[Sca-cooks] "Fabulous Feasts"
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Sun Apr 8 09:17:27 PDT 2007
On Apr 8, 2007, at 10:30 AM, Nick Sasso wrote:
> Frugal Gourmet has many really good recipes in his body of work. His
> editorial and production staff did a little background research to
> give some
> color to his ethnic and domestic recipes sets, and I don't think
> they ever
> claimed to be a research resource. They were entertaining and I
> daresay a
> significant part of the "normalization" and popularization of
> cookery and
> food on television. All of the unsavory ajudicated behaviors
> aside, his
> cookbook collection is a very decent source for beginning to
> intermediate
> home cooks to enter some unusual cusines they might not otherwise try.
What he said. If a little module-ized, i.e. X is the same thing as Y
but with a little more garlic added, when in fact things are
generally more complicated in the real world, Smith did a great deal
to demystify the culinary jungle and make things more accessible, in
a way that reminds me a little of Mark Bittman today.
> niccolo difrancesco
> (learned: hot wok . . . cold oil . . . food won't stick)
I can still hear Smith saying that in my head. But for me, the
ultimate PBS (before there was a food network by decades) cookery
show blurb was from one of the first of the Chinese TV cooks, a guy
named Titus Chan (I think he's a Hawaiian of Cantonese-speaking
Chinese ancestry, and still active today), who advised his audience
in heavily-accented English to heat the oil in the wok for a while,
then stick a finger into the oil, and if they heard a scream, they'd
know it was hot enough.
Adamantius
"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils mangent de la
brioche!" / "If there's no bread, you have to say, let them eat cake!"
-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
"Confessions", 1782
"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry
Holt, 07/29/04
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