Sam's prediction of more gloomy weather to come and old Baudier sliding into his corner in a grumpy mood were the only clouds over yesterday's lunch at the Canteen, an unexpectedly festive affair.
The place had been so empty on Sunday — and Sam was off duty — that I'd anticipated another ordinary meal and taken a pile of overdue reading along. Instead, I found everybody there, virtually the full complement of "regulars" for the first time this year.
It was as if, by telepathy, we'd decided to congregate and celebrate the end of another dismal Parisian winter.
I joined the three Netwizards, who were spurning the house wine and sent François home to fetch a second bottle of his own, while even the Literary Lion perked up considerably when a lass who'd been finishing off her meal alone slipped across the room to join him for a prolonged chat over coffee.
Could she be the Mystery Woman I'd heard about from Baudier himself during his moments of deliberate indiscretion? If so, she was even younger than rumour had it. Nobody dared ask...
The Kid deigned to tear herself away from her laptop and friends and join us as soon as I 'phoned her to tell her about the latest experiment Sam had conjured up without asking what I wanted for dessert.
"Mmm, looks delicious!" I said. "Home made?"
"Of course. Not by me, though; by Das."
There's real seasonal promise in the air when the Canteen's Sri Lankan chef starts experimenting in his own right again.
His surprise mixed chocolate cake, chocolate chip ice cream, bananas, lashings of cream and a rich sauce into a beautifully presented gâteau which Sam said will be "good next time".
When Marianne arrived, the perfectionist was well into a complicated explanation of what Das should have done with the bananas before the Kid kindly diverted him to the other side of the restaurant to play dominoes.
By that time, Sam had locked the door, Das and his wife were keen to go wherever they go for their afternoon siesta, and I wanted more pudding, irrespective of Sam's distinction between excellence and perfection.
Two handsome young couples showed up in rapid succession and peered longingly through the window, but spent so much time perusing the menu boards on the pavement that their hesitation was their undoing.
It's at such moments that Sam normally says, "Sorry, but you can come back at six o'clock," but he was engrossed in thrashing the Kid at their game and it became my job to make the coffees and to turn the tourists away.
"That's just brilliant," commented Jacques the Neighbour. "Stray Americans stumble across a pizzeria run by Berbers in a quiet corner of the French capital and get told 'Sorry, it's closed now!' by a Brit."
And somebody suggested that we should have let the ladies in and told their fellers to pursue their search elsewhere...
Jean-Paul was regaling me with a novel explanation of why English cooking has acquired such a bad reputation. I'd always attributed this to overboiled veggies, overcooked meat, the legacy of wartime food rationing and a difference between Protestant and Roman Catholic attitudes to their meals.
There's also the way that the English are far too polite when they are served bad food in restaurants, swallowing back their complaints with the nosh. This is a behavioural pattern I swiftly shed on this side of the Channel, but the rare times I expressed dissatisfaction used to cause considerable embarrassment to visiting family until most of them realised that sending things back to the kitchen if really awful was an idea worth exporting.
J.-P. claimed however, on the strength of a TV documentary he's just seen, that the rot set in right back in the 18th century, when a royal decree in England proclaimed that everybody, rich and poor alike, should get enough to eat. This, the film-maker contended, led to a "dumbing down" of culinary standards.
J.-P. couldn't remember which monarch was held responsible, but asserted that even the aristocracy then made a point of "eating badly to show solidarity with the poor". The notion is intriguing, but a fellow at Princeton University, Paul Krugman, guesses instead that:
"the country's early industrialization and urbanization was the culprit. Millions of people moved rapidly off the land and away from access to traditional ingredients. Worse, they did so at a time when the technology of urban food supply was still primitive: Victorian London already had well over a million people, but most of its food came in by horse-drawn barge. And so ordinary people, and even the middle classes, were forced into a cuisine based on canned goods (mushy peas!), preserved meats (hence those pies), and root vegetables that didn't need refrigeration (e.g. potatoes, which explain the chips)."
Krugman expands on his thesis on a web page he has dubbed "mushy": 'Supply, Demand and English Food.'
The 'Guide to Food and Drink' (London Tourist) does its best to warn people off most British grub if not the capital:
"English social life revolves around alcohol to a degree we've not seen anywhere east of Poland. It's difficult if you take alcohol in moderation. The average Brit likes to get drunk, and then roar up and down the street in an aggressive manner, before vomiting and going for a curry. This is not new and was the chief complaint of 18th century visitors like de Sassure - his descriptions of London life ring true even today (...)
Recently Cornish Pasty stalls have been set up in stations and other late night haunts - and offer a much better than average quick food option: they're targeted at people with the munchies and you can smell them several hundreds of yards off (this is a ploy in the same way supermarkets pump baking bread smells into their air con units).
Generally, the English like their meat blackened and their vegetables boiled until they resemble lab specimens - so be sure to specify your preference."
 Martin Phillips further tips the kitchen scales with his Black Pudding Page (Health Warning) and a link to a splendid excerpt from 'Troubled Times' (Zetatalk Food). Click on their 'Bugs' icon (borrowed here for illustrative purposes) and you can learn how to cook maggots. If that's not helpful enough, here's Zetatalk's sensible advice regarding grasshoppers:
"One thing to keep in mind in hunting any animal you are going to eat is to never expend more energy in capturing it than it is going to give back to you upon consumption."
Apart from whole recipe books, of which 'Seven Centuries of English Cooking' — by a Frenchwoman — looks the most promising for a historical perspective, trying quite a range of search terms has brought me precious little on the Net in favour of British food.
As somebody who first learned how to be a good cook from a mother who's always been adventurous in the kitchen, I find it hard to believe that nobody of note has written anything 'In Defence of English Cooking' since George Orwell had a brief go at it. In 1945.
What Mum taught me, before the French made further improvements by introducing me to the meaning of "rare", was gleaned mostly from her own mother and from Mrs "First catch your hare" Beeton. The latter's principles of household management (OUP) were considered so indispensable that a copy was infiltrated into France as a wedding present for Marianne's mum and me, which became part of my "share" after our divorce.
Apparently unlike most people, for several years I used it frequently. In those days, the kitchen was my domain, even when it came to dinner parties.
"Those famous lines about eggs and hares were never written by Beeton, but represent the persistent misinterpretation to which the book has been subject," the Oxford World's Classics Magazine tells us. "Although it contains a smattering of extravagant recipes, if anything it errs on the side of frugality, with many pages devoted to plain family dinners and the use of left-overs."
Now that, Jean-Paul — and one day, when I have a kitchen again, I'll show you the proof in the pudding — is exactly right.
Much of the inventiveness he finds so strangely lacking in perfidious Albion's cuisine, arguing that this absence runs against the grain of British culture, was manifest in my own childhood in the use of left-overs.
This is a notion worth exploring in the blogosphere, from Mary Beth in Pensacola 'Switched at Birth' (take a look in her kitchen) to a 'Sassy Lawyer' at the House on a Hill in the Philippines.
Though very out of practice nowadays, I must already have mentioned my long-held view that cooking well is like making music: once you've learned a few sets of notation and harmony, the rest is about variations on themes. A Hungarian goulash, for example, is part of the same culinary family as boeuf bourguignon ('About' French cuisine).
I don't know whether "a couple of geeks in Seattle", Gay Gilmore and Troy Hakala, are Netwizards. But their site, Recipezaar, is an international introduction to what cooking has in common with technology and science: many of the most interesting "discoveries" are the outcome of happy accidents.
11:27:33 AM link 
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