I had to skip last week’s Cucina Verite because it took me a full 10 days to get through the entirety of Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe, and frankly, I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about it.

In the newspaper Le Courrier de Paris we read this striking sentence: “A very good dinner is a rare thing today. Gastronomy is like poetry: It is in total decline.” Now, that pronouncement was made on ...