Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward wrote:
>
> Reading about the upheaval caused in the restaurant trade by the ban on
> trans fats in NYC, I was wondering whether say a fine restaurant in
> Paris also uses Crisco-style shortening for their tarte tatin. And if

I presume they use lard.

> they don't, how come American restaurants are struggling so much to
> reproduce the taste and texture of something that was inferior in the
> first place to the original (ie. they're working hard to make the food
> taste like it was cooked with trans fats)? I'm thinking of french
> fries, cookies, pastries of any kind... the original recipe couldn't
> have used hydrogenated oils because that didn't exist at the time...

Lard has a bad reputation in the U.S.

I heard that U.S. restaurants are switching
to "heat-resistant" canola oil. I don't know
what that it, but I imagine it is the opposite
of a winterized oil. It could be a by-product.