EXCERPT Good cooking comes from small villages and long traditions. One cannot favour, for instance, France’s petite cuisine over its cuisine villageoise. A solid, rooted, generous, confit de canard aux lentilles, deliciously magnified in Moissac, far exceeds a light, pretentious, stingy, rémoulade de tourteau à l’aneth, sauce fleurette citronnée, served at Taillevent’s. But philosophy in the twentieth century has followed fashions far meaner than those of the petite cuisine…