The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 97

section V- fiifabelpfe Inquirer Recipes and news about good food, gourmet cooking and fine wine food Sunday, July 31, 1977 The lady was a gourmet ecologist By MARILYNN MARTER What irritates diners most? The smokers -fit-' --V- in i mi wmMihwwMmrTwmmmmiim You, the restaurant patron, have spoken. You have said what dining-out establishments can do to make you happiest when you cross their thresholds. And surprise it's not the quality of food you want changed. It's not the pricing or even the service. Your wants are simpler but very important.

Philadelphia lnquirrbtRALD BtNtNt While Mundy DiSimone enjoys an after-dinner cigar at Bookbinder's, Ann Burns seethes In another surprise, our poll showed that the third biggest bother is too much food. More than 14 percent of our letter writers (18) said that most restaurants served oversized portions far more than dieters, senior citizens or anyone with less than a lumberjack's appetite could comfortably consume. The same 18 suggested that restaurants could make everyone happier by offering a choice of portions with prices scaled down for the smaller ones. There were also three letters that vice, 42 of them exactly one-third wrote that cigaret, pipe and cigar smoke was what bothered them most. They said the biggest thing that the restaurants could do to make them happy would be to either ban smoking or to banish smokers to separate rooms or sections.

Our poll of patrons, you may recall, came about in reaction to a nationwide survey of restaurant operators by American Express. Proprietors and managers were asked how they thought customers could best help them improve their operations. By Bill Collins Inquirer food Editor What is the biggest gripe restaurant-goers have about restaurants? Other restaurant-goers who smoke. The question was asked here three Sundays ago and the answer from readers was as emphatic as it was surprising. Of the 126 readers who took up the invitation to air their complaints about area restaurants, as well as their suggestions on how public eating places could improve their ser Sarah Tyson Rorer's ideas on how to recycle leftovers would put today's ecologists to shame.

She believed, among other things, that no one needed a garbage can. You should, she insisted, buy only the best and freshest ingredients in amounts that could be used in a reasonable length of time then use every bit of what you had. One of the most popular demonstrations given by this Philadel-phian, whose name became a household word around the turn of the century, as the "nation's cooking teacher," was "Four Meals for Four From a Four-Pound Chicken." Mrs. Rorer's declaration that one four-pound chicken was enough to make 16 meals often drew laughter from her audiences. They were eager to see that miracle.

And the lady obliged. From one hen she prepared four entrees, including chicken pilau, chicken tim-bales and giblet soup, each sufficient for four. And she did her cooking with style. Throughout her career, she gave cooking demonstrations while gowned in silk. Reports of the day describe the fair-haired matron attired on stage in a biscuit-colored dress of India silk or wearing a dainty, lace-trimmed apron, kerchief and cuffs that "no ordinary woman would dare to wear in the kitchen." She was determined, however, to prove how neat and clean cooking could, and should be.

Much of her 20 years, from 1883 to 1903, as head of the Philadelphia Cooking School on Chestnut Street and later, 1897 through 1911, as domestic science editor of the Ladies Home Journal was spent trying to ease and to improve the lot the 1 housewife and cook by adding dignity to the job and by promoting ef- i ficient techniques and new appliances. Her concern for nutrition and for diet-planning for the sick, led to her lectures and classes for medical students, doctors and nurses and earned her recognition as the first American dietitian. Her students were among the first generation of home economists and dietitians, as were those of her cooking contemporaries, Juliet Corson of the New York Cooking School and Mary Lincoln (followed by Fannie Farmer) of the Boston Cooking School. "She was the Julia Child of hei day," says Emma Seifrit Weigley, whose biography of Mrs. Rorer was recently published by the American Philosophical Society here.

"She worked through all the communications nedia of her day, writing cookbooks and articles and giving demonstrations. "She was interested in improving the situation of the woman in the home, in promoting labor saving devices," says Mrs. Weigley, a teacher of nutrition and dietetics and who has a doctorate from New York University. "She once said she would feel her life's work done if she could liberate women from the coal stove, which she especially despised." The witty, and sometimes even caustic, cooking teacher minced no words in her demonstrations. Over the years she became increasingly convinced that sweets and fried foods were potentially harmful.

Yet those were the recipes most requested for demonstrations. So Mrs. Rorer demonstrated their preparation. "Desserts of any sort have very little value as food so my subject today may be classified as a somewhat dubious one," she began before one audience, finally concluding with the remark that "all these things look so good but they are so deadly." In a society in which the fatter a (Set TEACHER on 2-G) my new number one (Gallo) had not existed three years ago. Number two (Paul Masson) had risen from old number seven.

Numbers three and five were new. Number four (G. had been pushed down from number two. And so forth. Is there a lesson in that? I cannot be certain, though I suspect the wines that moved up and down in my preference have changed more than my fairly stodgy, habit-set tastes have.

Even if that is true, it does not make them better or worse, only more or less pleasing to one person's taste, which is a purely personal thing. That taste is no better or worse than your own. It is all I can offer. I do it with the strong admonition that you tollow your own. Be fair to yourself if you want life, or wine, to be.

How to get full value from 'fully equipped' vacation kitchen AN ELECTRIC FRYPAN to supplement a meager summer kitchen is fine for preparing Rum-Flamed Peaches. complained of portions being too small. Other common gripes were with restaurants that refused to make out separate checks for Dutch-treat lunch and dinner groups (10 percent), the hiking of tea prices along with the cost of a cup of coffee (8 percent) and overcharging for wines (6 percent). Even more surprising than the strength of vote against smoking and overgenerous portions was the paucity of comment on the quality of (See SMOKERS on 12-G) Pnitddelpnia InqunefAMRA SuWA ever. On a later trip, we came home with fabulous flounder.

Another drive to the docks netted us enough meaty bluefish fillets to feed the three of us for S1.50. We found soft shell crabs in a town market specializing in shellfish. All three seafood purchases were cooked and eaten the day they were bought. We knew our resort town well from several earlier visits and could count on well-stocked food stores. But even so, we brought (in an ice chest) several items we doubted (See VACATION on8-G) fairly diverse area, and blended to meet the standards or economic realities of a winemaker who may move on, or may decide to change style, or may be as whimsical in his tastes as the rest of us.

In recent weeks I have done blind tastings of seven reasonably priced California cabernet sauvignons and 12 zinfandels available on the general market. I had last done the same methodical comparisons a bit more than three years ago. Among the cabernets, the one that I recently ranked highest (Beaulieu Vineyards) had not been available for the old sample. Number two (Christian Brothers) had ranked fifth three years ago. My third and fourth preferences had not been available.

The fifth had moved up one point. Number six (Paul Mas-son) had dropped from number one. And so on. Among the zinfandels, The restaurateurs' biggest concern: That dissatisfied customers were leaving hungry and angry rather than complaining (politely) on the spot. So, we decided to give all those hungry, angry and silent customers a chance to air their grievances, however belated.

The results were (to me, at least) unexpected and in some ways confusing, not to say contradictory. Tobacco smoke easily outdistanced poor service (the top peeve of 28 of the respondents) as the most common complaint. Our real aim had been to eat the best and freshest of what was available in the markets and to avoid, if possible, mixes and those chemical concoctions that pass for "convenience" foods. The amount spent gave us a light breakfast on most days, and a more hearty one on others, sandwich or salad lunches, simple but substantial dinners and inexpensive wines, and beer or iced tea with meals. There was even enough for an occasional pre-dinner wine spritzer or cocktail and a snack of cheese, nuts or raw vegetables.

know and love is dreary dross and that your affection for it exposes you as a philistine for a pharisee or, for that matter, a common, contemporary lout, strike him down righteously with the jawbone of a som-melier. Tell him I sent you. In the third of a century that has passed since the first glass of wine I can remember, in some 25 years of fairly attentive guzzling, sniffing and note-taking, I have met very few wines that revolted me. Obviously, I prefer some to others. Some flit in and out of my favor, as my tastes or my experience, or in some cases the wines' flavors, shift and vacillate.

There are, of course, certain characteristics of wine that are measure-able; most of them, in fact. Relative contents of various acids, sugars and other chemicals natural to the fermented juice of grapes can be 4 Would you believe that with a kitchen no better than the one described you can feed your family well for about $5 a day per person? I didn't. That the cost of feeding three adults three meals a day could be so modest came as a surprise when I added up the receipts from last week's seashore sojourn. The only conscious cost-cutting measure had been to try to eliminate wasteful buying of items that were duplicates of things we already owned or were in sizes too large to be used up in a week. We know life isn't fair.

Mr. Jimmy Carter has told us so, relying on no meaner authority than John F. Kennedy and an earnest lifetime of personal observation. It should blunt no one's corkscrew for me to declare that judgments of the quality of wines are no fairer than life. That is especially true of gradings that assertively list wines in sequence of excellence.

With the humility of Job, I include in that generality the reports on my own comparative blind tastings that appear in this space from time to time. There is one, and only one, absolute and immutable standard of excellence for wine: Great wine is what you like; bad wine is what you don't like. If anyone tells you that a wine that offends you is superb, that you must like it, tell him to go gargle with it. If anyone insists that a wine you By Elaine Tait inquirer Soft Writer The lease for your summer vacation home tells you the kitchen is "fully equipped." Read that to mean plastic dishes that match, but bent stainless flatware that doesn't; a range that may or may not have a working oven; a collection of impossibly small, warped and thin-skinned aluminum pots and pans; two knives that require heating before they'll glide through a stick of high-priced spread and a pantry as bare as a nudist's swimsuit. By MICHAEL PAKENHAM To thine own taste be true I IV On Wine Fresh fruits were plentiful and the quality glorious.

We shopped often and bought blueberries, melons, nectarines, peaches, cherries, apples and bananas. One day, as a special treat, I pared, sliced and sau-teed a few peaches in rum butter and served them flaming over ice cream for dessert. Fresh papaya halves, sprinkled with lemon juice, were another good dessert. Surprisingly, fresh fish which we love wasn't easy to find. Our first visit to an open-air, dockside fish merchant sent us home empty-handed.

Persistence paid off, how determined in a laboratory, and in your mouth. There are smells and flavors that can be judged, and which with patient practice will become fixed in any of our minds. As they do, our preferences become more precise, more confident, and usually more demanding. Make no mistake about it: Wines change. The wine in a single bottle changes with age, for better or worse.

The grapes of a single hillside will vary greatly in flavor and density and in other ways from year to year, depending largely on the weather. The craft and art of wine-makers, above all else, makes critical differences in wines. Those variations are particularly consequential in the wines most of us can afford to drink with some regularity. Relatively inexpensive wines are usually made in large quantity from grapes grown over a.