>>11364Even more despised than the Brunch People are the vegetarians. Serious cooks regard these members of the dining public—and
their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans—as enemies of everything that’s good and decent in the human spirit. To live
life without veal or chicken stock, fish cheeks, sausages, cheese, or organ meats is treasonous.
Like most other chefs I know, I’m amused when I hear people object to pork on nonreligious grounds. “Swine are filthy animals,”
they say. These people have obviously never visited a poultry farm. Chicken—America’s favorite food—goes bad quickly;
handled carelessly, it infects other foods with salmonella; and it bores the hell out of chefs. It occupies its ubiquitous place on
menus as an option for customers who can’t decide what they want to eat. Most chefs believe that supermarket chickens in this
country are slimy and tasteless compared with European varieties. Pork, on the other hand, is cool. Farmers stopped feeding
garbage to pigs decades ago, and even if you eat pork rare you’re more likely to win the Lotto than to contract trichinosis. Pork
tastes different, depending on what you do with it, but chicken always tastes like chicken.
Another much maligned food these days is butter. In the world of chefs, however, butter is in everything. Even non-French
restaurants—the Northern Italian; the new American, th