I read this story once but have never been able to find it again: Sometime around the middle of the last century, a women’s magazine printed a letter from a reader, in which it was proposed that an elegant presentation for asparagus would be to freeze a bundle of the vegetable in a block of ice. The magazine’s staff responded that this would indeed be elegant, but they were unsure how it would be eaten.

Cochinchina is a region encompassing the southern third of Vietnam. It was a French colony from 1862 to 1954.

Recommended Readings on French Cooking and Translation:

• Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste (1825). A wandering maze of theorizing and fables. Translated into English by American food writer M.F.K. Fisher, who said, "I hold myself blessed among translators."
• Auguste Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire (1903). An encyclopedic account of which sauce may be put on which food.
• The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954). Written by Gertrude Stein's partner (and frequent cook) during the couple's years in France.

"When gourmandise becomes gluttony, voracity or debauchery, it loses its name and attributes, falling into the hands of the moralist who will treat it by advice, or the medical man who will treat it by remedy. Gourmandise, as the professor has described it, has a name only in French; neither the Latin gula, English 'gluttony' nor German lusternheit, expresses it, and we recommend all who attempt a translation of this instructive book to preserve the word, changing the article which produces it only." — Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

"Indeed, stock is everything in cooking, at least in French cooking. Without it, nothing can be done. If one's stock is good, what remains of the work is easy; if, on the other hand, it is bad or merely mediocre, it is quite hopeless to expect anything approaching a satisfactory result." — Auguste Escoffier

"The best foreign cooking is in the homes of the French who have been forced for one reason or another to live in their colonies. Even Italian dishes are rarely well prepared by the French. As for American dishes, they are scarcely recognisable. But after two or three years in Indo-China or Africa, they return not only with the recipes of the local cooking but with the materials unobtainable in France and a knowledge of how to prepare them." — Alice B. Toklas

I've always thought this section was funny, although I doubt many others do. David Burke, the chef at Townhouse in New York, I think might. For at least the past few years, he has had on his menu a dish called Duck Duck Duck. At one point it consisted of a seared breast, a foie gras dumpling and a confit thigh, but it seems that the thigh has at some point been replaced by a meatloaf. Apparently Duck Duck Duck may be many different things—and to many different people, as Masaharu Morimoto (of Iron Chef fame) includes on his menu a dish of the same name. His version includes a Peking duck leg, a soft duck egg and a duck sandwich on a foie gras croissant. New York magazine called Morimoto's dish "an inspired postmodern dissertation."

Complications proliferate. Burke has accused Morimoto of stealing his dish, and Morimoto, at his Napa restaurant, offers a dish called Duck Duck Goose that introduces gooseberries to the mix.