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India has cinemas? You could view the change as broadening of coverage, but in reality the change has mostly been that authors (and chefs) are encouraged to sell their supposed heritage rather than become knowledgeable about what lies beyond. Thus the author recommends Taiwanese bubble tea from an international chain to Paris visitors. It's nice to learn about Taiwanese food but it's also nice if a publication would send someone familiar with French food to cover a restaurant where even the water stains on glasses were imported from France.

chou farci person? sure, it may turn out that given her biography (which, i don't know) she should know the names of more french dishes than she seems to know. but sneak wasn't responding to her biography (which he doesn't know either) but to the very idea of a food writer--even if the editor-in-chief of eater--having to google the term "chou farci" and that's what i was responding to. my point is that the horizon of culinary coverage in the u.s has expanded dramatically in the last 10 years and much as we might want every food writer to know every important term in every important cuisine, this is no more possible now than to expect a literary scholar to know every important writer/book in every major literary tradition--to take an analogy from my line of work. once upon a time, pretty much every professor of literature could have told you what an anapest is or rattled off an example of trochaic pentameter. now most would have to google. this is because the canon has exploded and the larger world of literary study has become impossible for anyone to keep track of.

Unfortunately she studied Drama and not Farce.

it's not a question of high and low. (the analogue of rene clair in my comparison would be a long list of serious indian film directors.) it's a question of a canon. i do agree with you that the state of food writing is generally quite dire these days. but the proof of that is not the fact that eater's editor-in-chief makes a flip comment about googling the name of a french dish in a listicle.

given that the vast majority of american film critics* show no evidence of knowing the names of more than 1 or 2 indian film-makers of the 20th century, i'm not particularly exercised if they don't know the names of every significant french film-maker either. *the french, it must be said, are far better on this score.

WAIT A MINUTE. That stuff was responding TOTALLY and ONLY to @backyardchef's raising Richad Edson as a corrective to René Clair. It had NOTHING to do with anything you said. REALLY.

showing off the plating skills I didn't learn in cooking school: Chicken pot-roasted and "carved" (well, pulled apart). Pan jus. Twice-baked potato with twice as much sour cream as I should've put in. Peas and carrots. Rib pork chop, sautéed and sliced off the bone. Pan gravy from drippings, stock, vermouth, mustard, butter. Rancho Gordo's alubia blanca beans, stovetop cooked first, then baked with Parmigiano, olive oil, herbs, bread crumbs. Thrice-baked potato. Cole slaw on the side.

so, once upon a time it would have been truly shocking if an american food writer working for a major publication did not have an intimate knowledge of the terminology of french cuisine. now it's not really the end of the world and to behave like it is is perhaps to reveal an unexpected nostalgia. and speaking of unexpected things, sneak, your talk of "high and low" when i gave the analogy of american critics not knowing the names of more than 1-2 indian film-makers seems revealing as well. it would seem to suggest that you automatically think of indian cinema as "low" and french as "high" when you say that i am privileging one over the other (which i'm not anyway: i'm saying it's hard to keep track these days because people have to know a lot more).

But let me do something REALLY weird and write something on-topic. A year or two ago -- whenever it was -- when The Times brought back stars for restaurant reviews and Pete Wells changed the criteria so as to let different kinds of restaurants get evaluated on an equal footing, I was all in favor of the change. Opposed were people here who said, "no, it's got to be a 'real restaurant' to deserve a starred review." I think fuck that kind of category-mongering. But it's JUST AS BAD to be like Sietsema, all "fuck fine dining" and "I can write about it without knowing dick". It's bad BOTH ways. And, I think, invalid as criticism.

You know, I recently saw a promotional thing for some gig that Richard Edson was playing at, and he was identified as "drummer for Sonic Youth". And I thought, that's not the half of it.

who is rene clair? the stuffed cabbage of french cinema?

If only you had called it stuffed cabbage, he might have remembered.