On 06/09/03 10:24, in article ,
"Mxsmanic" wrote:

Jenn writes:

hard to beat US beef -- the French have made a culture out of disguising
the scrawny stuff they serve with delicious sauces

Some varieties of French beef are said to be among the best in the world
(e.g., Charolais, if I remember correctly). The French aren't very good
at actually preparing beef, though--most of the time, it tastes like
tire rubber after they've dealt with it. In all the years I've been in
France, I've only had one experience of beef that _didn't_ feel and
taste like vulcanized rubber. I avoid French beef today, unless it's
ground up or otherwise made easy to chew.


Charolais is good, only it's seldom properly marbled and most of the
charolais I've had didn't have much flavor. The great beefs of France are
the limousin, the salers (whose milk is used to make Cantal cheese) in
Auvergne (the central mountains) and the hard-to-find Bazas beef and blonde
d'Aquitaine : wonderful ribs and steak...

Bull's ribs from the Languedoc are excellent too. They're seldom to be found
outside of the Béziers-Nîmes regions (because of the bullfighting tradition
there).

It's true, though, that we (French) are not great at cooking beef. For one
thing, we never mastered the art of low-temperature roasting that gives such
wonderful results for English beef and American prime rib. Some restaurants
are pretty good at this though (because they can afford large cuts of meat
to be cooked in one piece), but if we mastered this technique on a national
scale we'd pay a better tribute to our delicious bovine meat.

As for Spanish versus French, I couldn't say, the gastronomic traditions of
both countries are so different. I wouldn't trust a restaurant critic,
anyway, to dictate the ultimate truth in food matters; the subject is so
much larger and complex than a journalist could grasp. And "chefs" don't
represent "food", not even "cuisine".

The most creative chef alive today, Ferran Adria (El Bulli), lives in Spain.
But he happens to be Spanish and his path is marked by his individuality,
not by his origins. He could be Swiss, French or Italian, he'd be just as
creative. He's more an artist than a chef. What he does goes far beyond
cuisine. And just because quite a few chefs in Europe try (more or less
successfully) to imitate him doesn't mean that Spain is the leader in
European cuisine today. It only means that Adria is the genius.

On the other hand it is undeniable that French "haute" cuisine suffers from
an excess of conservatism, and that isn't the case of Spain, which allows
the latter to show more vitality and creativity. But "chef" cuisine is a
fairly recent phenomenon in Spain, so it's easier to do without the weight
of tradition. And creativity and vitality are not absent from France either.
They may only be not so visible.