Who is the reluctant gourmet

One of the most difficult places in which to find education funding continues to be the culinary field, where investors are few and students are many. This opportunity arose through a partnership with Chefs4Students. Stephen Jones, the home chef entrepreneur behind the Reluctant Gourmet name. To keep up on the latest in the culinary world, From A to Z includes terms every novice should know like gremolada an Italian garnish and roux a mixture of flour and fat used to thicken soups and sauces.

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Reason: if you add the oil too quickly, the dressing will be separate and not emulsify. To serve Tear the romaine lettuce into inch pieces and add them to a large bowl wooden if you have one. Add half the dressing, toss, add remaining dressing, Parmesan cheese, and croutons and toss again. The enthusiastic author rates all his food from one to ten, and he wants the well-fed gastronomic adviser and me to do the same. He gives the lomo, a thinly sliced, burgundy-colored prime cut of cured pork, only an eight.

The gastronomic advisor has ventured a nine, and so they turn to me, the Hamlet of our group, who can't make up his mind and requests clearer definitions of eight and nine. A gourmet, according to one dictionary definition, is a judge of choice foods. The term comes from an Old French word for a wine-tasting servant. Gourmand, on the other hand, comes from an Old French word for glutton. From this it appears that medieval Frenchmen knew the difference between a judge, who is guided by intelligence, and a glutton, who is guided by appetite.

But Americans, I've observed, always get gourmet and gourmand confused. Indeed, being called a gourmet in the States is as likely to be an accusation as a compliment. In French, by the way, the two words are still distinct. I used to write about food for a French-staffed publication and the accountant who processed my expenses would take enormous delight in pointedly calling me Monsieur Gourmand. Can it be a lingering puritanism that makes Americans dislike gourmets?

In , Picasso depicted a little girl reaching up to a table to scrape the last bits of food from a bowl. The painting is usually labeled by its French title, Le Gourmet. Is a gourmet greedy? Is all that judging and analyzing really just an excuse to eat as much as possible?

Picasso's little girl did finish off the contents of her bowl. My gourmets are discussing the lobster. The red-faced author has given it a 10 and is trying to get me to concede that these tough little clawed creatures from northern Europe are far better than the lobster from what he does not realize is my native New England, which in fact they are not.