Sublime

Brunch menus are an open invitation to the cost-conscious chef, a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday nights or for the scraps generated in the normal course of business.

He tucked his napkin under his chin and murmured to the waiter. “Un grand?” said the waiter. “Un grand,” said Régis, and sixty seconds later a large glass pitcher, opaque with cold, was placed in front of us. Régis became professorial; our lesson was about to commence. “In a serious restaurant,” he said, “one can always have confidence in the house

I have a great fondness for boudin noir, which I think of as one of the aristocrats of the sausage family—a blood sausage made with pork, usually served on a warm bed of thinly sliced cooked apples. Smooth and rich and dark, it is a dish to be eaten in front of the fire on a day when there is frost on the ground and an icy wind butting against the

He sees Mark’s bag of fried flowers on the tip-pocked table. Funny thing about those flowers. Who’d voluntarily cook and eat a rose? It’s like planting and watering a breadstick. It’s perverse, and even sort of obscene, eating what’s clearly put on earth to be extra-gastric. Didn’t taste all that hot, either. And there’s still a piece stuck with

First, they grind and leach the flour with copious amounts of water, which increases digestibility and decreases concentrations of the vitamin B1-destroying thiaminase. Second, in making the cakes, the flour is directly exposed to ash during heating, which lowers its pH and may break down the thiaminase. Third, nardoo gruel is consumed using only