OUR FRIENDS, students, families, and husbands who have gracefully and often courageously acted as guinea pigs for years are owed a special thank you from the authors. But there are others toward whom we feel particular gratitude because of help of a different kind. The Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been one of our greatest sources of assistance and has unfailingly and generously answered all sorts of technical questions ranging from food to plastic bowls. The Meat Institute of Chicago, the National Livestock and Meat Board, and the Poultry and Egg National Board have answered floods of inquiries with prompt and precise information. Wonderfully helpful also have been the Fish and Wildlife Service of the Department of the Interior, and the California Department of Fish and Game. Sessions with L’École Professionelle de la Boucherie de Paris and with the Office Scientifique et Technique de la Pêche Maritime have been invaluable in our research on French meat cuts and French fish. During our years of practical kitchen-training in Paris, Chef de Cuisine Max Bugnard and Chef Pâtissier Claude Thillmont have been our beloved teachers. More recently we have also had the good fortune to work with Mme Aimée Cassiot, whose long years as a professional cordon bleu in Paris have given her a vast store of working knowledge which she has willingly shared with us. We are also greatly indebted to Le Cercle des Gourmettes whose bi-monthly cooking sessions in Paris have often been our proving grounds, and whose culinary ideas we have freely used. We give heartfelt thanks to our editors whose enthusiasm and hard work transformed our manuscript-in-search-of-a-publisher into this book. Finally there is Avis DeVoto, our foster mother, wet nurse, guide, and mentor. She provided encouragement for our first steps, some ten years ago, as we came tottering out of the kitchen with the gleam of authorship lighting our innocent faces.