Eat: A Sauce Worth Slaving Over

THE people who invite us to wallow in food seldom remind us to beware.

Frank Bruni

In the pages of their gorgeously illustrated cookbooks or on their delectably edited TV shows, they assemble and plunge headlong into lavish feasts, oohing as they baste, cooing as they carve and swooning over the side dishes. We respond as intended. We hanker and yearn.

Here’s what we don’t see:

PAULA DEEN, the self-crowned “Queen of Southern cuisine,” said Tuesday morning on the “Today” show on NBC that she has Type 2 diabetes, a diagnosis she received three years ago. Ms. Deen also confirmed that she is being paid to promote Victoza, a noninsulin injectable medication made by Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical company.

Paula Deen in January 2011. 

Ms. Deen, 64, ran a restaurant in Savannah, Ga.,

THERE are lots of crab-meat salads out there. Some are fine, but many tend to be rather indifferent mixtures of crabmeat and bottled mayonnaise.

One memorable crab salad is the war horse from San Francisco known as crab Louie. It used to be featured at all the old fish restaurants, but now is seldom seen, except for the most touristy places, where it is usually served with frozen crab meat. At

A WHOLE roasted fish is the aquatic analogue to roast chicken.

It’s easy to prepare, forgiving and adaptable.

Drizzle on some oil, season it with herbs and spices or pretty much leave it alone, and bake it at almost any oven temperatures along with anything else you want to roast, like cauliflower sprinkled with cumin. You can stuff it with chilies, garlic and citrus to perfume its tender flesh.

Time: about 30 minutes

1/2 cup heavy cream

3 large egg yolks

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

2 tablespoons lemon juice

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

1 teaspoon dry mustard

1/2 teaspoon salt

Pinch of cayenne pepper

Black pepper, to taste

1 tablespoon fruity extra virgin olive oil

8 ounces

Seared Frozen Steak:
Nathan Myhrvold, co-author of “Modernist Cuisine,” shows Melissa Clark his method for preparing seared steak.

MY friends were perplexed when I invited them over for a dinner party based entirely on recipes from “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking,” the multivolume examination of avant-garde cooking and culinary technology.

“What, did you get a chemistry set for Christmas?” one friend asked.

“Foams