Several years ago, perhaps during the mad cow scare, it became something of a trial to get beef at a restaurant that was properly cooked. To get anything less than well done, you had to order rare, and do so clearly and emphatically. I always suspected that this problem—which seems to have abatted—had something to do with health inspectors, or regulators, or some government warning of some such.
But even so, it is a shock to learn the extent to which health inspectors are increasingly regulating what is served at restaurants.
“What’s been fascinating the city’s chefs lately is a technique long used in France called sous vide,” reports Gabrielle Hamilton in the New York Times, “in which serving portions of seasoned and vacuum-packed food are submerged in barely simmering water. This long, slow and low-temperature cooking makes the food taste more intensely of what it should taste like, preserves its nutritional value and often creates a texture of unspeakable silkiness that everyone ought to experience.
“Except the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene won’t allow it. In recent weeks, having caught wind of the use of this new technique — not by a single report of food-borne illness but rather through the restaurant coverage of newspapers and magazines — inspectors have shut down the system at many restaurants, standing by to make sure that chefs have destroyed the shrink-wrapped food, fining them for serving sous vide dishes and forbidding the use of the equipment used in their production.”
