The New Yorker, 2005-09-05, c +

[fiefoe]

"The Egg Men" / Burkhard Bilger
__ Short-order cooks are among his favorite examples. ...He calls them "the master interval timers."
__ "He's in such a comfortable zone that it's hurting him."

"The Bakeoff" / Malcolm Gladwell
__ for evidence of rhythmic munching (the metronomic hand-to-mouth cycle that lies at the heart of any successful snack experience)
__ a colloid mill for making oil-and-water emulsions, a flsh pasteurizer, and an 85,000-dollar Japanese-made coextruder...

"The Quest" / Jane Kramer

• I am determined one day to turn a few plump oysters and some tapioca poached in cream, buried in sabayon, and topped with caviar into a dish worthy of Thomas Keller, whose “French Laundry Cookbook” actually tells you how to do this if you happen to have six hands.
• a bluestocking’s horror of garlic
• In the event, it was impossible to find any of the things I needed to savor the coast of India or make a proper couscous (for one thing, Umbrians do not eat turnips)... In Italy, it is even impossible to sit down to a Provençal table.
  

"Paradises Lost" / John Updike on Rushdie’s "Shalimar the Clown"
__ characteristic Rushdiean overflow. His novels pour by in a sparkling, voracious onrush, each wave topped with foam...  verbal hyperactivity

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"Don't Mention It" / Calvin Trillin

• Eve will, in the interest of saving time, reveal her own favorites, which these days happen to be three dishes with chicken in them—Chicken Tortilla Avocado Soup, Pecan Chicken Wild Rice Cream Enchilada, and Taco Fried Chicken. But she doesn't do it with a song in her heart.
• Pretending to be a party of three that happened to have come in with a party of two is a very bad idea.
• "You're really not allowed to be anonymous here," Kenny has said. "You have to be willing to be who you really are. And that scares a lot of people."
• He has always thought of us as being in similar fields, and, as someone who has to be prepared every day to turn out any one of nine hundred dishes a customer might ask for, he has a deep understanding of waste not, want not.
• Lately, for instance, a lot of dishes have been inspired by the tchotchkes he's bought on eBay.
• He is someone whose contrariness is so ingrained that he can begin a description of one cooking experiment like this: "At the time I was interested in baba ghanouj, I was reading a James Beard article about eggplants and he said never put eggplants in a microwave. So I went and put an eggplant in a microwave..."
  

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