The purpose of art is to delight us; certain men and women (no smarter than you or I) whose art can delight us have been given dispensation from going out and fetching water and carrying wood. It's no more elaborate than that. — David Mamet

Jun 25 4 2025

Cooking with AI

I once read a note by Alexander Lobrano, who can write, about the fact that the corect bistro accompaniment for duck confit, which was to be tonight’s dinner, was pommes salardaises, which is to say fried potato disk with garlic. I’ve tried this a few time, and have never been impressed. Returning home tonight, I thought I’d google for a better recipe.

On impulse, I asked claude.ai, and it gave me the recipe I expected, but with thicker potato slices. I asked, “Are you sure about the thickness of the potato slices?” It was confident. And it turned out well.

This is a nice example of using AI in a way where you’ll catch fabrication right away, and even if you miss, the damage is limited.

Jun 25 2 2025

Sweetbitter

A good short series, adapted from Stephanie Dancer’s marvelous novel — the best novel about front-of-the-house restaurant life I know.

Jun 25 1 2025

Forgery

One who studies the career of forgery in the West may well wonder if the human mind nourishes a deep-seated desire to be taken in as grandly and as thoroughly as possible. Muntus fuld tezibi — ‘the world wants to be fooled’ — is after all the motto on the title page of one of the greatest of all exposés of scholars’ propensity to be fooled, J. B. Menke’s orations On the Charlatanry of the Learned” – Anthony Grafton, Forgery and Critics, Princeton University Press

I wondered what language Muntus fuld tezibi might be. It sounds like something John Dee might have mentioned in a spell book! But the answer is simple enough: the actual frontispiece says “Mundus vult decipi”, which is perfectly good Latin. I had my doubts at first, but Claude explains plausibly that decipi is the passive infinitive of “decipio, decipere, decepi, deceptus”. I don’t think Latin III got that far.

But fuld tezibi?

In the ACM Digital Library.

May 25 7 2025

Ratatouille

Ruhlman mentioned in his newsletter that Ratatouille remains the most accurate picture of a fine-dining kitchen. Having a 15-hour flight, I watched it again. It’s great.

The subtext of the film is a family debate among the rats. The kids are interested in people; in particular, one of the boys is fascinated by cooking. The father warns them that people simple cannot be trusted: that unfortunate and unfair, but that is also the way the world is.

When I saw this in 2007, I thought this was just generational conflict. But it’s not: the rats are meant to be read as Jews, the hero, young Remy, is a Jew Out Of Water, and his father’s warning is simply that you will never belong. When Father relents, it is only because Remy has no choice; if he is to cook, he must live among the gentiles and, while that is terribly dangerous, Father understands in the end that Remy has no choice.

Now that overt anti-semitism is once more part of mainstream-ish politics, it’s obvious.