[Sca-cooks] "Fabulous Feasts"

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

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