I've been wondering for over a year how to handle this matter, that of the palatability of foods, particularly meats. It comes up everywhere, but particularly with travel, especially international travel, and it's highly subjective—X might love to eat something that Y finds disgusting.

I've reflected over decades of travel, and have collected together all the pertinent stories I could think of. These are events where hosts unthinkingly tried to foist on Beverly and me, as a captive audience, meats I would never, never considering ordering by myself in a restaurant. Actually, there were not that many such events, and they came up only sporadically, mostly decades ago, that is, until my culinary annus horribilis of 2017. This is the year when in Peru, in May, a number of food events happened that you may recall reading about. But then in September, in France, on the Luciole, many more such events continued rapid-fire. You may have noticed I completed the discussion of the Luciole without discussing food. This summary is not just about the Luciole, but deals with the subjective palatability of animal flesh in general over the years, though those events did reach an apex on the Luciole. After the primary subject of palatability, I'll have a few more comments about food on the Luciole as add-ons. As a indication of how long I've been pondering this matter, as I now present my lead-in into the subject, note the below date, which is only at about the half-point of the period I've been mulling this over.

I have long been a fan of journalist Frank Bruni, who writes an op-ed column for the New York Times. He usually covers social and political matters, but on 14 March 2018, he opened his column with a culinary point, which I most certainly did not agree with him on. He wanted to show how adventuresome he could be, and said:

Before I comment, let me refer to the cartoon you may have seen showing a haughty society matron at some gathering who intones piously and virtuously "If you have nothing good to say about people . . ." but then adds sweetly ". . . then come sit down here by me, dear."

So if you agree with Frank Bruni and would do as he did, then please move over to him at the next table. On the other hand, if your reaction to his statement was "Ewwwww!", then come sit down here by me, dear.

I am reminded of when U Thant came over from Burma (Myanmar) to New York in the early 1960s to take over after Dag Hammarskjöld's death as Secretary General of the United Nations. There were pictures in the papers of him being offered a quaint, exotic New York delicacy: a hot dog with mustard and sauerkraut. He thanked the vendor but did not dare to eat such a strange and unusual thing. So what we're talking about is not only relative, but highly, highly subjective. But you are what you eat, so why shouldn't you limit yourself to what you find palatable?

Ask most people why they like or dislike a food and they'll mention taste, and also texture. But too many people don't realize that there's a meta-criterion hovering over taste and texture, and that's palatability. If you'd just rather not eat something, or certainly if it outrightly disgusts you, you won't even reach step two, taste and texture. That explains why you might hear this type of ridiculous statement from a person who does NOT understand that palatability comes first: "Rattlesnake? It tastes just like chicken!" In that case, palatability is not an issue with that individual, though it might very well be with the person he's talking to. While a jovial comeback might be "Well, give me some chicken then", it should be followed with an explanation of the vagaries of palatability.

You may wonder why I bring up this subject now. I've always known my personal feelings and have never paused to quantify them. I've always been aware that people to my right (the negative side) on the continuum of palatability will eat things I wouldn't touch, while people to my left (the happily positive side) won't eat some things I'm happy devouring. But also keep in mind that on this palatability continuum, items to one's right run between those one is merely rather uncomfortable with (for me, duck, goat, a lot more) and items that totally disgust (Frank Bruni's wriggling shrimp; roadkill; make your own list).

The spark to investigate this right now occurred that very first evening on the Luciole, after that reception. Penny joined the passengers that one time for dinner, and sat to my right. When the chef announced the meat for the main course, I was startled, as I didn't expect it to be something I don't eat and would never order in a restaurant where I was in control of my meal. I blurted out my distaste, and Penny hastily had the kitchen send out some vegetable tart in its place. But she followed that up by wondering why I hadn't listed on the registration sheet I didn’t eat that meat. I had to make it clear that, if I were to sit down and actually quantify meats I wouldn't touch, I'd need an extra sheet to list the entire zoo, half the aquarium, and half the barnyard, and still may have forgotten to include zebra and goat. Therefore, this posting is meant to clarify to the people on my right on the continuum of palatability that not everybody eats every kind of animal flesh. I can do so only by quantifying my personal likes, since my dislikes would again list the entire zoo, half the aquarium and half the barnyard. And I know I'm not alone.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral    We ingest few minerals other than table salt, and of course, water, so it comes down to vegetable and animal. But we can virtually discount vegetables from this discussion, palatability of vegetables—that is, outright disgust--doesn't usually enter into the discussion. Because of the taste you either like or dislike Brussels sprouts. Because of the texture you either like or dislike celery. I cannot see how either those or other vegetables, fruits, or even beverages has a disgust factor parallel to that of animal flesh.

CAVEAT: Ah, but we have to be careful. We have to consider fungi within the vegetable world, and some people do not like the idea of eating mushrooms. Perhaps it's because of how they grow. Also, there are people who are disgusted by the blue cheeses. Some people might say "Ew! That's mold you're eating!" Personally, I fry portobellos for dinner (Photo by Leif K-Brooks), love mushroom soup, and my favorite cheeses are gorgonzola (Photo by Dominik Hundhammer), Stilton, Roquefort, bleu, and any other veined cheese on the market. But I do understand that there is a disgust factor for some people with fungi, and accept that fact. This just goes to show the subjectivity of this subject, and wherever we stand along the continuum of palatability, there will always be people to our left and to our right.

So it comes down to animal products, specifically meat. For those that see minimal problems here, note that I've occasionally been using in place of the word "meat" the much more provocative phrase, "animal flesh" to indicate more of the potential disgust factor. As we ponder the continuum, we can say it goes from 0% to 100% of acceptance of meat.

On the left end would be the vegetarians (and vegans). They eschew meat entirely, both for health and humanitarian reasons. Still, I think it's safe to say many vegetarians might therefore find all meat at least distasteful, and possibly ranging up to disgusting. Their acceptability of animal flesh would most likely be 0%.

On the right end of the continuum would be—dare I say it—cannibals, whose meat acceptance is 100%. (You may ponder here in the last posting Saint Nicholas's three naked boys in a barrel that the butcher wanted to sell off as ham.) But that's impractical, so we'll stop short of 100% for people who will gladly eat most sorts of meat. Though the word "omnivore" refers to an eater of both vegetable and animal matter, I use it here more concisely as "meat omnivore", to describe an individual who will eat almost any kind of meat, and whose acceptability of meat would reach a very high percentage.

I can think of several people I know that I've discussed this with who will eat "anything". And I've tested that with some of them by asking graduated questions (short of cannibalism). Would they eat ostrich? Yes. Snake? Yes. Bear? Yes. You usually have to get pretty extreme before you get a no. Rat? No. Dog? No. Roadkill? No. This will indicate that even meat omnivores do have their limits, thank goodness.

My Criterion    We all have our reasons for what we are willing to eat, and what we avoid. I'm going to list my personal criteria for what I find palatable. If you're sitting at Frank Bruni's table over on my right, this may be a revelation to you, especially if you've been keeping your head in the sand regarding palatability as it affects other people. If you're sitting at the vegetarian table way over to my left, you may not want to hear any discussion of meat. On the other hand, if you're sitting at my table, dear, I suspect my tastes—and distastes--won't be too far off. After some self-analysis, I find my criterion as to meats I avoid is really quite simple: ►No Exotica! However, to that I have to add two corollaries, further clarified below. Even with the meats I enjoy, I accept ◊No Organ Meats and ◊No Dead-Animal Presentation.

►No Exotica!    This is the criterion self-analysis shows that I follow. The easiest way to explain what I do find enjoyable and wholesome is to describe it as any common meats you'll find on all restaurant menus, either serving domestic foods or foreign—and in my chosen field of language, culture, and travel, foreign foods are everywhere. Another benchmark of what is exotica is describing a dish as a delicacy. Doing so gives the dish an aura of intrigue, but "delicacy" is always a code word for exotica. I'm sure Frank Bruni's wriggling shrimp were described to him as a delicacy from somewhere. To point out what I find acceptable, let's first talk about meats, and then about seafood, something that also often appears frequently on menus.

MEATS    The meats I enjoy are pork, my favorite (also as ham), beef, chicken, turkey. I also like lamb and veal, though I respect the feelings of people to my left, between me and the vegetarians, who don't, possibly because both meats come from young animals. On the other hand, I've never had mutton (sheep meat), or have even seen it on a menu. If I ever were to see it, I'd decline it.

Beyond this, you have exotica, foods that might be served in restaurants, but not universally. A Dominican restaurant may serve goat, but not to me. A French restaurant may serve frog's legs, but not to me. A Chinese restaurant may serve Peking duck, but not to me (although I've tried Peking duck, I'm uncomfortable with eating duck). Other than the above very common meats normally found in any restaurant, I consider anything coming from the zoo, aquarium, and barnyard to be exotica.

I think a good example of exotica one might come across when traveling is something I've seen in France, as illustrated here in a town near the Mediterranean coast (Photo by quinet). Concentrate on the free-standing sign that says Boucherie Chevaline, with the latter word writ large above the shop. A boucherie, which looks like "butchery" on the model of "bakery" is a butcher shop. Since a cheval is a horse, using the adjective form, a Boucherie Chevaline is a horsemeat butcher shop. This is a no-no if you're sitting at my table, dear.

Searching for an more graphic picture, I found this shop which is located in south-central Paris (Photo by LPLT/Wikimedia Commons). It's not unusual to see horsehead busts on these shops (click), though the luck on those horseshoes seems to have run out on these horses. But what also struck me is a word I've never seen before, either in French or English, hippophagique, or "hippophagous" (hi.PA.fa.gus). Can you see the two Greek elements that explain what it has to mean? "Hippo-" refers to horses, as in a hippodrome, which originally just referred to a racetrack; -phag- refers to eating as a bacteriophage eats bacteria. I suppose delving into Greek roots is a way to deflect thoughts that you're eating meat from a cheval.

UNEXPECTED LIKES IN MEATS    But no two people are alike. If you're sitting at my table, dear, I'm afraid I have a couple of surprises for you, but don't send me over to Frank's table yet. We all stand on a continuum of palatability and, with all the items to one's right, there will still be some items to one's left that others further left will be surprised at. You may very well say Ew! to one or both of the following, and I'll understand, dear.

Escargots de Bourgogne As you know, these are snails, Burgundy style. You don't see them that often on menus, but when they're there, I run right towards them. They can also be called Escargots à la bourguignonne (Photo by Arnaud 25). It's essential, to get it right, which means they should be served with generous amounts of beurre à la bourguignonne, which translates as butter, Burgundy style, but which means butter and garlic, pounded into a paste, and served, as the picture shows, with parsley. Usually, parsley is an herb that doesn't impress me, but it's important here, so let's call it parsleyed garlic-butter. The escargots, usually a half-dozen, are baked in their shells, which adds so much to the atmosphere of the dish. I've been served it without the shells, which deflates the experience. Some sort of dedicated serving dish with six indentations is also usual. (On the Monday lunch on the Luciole, we were served what was called on the menu Escargots de Bourgogne. I accepted it, but I recall the escargots were part of a salad, without butter, and were quite unremarkable.)

Steak Tartare As you also know, this is a meat dish made from raw ground beef, usually served with minced onions, capers, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and perhaps other seasonings, often with a raw egg yolk on top. Sometimes Steak Tartare (Photo by Jorge Díaz) is brought to the table already prepared, shaped like a meat patty, but it's even more enjoyable when the waiter prepares it at your table, which is how I've had it at the 21 Club in NYC. It's then best spread on bread, either all at once or bite-by-bite. I prefer coarse white bread or a white roll, and usually reject any overdone toast that sometimes is served with it. You may recall that two of the best meals I had on the September trip was a tartare at Le Family in Passy, and another tartare at the airport hotel restaurant. Neither was overly elegant, but still quite enjoyable.

SEAFOOD    Along with the above meats, I also like most non-fish seafood. That sounds a little strange, but over the years a dividing line has developed for me. I find it's mostly shellfish in the broadest sense that I'm crazy about, while just ordering a slab of plain "fishy fish" appeals less to me now, and I hardly ever order it, though I have nothing against eating it. Over time, I've had, and have absolutely nothing against, Chilean seabass (not bad—see below), sole, trout, catfish, cod, red snapper, grouper (not bad), orange roughy (not bad), and many more that don't come to mind right now. I just don't order them any more. I don't dislike them, but they've lost their appeal to me when other items are available.

I find when I read a restaurant menu, I look for pastas (Italian; Pad Thai in a Thai restaurant; Lo Mein in a Chinese restaurant) and non-fish seafood (see below). After that, I look for meats, such as saltimbocca in an Italian venue or General Tso's chicken in a Chinese one. I ignore the regular fish listings, usually finding either a pasta, shellfish, or a meat dish that catches my eye.

Now to expand on the topic of seafood (mostly, but not completely, non-fish) that I find not only extremely palatable, but that I love to order in a restaurant. While I mentioned a couple of specific meat dishes I enjoy, I see no further need to expand on that. However, to illustrate all the other seafood I really like, a bit more detail is necessary, including naming specific dishes.

I like shellfish (see below). I realize some people to my left don't find shellfish palatable, and I understand that. I like pickled herring (see below). I like scallops (see below), both the larger sea scallops and smaller bay scallops. I like gefilte fish (see below). I like lobster and crabmeat (but have successfully avoided softshell crab--Ew!). I love smoked salmon (lox, nova), anchovies (on pizza or in salads), shrimp/prawns, tuna (but just as tuna salad or in a salade niçoise). I like so-called fish soups (see below), a name that's misleading, since so often there's more shellfish, shrimp, lobster, and crab in them than "fishy fish". A great way to serve both seafood and meat together (shellfish, shrimp, chicken, chorizo, and more) is in a paella, which I often serve to guests (picture follows below).

SHELLFISH: I will immediately gravitate to steamed mussels if I see them on a menu. I have a local place that used to prepare them in a gorgonzola broth, for me, two winning flavors. These are steamed mussels in garlic sauce (Photo by PookieFugglestein). In Brussels, mussels (a rhyme!) are a specialty, and Beverly and I had them as the popular moules-frites, or mussels and French fries, where the mussels can be prepared in a variety of ways.

I love clams, in the form of Clams Casino (Photo by Jazz Guy), with stuffing and bacon, or Clams Oreganata (topped with oregano-bread crumbs, and olive oil or butter) . While I would never go near raw oysters on the half shell (Ew!) there is nothing better than Oysters Rockefeller (Photo by Erik Anestad). We reported first having them in 2008/6: Crossing into the Florida panhandle, we spent the night in Apalachicola (“Apalach”), at the historic Gibson Inn (1907). The town is famous for oysters, and I remember we had oysters Rockefeller for the first time at the Gibson. And frequently since: I've had them in New Orleans, where they were first created in 1889 at Antoine's.

Beverly's Swedish-American background got me used to all kinds of wonderful Swedish herrings, which we needed to seek out when years ago we twice (!) put on smörgåsbord dinners at home. There are also so many kinds of herring, sill in Swedish, inlagd sill for "pickled herring", that are served in Scandinavian restaurants. This is a selection of inlagd sill (Photo by Johan Fredriksson). The senapssill (mustard herring) stands out because of its color.

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Nowadays I find very little pickled herring in restaurants, so I have to be satisfied with bottled herring from the store as shown above. This shows herring in sour cream (and onions), which I prefer, though it also comes in what's called a wine sauce, which I suspect is more vinegar than wine. The explanation is that initially, all herring is cured with salt to extract water. The second stage involves removing the salt and adding the herring to a brine, which is typically a vinegar ("wine?"), salt, and sugar solution, to which other ingredients, typically raw onion, is added.

SCALLOPS: Other than plain, one way to enjoy scallops (Photo by stu_spivack) as a main course is in the dish called Coquille Saint-Jacques, "Saint James's Shell":

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The above picture of scallops in cream sauce is the dish as prepared by Julia Child, served with an ample portion of asparagus. It's typical to serve Coquille Saint-Jacques in a shell-shaped dish as well, as shown. In French, the phrase is both the name of the dish, also the name of the type of scallop used in this dish, and also the name of its shell (Photo by Thomon). The scallop shell is the traditional emblem of Saint James and is popular with pilgrims having visited the shrine at Santiago de Compostela. In German these scallops are called Jakobsmuscheln, which is literally "James's mussels".

GEFILTE FISH: Again, we'll start with the name. Gefilte (ge.FIL.ta) fish is Yiddish, and is literally "filled fish", that is, stuffed fish. In German it's written Gefilte Fisch also spelled Gefillte FischGefüllter Fisch. In any form the element "fill" is noticeable. It consists of a poached mixture of ground, deboned carp, pike, and whitefish, and is usually served as an appetizer, though I like it simply as a snack. Gefilte fish is eaten cold.

The question arises as to just what's being filled or stuffed. That's most easily shown in an analogy. Turkey is served with stuffing. When more stuffing is prepared that fits into the turkey, it can be prepared separately, in a dish. That's unstuffed turkey stuffing. I now learn that in the 19C gefilte fish was actually stuffed into a fish before serving. That's done much more rarely now, to the point where I've never heard of it before, and making the name a misnomer. So what one finds today is unstuffed, or "ungefilte fish". (More culinary humor.)

Gefilte fish today most commonly appears in the form of large egg-shaped fish balls or patties, very similar to French quenelles, patties which are also usually poached. (The word quenelle derives from German Knödel, or "dumpling".) Larger patties of gefilte fish can be served sliced (Photo by Mushki Brichta). Topping it with sliced carrot is common. Gefilte fish is usually served with prepared horseradish, which is the grated root mixed with vinegar, usually called "white horseradish". It also is available mixed with beets, called "red horseradish", which is milder, and which I prefer, since it doesn't overpower the very subtle taste of the gefilte fish. An interesting variation is to prepare the gefilte fish in the form of a log which is then poached. It can also be put into a terrine and baked, then sliced like a meat loaf, making it a kind of pâté en terrine (see below).

My experience with gefilte fish is to purchase it in slightly sweetened patties in large glass jars (Photo by Florida Memory), in an aspic made of fish broth. This is how gefilte fish might be served to a group (Photo by Alef Alef), with aspic, and those ubiquitous carrot slices. And this is loaf-style or pâté-style gefilte fish, served with "white" horseradish (Photo by Joe Mabel).

FISH SOUPS: I have two spectacular preparations of seafood as I like it, both being referred to as fish soups (my preference) or sometimes fish stews, although there's usually less "fishy fish" in them, as opposed to primarily shellfish, lobster, shrimp, and the other items I prefer.

Of the two, my second favorite is bouillabaisse (bu.ya.BÉS)--the spectacular name alone draws one to this French dish typical of Marseille and the Mediterranean coast. The name possibly derives from the Provençal Latinate language Occitan (also called langue d'oc). There's a compound word in Occitan, bolhabaissa, based on bolhir "to boil" and abaissar "to lower (heat)" or perhaps "simmer". Thus the name would interestingly seem to be a warning to stop the dish from boiling!

In any case, Bouillabaisse actually did really originate among Marseille fishermen (Photo by Muesse). It can include a lot of fish, including a variety of kinds (Photo by Varaine), but also shellfish such as mussels, also crab, even non-traditional langoustine (similar to lobster). Vegetables such as leeks, onions, tomatoes, celery, and potatoes also go into the mix. However, the bouillabaisse I've had was in the US, which would affect the kinds of fish and other seafood included. A tiny seafood fork for extracting the meat and a seafood cracker (like a nutcracker) are usually included, as well as an empty dish to serve as a poubelle de table ("table discard bowl"). For the sake of neatness, one is also usually provided with a bib.

I have to include here a picture of me that I call Waiting for Bouillabaisse (Photo taken by Leslie Jones, but on MY smartphone! You're seeing it uploaded from my Flickr account, the first picture I've placed there since Penny's picture). It was taken at the Grand Central Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station in NYC on 27 February 2018, when I was there with friends Dave & Leslie, and Simi. We all enjoyed seafood, with beer (visible on the signature red-checkered table). Their clam chowders, both New England and Manhattan, are excellent, and their menu calls their bouillabaisse "an Oyster Bar classic".

Click to inspect the famous Gustavino terra-cotta tiles on the arched ceiling of the restaurant. On the left of the above picture is the arched main entrance (Photo by Leonard J. DeFrancisci), seen here from within the terminal, and this is an interior view (Photo by Jazz Guy).

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The red-checkered tablecloth above shows it's an online picture of an Oyster Bar bouillabaisse, rather similar to the one I had. The Oyster Bar opened in 1913 along with the Terminal. As an interesting point of trivia, if you watch the new opening introductions this season of Saturday Night Live, you'll see the cast members enjoying the Oyster Bar—you can't miss the Gustavino tiles.

But of the two fish soups I've already had in the past, by far my favorite is cioppino (cho.PI.no), which I first discovered in Florida. I always thought from the name that it was fully Italian, and only when researching this posting did I find it actually originated in San Francisco! However, it did originate in the Italian-American neighborhood of North Beach, which was largely settled by immigrant Italians from the port city of Genoa, so it is related to various regional fish soups and stews of Italian cuisine.

Cioppino in San Francisco—I've not yet had it there--is traditionally made from the catch of the day, which there would be typically some combination of Dungeness crab, clams, shrimp, scallops, mussels, squid (which I'd reject), with salt-water fish. All this, when combined with fresh tomatoes in a wine sauce, results in a cioppino (Photo by Kelly Sue DeConnick). It's usually served with bread (Photo by Breville USA), either local sourdough or French bread. The bread acts as a starch, like a pasta. It's used for dipping in the rather watery sauce. As with bouillabaisse, the seafood is cooked in the broth (Photo by JPS68) and served in the shell, so a seafood fork and cracker are required, plus a bib and bowl for discards.

Showing its relationship with Genoa and its region of Liguria, the name cioppino comes from ciuppin (chu.PIN), a classic soup from there. It's similar to cioppino, but tomato is of much less importance, and is made from very well-done Mediterranean seafood.

My most recent experience with cioppino was just two months ago as part of my Ontario trip. I stopped at my favorite restaurant in Kingston and had a cioppino. The only "fishy fish" in it turned out to be Arctic char, typical for Canada—I also had char on the trip to Churchill in 2011. I liked the cioppino so much that I told the waitress at the end that it should be declared a national treasure!

Seafood No-Nos    There are, however, just a few aquatic creatures that I find so vile that I refuse to ingest them. As just mentioned, one is squid, whose vileness is usually disguised by using the Italian name calamari. (When ordering a cioppino, I ask that calamari be left out.) I have eaten calamari, and a Florida restaurateur once even talked me into ordering a couple of calamari dishes for a restaurant buffet I was organizing for Beverly's 50th birthday. I have, unfortunately, eaten calamari, and am of the strong opinion that it tastes like cut-up garden hose, so for me, it loses both in palatability and taste/texture.

Just as vile is octopus, and largely for the same reasons. I've also tasted fried octopus when a friend ordered some in a Spanish restaurant and gave me some to taste. Fried, it wasn't bad on the taste/texture level, but still failed on the palatability level.

Smoked eel is a specialty of northern Germany. When I was there with friends, I did taste some, and I repeat the same comment. Smoked, it wasn't too different from other kinds of smoked fish from a deli, but it remains a vile snake-like bottom feeder, which I reject.

AN UNEXPECTED LIKE IN SEAFOOD    Again, if you're sitting at my table, dear, your reaction may be the same as someone I know who said "Fish eggs! Ew!", but I think caviar is just fine and gets flying colors as to palatability. Not that I get it often. More likely I've had it on rare occasion served as a garnish on a canapé, done that way to curb its salty taste. But my best memories of eating a dish with caviar were several times at the late, lamented Russian "Firebird" restaurant in New York's theater district. The venue was made to look like a pre-revolutionary Russian upper-class house, and the menu reflected that. The dish was served with several Russian crêpe-like pancakes known as blini (блины). It's a plural word, and is often misused in English as a singular, but the singular is actually blin (блин). The dish looks like this (Photo by Deror_avi).

Once it's served, you then prepare it yourself, similar to how you prepare your own fajitas in a Mexican restaurant. You unroll a blin, slather it with a little caviar, since a little goes a long way (red caviar here, though I was usually served black), add a little sour cream (or maybe butter) to both add flavor and cut the saltiness of the caviar, roll up the blin and either eat it like a wrap, or, to be a bit more genteel, slice it with knife and fork. This other picture (Photo by Ewan Munro) shows the dish more as I was used to getting it at the Firebird, with black caviar and sour cream. However, this presentation doesn't use any blini, but instead оладьи (o.LA.dyi), or pancakes.

◊No Organ Meats!    We come to the first of our two corollaries, the rejection of all organ meats. Using pork, my favorite, as an example, I like it in many ways, including a pulled-pork sandwich. But please! Don't serve me brains, heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, tongue, or whatever else that's disgusting you find inside the pig, also skin. You'll remember that, next door to the Le Family restaurant in Passy was a triperie which I walked right past, since tripe is a stomach lining, usually of beef. For that matter, pig's feet is a delicacy for many. I pass. I've tasted foie gras, which is goose liver. Other than being organ meat, it's fatty, and its preparation involves cruelty to animals, so I pass again. I will admit that, when we were kids, almost every Friday my mother would prepare (calf's) liver and onions, which I ate: "It's good for you! It's got iron!" But I avoided it as soon as I was old enough to know what it actually was.

There's another word for this category, perhaps a better one, but less well-known: offal. It's better, because the term includes all organ meats plus other "unusual" items, such as tails, hooves (and pig's feet), and also, for instance, the entire head of an animal. If you doubt I'm serious, a Christmas delicacy (that word again) in some European countries is a whole calf's head (Photo by Myrabella/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0). It's called tête de veau in French, testina di vitello in Italian, and Kalbskopf in German. It's usually (but not always) served boned, and with eyes, nose, and skin removed. Prized are the cheeks, and the tongue and brain are also eaten. Hungry?

There's something similar that my Swedish-American father-in-law in Minnesota used to prepare that I avoided like the plague. It's called head cheese, a name that's extremely misleading because it's not cheese at all, just presented in loaf form like a cheese might be. It's a meat jelly made with meat from the head of calf or pig, often set in aspic. The brain, eyes, and ears are usually removed, but the tongue and sometimes even the heart and feet may be included. It's flavored with onion, black pepper, allspice, bay leaf, salt, and vinegar. The name head cheese is limited to North America. The usual British and Australian term is brawn.

A version of head cheese pickled with vinegar is known as souse, since that rather archaic word means "to pickle". Hence it became a jocular term for a drunkard. Souse is apparently related to Frankish *sultja, Old Saxon sultia "salt water", and Old High German sulza "brine", and all apparently descend from Proto-Germanic *salt-, as does the word "salt", and German Salz (ZALTS) as in Salzburg. This also accounts for the fact that head cheese/brawn in Germany is Sülze (ZÜLTSA) and in Sweden and beyond in Scandinavia sylta (SÜL.ta), which explains my Swedish-American father-in-law's interest in it.

My motto has been for years that all offal is awful, but only now have I researched where the word comes from. Since the late 14C, it's meant "waste parts" based on "off" and "fall", the notion being that it covers that which "falls off" the butcher's block! It also is listed as a loan-translation from Middle Dutch afval. I'm glad to see that, because to this day, afval also remains the Dutch word for "garbage", similar to German Abfall. So why eat garbage?

UNEXPECTED LIKES IN LIVER    While I continue to remain queasy about liver, once it's processed and no longer looks like what it really is, I can successfully suppress the discomfort factor for two items, one of which is pâté. Just to define what we're talking about, a pâté is usually made from meat, but there are also fish pâtés and vegetable pâtés. A pâté is prepared in loaf form, and sliced. In a way, it's reminiscent of a meatloaf. Ingredients in all pâtés are very finely minced. A similar dish, perhaps less known outside France, is a terrine, which is, however, oven-baked.

A meat pâté probably will include at least some liver among, I'm pleased to now discover, several other chopped meats, such as pork, poultry, or beef—so it's not all liver. Other ingredients include eggs, herbs, spices, vegetables, and fat. Sometimes wine or brandy (cognac or armignac) is included. When a pâté is baked in a pastry crust, it's called just that, pâté en croûte.

There's a kind of glazed earthenware (terra cotta) cooking dish called a terrine (Photo by gerard cohen). It has a tightly fitting lid, and is usually rectangular or oval. If a pâté is cooked in a terrine, it's called just that, pâté en terrine, but on menus, that's almost always shortened to the last word, so you're eating a terrine. In other words, the "dish" you eat has the same name as the cooking dish it's prepared in.

My favorite pâté is pâté de campagne, or "country pâté" (Photo by JPS68). As I recall, I've had this with bits of truffle in it, and very memorably, with pistachios in it. Note in the picture that pâté is almost always served with cornichons, tart pickles made from small gherkins picked in vinegar and tarragon—and tarragon is my favorite herb. Black olives are also common, as shown.

This is a selection of pâtés in a charcuterie (Photo by DC). Click to inspect some pâtés en croûte in the left rear, and note in the foreground that many pâtés are served in an aspic. I was glad to find this next picture of a pâté en croûte aux pistaches (Photo by JPS68). If you click, you can see (a big fuzzily) the pistachios in the pâté, along with capers and black olives on the side. Finally we have a salmon terrine (Photo by DocteurCosmos), to show a fish terrine, which is in aspic. We've now illustrated both a terrine, and a fish dish.

The second liver-based item is Braunschweiger, something I've lately come back to after a good many years, but this needs some explanation, including some information I've just come across. We have to discuss what is meant by the terms "liverwurst" and "Braunschweiger".

The term Leberwurst in Germany describes various kinds of mostly spreadable sausage. It's usually made from pork, but, according to the recipe, can be of beef, veal, or poultry. It usually consists of regular meat, though the amount of liver can be as high as 40%, which is far less liver than I'd imagined. This is Pfälzer Leberwurst (Photo by Elvis untot) from the Pfalz area of Rheinland-Pfalz, where Mainz is located. Leberwurst can be spreadable on bread (Photo by Torsten Maue), and is often served with pickles and mustard.

Braunschweig is a city in Germany. There's an English version of the name, Brunswick, which I avoid, though it appears in the name of the Canadian province of New Brunswick, and also in the city of Brunswick, Georgia. While in English, words like New Yorker, Londoner, and Berliner refer to just people, in German the very same words refer to both people and things. This can become amusing to English ears when someone describes himself as being a Frankfurter, Hamburger, or Wiener (Wien=Vienna), but it also illustrates that these food items are also things from these places. Thus a person can be a Braunschweiger, and so can liverwurst be Braunschweiger.

But the term Braunschweiger as used in Europe can be problematic. Under German food law, Braunschweiger is classified as a variety of Mettwurst, including Braunschweiger Mettwurst. It's been produced in Braunschweig as a regional specialty since the early 19C. These are two types of Braunschweiger Mettwurst (Photo by Monstourz), grob & fein (coarse & fine). The former is similar to salami, the latter similar to liverwurst: it's smoked, soft, and spreadable, and is usually made from minced pork and spices. However, I've seen nothing to indicate that liver is an ingredient. To add to the confusion, in Austria, the term Braunschweiger is used to refer to something else still, a variant of Brühwurst, a parboiled sausage.

In North America, the term Braunschweiger is used to refer to a type of pork liver sausage which is smoked, and which contains smoked bacon. Liverwurst (Photo by Stu Spivack), also a pork liver sausage, is neither smoked nor contains bacon. However, American Braunschweiger and liverwurst are often confused. All liver sausage contains pork or calf liver, but also other meats, notably veal, plus spices. The USDA requires the product contain a minimum of 30% liver. Commercially, the amount is about 40% pork or beef liver with the rest pork, including bacon, and spices. Braunschweiger has a very soft, spreadable texture, and can be spread on toast or crackers. It can also be used in sandwiches, both closed and open-faced. Although pâté is creamier, in many ways, Braunschweiger is similar to pâté, which is why I prefer American Braunschweiger to other liverwurst.

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The first picture shows the brand of American Braunschweiger my store carries, Jones Dairy Farms, from Wisconsin, which is nicely spreadable. It has pork liver, pork, and bacon, as well as some onion and spices. It's cured, but says nothing about being smoked. Note how it uses both words, "Braunschweiger Liverwurst", not attempting to differentiate between the two. The second picture shows that Oscar Mayer takes a safe route, calling its Braunschweiger "a liver sausage", implying other kinds. I fully accept its claim of being "Authentic"—so is Jones--but not in the sense of Braunschweiger in Germany. It has to be considered an authentic North American understanding of Braunschweiger.

But the point of this extensive discussion of both pâté and Braunschweiger, which I consider similar, is that the liver content of each is low enough as not to be unpalatable, and I love both.

AN UNEXPECTED FALSE ALARM!    For over three decades I've been under the impression that Beverly and I deliberately ate something unpalatable, but the research done for this posting has proven it to have been a false alarm. We were in Newfoundland on our first longer stay there. It's known for its seafood, particularly cod. Though I remember this very well, I'll let Beverly tell it, as quoted from our travel diary of 1 July 1984, which was Canada Day. Beverly wrote: For dinner we had a fisherman's platter, which included fried cod tongues.

We had heard that cod tongues were a Newfoundland specialty, so when we ordered the fisherman's platter—I DO eat fish, you know—included among the other items was something we wouldn't have ordered by itself, cod tongues.

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They were breaded, were served with tartar sauce, as above, and looked rather innocuous, so we ate them, but continued to wonder what on earth we were getting into. Well I now find that, despite the name, they weren't tongues at all, just pieces of codfish. First of all, fish don't have tongues. For the years that codfish abounded in Newfoundland, fish heads were discarded and little attention was paid to them. When the supply dwindled due to overfishing, a second look was taken at the heads of codfish to see if some good fish was being wasted. Some was found in the jaw or throat area of the cod and was then prepared and served separately from the rest. It was unfortunately given the name "cod tongue". Was it a joke? Was it ironic? In any case, it had me fooled for over three decades, when I now find I was just eating a piece of codfish.

◊No Dead-Animal Presentation!    The second corollary besides "no offal" is this. Do not present me with the easily identifiable carcass of a dead animal! Ew! That's disgusting! Give me a slice of meat or a slice of fish that looks like food and doesn't look like it would get up and run off or swim off if it only still could.

The "poster child" event for this for me happened maybe 3-4 times in the Dominican Republic at Eden Bay Resort, where we'd go annually as condo owners. The food in the dining room was the usual, but on the weekend, there was usually a pig roast down near the beach, at the beach bar. I was usually there over a weekend and had no choice but to attend, as the dining room was otherwise closed. Workers would spend a whole day actually roasting a pig, but instead of presenting a platter of pork on the buffet table, they chose to display the dead-pig carcass in what for me was the most disgusting way possible. The pig lay on its side. Its head and dead eyes pointed to the right, along with the front feet, and its tail and hind feet to the left. The belly was then torn open, for diners to then pluck away at pig flesh while the pig's dead eye looked skyward.

Pork is my favorite meat, and I like barbecue or a pulled-pork sandwich as much as the next person. But please, serve the meat on a platter so it looks like food. Don't make people eat part of the dead animal's body as its dead eye seems to watch you. I didn't note that this bothered many people, who dug away at the pig. I, on the other hand, avoided it entirely, and ended up dining just on the vegetable items on the buffet. And this happened several times, one of which happened to fall, quite disturbingly, on my birthday.

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This picture is as close as I could find to my experience. It looks like a carcass that's ready for burial. Nix the apple in the mouth, thank goodness, but lie the pig down on its side so that diners are digging out unsliced meat from between the front and hind legs. Atrocious.

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Over time I've seen unpleasant things at an adjoining table in a restaurant. I remember being in Chinatown in NYC once, and a Chinese group at the next table was munching on roasted chicken feet, a Chinese delicacy (that word again). I also remember averting my glance from people disembowling a large, whole fish at the next table, similar to the above picture. Then came this past summer when that happened at my table. Five of us were dining at what was billed as a Turkish fish restaurant. Disinclined toward fish, I first checked that meat was also available, and ordered lamb shish kebab. Another in the group ordered Chilean sea bass, which might have been my choice if meat hadn't been available—I've had it before, and would gladly have it again. But the three other members of the party ordered two large dead whole fish, one individually, and the other for two of them. Once again, there was the large fish head to the right, with its dead eye looking skyward, the tail to the left and the diners digging flesh out of the belly in the center. Worse, the fish were quite bony, so a Halloween-like skeleton remained after the flesh was pulled away. To add to this situation, several dishes were ordered "for the table", so I dined with pieces of a dead octopus near me, and pieces of a dead squid (calamari) just beyond. I had to keep my eyes averted a I ate my shish kebab. Fortunately, the venue was at an excellent bayside location and we were on an open-air porch with sea breezes coming through, and the conversation was very enjoyable, so it was a pleasant event nevertheless.

I've never eaten fried chicken, known in the US as Southern Fried chicken. Other than that I don't like to eat meat on bones, nor animal skin, the pieces of chicken just look too much like disembodied body parts. However, I have convinced myself several times to eat chicken wings from a buffet. I found it somewhat distasteful, yet I survived, but don't do it anymore.

To summarize my personal feelings on palatability, which I'd never stated before, and only thought through for this presentation: I like meats that are on most menus, avoiding exotica. I like seafood, including fish, but rarely order a slab of "fishy fish". I avoid offal, and graphic presentations of meats.

Unpalatable Events    Problems only arise when one is a captive audience, where hosts serve meats they personally are comfortable with, being totally clueless that others might stand to their left on the continuum of palatability. I find this occurs rarely, more often internationally than domestically, and over the past year and quarter since the France trip have thought of only three instances, recently raised to four (other than those presentation ones already mentioned), where hosts have served me items I found unpalatable, things I either would just simply rather not eat, or may have even found disgusting. Those four events occurred before my culinary annus horribilis of 2017, which added quite a few more instances to the list, in two segments. We'll list the events anecdotally below, based on where they took place.

1) BODENSEE Beverly went to Bloomington High School in Minnesota, and at one point, they had an exchange student from Germany, and Beverly and her friends got to know him well. Over the years when we traveled to Germany, we got together with him and his wife maybe 3-4 times. Since we traveled frequently to Europe and Germany and were German majors, Beverly's circle of friends in Bloomington would ask us about news from him and how he was doing.

We visited him and his wife in southern Germany where they'd settled in Markdorf, a small town on the Bodensee (Lake Constance). The very first time we visited, sometime in the 1970s, they invited us to stay in their guest room. It was a lovely visit, although dinner that first evening involved the most embarrassing of all the palatability incidents, which is why I'm starting with it. All conversations in this anecdote took place in German, of course.

At dinner time, we went into the candle-lit dining room, where wine was poured and vegetables and potatoes were already in bowls on the table. Once the three of us were seated, our hostess came in with a large oval platter on which the main course was slathered in brown gravy, and set it on the table. Beverly and I asked what it was. Our hostess said proudly Hasenpfeffer!

In our travels in Germany and Europe we got to know and enjoy many new dishes, as we're very open to the cultural and culinary aspects that go along with language study. While we'd heard of Hasenpfeffer, as many English speakers had, we also knew that a Hase was a hare, like a rabbit. By announcing the name of the dish, she just as well might have said to us that there was a dead rat lying under that brown gravy. And so, Beverly and I both said, as diplomatically as possible "We don't eat rabbit!". What then followed was most interesting. Our host immediately turned to his wife and said "I TOLD you Americans don't eat rabbit!"

The upshot of it was that our hosts dined on Hasenpfeffer, vegetables, and potatoes, while Beverly and I dined on vegetables and potatoes. Our only concession to the dead creature on that oval platter was that we used a little of the dead-rabbit gravy on our potatoes. You can picture the all-round embarrassment.

I've never seen Hasenpfeffer on any restaurant menu, anywhere. I assume it's a rarely served dish. Our hostess was certainly well-intentioned, and apparently had prepared something she considered very special. But she was so clueless to the fact that rabbit, not being a common meat, is exotic, and that others might not be inclined to find it as palatable as she did. This is compounded by the fact that her husband had even warned her, but she boldly went ahead with preparing it anyway.

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All these decades later, I finally researched Hasenpfeffer (above). It's made from rabbit or hare, in pieces, marinaded in wine and vinegar. It's seasoned with pepper, salt, garlic, lemon, sage, thyme, rosemary, allspice, juniper berries, cloves, and bay leaf, then braised with onions. I assume our hostess went to a lot of trouble, and I continue to find it amazing that she didn't follow her husband's advice after he had had the experience of living abroad.

2) LIBERTÉ Beverly and I met at Middlebury at the end of June 1961, and we both discovered we were in that summer's six-week German School program with plans to study for the year in Mainz, for which a previous summer session was required. She went back to Minnesota afterwards in mid-August, and I went home to New York. In September, she came to New York to visit before we boarded the French Line's Liberté for a six-day trip from September 30 to October 6 to Le Havre (2013/7, Voyage 3). From there we went to Paris, the visit that included the recently described visits to Montmartre for singing and Les Halles for onion soup, before continuing to Mainz.

I just found Beverly's entry in our very first travel diary (of 20) where she said about the Liberté: The meals were the best part of all . . . and went on to describe them. However, she left out, surely on purpose, the one big glitch at one meal. As is common on ocean liners, passengers were assigned a table in the dining room for the entire voyage. This worked wonderfully for us, because we were placed at a table for eight with other twenty-somethings. The other six were all French, but English was the language of the table. I remember in particular one young man who was pre-med, who was more authoritative than the rest of us. When I said I had a cold, he called the waiter over and ordered chamomile tea for me. I'd never had it before, but liked it and it made me feel better. I mention it to show I'm willing to try new things, as long as they're palatable.

At one meal, in the middle of deep conversation, we were served an appetizer. It was on a lettuce leaf on a small plate. It was breaded and dome-shaped, as though some pastry or something had been flipped out upside down from a ramekin. It looked quite appetizing, though the very thin breading was now loose, as the contents had apparently shrunk during baking. Beverly and I each used a fork to tear an opening in the breading and peer in at the contents. What we saw was a small brain.

I've put this anecdote second because it simultaneously describes something disgusting and a surprise, since we had no warning. It was placed in front of us and looked really good, until the surprise hit. It was a calf's brain (Photo by Scott), called in French cervelle de veau. Needless to say, we pushed it away from us, while the French people at the table seemed to enjoy it. Have any thoughts [heh-heh] on the matter?

3) MAINZ This anecdote is a little different in that it's not about a home or restaurant, but involves a gift of food. Rita is a friend that was a fellow student of mine in the German department at Queens College. The department was small, and German majors would be in the same classes all the time. But Rita graduated two years before I did in 1961, and we lost touch.

But in the summer of 1961 is when I went to Middlebury for the year abroad. That first day of the session was when I met Beverly at dinner, we then walked together up to the front of Pearsons Hall, where German School students would congregate in the evening. As we got there, Beverly said she'd like to introduce me to her roommate, Rita. Talk about coincidences.

After being roommates that summer, Beverly and Rita decided they'd be roommates in Mainz as well for the year. The three of us ended in a villa in Mainz-Gonsenheim on the edge of town. Frau Bügler was our landlady, and Beverly and Rita shared a large room with a tiny kitchen on the ground floor. I had a small room two flights up in what turned out to be a converted attic. I remember being told just before I was shown the room that it was ein bisschen schräg (a bit sloped). It being an attic room, one wall certainly was, but it was a cozy room, which is what I like.

Though Rita was born in the US, her parents had immigrated from Stuttgart, and indeed, ended up retiring back there, which is a story you rarely hear. At any rate, Rita had relatives in Stuttgart, and at holiday times during the year, she'd take the train to visit them. I'm sure the relatives were proud of their American-born relative being a German major, and they would give her gifts to take back to Mainz. This anecdote involves her returning from there, probably after the Christmas holiday. One gift item perplexed Rita, and she pulled it out of her suitcase and showed it to Beverly and me. It was a rather large can labeled Blutwurst, which translates as blood sausage. Ew.

Not being sure what to do, Rita got a can opener and cut back the lid and raised it up. We peered into a maroon mass of mush. She took a teaspoon and pressed it sideways into the mass to get a feeling about what it was all about, but then gave up. The can was destined for the garbage.

But then Rita got a great idea. She went and asked Frau Bügler to step into the room. She showed her the can and explained (in German, of course) where she'd gotten it from, why it was opened, and why there was a teaspoon gouge on the surface. She asked Frau Bügler if she'd like to have it. Frau Bügler protested that it was far too good a gift, and far to expensive a one for her to accept, but Rita said it would otherwise go into the garbage, so Frau Bügler accepted it with thanks, taking it off Rita's hands.

The relatives surely meant well in giving Rita an expensive gift like that, but were totally clueless when it came to understanding what others would be willing to eat (see Hasenpfeffer above). The three of us sighed a breath of relief at the sensible resolution of the matter.

But this matter occurs elsewhere in Europe. I remember our being in Ireland, in a hotel in Galway. We went for the breakfast buffet and I spotted a number of familiar-looking maroon rounds on a grill the size of a large coin. Since by then I knew the terminology, I asked the attendant if that was black pudding (made of pork blood and pork fat), and it was. Saved! (Photo by Jay Cross). I also know on a French menu, black pudding is boudin noir (Photo by Roberto Verzo), so caveat emptor. Under any name, leave it for Dracula to enjoy.

4) MINNEAPOLIS This is the additional anecdote that came back to me more recently. In the 1970s, in connection with the Vietnam War, there was a large migration of Vietnamese to the US. We were visiting Beverly's relatives in Minnesota when they invited a family over to visit that a church had just sponsored, the Ho family. Along with her parents was their adult daughter, Minh. In time, she and Beverly's younger nephew David got married.

When they later moved to Miami, Minh on two occasions prepared a dinner for us she knew we liked, pho bo (Photo by Codename5281), which is painstaking to make. It's a rice noodle soup with beef and herbs, where you use your chopsticks to dip beef into the hot broth to cook it. However, this anecdote took place earlier, just after they got married, and had just settled into their first "newlywed" apartment in Minneapolis. Beverly and I were visiting from New York, as we frequently did, and newlyweds Minh and David invited us and my in-laws over to dinner.

I don't remember what we had for dinner, but suspect it was some sort of stir-fry, and was very good. At the start of the meal, a plate of stir-fry was brought out from the kitchen and presented to each of us. All looked the same, except for mine, which had something exceedingly gross sitting on the top of my stir-fry. When I looked up questioningly, David said it was a chicken gizzard. It was apparently a Vietnamese sign of respect to present it to someone, and we had come all the way from New York . . . But since I blanched at the sight of it on top of my dinner, the chicken gizzard was promptly removed. I'm sure David had pointed out to Minh that that just wasn't done, but then she probably had wanted the meal to be properly Vietnamese. I appreciated the gesture, especially once the little bugger was removed.

This is a chicken gizzard (Photo by Bjferstern). Though I'd heard the term, only now have I looked up exactly what it is and does. Since chickens and other birds have no teeth, they can't chew their food. Therefore, chickens swallow small pebbles, which then lodge in the gizzard, an adjunct to their true stomach. Food passes first into the stomach, and then passes into the gizzard, which uses the stones to grind the food, similar to "chewing" it. The food is then transferred back to the true stomach. When the pebbles over time become too smooth to grind properly, they are excreted and fresh ones ingested. Particularly interesting is that gizzards existed in all dinosaurs and still exist in all their descendants, including crocodilians (crocodiles and alligators) and all birds. But please keep all gizzards off my stir-fry.

CULINARY ANNUS HORRIBILIS OF 2017 All four above events occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, and from then on it was smooth sailing for a very long time, both domestically and internationally. But then came the two 2017 trips to Peru and to France, and old statistics went out the window. If you follow these postings, you'll recognize the culinary problems that happened in Peru, summarized here:

PERU 1: I had read in advance that there was a 1753 Colonial-era painting in Cusco cathedral showing a Last Supper where cuy, or Guinea pig, was the main course. I went to see it, feeling confident that such a thing was a quirk of the past. I was wrong, because I then came across the occasional restaurant in Cusco, which I avoided, that had Guinea pig on the menu. I've read that Peruvians eat 65 million Guinea pigs a year, but wasn't actually confronted with this reality until guide Boris and I were being driven in the Sacred Valley, from Pisaq to lunch, and, as I wrote in 2017/11, we passed a number of roadside stands wanting to sell us cuy, and the vendors were waving roasted ones on the end of long roasting sticks. It looked like road kill.

Also refer to 2017/11 for pictures of the painting, of a live guinea pig, and of the (Ew!) roasted kind. If you don't wish to do that, I've found another horrific picture of a roasted Guinea pig (Photo by Brianwray26). The scary thing about this picture is that its online caption says that it was taken at a backyard Guinea pig roast in Chicago. Chicago! What are we coming to!

PERU 2: When we got to the Wayra restaurant for lunch and the horse show, we had a delightful local Peruvian meal out on the terrace. As I said in 2017/13, there appeared on the table, among other things, a selection of meat and cheese empanadas, a large bowl with five varieties of Peruvian Andean potatoes, and a serving dish with three traditional sauces, which I tried and liked them all on the empanadas and on the wonderful variety of potatoes.

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But then we were served, in individual plates, four skewers each with several chunks of mystery meat on each skewer, as above. I turned to Boris and he volunteered that they were pieces of grilled beef heart. I grimaced, and gave him my four, which he was happy to get.

PERU 3 & PERU 4: The last two incidents in Peru occurred, surprisingly, at the same meal on a train. I'd taken the Belmond Hiram Bingham to Machu Pikchu and back with a meal each way with no incident. On the Belmond Andean Explorer to Puno on Lake Titicaca, lunch went smoothly, but when I sat down to dinner, I noticed on the printed menu that the appetizer was to be alpaca tortellini, very much an exotic meat (I later discovered the dish was a specialty of the celebrity chef), and the main course duck breast, a somewhat exotic meat. I wanted neither. I was a bit surprised when the waiter took it in stride, and instead brought me vegetable tortellini for the starter and a pasta for the main course, and I was perfectly satisfied. Only now, over a year later, did it strike me why it was so easy to switch. The waiter didn't bring me substitute meats, he brought the back-up vegetarian dishes they obviously already had on hand. Oh, well. I don't mind moving over, just for a moment, to the vegetarian table to our left, dear.

At any rate, the four incidents in Peru alone were as many as the four incidents that I'd experienced decades earlier. But the year was not over, and I still had the France trip ahead of me. What could possibly go wrong there? In Paris I was on my own and could choose what I dined on, following nothing but my own free will. I know my choice of beef tartare on two occasions would disturb those on my left, but I was happy to have them. It hadn't occurred to me though that on the Luciole I would be a captive audience, and would be served meals chosen by others. And that's where the trouble began. Or more accurately, continued, from Peru.

LUCIOLE 1: I mentioned earlier that the first night on the Luciole, after the reception and getting our rooms, we had our Sunday evening dinner that Penny attended. She sat to my right (given the palatability continuum, I now see that as an ominous location), and as I said earlier, when the main course was announced by the chef, I stated I didn't eat that meat, and it was replaced with some vegetable tart. I'll now say that that meat was duck. It would seem that some bad karma was following me from Peru since the last item I refused there turned into the first item I refused here. Two duck incidents in the same year would have seemed quite unlikely. Fortunately, the first course included scallops, which I very much like. But palatability on the Luciole couldn't possibly be an ongoing problem. Could it?

LUCIOLE 2: Monday lunch had what was billed as escargots de Bourgogne, but as I said they were served without the expected garlic-butter sauce. It's still odd that the kitchen was playing around with exotic meats. While some people might reject snails, they were fine with me, though dry. But Monday dinner started out with a rabbit dish, which was also replaced for me. Can you believe I was reliving the Hasenpfeffer incident? So far, the tally is two strikes for duck and two strikes for rabbit. The main course included cod, which was fine with me.

LUCIOLE 3: Tuesday lunch and dinner were uneventful, though dinner included lamb shank, which was fine with me, but some of those to my left on the continuum don't eat lamb, so the kitchen was still playing with exotics. But Wednesday lunch was a low point for me, as I'd never thought someone would actually plan on serving me frog's legs. As always, unpalatables for me were replaced with something else, but I had to sit at the table watching others eating those vile things.

LUCIOLE 4: While the Tuesday meals had been eventful, Wednesday made up for it, since dinner was also a problem. The first course included boudin noir, which we now know is French Blutwurst. The score is now duck 2, rabbit 2, Blutwurst 2. Was this really happening? Was history repeating itself? And all on the Luciole?

LUCIOLE 5: Thursday lunch was OK, but Thursday dinner had as a main course something unpalatable that also had a repulsive name, one I'd only really heard about in commodities trading, pork belly. Pork belly (Photo by Rainer Zenz), shown here uncooked, and with pigskin on it (ready to make a football!), is just that, a fatty meat from the belly of a pig, sometimes considered a delicacy. (!) I realize that in the US, bacon is made from pork bellies, but bacon is prepared in such a way as to make it very appetizing, usually quite crisp, with much of the fat fried away. For me, hearing the chef announce pork belly reminded me of those evenings at the beach bar seeing people dig into the belly of a dead pig. This is not the type of pork that's my favorite meat. Score: duck 2, rabbit 2, Blutwurst 2, pig belly 2.

LUCIOLE 6: Friday lunch started out with whelks. I'd heard of the word, but wasn't sure what it was. I learned it's a common name applied to various kinds of sea snail. Thinking it might be similar enough to an escargot, I allowed a single whelk to be put on my plate (Photo by Leslie Seaton), but found it much too tough and unpalatable, and refused to eat it. Some whelks I learn are edible, others not. Wikipedia notes: "When used for cooking in the United States, busycon whelks are sometimes called scungilli, an Italian-American adaptation of the Neapolitan sconciglio which means the meat of a (usually edible) sea snail." Thanks, no.

LUCIOLE 7: Friday dinner was the farewell dinner, since we'd be taking the van back to Paris in the morning after breakfast. This time we had two extra diners, as Francisco the captain, who sat to my left, and Andy the guide, who sat to my right, joined us. The appetizer was foie gras (goose liver), which as I've said I've tasted in the past and disliked, finding it too fatty, and also involves animal cruelty. But I had a surprise. When the chef announced the meal, she told everyone (as usual, embarrassing me) what I would get as a replacement, but this time, she also said Francisco would have the same replacement. Finally! Solidarity! The main course was filet of Charolais beef, which I was happy to get, but another surprise was that one American couple both opted for something else, for what reason I know not. It was not until this farewell dinner that others finally rejected what they felt to be unpalatable items on the menu, and I was no longer the only odd man out.

So after four unpalatability incidents years ago, in 2017 we had four in Peru over two days, and seven on the Luciole over five days, both of which averaged more than one incident a day. So the four incidents years ago are way outnumbered by the eleven in 2017, almost triple as many, making it my culinary annus horribilis.

No food service problem would ever have stopped me from taking the Luciole trip, which was far too much fun otherwise. However, if I had known at booking what I know now, I would have done two things differently. ►I would have insisted that I be given my cabin number on my booking form, something done on ALL the many cruises I've taken over the years. Then I would have known what I had, without that last-minute kerfuffle. I would also have insisted I be given my key directly on arrival and would have gone to find my own cabin, as I do on all cruises. I knew what the deck plan was like, and didn't need to be led anywhere. ►On the online registration form where special requests are to be noted I would have told a boldface lie and claimed to be a vegetarian (not a vegan, because then I'd have missed all those wonderful cheeses we had). As a pseudo-vegetarian, I would have been spared all seven palatability incidents. The down side of that is that I'd have also missed the Charolais beef, lamb shank, and maybe more, but it would have been worth it, given the embarrassment of always having my food dislikes publicly announced to all the other passengers, which might have added to the friction I felt with others.

Hosting a Captive Audience    For some time I've been hosting in my New York condo two events a year, in May a Maifest and in October, an Oktoberfest. I know my 12-15 guests are a captive audience, and other than being concerned about vegetarians (none are) and those needing a gluten-free diet (two do) I know I still have to be careful of guests' sensibilities as to palatable meats. I do not serve sit-down meals, as Beverly and I once did, but always have a buffet that I have catered. This allows utmost flexibility in serving.

I've often served a paella, in my own paella pan, but made by a restaurant downstairs in my building (Photo by Allan Chin, taken at Maifest 2014, and again presented via my Flickr account). But not everyone likes shellfish as much as I do, so I also have something like wraps as a backup. This last October, I had a Turkish restaurant cater the food. I love lamb, and we had lamb shish kebab, kofte kebab (meatballs) and lamb gyros (on pita). However, not everyone eats lamb, and so I also had chicken shish kebab, kofte kebab, and gyros, as well as roasted vegetable kebabs. In these cases, I don't know who took what from the buffet. That was everyone's own private business, as it should be when someone hosts a captive audience.

My One Capitulation    To close this palatability topic, and for the sake of full disclosure, I've left one last anecdote for the end. It deals with the one time I capitulated and ate something I disliked. It's actually more than that. It was the item I found most disgusting of all, and wouldn't you know, that's just the one item I ate, which still roils my stomach. My excuse is that the setting involved great ethnic pomp and circumstance, which I enjoy, and I yielded in order to be a part of it.

What we're talking about here is haggis, a traditional Scottish dish. You may know what it is, but I'll still explain what I know about it, and what I've also found out, so that we're all on the same page. It will, however, be a biased definition presented here at my table, dear, along with some sarcasm. If you want a neutral definition, look it up online. If you want a positive one, go check with that Scotsman sitting at Frank Bruni's table.

To make a haggis, you need to prepare the filling, and then something to put it in. For the filling, you kill a sheep, an animal I already classify as exotica. But you don't take the regular meat (mutton). Instead, you open it up and take the heart, liver, and lungs (at least--there may be other goodies). You finely mince all of these lovelies and mix them with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, then mix it further with stock. You now have a vile stuffing, but nothing to stuff. So do you cook it in a pot? No. You can't stuff a sheep as you would stuff a turkey, so instead you go back to the animal carcass and find another way to dishonor it, but cutting out the sheep's stomach, and then stuff it with the mixture. You then boil it (!!!) for several hours before this culinary delight is ready for serving.

A description I've seen is that the texture of a haggis (Photo by Tess Watson) is "consistent with dry, lumpy, organ meat pudding." (DON'T click, or you'll get too close!) I'll say, since it's also consistent with the theme "offal is awful." Actually, it really is considered a savory pudding (not a dessert!!), as defined earlier. It's become the Scottish national dish, largely as a result of Scots poet Robert Burns having written a poem in 1787 actually called "Address to a Haggis", where he speaks to a haggis "face-to-face" as it were, and praises it. I'm not making this up.

The haggis is traditionally served with "tatties and neeps", (again, don't click) both separately boiled and mashed (Photo by Kim Traynor), and a dram, or a glass of Scotch whiskey. You can imagine that a shot of alcoholic sustenance would be necessary with this dish.

Tatties are potatoes. I imagine the word is a reduction of "potatoes" ('tatoes), just as "taters" is. Neeps needs a bit more explanation. It started as a Latin word, napus, then appeared in Old English as næp (sounds like "taking a nap", since æ is the same vowel in "cat, bat, sat"). It's a root vegetable that originated as a cross between the cabbage and the turnip, and was introduced to English speakers from Sweden. This vegetable is known in much of England and many Commonwealth Nations including Australia and New Zealand as a "swede", short for "Swedish turnip". But the common term in North America is "rutabaga" (also "yellow turnip"). The name rutabaga (Photo by Seedambassadors) also has a Swedish background, being derived from the Swedish dialectical word rotabagge, based on rot "root" and bagge "bag", in turn probably from Old Norse baggi "pack, bundle". Thus a rutabaga is literally a "root bag", but better explained as a "root bulge"—see the picture. Anyway, these are the neeps that go with the tatties—and haggis.

We now need a word on the Scottish poet Robert Burns, widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland. He's the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, though he also wrote in standard English, to reach an audience beyond Scotland. In 2009, on a vote on Scottish TV, he was publicly chosen as the greatest Scot, narrowly beating William Wallace. He's a cultural icon in Scotland and among he Scottish dispora around the world, and in the 19C and 20C has gained an almost cult-like following. He's known for many poems beside the haggis poem above and is credited with the poem and song "Auld Lang Syne", though Burns did explain that it was a compilation gathered from folk sources, which he then polished, just as the Grimm brothers didn't write the fairy tales, but compiled them from folk sources.

There is sure to be confusion between two languages, Scottish Gaelic and Scots, which we can clarify now. Scottish Gaelic (Scots Gaelic, Gaelic) is a Celtic language native to the Gaels of Scotland. It's related to Irish and Manx (on the Isle of Man), all of which developed out of Middle Irish. Most of Scotland was once Gaelic-speaking up to the 16C, but today, perhaps 1.1% of the population can do so, and only half of that fluently. Gaelic speakers are located in Highlands, in northwestern Scotland, particularly in the Hebrides, the darkest blue on the map (Map by Javier G. Pereda). I assume this concentration in the northwest was due to the Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) taking over the more easily invadable lowlands.

On the other hand, Scots (or Lowland Scots) is a Germanic language, like English, spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Northern Ireland (Map by Zakuragi), once settled by the Scottish. Scots developed during the period of Middle English as a distinct entity. Put simply, if you heard or read Scottish Gaelic, you'd understand next to nothing, but when you hear or read Scots, it's close enough to English so that you'll understand much of it, though not all, the original version of Auld Lang Syne being the best example.

I must admit that I was blissfully unaware that Auld Lang Syne was Scottish, let alone that Robert Burns compiled and extended the poem that became the song. Actually, those three words are the only words in Scots that most English speakers know, though the meaning is usually totally befogged. It was for me too, and now that I've dug into the matter, it's a distinct pleasure to fully understand the sentiments involved when it's sung.

First the words. In the original Scots, "auld" rhymes with "bald", but it's always anglicized to "old"; "syne" sounds like "sign", though it's always altered to "zyne" with a Z instead of the S, and rhymes with "mine". After his folk compilations, Burns wrote the poem in Scots and set it to the tune of a traditional folk song. It's not only known in the English-speaking world, but in many countries, and its first verse and chorus are traditionally sung on New Year's Eve and at other sentimental occasions. If there's any doubt that the song is in (almost understandable) Scots and not in standard English, I'll quote as an example the first line of the third verse: "We twa hae run about the braes", pronounced "We twa hay rin aboot the brays", which in standard English is "We two have run about the hillsides".

But what to those words mean? Well, "auld" is easy, since it IS "old". But the rest? Well, I've figured out a reasonable way to open that up: "lang syne" means "long since". That may not seem familiar in English, but it certainly exists, as when you say "my school days are long since over"; "his days of playing tennis are long since finished"; "her ability to tap dance is long since gone". Once you realize that that phrase has meaning in standard English as well to refer to times past, it's just a (slightly awkward) step further to see that Scots has made the phrase into a thing: the "old long since" (= the "auld lang syne") means "the past". When the chorus suggest doing something "for auld lang syne" it's saying we should do it "for (the sake of) the past", or better, "for (the sake of) the good old days".

Other issues in the poem/song cloud comprehension, because it's byzantinely super-poetic, making some meanings obscure. The reference to old "acquaintance" is a reference to old friendships. A "cup of kindness" is quite simply a drink. It's time to look at the part of the song that's usually sung, the first verse and chorus, not in Scots, but in English. With the above now understood, the meaning on the right springs forth:

Anyone who has sung this has felt the emotion involved, but opening it up further shows how heartwarming a meaning it really has. However, there is a common alteration. The last lines of both the verse and chorus are short on words, so the four words that are there have to be stretched to cover the melody, which is longer. For that reason, each last line is commonly extended by adding at the beginning either "For the sake of" or "And days of", rather than using Burns's shorter lines. The first extension reaches the goal of one word per note, while the second one almost does.

It's worth mentioning a similarity here. Looking toward, and reveling in, the past is also very evident in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, which is literally "Searching for Lost Time", though the standard English title is "Remembrance of Things Past".

Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians (from Toronto) are widely credited with spreading the popularity of Auld Lang Syne across North America. He broadcast a New Year's Eve program to the US and Canada from NYC hotels, including Auld Lang Syne, on radio and television for almost a half-century, from 1927 to 1976. At times, there was even a segment broadcast from Times Square. To this day, Lombardo's Royal Canadians' recording still plays as the first song of the New Year in Times Square, right after the dropping of the ball. This of course, we must listen to. This, on YouTube, is a 1947 Lombardo recording of Auld Lang Syne (2:33). And then EVERYONE will recognize the ending of "It's a Wonderful Life" (0:20-1:41).

But how are all these topics connected to haggis? Well it's all based on the fact that Burns wrote his "Address to a Haggis" and the fact that he's so well-regarded within Scottish culture. For that reason, we come to the topic of a Burns Night (Scots: Burns Nicht) centered around a Burns Supper or Burns Dinner. A Burns Night is a de facto second Scottish national day, celebrated on Burns's birthday, 25 January. It's more widely observed in Scotland than the official national day, Saint Andrew's Day, 30 November. And it's celebrated around the world, particularly in places of Scottish influence.

I had to review the facts to remind me of what I already knew, much of which I'd forgotten. The format of a Burns Night, celebrating the life and poetry of Burns, is standardized. After a bagpiper greets the guests at the door and they're seated, it starts with the host, in Scottish regalia, welcoming the guests. Then grace is said, usually the Selkirk Grace in Scots, associated with Burns. The supper then starts with the soup course.

At this point, things become even more unique and perhaps startling to the unknowing eye. Everyone stands for the piping in of the haggis (Photo by Glenlarson), here the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Pipes and Drums band doing the honors. Along with one or more bagpipers, the chef carries in the haggis on a platter and sets it down at the host's table up front. Then the host recites the entire Address to a Haggis (Photo by Kaihsu at English Wikipedia), as here at an Oxford church, literally speaking to the haggis and praising it. The haggis is then cut open end to end, more often than not with a fancy dagger—here's another view--and is then served around the room (Last three photos by Kim Traynor). After a toast with Scotch whisky, all are seated for dinner, which might end with dessert, cheese, and coffee. More speeches and toasts are given. Then everyone stands to sing Auld Lang Syne.

If you've still incredulous about this, then watch this video of a Burns Night at a London club. It covers the piping in of the haggis and the Address (0:39-4:52). If you've never seen anyone before talking to his dinner, you're in for a new experience. This is SO Scottish, and the Scottish take it VERY seriously.

Now you may wonder what our connection was to a Burns Night. Beverly and I did not seek it out, it landed in our laps. I refer back to our 2004 trip on Cunard's Caronia counterclockwise around South America, the longest ship voyage we ever took (2013/7, 28th voyage). For those of us boarding in Florida at Fort Lauderdale, it lasted seven weeks. However, I'm not sure I ever pointed out that the trip actually started for the Brits and large group of Germans in Southampton, so they crossed the Atlantic both ways before and after we boarded, making their trip closer to ten weeks. I point that out now to emphasize that, not only does Cunard have a British tradition, there were actually a large number of Brits on board.

We started by crossing the Caribbean to the Panama Canal before circumnavigating South America. For those on board it was a winter trip, because we'd then have summer weather when we were in the southern hemisphere. We left in January, and the day before we reached the Canal was 25 January and a Burns Night was announced. Who knew? Nothing had been said in advance, which is why we had no idea what was involved, other than a haggis. I would have read up earlier about it if I'd only known, so we watched things happening that we didn't understand for a long time.

I do not remember if we had our normal dinner first, or if the Burns Night replaced it. I suspect it was a later event, but I just don't know. We were seated at separate tables around the room, and the ceremonial table was some distance away, making it even more difficult to see what was going on. Perhaps they got some ship's officers or passengers to be the host and piper, I don't know, but the haggis was duly piped in. The host was doing something at the table for a while, we knew not what, but I suppose now that he was addressing the haggis. It was then cut and small portions served. I'd totally forgotten that we'd enjoyed standing and singing Auld Lang Syne at the end, but that came rushing back to me as I recently reviewed the protocol.

Now as the details come back to me, I clearly remember having some haggis before us. What to do with the vile stuff? This was a unique occasion, and we yielded and ate the little bit of haggis before us. It still riles me, but it was all the ethnic pomp and circumstance that did it.

I've reflected lately about this. We visited Pamplona for 24 hours and attended the running of the bulls (2007/8). It was a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience. Like most people, we watched from the sidelines and didn't participate in the super-macho event. The Burns Night was also a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Why couldn't we just have watched from the sidelines and not eaten the haggis? Well, we did, and it's done and over. It's something else to cross off the bucket list, though it had never been on it in the first place.

Luciole Meals    That's the end of the palatability discussion, but you'll note that I never broached the subject of food service on the Luciole until now, while discussing palatability. But with that topic now on the table (culinary humor) I have to say there was something else I found disappointing. All the food was tasty and wholesome, and I always cleared my plate, so the food was part of the pleasure of the cruise on the Luciole. But let me explain my disappointment.

Well-Known French Dishes    The first thing was my own fault. I had jumped to the conclusion that, with five days in Burgundy, I'd be experiencing repeated examples of fine French dishes. In my mind, it was almost a given that, being drawn to Burgundy for a cruise, at one point we'd SURELY be treated to a fine Boeuf bourguignon (beef burgundy), which is beef stewed in red wine (Photo by Slayschips). And how about dishes from elsewhere in France, such as a nice Coq au vin (Photo by stevendepolo), chicken braised in red wine, lardons, and mushrooms? Or a ratatouille (Photo by Marcus Guimarães), the Provençal stewed vegetable dish? Of the dishes discussed and illustrated earlier, there's always a nice Coquille Saint-Jacques, or a bouillabaisse. In the past, I've had some or all of these when traveling around France, and was surprised that none of this sort of thing appeared on the Luciole. But again, that was my fault, having let my imagination and fanciful expectations run away with me.

Fun Dining    I must start with the three items I found extraordinary, starting with breads. Breakfasts were happily self-service (all meals should have been). Luke the deckhand would trot off into town each morning to the local boulangerie, and come back with fresh croissants, baguettes, and pastries, so the breakfast was as first-rate as anything I'd had in Passy the previous week. There was jam, juice, coffee, cereals, and all the extras.

But the key word here is cheese!. I have never in a lifetime of travel been offered such an incredibly good selection of cheese as on the Luciole, all French. Every dinner had a cheese course, as did the M-W-F lunches. There were often more than one cheese offered per cheese course. I'm still so taken by the selection that I want to list every one we had: Comté, Valençay, Morbier, Petit Billy, Bleu d'Auvergne, Reblochon, Chaource, Livarot, Saint Maure, Saint Agur, Brillat Savarin, Tomme de Savoie (my favorite), Cantal, Bresse Bleu, Époisses, Brie de Meaux, Roquefort. That's 17 cheeses, all outstanding, most of which I'd never heard of before and wouldn't know enough to order in a cheese shop.

There was also an amazing variety of quality French wines. I'll just list some, and you'll recognize some local names among them: Chablis Villages, Irancy, Saint Bris, Côtes d'Auxerre Blanc, Pouilly Fumé, Macon Villages, Pommard. However, an edge was taken off my full enjoyment of these wines, since I usually didn't know what I was drinking. I'm sure Jade announced the wine on the table at the end of her ramble, but it wasn't easy to follow just what wine was there. Many just asked to pass the red or the white. Only now that I'm carefully reviewing the names do I find one was a Sancerre, which I love, but don't remember that I knew I was having it. Only now do I realize that on Thursday, after we visited Vézelay, we had with dinner Côtes de Vézelay and Henry de Vézelay, and I didn't appreciate the connection at the time. Finally, with the Friday farewell dinner, we had Chablis Premier Cru Les Vaillons, Domaine Jean-Marc Brocard. Brocard was the Chablis domaine we'd visited for the wine tasting, and we were actually drinking a Chablis Premier Cru! Yet in the confusion, I didn't realize any of this until now. Knowing background adds to the enjoyment, and I wasn't aware of the background of what we had when we "passed the red (or white), please". This is an argument for mini-menus on the table each meal.

Styles of French Cuisine    The most famous French cooking style is surely haute cuisine ("high cookery"), with complex cooking methods that were most popular in the 19C. As the 20C arrived, Auguste Escoffier simplified and refined haute cuisine to become cuisine classique ("classic cookery"). What he did was to modernize haute cuisine, by formalizing the preparation of sauces and specific dishes, sauces being a defining characteristic of cuisine classique, which includes hundreds of sauces.

Cuisine classique has thrived throughout the 20C and into the 21C, only being challenged by an upstart for a while shortly after the mid-20C, but then regaining much of its influence. That upstart went under the name nouvelle cuisine ("new cookery").

Perhaps you can already sense that my discussion of nouvelle cuisine will be just as biased as with the discussion of haggis. If you're not familiar with its details, other sources can be more positive. In a word, from the 1960s on, I always associated nouvelle cuisine with undercooked vegetables. If "cooked" carrots were nevertheless still crunchy, that ruined them for me. If I want crunchy carrots, I'll take some raw ones out of a platter of crudités, thank you, and dip them in the dipping sauce (Photo by Colin Henein).

Nouvelle cuisine was a well-intentioned, minimalist movement to cut back even further on cuisine classique. To be fair, it's had some positive influence on modern restaurant fare, which I'll allude to shortly. Once the movement began in the 1960s, it was popularized--and given its name--by the food and restaurant critic Henri Gault and his colleague Christian Millau. In 1965, they wrote a restaurant guide, in competition to Michelin, called the Gault et Millau (GO é mi.YO), usually shortened to Gault-Millau, which praised the development and recommended restaurants who'd gotten on board. Simply put, nouvelle cuisine was an approach characterized by lighter, more delicate dishes, and an increased emphasis on presentation. In my opinion, this means that chefs now concerned themselves too much with looks to the detriment of taste. I don't need or want "pretty food"—please put all your efforts into taste!

I've found a longish list of guidelines for nouvelle cuisine. I'll pick out only four items I consider the most significant, and comment on them.

1) The freshest possible ingredients were used. (Editorial comment: this is the greatest contribution of nouvelle cuisine, and has spurred a general movement toward fresh ingredients in general.)
2) Preparation was even further simplified, and cooking times were reduced in an attempt "to preserve natural flavors". (Editorial comment: This is the gravest error of nouvelle cuisine, since it tended to leave vegetables only partially cooked and "crunchy"—see above.)
3) Heavy sauces such as hollandaise and béarnaise were replaced with simple flavorings using herbs, butter, lemon juice, or vinegar. (Editorial comment: that's fine. I like lemon juice on my shrimp anyway, and the others have good uses, too. But what's wrong with a nice béarnaise sauce with my steak or a nice hollandaise sauce on my asparagus?)
4) Newly invented combinations and pairings were developed. (Editorial comment: That's reasonable, though using new, quirky combinations, especially piled up in a little hill in the middle of my plate "gets old" very, very quickly, especially on a daily basis.)

Although it is debatable, it's widely considered that much of nouvelle cuisine has been abandoned, quirky foods and combinations having become passé. It did serve a purpose, as its preference for fresh flavors, lightly presented, has largely been assimilated into mainstream restaurant cooking. But even by the mid 1980s, just two decades into the nouvelle cuisine fad, its use started to decline in favor of a return to cuisine classique, though with the addition of fresher produce and lighter presentations. (Editorial comment: good riddance, except for those couple of contributions.)

I would say the thing about nouvelle cuisine that is most laughable is its penchant for quirky presentation, with the chef spending a lot of time on looks which has to come to the detriment of taste. This is a typical cutesy-poo presentation by a Michelin three-star chef, believe it or not (Photo by Jacques Lameloise). Doesn't this remind you of a child playing with his food? Picture a kid making gravy slide down a mashed potato mountain to imitate a landslide. And some of this continues. I saw a major chef on TV recently telling about how he was "deconstructing cole slaw". (??) I'll take my cole slaw undeconstructed, thank you.

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Osq4fjCjnBs/WaNAt1vW2oI/AAAAAAAADk4/Eu7Oi5NacQoG_ah8cA8_JGLdMqZtRz_ZgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_9400.jpg

So why do I bring all this up now? The disappointment I referred to was that the food presentation on the Luciole over five lunches and five dinners was in this very style I don't care for. Above is Jade, who was the chef when I was on board, with a lineup of her "artistic food confections". Pretty, aren't they? Also, they tasted pretty good, and as I said, I always cleared my plate. But whenever I saw this food that looked like a child had been playing with it, I felt that someone was pulling my leg. It this was diametrically opposed to what I'd expected and hoped for. Penny Liley herself had trained as a chef, cooking at Eton College and for the Grand Prix around Europe in 1977. That would have been during the heyday of nouvelle cuisine, so I suppose she's steeped in that tradition. She's said "Our chef is encouraged to be innovative and imaginative, marrying French cuisine with a contemporary twist." And that's just not my cup of tea. If I had checked out a restaurant in Passy that seemed to serve in this style, I'd have kept on walking.

When I commented about this at an early meal, I didn't hear any other objections, so I suppose I'm the odd man out. N. and M. both said this is precisely the style they were looking for, and that it was explained on the Luciole website. I checked, and sure enough it is. I'd missed that fact—I suppose my due diligence wasn't diligent enough. Over dozens of cruises, I've never before had to check a ship's food out in advance to see if it was to my liking, either as to style or to exotica.

I cannot become enthusiastic, no matter how tasty the food is, about a style that piles a carrot on top of a mushroom on top of a piece of meat set in a small circle of risotto. Also, you cannot name such a meal. I say if you can't name a meal you've just eaten, it's too weird a concoction. I would say I could only name the lamb shank dinner, perhaps the cod, but all the other pile-up meals can't be named. International dishes that are either named or easily describable would include: chicken Kiev, steak & onions, paella, bangers & mash, sukiyaki, pork chop & beans, saltimbocca, roast beef & Yorkshire pudding, burrito, arroz con pollo, Sauerbraten, jambalaya, fish & chips, pad Thai, dim sum, gnocchi, meatloaf, gumbo, lobster Newberg, and on and on. How does that compare with a pile-up meal, tasty as it may be? Compare the two responses below:

What did you have for dinner last night?
a) We had veal piccata/Wiener Schnitzel/rack of lamb. It was delicious.
b) We had string beans on top of apple slices on top of a bit of salmon on top of a risotto, with cherry tomatoes around the edge. It was very pretty. Oh, it tasted good, too.

I have three short anecdotes dealing with this subject that I've been mulling over during the past year-and-a-quarter.

1) GAZPACHO: Many people are familiar with the chilled Spanish soup gazpacho, with a tomato base plus diced raw vegetables, as it's now spread well beyond Andalusia. Beverly and I first got to know it years ago in Spain, where the reason for its being chilled is obvious. After a hot day walking about, you retire to a restaurant's secluded, cool patio, and a chilled soup is ideal. Having gazpacho in an air-conditioned restaurant is OK, but then you lose the culture-associated need of its existence.

In Andalusia, in addition to the tomatoes (with olive oil, vinegar, salt), gazpacho usually includes cucumber, bell pepper, onion, garlic, and stale bread. One trouble nowadays is the blender. I've come across too many cases where the veggies were put in with the tomatoes in a blender, resulting in an overly creamy, overblended mix. The raw diced veggies (just like crudités!) should to be added directly to the tomato mixture to form an ideal gazpacho (Photo by tomatoes and friends). If gazpacho doesn't have texture, it's nowhere as good. The most charming way Beverly and I ever had gazpacho was in an Andalusian patio, where the soup was in the center of a bowl with an overly wide rim. Piles of different diced raw veggies were lined up around the brim, which one could add to taste. Of course, best is to just scoop them all into the soup and enjoy the wonderful texture, a soup you have to chew!

The Monday dinner on the Luciole was announced as centering around cod, but in addition there was to be a "cucumber" gazpacho. I couldn't imagine how you'd serve a soup along with a main course. What happened was that the "gazpacho" was served in a shot glass that sat on the plate. Two sips, and the small "glass of soup" was gone. Why prepare an entire dish to actually serve so little of it? It was the same above with the Salade Niçoise. I just don't understand this style of service. It takes minimalism much too far.

2) RHUBARB: Growing up, I'd heard of rhubarb, but never had had any. It was only once we found out that Beverly's mother in Minnesota had rhubarb growing in her yard that I became well acquainted with it. It can be sweetened (considerably—it's tart), and served as a dessert, notably rhubarb pie, or strawberry-rhubarb pie, or it can be served along with a main course as stewed rhubarb. However, it's very liquid, like stewed tomatoes, and has to be served in a small dish on the side.

One day I was on deck and came across Jade the chef. We were discussing vegetables, and I said I liked rhubarb. She declared that we'd be having rhubarb, and sure enough, Thursday evening we had "rhubarb and custard tartlets". Stress the "-lets" because they were smaller than small. You could pick one up between thumb and forefinger and it was gone in two bites, if not one. She was technically right that we were having rhubarb, but does it make sense to go to such bother to have such a tiny portion? (See above.)

3) ASPARAGUS: Another thing I discussed with Jade on deck was asparagus, a wonderful vegetable. In Germany, once asparagus season comes, people flock to the countryside to restaurants serving it fresh from the fields. It was in Germany that I learned about white asparagus, which is cultivated by building up mounds of earth around the plant so that it gets no sun and never turns green, but remains a virginal white. Since it's much more labor-intensive, it's more expensive.

Jade told me we'd be having asparagus, too, and Thursday dinner's main course was indeed announced as "Pork Belly with wholegrain mustard mash, sliced apple, apple purée, asparagus, and apple cider jus". (You may know that "mash" is Britspeak for mashed potatoes.) You can well imagine that most or all of those many ingredients were in a "Magic Mountain" in the center of the plate. But I think I must have laughed out loud at the extent to which we had "asparagus for dinner". There were exactly two—I repeat, two—very slender stalks of asparagus visible, but barely, since they were sticking out of the mountain front and back. I laughed, because it looked like a skier had had a bad encounter with a snowdrift. Again, it was minimal asparagus, but typical of the trend.

That experience made me realize that I hadn't prepared asparagus at home in a long time, and so in the time since the trip, I've done so several times. I like to fry the asparagus in butter, along with garlic and onions, and add my favorite spices, tarragon, thyme, and sage. And every time I do, I think of the unfortunate skier.

An Embarrassment to Women    I was going to leave out this last topic, but then a development made me rethink that. On one of the first dinners, guide Andy happened to be helping out with serving. We were seated as usual at the long table for twelve, and he came out and put dishes down at certain places, then came out again and filled in the blanks. It suddenly struck me he was going around the table twice in order to serve women before serving men. I was always quite outspoken on the Luciole and I mentioned it out loud. Andy's comment was that "Penny wants it this way", although on the next course, I was served on his first round about the table. I was startled by that, and didn't notice if the other gentlemen were also upgraded. It was particularly vexing, because gentlemen were in the minority at the table, 7-5, and were being discriminated against.

Should a man, arriving at a door first, hold it open for a woman with him? Of course! But in the 21C, if the woman, no longer being considered a delicate flower, gets to the door first, shouldn't she hold it open for the man? Simple politeness dictates that a person, to be gender-neutral, should hold the door for another person.

How about at the dinner table? Should women be served before men? Let me phrase it more provocatively. Should the genitals hidden in one's lap underneath the dinner napkin dictate who gets served first? I got a bit of positive reader feedback from the last posting when I said, in regard to being forced to be led to one's cabin instead of finding one's own way, that it seems that "protocol causes efficiency to fall victim to undue graciousness." Isn't this another example of antique protocol?

I'm only bringing this up because the two retired professional ladies, N. and M. said they felt embarrassed being singled out by being served before others. When I reflect on it, I realize that the two professionals in particular had apparently worked their way up rather high on the corporate ladder in NYC before retiring. I can just imagine all the effort they had to make over the years to show they were equals of men sitting around the boardroom table. It made me think that not only executives, but any woman would feel embarrassed by being singled out for no reason in this manner.

To my mind, the only variation as to whether someone gets served before the others should be when there's an honored guest present, or perhaps an elderly grandparent. But that's just common-sense, heartfelt respect, not some must-do protocol.

To end this topic on a lighter note, I defer to Dame Maggie Smith in the role of Lady Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, sitting at the dinner table in Downton Abbey below (Again, disregard the extraneous matter Google Images now includes on the right side.):

https://goo.gl/images/WjdEZj

Imagine this caption with the above picture:

The footman is quite correctly coming in this direction to serve me first.

https://goo.gl/images/15chKY

The caption on this follow-up picture would then be:

What! You served his Lordship before me?!!!

In an attempt to be constructive, assuming that on-shore dining does NOT take over, to make food service (to my mind) the equivalent of everything else that's so good on the Luciole, I think lunches and dinners should be done as cuisine classique and, like breakfast, in buffet style, which is how I always host my events (see above). For breakfast, the three tables seating four each are used freestanding around the lounge. Breads, jams, and coffee are on the table, juices and cereals on the corner buffet. I would suggest for lunch and dinner the corner buffet be extended for more room, and the three tables NOT be joined in the center, banquet-style. With twelve at a table, conversations are broken down anyway to the few sitting near you. With a buffet you can still serve your frog's legs and black pudding, but put the alternate choices next to them so that no one knows who takes what. Also, there's no protocol as to who gets served first.

Epilog    This concludes the discussions of the France trip of September 2017. A lot happened, and it took a long time to write up, with additional related excursions to Bucharest and New York. In 2018, I went on a cruise on the Ohio River in the early summer, and on a pair of back-to-back cruises in Ontario in the late summer. This puts me in a position to make comparisons.

The Ohio River cruise was mediocre, as was the food quality. Both were much better on the Luciole. However, there were no exotic meats, and the service was standard restaurant-style. The server took orders around the table, then served the same way. No "ladies first". We'll get to this trip in the next posting.

The pair of Ontario cruises were excellent. The route was almost as good as the Luciole's, and the food service was outstanding, it was Canadian country-style food, no exotics, regular restaurant style, and very enjoyable, with as good food quality as the Luciole's, maybe a little better. We were eight to a table, four on each side, and the server took orders, then served, up one side, and down the other. Gentlemen were not discriminated against and ladies were not embarrassed by being served first.