordered an octopus salad as my main course, largely because octopus is one of my favorite types of seafood, especially at the sushi table - there, the Japanese wash it in salt to remove its brine, pound it (traditionally) with daikon radish to make it easier to eat, and then boil it briefly to cook and colour it. Il Mulino had necessarily followed much the same method in making its salad of baby octopus, scallions, olive oil, and lemon - and yet, the kitchen had somehow made a mess of it. There was too much sauce, and it tasted of too little - salad ought to be annointed rather than doused in dressing that tastes of something other than water and onion. The octopus was desperately overcooked - like small tubes of red tinged rubber, while the 1980's style presentation in a sheath of Bibb lettuce was an unnecessarily outdated pastiche of a second rate brunch shrimp cocktail. Even the dubious appeal of nostalgia was muted by the frayed edges of the leaf - was there really not a piece of fresh lettuce to line my bowl with? Or was I not as important to them as Mr. Grasso?

Dessert was a muted affair at our table, stuffed as we were with portions that verged,and crossed over, into the vulgar. Unwilling to leave without a sweet end, though, our party shared a predictable, though good, tiramisu - strong in coffee and chocolate, layered with a creamy zabione - and also ordered some fresh strawberries and a bowl of yet more of the meringue-like sauce. As we staggered outside, a disconcerting thought crossed my mind - is it wrong to be so annoyed at such a luxurious meal? How can I justify such damning criticism of an admittedly overindulgent bachanal, provided not my expense but out of my employer's pocket - isn't that kind of childish grousing the very height of greed?

Well, there is some of that, I admit. But the real height of greed is charging what Il Mulino does for poorly executed and over-hyped food in an atmosphere that suggests that the customer ought to be grateful for the privilege of dining there. I'll admit that the pasta other people ordered seemed competent, though I can't comment definitively from the small tastes I took. Maybe one shouldn't expect too much else of Il Mulino, an avowedly old style Italian-American restaurant. But I don't buy that argument - for the astronomic prices they charge, and the fawning praise they receive, Il Mulino deserves the strictest and most impartial scrutiny. It should deliver strong and winning dishes across the menu - and should continue that strength even into its amuses bouches and service. Sadly, Il Mulino does none of those things - preferring instead to dazzle the apparently awestruck with empty show. I'll admit that my impressions are from only one visit - that's why I don't term this article a review, but a snapshot - nonetheless, it's clear to me that the door is open for a new king of Manhattan italian cookery. Babbo, which I hope to visit soon, may well be the answer. I certainly hope it is.

Tropica

My meal today was at Tropica Bar & Seafood Club, situated a convenient distance from work in the Metlife building, and accessible through Grand Central Station (quite the pleasant side effect when it happens to be raining, let me assure you). Though the seafood was of high quality, my opinion of the cooking is rather less positive. Indeed, for a bill of well over $100 for two, without any alcoholic drinks, I would expect much more sophistication and craft. As it is, I would avoid Tropica in the future, and counsel any readers to do the same.

The meal began with a shrimp and scallop ceviche, served in a very large cocktail glass. Indeed, too large a cocktail glass - the size of the serving had nothing to do with taste and everything to do with a desperate desire to charge $14 dollars for a starter. Furthermore, I'm unsure why the ceviche was drowned so liberally in a sauce of what tasted like tomato, lime, and cilantro - and if the sauce had to be that prodigous, why not serve something delicious to sop up the liquid? What I got instead of some interesting croutons, for example, was a piece of fried plantain. How much less useful an accompaniment would there possibly be for half a gallon of pungent sauce? Maybe they should have added a spoon with a giant hole in the bottom too.

My second course was a seared and then pan-roasted halibut on a "ragout" of potatoes and mushrooms. The halibut was properly cooked, only just converging towards flakiness, and the sauce would have been interesting but for one fault. The supposedly new potatoes had obviously, evidently, indisputably, been sitting around for more than a week. They literally dripped of starch - and while I have no objection to starchy potatoes, they had no place at all here. Who does Tropica think they're kidding, sneaking their old potatoes into a heavily flavored sauce? Do they think their lunch public has no sense of taste at all, or that they can hide their obvious faults with large glasses of ceviche? I was not impressed with this short cut. It's not that I fault them for trying to use up old potatoes- but if you're going to do that, how about some dish where other flavors mask the ingredient's inferiority? In the same situation, I perhaps would have grated the potatoes, washed them to get as much starch out as possible, and then fried them in either a potato pancake or a straw potato cake. But a preparation that literally demanded waxy salad potatoes should never have left the door of their kitchen in that condition.

Dessert, by contrast, was an entirely pleasing, if slightly bland, key lime pie topped with what seemed like a sort of large gingersnap cookie. I'd happily eat it again, though $4.00 would have been a much more sensible price for what is at best a piece of down-home baking than the required $8.50. But I guess when your clientelle consists of the expense account crowd, you can pull numbers out of a hat - it seems to work for Tropica.

Fritto misto

I don’t have much time to cook right now. Actually, it’s not really a matter of time but of opportunity. I can cook after 9 pm, when I often get home – but I often don’t feel like cooking the kinds of things I want to eat, given the enormous lunches so often provided gratis by the law firm. For the rest of the summer, then, I’m going to experiment with the cooking version of my restaurant “snapshots” - short tidbits relating to one quick dish or experience over the last week. The dinner last Sunday was my first try in that direction – but it’s a style I’m still working on to perfect.

In any case, I went to the Union square farmer’s market this morning looking for floury potatoes, fresh eggs, and perhaps some dandelion leaves or some other interesting bits of greenery. The idea was to have a pleasant summer brunch for dinner, in the form of eggs hollandaise perched atop a potato pancake – if I was feeling particularly devilish, perhaps I would find some organic bacon to render, yielding some cooking fat for the pancake. But that’s really the wrong way to go to a farmer’s market, now that I think about it. What you should do is go with an open mind, ready to buy whatever looks delicious – or catches your eye – or just seems like the kind of thing you’d like to eat that night.

Once I saw these zucchini flowers sitting in small boxes at one stand, I knew there just wasn’t anything else to do. They looked fresh, and were cheap – and I had just been mumbling to myself about the distinct lack of vegetables in my diet this summer. It’s not that I’ve given up on my commitment to healthiness – the amount of fruit I shovel indecorously onto my plates is almost obscene. But for whatever reason, I haven’t been eating a lot of greenery. These elegant squash with their delicate blossoms still attached fit the bill perfectly.

Zucchini flowers have a relatively limited number of uses. You don’t want to overcook them – and it’s rather a shame if you cut them up at all. The great Mario Batali suggests a tortellini of them in his book on Italian country cooking – and there’s also a recipe I’ve seen somewhere involving buffalo ricotta. But to my mind, the most basic choice is the best. Zucchini flowers ought to be dipped in a mix of milk, semolina, flour, salt, pepper, and olive oil, and then fried in a deep vat of yet more flavorful oil. They shouldn’t be over-battered – make sure to use as little as possible, and when they come out, the only flavoring they should see is some more salt, and perhaps a wedge of lemon. The resultant vegetable is crisp on the outside, delicate and intensely tasty within. One you arrange them hot, and crusty and salty on your plate, you'll realize they need no meaty accompaniment to serve as a glorious dinner. Take my advice – the next time you see these things anywhere, buy them while you can. They’ll pay dividends not only that night, but if you’re like me, for mornings of daydreaming after.

La Bergamote

I was planning on holding this snapshot until later, when I was ready to release my larger project on bakeries. But sitting at La Bergamote this morning, I looked over the line forming at the front of the small Chelsea boulanger and realized that I had seen the fellow right at the back somewhere. No, he wasn’t an HLSer. And I don’t think I recognized him from my undergrad years – he looked entirely too nattily dressed for that. Then it struck me. It was my first New York semi-celebrity sighting – Ted, the food maven from Bravo’s hit show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”. Actually, though I enjoy the program, I’ll admit that I don’t like his cooking very much. Sure, I understand he’s trying to give the clueless something they can do in a few minutes, but I still think he can do better. And I will say that he wasn’t looking quite as chipper as on the show, though few of us are on Sunday morning. But it is true that he must have good taste in croissants. Because on that point La Bergamote has no equal in New York, at least so far as I’ve found.

I wouldn’t buy a sandwich from La Bergamote. The bread might be good enough, but the sandwiches are wrapped in plastic rather than stacked freeform like in a normal boulanger. As anyone can tell you, that means rubbery unappetizing bread, rather than the crispy, crackly crust that so characterizes baguette. Which is a shame, because their selection is sandwiches is correct. Not too wide, or too self consciously inventive – just the basics of the French palate – ham, ham and cheese, sauccison beurre, jambon de bayonne, pate de campagne, all with or without pickles. If only they didn’t wrap the things in cling film – but what better a clue that the sandwiches aren’t fresh?

Despite that sin (and it is a great sin, I think), La Bergamote is worth going to. The croissants, and particularly the dark, deeply caramelized almond croissant, are excellent, buttery, flaky – as close to a Parisian boulanger as I’ve ever seen in the US. My one complaint is that the baker seems to habitually overbake the things. I understand that this is an affectation some bakers like, but I think he’s occasionally overdone it, crossed the precarious line into burned. Nonetheless, for just over two dollars each, these are the best examples anywhere in the city, with the one caveat that I have not yet tried the much more expensive Payard Patisserie’s effort. But even if Payard matches La Bergamote in taste, which I doubt, the stuffy dark bastion of quasi-French pretension in the upper East side can’t match La Bergamote for friendly service, or a nice place to have a café au lait. So my recommendation is almost unconflicted for La Bergamote – and its presence makes the rest of my bakery project harder to complete, since I’d rather go back there than try anywhere new.

Diwan

Entirely different from the rarified meals I've been eating in the last few weeks, today saw a visit to the superficially modest Diwan Indian restaurant in Midtown. I say modest because of a merely 14 dollar buffet - but with a quality that belied the price and a pleasant well apholstered setting, I think the modesty here is only skin deep.

No, I don't normally like buffets. I eat too much - the food is both bad and cold; you don't get any sense of the individual dishes. But Diwan is one of the best buffets I've ever been to, in part because of the rapid turnover inherent in a weekday New York lunch. The fragrant basmati rice (saffron-less, unsurprisingly) was hot and entirely fresh, the curries changed completely every few minutes, and a chef was on hand constantly producing top quality dhosas on a small portable griddle(lentil flour pancakes usually filled with more lentils and potatoes). When you add to that the quality of the food, I think Diwan is a great bargain. The paneer was excellent in a cream and tomato based curry, as was the boneless chicken. There was a flavorful saag spinach curry available, as well as fresh, hot, tandoori chicken. The naan bread delivered to your table was also obviously fresh - and if you couldn't tell from the taste you could certainly confirm your suspicions looking through the window framing the buffet into the open kitchen. And as for dessert, this is rarely a strength of an indian restaurant. But Diwan's large bowl of cream and rice pudding, flavored gently with lemon and perhaps a tinge of jasmin (and it should have had more) was a terrific, cool, finish to a fiery meal. For going out with friends, or for a charity lunch if your firm offers such a thing, don't hesitate - Diwan is an excellent choice.

In yesterday's New York Times, Mark Bittman says the following:

"There was a time when the appearance of the first ripe tomatoes would have inspired me to make the southern Italian sauce of raw tomatoes, basil, garlic and olive oil. These days, I turn to a Mexican-style salsa fresca: tomatoes, white onion, chili and loads of cilantro and lime. The differences in the ingredient lists are minimal, the preparation is identical, and each result is linked to its parent cuisine.

The Mexican version is lighter and brighter, I think, and seems a tad more versatile (the Italian salsa is used primarily on pasta). Both stretch the definition of sauce. Once, you would have called these preparations salads: a sauce was cooked, a sauce was smooth, a sauce was usually complicated. Fortunately, Americans' horizons have expanded, and we routinely throw fresh things like this together in 10 minutes".

Of course, I disagree. I believe that the sugo crudo I mention in my essay The Menu of a Harried Student is much superior to using fresh tomatoes in a Mexican salsa. But that might be because I'm terribly obsessed with good mozarella, and will take any opportunity to stuff it into a dish. Still, what I would say is that sugo crudo is a sauce, and salsa a sort of salad, or condiment. And that's without taking anything away from good salsa.

Phoenix Garden
242 E 40th Street

The grand caveat over this snapshot is that I know next to nothing about Cantonese cooking, other than what I've picked up over the years from visiting the local second rate chinese restaurant. I know all the sauces shouldn't be the same color and flavor, and that one should taste something, but other than that, I haven't the slightest clue. Still, I think there's a certain extent to which someone with a decent sense of taste can say, "yes, this is likely to be a good example of X", even if they don't know much about it.

On that note, I'll say then that I think pheonix garden is probably quite a good cantonese restaurant. I was genuinely surprised by the sheer flavor of a few things I ate - there were these astonishing steamed pork dumpling, set aside from the usual unfortunate effort by the large chunks of pork tucked in each chewy ball - that's always been my complaint about dumplings, honestly - if you can't taste the meat, why not use something else? And the simmered eggplant in a clay casserole was tremendous - like the turkish/armenian/generally middle eastern iman bayadi, but interesting - with ginger, and spices, and, well, taste. My only regret about the place was that I didn't know about their bring your own booze policy (no corkage!), and that I didn't realize how aggressive you had to be to get served in the busy, crowded space. Still, next time I'll know to show up with beer, get in people's faces, and order what the people who seem like they're from Canton are ordering. And if you make a mistake - no matter - for almost everything's under a tenner. Other sources list Phoenix Garden as some of the top Chinese in the city - at this price, it's a flat out bargain.

Bouley

I visited the New York super-restaurant Bouley for lunch today. I don't put much stock in the Zagat's guide, but to give some perspective on the matter, that book has it tied for the top restaurant in the city. Obviously, my view is that dinner there is probably better, but there's something to be gained from observing lunch. For one thing, I was able to realize that the room on the right hand side, with its white ceiling and larger windows, is much preferable to where we were sitting, on the left - if at all possible, considering the general somberness of the dark maroon space, opt for the former side. Why ought you not see your food?

As for the meal, it began promisingly with a novel amuse bouche (called here a Chef's canape for one reason or another) of a clam topped with a sort of tomato coulis and a cold horseradish tinged cream. I have certain problems with the texture of the last two when combined with each other, but as a taste, the dish was quite striking. I also felt that the clam was entirely overshadowed by the other ingredients - what I wouldn't have given for a larger piece of beef tartare topped with the carefully balanced bite of the horseradish sauce.

I chose the lesser of the two tasting menus, which began with some pan fried soft shell crabs served atop grapefruit. I love soft shells, though I would be just as happy leaving their squishy centers to the hungry denizens of the sea. The chefs at Bouley, understanding this, had cleverly isolated the delicous extremities of the unprotected crustacean, leaving only the crunchy sweetness of its claws and arms to be shovelled delicately into my waiting mouth. Though I normally don't talk much about the physical plant of restaurants, I should note here that the restaurant erred in presenting a fish knife with the soft shell crab. I haven't the slightest idea what the proper etiquette is, but even the tenderest soft shell still has a leathery skin, that eventually hardens into the thorny armour that protects them from the depridations of fish, if not man. A sharper, more aggressive knife would have been more appropriate.

The crab was followed, after a slightly worrisome gap, by a Maine cod served atop a bed of wild oysters and organic peas. The dish was largely a low - key one, and I'm not sure entirely worthy of a place like Bouley. I will say, though, that I much admire a chef who can stop cooking fish at the very moment when it reaches translucence, before the fish begins to flake, and remembers to present it quivering atop its accompaniment. That's how fish should be served - at a consistency much more reminiscent of gelatin than of cotton. As another free tidbit, the kitchen presented two delicate plates of mashed potatoes - made with waxy fingerling potatoes rather than their more usual starchy compatriots. I would say that the dish was striking, but I haven't yet made up my mind whether I was pleased or not by a richness that verged so close to pureed butter that even our table of four champion eaters couldn't finish the two small plates. Yes, mashed potatoes should be rich - but this rich? I'm not sure.

The highlight of the meal, I would say, was Bouley's magnificent palate cleanser that followed the cod, a truly great combination of apricot and champagne puree, all topped with a sparkling buttermilk sorbet. The sorbet was clever on so many different levels - the low tones of the wine underlying everything, the astonishing use of buttermilk, which of course has little inherent fat, to make a sorbet, which normally has no milk. I can only say that I was terribly impressed. After the sorbet, we were treated to a well-executed but somewhat standard warm Valrhona chocolate cake, served with three ice creams of varying excellence, and several serviceable petit fours, including a somewhat surprising sesame biscuit of terrifying butteriness, all with a cup of excellent coffee. All in all, I saw tinges of what could be the best restaurant in New York, but I feel as though the real strength of Bouley's legendary cuisine is left for the evening. One day, I hope, I'll find out.

Pellegrino's

I don't understand restaurants like Pellegrino's. I don't get their appeal, I don't get their popularity, and I definitely don't get their 23 rating in Zagat's New York. Sure, it's nice to sit outside in an interesting part of New York's Little Italy. But we do really need to eat such mediocre food while doing it?

The problem with Pellegrino's is much the same as the much more upscale (and uptown) Grifone, where I dined in the fall. Simply put, the food is stuck in the mid 1950's - insipid, uninteresting, sugary pasta sauce, without that dark musk of garlic and onion that makes italian food italian, pasta on the very edge of bloated overdoneness, and main dishes that could be interesting, but in the hands of the Pellegrino kitchen, aren't. Veal with artichoke and mushroom, for example, sounds nice - it's not bad, I have to admit, though I'd like it a lot more if the meat hadn't gone an odd shade of gray. And as for the eggplant parmesan, I'm reasonably sure they got that eggplant the same place that the sub shop next door to my cambridge apartment gets theirs - what happened to fresh eggplant, salted, battered, and then fried in olive oil before being put in the oven with the sauce? The best part about Pellegrino's is that you can sit outside and plot where you're going to pick up some gelato for dessert. Otherwise, I'd skip this (admittedly reasonably priced) restaurant and shell out a little more money for Mario Batali's Lupa somewhat uptown, or for either Il Mulino or Batali's mainline restaurant, Babbo.

Grimaldi's

Yes, it's all the way in Brooklyn. Yes, there was a line even at 1 pm on Saturday, when we arrived. Yes, you have to pay with cash, and the menu fits on a small sheet. But Grimaldi's is a magnificent pizzeria, and I recommend a visit for anyone in the New York area.

To my mind, there are two really important attributes to a good pizza, though I'm sure some disagree. First, the dough has to be excellent. There should preferably be no oil, though I understand if kitchens cheat on that point to make handling the crust easier, it has to be properly (that is to say, relatively lightly) salted, and it has to have been kneaded sufficiently. Even more important, the dough must be baked in a good oven, preferably one fired by hot burning wood or fuel, and one that's been in the same place for a long time. Grimaldi's, in all these respects, is utterly spotless. The dough tastes of bread, blistered by a fierce coal fire that's been in Brooklyn for over fifty years. It has many of the characteristics of a good loaf - the outer skin of the crust seems to have been grafted directly from some of the better bakeries I've visited. There's simply no doubt that with the exception of Pepe's in New Haven, this is some of the best pizza in the country. If there's better, I would have heard of it.

Second, I think it's vital that the pizza is properly topped. This, to me, means an interesting and viscous tomato sauce dotted with the occasional ball of torn fresh mozzarella. No heavy lid of shredded pseudo-cheese - no filled crusts - no bizarre combinations of cheddar and mozzarella. Just a simple, light, meal. From the piles of mozzarrella sitting on the baker's counter at Grimaldi's, and from the sparsely topped pizza that arrives, it's clear that Grimaldi's understands the point exactly. Combined, the hot crusty dough and this perfect topping make a tremendous pizza - and in rough and ready surroundings, served quickly with a hastily filled cup of ice and bottle of coke, I'd pay twice the $14 that Grimaldi's charges for a large pizza. Go to Grimaldi's - it's one of the best restaurants in New York.

Cafe de Boulud

It goes without saying that Daniel Boulud is one of the undisputed dons of New York cooking. Eating at his secondary restaurant, Cafe de Boulud, I can see why. That doesn't mean his performance is spotless, however.

I started my (relatively) reasonably priced meal with a clever amuse bouche - a tiny chinese soup spoon of molded sauteed aubergine topped with a single half of cherry tomato and a little tart yogurt sauce. The meal continued with my second fluke carpaccio of the summer (see Django below), this one draped over an interesting semi guacamole of avacado and apple - the face of the fish was scattered with thin slivers of juicy tangerine, I think. For a main course I chose Sea scallops sauteed in butter and served with a rich lemon-verbona sauce, piled atop a delicous fricasee of green beans and peppers, and topped with an excellent frenchified puttanesca, dotted with tiny salt cured capers. Dessert was an terribly disappointing hazelnut biscuit crowned with chocolate mousse and cream - whoever did this pastry needs to be lectured by Boulud about freshness, though even if fresh I think the dessert would have failed - but the course was saved by the delicate little madeleine cookies served with my cappucino. If I had to pick one thing from the meal that exemplified the magnificence of French cooking, those little lemon zest tinged butter cookies would be it, actually - flour, sugar, butter, egg; those are the four pillars of french cooking. Indeed, it seems safe to say that the kitchen's boulanger is stronger than the patissier, since the bread too was excellent - crunchy, airy, and when slathered with obviously fresh and high quality butter, utterly delicious.

Assuming that Mr. Boulud has cleared up his pastry problems at the main line restaurant Daniel my hopefully impending visit there should be pleasurable indeed. But for a reasonable price, Cafe Boulud is high dining, and standing alone, would probably be the best restaurant in many a city.

Django is a modern sort of restaurant with all the usual accoutrements of a New York eatery; sleek tables, trendy wait staff, and patrons (i.e, lawyers from Midtown law firms) who fit neither of those categories. I'm beginning to think thatI can write that about any of the places I'll dine this summer, though, at least until I get to London.

The meal began with bread, especially for many of my companions who eschewed appetizers - unfortunately, the bread was entirely average. If you've ever eaten any of those half baked breads sold at the supermarket that you're supposed to take home and warm, then you know what it tasted like, except that one of the presented choices was supposedly a sourdough (though I couldn't taste any natural leaven to save my life), and the other was dotted with a few desultory olives. Not, I think, the best way for the restaurant to make a good first impression.

I was much more impressed with the clever carpaccio of fluke, though, marinated in red grapefruit. Fluke lends itself to carpaccio - and the restaurant had been very clever in using just a few specks of large crystal sea salt instead of any other seasoning. This way, most of the time you tasted the fish and marinade, an experience interrupted only seldomly, but with great effect, but a deep salty tang. I'd definitely recommend this dish, though my friend's choice of tuna tartare also looked serviceable. The menu also boasted a pissaladiere, which I would have ordered but for the fluke - I wonder, though, if they had given it as aggressively over to anchovies as that recipe demands.

My main course was quite an interesting "tagine" of beef - that is, a beef stew ideally baked slowly in a clay pot, a technique that hails from Morocco and has become trendy recently here. It was served in a stark white faux-tagine, which I thought did something for the presentation at table. If eating at a restaurant is half spectacle, then I think bringing a covered pot to the diner is always likely to increase his or her anticipation, and perhaps pique the interest of others sitting elsewhere (I suppose this is particularly effective if the showy dish happens to be a high profit margin food, which a beef stew generally tends to be). The citrus spiked stew was served, somewhat surprisingly, not with the traditional couscous but with basmati rice, a change I'm not sure works perfectly (couscous does a better job bathing itself in the fragrant sauce) but to which I have no real objection - certainly, if cooking rice is one of the marks of a skilled cook, the kitchen at Django has a few quality technicians working in the back. Also noteable is the fact that the sauce is sufficient to require mopping up with bread afterwards, which has always been one of my favorite parts of any meal - the whole process was made only slightly less interesting by the second rate bread, which obviously was salutorily improved by being doused in pungent gravy.

We didn't have dessert, so I can't comment, though there did seem to be a viable choice or two. All in all, I think I'd spend my own money elsewhere, but on the law firm teat, you'll never find me complaining about a kitchen like Django.

Asia de Cuba is an interesting fusion of asian and latin flavors, though I'm not sure I buy everything they're trying to accomplish - it's a little too slick and trendy for my very traditional tastes. It's not that I dislike innovation, but I'm extremely skeptical about the claim that two cuisines can be stuffed together with anything but dubious results. Still, it's tasty food, as the description below should demonstrate.

Dining is so called "family style" - that is, you share with everyone else at your table, and portions are ludicrously sized. We started with an excellent tuna tartare spread over fried squares of wonton, an equally good fried calimari salad of frisee and banana, a thai beef style salad, and beef dumplings both steamed and fried - the former was served with a heady soy based sauce. Main dishes included a sort of flank steak served in a lime and jus sauce and topped with jicima slaw, seared tuna sliced and served with wasabi mash, braised pork ribs mixed with bok choi (entirely the stars of the show), and some relatively pedestrian jamaican jerk chicken. Side dishes included the excellent coconut infused sticky rice, a fried rice of plantains topped with guacomole like avocado salad, and two orders of lobster mashed potatoes. For dessert, the group indulged in the utterly preposterous "Bay of Pigs", which consisted of a brownie topped with 7 or 8 scoops of ice cream and decorated with various cookies and a few bananas, all slathered with caramel, and the equally unhealthy "Latin Lover, which is apparently what one calls a flourless chocolate cake these days.

Here, at the end of all things

The end of a law school year is not the end of all things. But it is the end of at least one thing, and deserves comment for that alone. As a matter of food, though, the last few days of any period present a far more interesting sort of puzzle. How is one to finish off the last bits of food in the fridge and the pantry before leaving for a new home, or vacation, or school? On Sunday morning, I'd be on a train bound for New York, and a summer of hopefully fruitful apprenticeship. But what would I eat till then?

The question is particularly troublesome in my case - there aren't any ready made meals in my freezer, for which the simple remedy involves either the microwave or the garbage, nor are my cupboards full of cereal - to the extent I have anything lying about, it's flour, grains, butter, and other such staples. To be exact, as I realized when I decided to take a look at my thankfully dwindling provender at the start of last week, I had the following items.

1 baking potato, a jar of (store bought!) mayonnaise, a small block of unpasteurized Roquefort, One organic Anjou pear, Flour, Olive oil, honey, Oats, Milk, Butter, A block of cheddar, and a few eggs.

Not, it might seem to someone unwilling to stretch their imagination, the best bunch of ingredients. But that's where so much of the fun of cooking is to be found - it's one thing to produce delicacies with access to mounds of truffles, endless jars of caviar, and a team of busy hands to help you, all subsidized by the wealthy consumer. It's quite another to produce tasty things at home on a limited budget and in the cramped confines of a typical student's kitchen. Though the professional chef is an artist, and a real representative of the best of cooking, the latter cook is a guardian of yet another great tradition of kitchen heroics- It's said, for example, that the French revolutionary chef Dunand invented Chicken Marengo from whatever he had on hand after Napoleon's great victory in that Italian city, and the dish has had a particularly long life for all of that.

In that self-important mood, I set to thinking about the ingredients I had. It occurred to me that the best luxuries one can eat at home aren't the most expensive ones, necessarily. Indeed, the more expensive the ingredient, often, the less the cook's skill has anything to do with the finished product - the freshest raw oyster needs neither lemon nor hot sauce to be tasty, but only a sharp knife and a brave slurp. But to convert the humble potato into a knobly, crunchy, snowy white french fry, that to me takes skill and care. As so I cut the lonely spud, leaving the skin on for both flavor and texture, into thick uneven wands. The delicate crunch of shoestring potatoes or frites are not, I think, for the home cook; rather, it seems to me that the British have the right way of it with their robust chip. Like the best recipes, it is both unpretentious and forgiving, and it's my first choice when left to fend for myself in what is normally the domain of a fast food joint.

I dried the starchy batons carefully, as anyone making chips should, and then lowered them tremulously into a bubbling pot of olive oil. Yes, indeed, I said olive oil - anyone who hasn't ever used it to make fried potatoes is missing out on some deep flavor, and the last week before vacation is the best time to experience the difference free of wallet induced guilt. I let them fry slowly for a number of minutes, until soft but uncolored (just pinch them with tongs to find out if they're ready), and then rolled them out onto a great swathe of kitchen paper to dry before tossing them back into the now furiously hot oil until golden and crunchy. I know that some of my friends can produce great results with only one frying - and some recommend starting the chips in actually cold oil instead. But for whatever reason, I've only been able to produce the starkly contrasted pillowy interior and crisp exterior that commercial french fry makers so tawdrily try to duplicate by using dried mashed potatoes, with a double frying, and in my opinion the result is worth the extra effort. Almost painfully hot, and sprinkled with the barest few large grains of salt, I dipped them mischievously into refrigerator cold mayonnaise- I like ketchup too, especially since Mark Bittman of the New York Times has recently shown us that it too can be a noble condiment - but in this case the mayonnaise was both available and appropriate, and really very good.

The second meal was equally obvious to me. As I've said before, cold Roquefort isn't worth eating just like that. But I'd also never throw it away, and if I had had some pasta, perhaps the solution would have been to crumble it into a pot of fettucine with a few squares of ice cold salty butter. But there wasn't any pasta, and I had no puff pastry to stuff it in and paint lightly with egg wash either, so none of my usual uses for a spare end of cheese were available. But I did have oats and self rising flour, both of which ingredients literally scream the word biscuit to me at the highest possible pitch. So the Roquefort was crushed indelicately, and mixed with some of the rolled oats, and flour, a little salt, some butter cut into the flour with two knives, an egg or two, and just enough milk to bring it all together into a crumbly, potentially flaky dough. I then rolled it all out, cut out considerable rounds with a sharp knife (since I don't own a biscuit cutter, and a sharp cut is necessary to ensure even rising), and put them quickly into the oven until they were golden brown. Cut into halves and served with the juicy, room temperature Red anjou pear, and I thought to myself that I had found a new candidate for primary cheese rescue option, appropriate for the block of cheddar as well. My only regret was that I didn't have some crisp, tart, green apples, or some grapes or a melon to go with the biscuits also - though someone with more time could well provide those worthy accompaniments.

Made in sufficient quantity, the dishes above were enough to finish off my stores of food, and to provide me with admittedly repetitive lunches and dinners for the rest of the week. When I leave New York later this summer, I'll be able to play this same game again, hopefully with new and different ingredients. But my point in writing this is to show that cleaning out one's fridge shouldn't be a pain, but an opportunity - less of a chore than a chance to eat some very simple but interesting food. I certainly enjoy the challenge, and if I convince someone else to try it as this year ends for most college students, and vacation season starts up, I'll have accomplished most of what I set out to do. Enjoy!

The menu of a harried student

A lot of my friends excuse poor food by saying that they're stressed - with exams around the corner, the argument goes, there's just no time to bother with cooking. So they end up at one disastrous fast food joint or another - and in Cambridge, that usually means some kind of locally run eatery without even the guarantee of uniform mediocrity that a Mcdonald's provides. Not for this area the kind of fresh food focused burger eatery that the New York Times recently described in Oregon, complete with made to order seasonal blackberry shakes.

To some extent, I sympathize with my friends' reluctance to insist on good food right now. Exam time is not the best moment to make the Bouillabaisse below, for example. I certainly have never felt any compulsion to make something like croissants a few days before a test, and even a relatively simple but necessarily time consuming dish like risotto isn't first on my list of meals when I'm really pressed for time.

But none of that means that I stop preparing and eating good food. Indeed, there's an entire range of food that fits exactly the niche that exam time requires. None of these "recipes", and I hesitate to call them that due to their simplicity, requires much time, and usually I've tried to keep even the number of dishes, pots, and pans to a minimum as well. Indeed, I fear that if I didn't eat like this, I wouldn't be able to handle the other things in my life, even if the second semester of the second year at law school is hardly the test the first year was.

Potatoes, for example, are ready made for stressful occasions. Not only does their floury heartiness inherently make them a comfort food, but they lend themselves to a variety of simple dishes, and rarely require much hassle. Of course, one can bake potatoes, if you happen to be studying at home. All that really requires is a few shreds of quality farmhouse cheddar dropped lightly into the punctured tuber, and perhaps a few grindings of pepper - though if you have a little more time it's always good to scoop out the fluffy insides, mix them with smoked mackerel, dijon mustard, and cream before stuffing the mixture back into the potato and leaving it under a broiler with cheese for a minute or two. If you don't have time to let a potato roast for an hour, though, that doesn't mean the potato is off limits - as odd as it sounds, I've been known to take cold new potatoes to school with a sprig of thyme or two, and dip the peeled and boiled portions into an elegant pot of creme fraiche or refreshing yogurt. With a little more time, furthermore, you can always make a potato salad - either in the french style with lemon, vinegar, and chives, or like the Germans do across the border with mayonnaise, mustard, and pickles. Both make great lunches, or good accompaniments to grilled fish at dinner.

Of course, pasta is a friend of the harried student as well. One hardly needs my advice to buy a jar of pesto and mix the cold sauce into newly boiled ribbons of wide pasta. But I think store bought pesto is too salty, and the home variety too complicated, too finicky while such arcanities as the 1933 Exchange Act occupy significant and unwelcome portions of my mind. During times like these, then, I'm much more likely to throw together a sugo crudo : that is to say, just a sort of raw salad of still hot pasta mixed into a bowl of olive oil, fresh, uncooked tomatoes, olives, basil, and anything else you can think of, along with generous shavings of Parmesan or Pecorino Romano. For a bit of variety, you can even substitute a ball of fresh mozzarella and a little proscuitto for the hard grated cheeses, which makes for just as delightful a meal. And if you're happy using the same pot to boil the pasta as for making the sauce, I've found that a simple dressing of olive oil and hot chili flakes, with or without anchovy fillets melted nuttily into the mix, is a real pleasure, especially with two handfuls of hastily chopped or torn flat leaf italian parsley throw into the bowl at the last minute.

If even these preparations take too much time, however, don't feel as if you're left nothing but greasy takeout pizza to eat. As bad as the cheese situation is in the US these days, Trader Joe's has managed to bring in relatively cheap and authentic Roquefort - the greatest of the french hard cheeses, and a worthy competitor to brie and camembert. With a box of scottish style oatcakes at your side, and a healthy bunch of green seedless grapes, a generous slab of the salty, powerful cheese makes a terrific dinner and takes all of twenty seconds to unwrap the cheese and wash the fruit. It's made even better if you remember to leave the cheese out all day to come to the proper temperature. Cold Roquefort is like warm lager: an utter waste of time, and a worse sacrifice of needed calories. Stress also brings other high quality ready made meals to the fore, like smoked salmon, also at home on oatcakes, or as a sort of flat salad with capers and cornichons, or tossed over some more pasta with cream. Alternatively, it's true that the considerably and unalterably gluttonous side of me that's in love with the fruits of the worthy pig has had luck recently with the better italian hams and salamis, tomatoes, and fresh cheese like ricotta or mozzarella. Any of those things served with a decent end of bread would shame few people's tables.

Finally, one can't ever forget meats and fish as the paradigmatic quick foods - what could be better than a piece of fresh tuna seared for no more than a minute on each side, still ruby red beneath a crunchy charred exterior, served with a few spears of quickly broiled asparagus annointed with tart vinaigrette? And I've got a personal soft spot for steak au poivre- made simply by rubbing a good steak into crushed rather than ground peppercorns (ground pepper burns in the pan's heat), and then quickly sauteed to be placed along a salad of frisee and lemon, perhaps followed at some length by my restorative banana bread - made by mashing three ripe fruits with between 1/2 cup and a full cup of sugar, two egg whites, a quarter cup of melted butter or oil, vanilla, and enough self rising four to get a thickish batter - it's better if you then slowly cook it in a relatively cool oven for about an hour, though it can always be baked more aggressively as well.

In other words, stress shouldn't push you towards the fast food restaurant, though an occasional stop there doesn't hurt. It certainly shouldn't suggest raiding the frozen food bins at the supermarket, where one is served as much artifice as aliment. Rather, take some of the suggestions above, and put your own twist on them; studying hard into the night, the virtuous quality of good food ought to sustain you longer than any unnatural substitute, and give you a little more wisdom than you might otherwise have - and if it does neither, at least you'll have eaten well. Life is made up of small victories.

Bouillabaisse

A ce plat phoceen, accompli sans defaut,
Indispensablement, meme, avant tous, il faut
la rascasse, poisson, certes, des plus vulgaires.
Isole sur un gril, on ne l’estime guere,
Mais dans la bouillabaisse aussitot il repand,
de Merveilleux parfums d’ou le success depend

To make this phocean dish without fault
Indispensably, even before all, you need
The rascasse, a vulgar fish, of course
Which on the grill we think little of
But in the bouillabaisse it exudes
A marvelous perfume on which success depends



Some people doodle in class. Others play snood, or surf the web, or chat on instant messenger. A small group might even drift away in the lewd embrace of the more salacious range of mental speculations. But me? Well, I dream about food. I dream about what to cook; and how I’m going to cook it; and where I’m getting the ingredients to cook whatever I’m going to cook; and how I’m going to eat it. I might dream about a specific food, or about all foods – in the morning about what I’m going to eat for lunch, after lunch what I’ll eat as a snack, and later what I should make for dinner. The only constant is that the moment the class demands less than all my attention, food is extremely likely to be the topic of my distracted meditations.

The weather has turned here in Cambridge, for the past week or so. Today, on the day of the Boston Marathon, we’re supposed to hit the eighties. Emerging from a grim winter of long nights and colder days, this to me says spring, in the loudest possible voice. And so, for the past week or so, I’ve spent my time in class thinking about bouillabaisse, the glorious champion of fish stews, one of the greatest contributions of provencal cuisine to the expanding waistlines of the world’s gluttons. How much fennel? Can bouillabaisse be made without the paradigmatic rascasse, as one of my friends points out – certainly the French writer Mery, quoted above, doesn’t think so? Which fishes should make the stock, and which the stew?

But one doesn’t need to engage in all this pretentious navel gazing in order to eat bouillabaisse. It’s a complicated soup, in some ways – I’ll grant you that. But in the end it’s just a soup – and it can be made with mostly simple ingredients, and in not much time. Nonetheless, people seem intimidated by recipes like this – whether it’s the prospect of the fish, or the straining, or the saffron, I’m not sure. So I’ll be a little more specific than usual, and perhaps I’ll expect a few more people to actually make this when they need something really magnificent to eat.

What you’ll want to do first is get some fish – among the three types most people start with, you should aim for those less rather than more oily (I’m not sure mackerel is the best idea, for instance). Most importantly get at least one whole fish, to get you the head and bones you need to make a flavorful stock. Of course, if you’ve been saving fish bones and shrimp shells in your freezer like any sensible home cook, you don’t need to worry about this – but if you know to do that, you hardly need to read my amateurish blabberings here. Manfully cut the head off the fish (you need at least two if you’re cooking for four people), and turn the heads, cracked open with a sharp knife, and all the fish bones you can find, in a large pot with olive oil, along with fennel, tomatoes, thyme, onion, garlic, and any other herbs you like, all chopped roughly. After just a few moments in the heat, add water and white wine to the pot, and bring all that to the boil. At some point, you’re going to have to add saffron to this mix – and no, don’t try to skimp and use turmeric in a desperate effort to get the same colour. You’re spending a lot, presumably, on the fish. Don’t ruin the effort by being cheap with what is essentially the main ingredient.

Once forty minutes pass the stock should be powerful, fragrant, and colorful, both from the saffron and the tomatoes. Strain the liquid, and set aside – as wonderful as fish brains are for the taste of the soup, you don’t want them in the finished product, though I don’t suppose I have to warn most people about that. Boil a few new potatoes in salted water – peeled. Given the fish base of the soup, you really only need two of the waxy tubers per person, but you’ll regret not making more to dip sinfully into the aioli, which you’ll make by grinding a few cloves of garlic in a mortar, adding an egg, and then whisking in either pure vegetable oil or a combination of fats including some olive oil until you have something that looks like mayonnaise. Finally, toast a few pieces of French bread rubbed with yet more garlic – and if you’re now thinking that this isn’t the most convenient of dishes for the busy professional, I will admit that even in France it’s usually saved for what I can only imagine are some mightily odiferous Sunday afternoons.

To serve the great soup, just pour the reserved stock back into a pan, and bring to a fast and roaring boil. Drop your fish into the stew, and once the base comes back to the boil, drop a little more saffron into the pot if you like (and can afford it), turn down the heat, and cover the pot. While the fish finishes cooking, put a couple of potatoes on the bottom of each person’s wide and shallow bowl, and make sure there’s plenty of toast on the table sitting near a large bowl of aioli and a few spoons. Once the fish seems done, place each person’s share in their bowl with the potatoes, pour the steaming broth over the fish, and take the bowls to what I hope are your hungry guests. It’s vital that at least some of the toast gets smeared with too much of the garlicky sauce and floated in the soup like a sort of crouton – the dish is meager, if fragrant, and the combination of the oil and the bread put the finishing touches on the meal. Add a chilled glass of good white wine, or, dare I say it, champagne, to the table, and you’ll have something that you can serve to anyone on any occasion. It’s true that the dish is expensive, and that it takes a little effort – and I’m aware that in Provence itself, those outside Marseille sometimes scoff at the dominance of bouillabaisse in the face of so many great fish stews. But I think the effort and the cost are worth it – and as long as your guests haven’t been to a small town in Provence, the secret of your creation’s competition is safe with me. So enjoy. I certainly did.

A feast of Heterodox Delights

The best religious symbols are the tasty ones. Lamb is at the forefront of them – amply laden with Christian theology and yet delicious at the same time. Certainly, there’s much to like about celebrating spring with a large leg of the docile beast, dotted with fragrant full cloves of garlic and lovingly rubbed with thyme and olive oil - or with little cutlets of lamb stuffed with a bare slice of strong sheep’s milk feta and doused in freshly ground black pepper. Served with a robust puy lentil salad that’s dressed simply with lemon and oil or perhaps with a few boiled and then roasted potatoes, and you’ve got yourself a dinner fit for the occasion. Or you might use lamb as my relatives do on Easter, and make shells of ground meat and bulghur wheat, filled with more lamb and cubes of fat, and then gently simmered in a yogurt soup of rice and stock.

But this year Easter has turned my mind to Italy, and to simple dishes of homely fare. Don’t get me wrong – the pharaohs may have died content in the knowledge that their pyramids survived them, but I shall be happy if the untold generations of pigs, cows, and sheep to come tremble in horror at my name. But for some reason I don’t feel like eating the usual things this time. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that spring is upon us after a grim winter, and the cultivated delights of the summer season finally within reach. Or maybe there’s something about the poignant simplicity of the Resurrection story that has turned my stomach towards the Roman heartland. Or maybe I’m just feeling fat. Whatever it is, I have no desire to hew a great joint of flesh on that most holy of Sundays.

Instead, I find myself walking to my local deli for Alici marinati – that is to say, marinated anchovies. Before you recoil, these aren’t the tinned terrors of pizza fame – though even those are wonderful melted in oil with garlic and parsley as a pasta sauce, or draped over dough with olives for a pisalladiere. These are lightly preserved fish, with much more substance and bite than their desiccated cousins. When chopped roughly, combined with mashed and boiled potatoes, raisins, garlic, parsley, pecorino cheese, bread crumbs, and an egg or two, and then shaped into rough balls fried in extra virgin olive oil, they become real delicacies fit for the Easter table, and with just as much symbolic legitimacy as lamb has ever had.

But fritters alone aren’t enough for Easter – it is, after all, a celebration. And so I’ve got a stuffed pizza as well, with dough made of salt, water, flour and yeast kneaded until substantial enough to stretch until almost transparent, and then filled with broccoli stewed in copious olive oil and garlic mixed with the freshest, fullest fat ricotta I could find. And if even that wasn’t enough (and to be clear, I’m eating all this myself), I also filled little dough paunches of cornmeal, flour, olive oil, and milk with good mozzarella, imported proscuitto, and a few dices of sun dried tomato and parmesan, before folding in a half moon shape and frying in yet more olive oil. It’s true that none of these are as sublimely dramatic as a glorious leg of lamb coming out of the oven, but they’re wonderful all the same.

No Easter meal is finished without dessert, and in this case a plate of cheese or a few ripe fruits won’t do, I’m afraid – those are good enough for the normal table, or even Sunday lunch, but not for such a feast. Of course, brioche is perhaps the most symbolic of Easter foods, traditionally representing the triumphant return of eggs to the diet after the Lenten fast. Many people I know make types of cookies, rich with butter and sugar, for the feast. But for my family, Easter has always meant ghadayif. This famed and usually home baked sweet of the middle east and Greece is simple and rich – it’s made by rubbing shredded filo dough in melted and cooled butter, and then sandwiching a mix of walnuts, cinnamon, and sugar between two layers of the dough in a casserole before baking until golden, and then dousing while warm in a heavy sugar or honey syrup until all the sweet liquid is absorbed. When cut into crunchy and sodden squares, and piled onto plates with yet more syrup and honey, it’s a real effort not to eat the entire casserole yourself. And I’ve failed that test of self control many a time.

So stuffed, happy, and with sufficient leftovers for the week, let me wish everyone out there (Christian or not) a happy Easter. Though we might not be able to share the religious holiday, the great thing about most foods is that they’re usually ecumenical – and gladly, even if our minds disagree, are stomachs can be in joyful communion. So happy Easter, and good eating – I’ll be back next week with a less festive menu.