Food & Drink

I’m not sure what it is about brandy snaps that have placed them so firmly in the Christmas culinary tradition: this simple biscuit lacks the dried fruits and nuts of other yuletide stalwarts, its spicing is minimal, and its shelf life is fleeting compared to the cakes and puddings that require festive forethought months in advance. But whatever the reason, I can’t imagine making or eating brandy snaps at any other time of the year. In fairness, my brandy bottle is rarely used other than in the lead up to Christmas — when it gets sloshed into every cake and bake that stands still for long enough — but the brandy in the name is misleading.

Discovering a secret hoard of chanterelles or a giant cepe hidden under an oak tree is one of the most exciting and fulfilling things a foodie can do. But please be wary: to the inexperienced eye, an innocent looking poisonous toadstool can easily be mistaken for an edible delight. Luckily, there are professional foragers out there who will discover, collect and vet wild mushrooms that you can buy in specialist food shops to fulfill this recipe. This extraordinary year seems to have made people much more interested and aware of the provenance of what they eat. Indeed, lockdown turned many of us into foragers as we looked to get better acquainted with the countryside. Outside of a kitchen our brother Oliver’s favorite activity is to go foraging for wild mushrooms.

Being a citizen of the world is difficult when you’re not allowed to enter the rest of it, much less travel across state lines without excessive burden. The ‘bad thing’ has made eating adventurously a tad harder. Some of us are meat-and-potato people. Others of us will unflinchingly and unknowingly order gizzard served in the basement of a Nepali restaurant in Queens because, as they say, when in Rome.Although I’ve been unable to travel or eat at restaurants, my enduring love affair with my stomach has not taken a hiatus. With Christmas fast approaching, neither should yours, or that of the citizen-of-the-world you love.These are items I’ve used or eaten, or that are also on my wish list, most of which are under $50. Bon appétit (and joyeux Noël).

Many moons ago, long before I learnt how to cook properly, I took it upon myself to make Scotch eggs. It seemed like a nice little weekend activity but, looking back, it was doomed from the get-go. My boiled eggs were too soft and threatened to splurge their yolks. The meat I used was mealy, not fatty enough, and crumbled when I tried to press it onto the eggs. I didn’t really understand how you coated food for frying so haphazardly stuck breadcrumbs to what little meat was forlornly clinging to my misshapen egg. I tried to fry them anyway: it did not go well. Scotch eggs shouldn’t be this hard, I thought. Who can be bothered with this? I ended up smashing the whole thing up (in resignation rather than anger), and turning it into a slightly strange hash.

Take your time. Measure twice. Finish what you start. How will you have time to do it again if you don’t take time to do it right the first time? Work hard at work, then come home. Loosen your tie and relax. Make a highball or mix a cocktail for your wife and yourself. Share the end of the day. We are brothers and we write here of a drink and the man who taught it to us, our father. Teaching us how to make it, he also taught us something of how to live. He was a chemical engineer, and so the formula was important. The drink was the Old Fashioned (or Old Fashion; it doesn’t matter), and this is how he made it.

If your family is like mine, you’ve spent the time and energy normally reserved for dividing up Thanksgiving potluck assignments determining how many people may attend your holiday, and under what public-safety conditions. The truth is, some families’ scaled-back Thanksgivings this year may actually mark an improvement on the traditional meal. We all know that turkeys are bland and fussy to prepare, one reason we don’t eat them all year round. (My father has a more gruesome objection involving the perceived similarity of turkey and human flesh, which I generally prefer not to consider.) Melissa Clark’s bacon-wrapped turkey breast is surely an enormous improvement.

When we talk to guests on The Spectator’s food and drink podcast, Table Talk, school dinners never fail to elicit strong opinions: from those who loved spam fritters, stodgy crumble and vats of custard, to others who shudder at the mere thought of a gloopy, tepid rice pudding. One dish that seems to have the fewest detractors is cornflake tart: a cheap and cheerful pudding, that required little more than store cupboard staples to make, and satisfied generations of children with its sky-high sugar levels. Food has the power to evoke nostalgia like almost nothing else. Dishes can be a shorthand to memory, to shared experience — good and bad; smells and tastes bringing back things we thought we’d forgotten.

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday, and not only because it offers an excuse to dine lavishly among friends. It also provides an occasion to live up to its name and give ourselves the pleasure of correcting Aristotle. Man, the old Greek said in a distracted moment, is the rational animal, ζῶον λόγον ἔχον. Clearly, what he meant to say is that man is the ungrateful animal, ζῶον αχαριστίαν ἔχον. Since Thanksgiving is all about enumerating one’s blessings, it is one of those rare opportunities in which everyone’s favorite pastime, virtue-signaling, can be indulged while thoroughly enjoying oneself.

‘Put the hen in a Dutch oven, brown him in butter for 12 minutes. If you have a piano in the kitchen, play the “Minute Waltz” 12 times. Add a little water. Put the lid on and let simmer. When you have finished playing half “The Dance of the Hours”, dragging it slightly, you’re ready to eat like an epicure.’ The Danish-born pianist and comedian Victor Borge is best known for his virtuosity on the keyboard, his wit and his timing. Most Borge fans don’t know that he was also a shrewd gentleman farmer. Julia Ransom Doty, my father’s first cousin, was a food and fashion editor for the Ideal Publishing Corporation, which produced popular, glossy ladies’ magazines back in the Fifties.

Bonfire night in Britain this year, like most of the occasions we celebrate, was a little different to previous years: no hustling lines to public displays, squeezing spectators in like sardines, standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Many of us can’t have people round to ours, even in our gardens. It’s never been more important to lean into a shorthand to create a sense of occasion, something that reminds us of the rhythms and rituals of our year. Those foods that we eat at certain times are an ideal shorthand, filled with memory, nostalgia and the ability to transport us. And when it comes to Bonfire night, you can see why honeycomb has become so associated with it: bright, smokey and with more than enough sugar to gird you against the cold, it’s the perfect November treat.

Peruvian cuisine is the ultimate cultural melting pot: from the traditions of indigenous Andean and Amazonian cultures to the influence of Spanish conquistadors, African slaves and immigrants from Europe and Asia. Popular sub categories continue to emerge such as the Chinese-Peruvian fusion, Chifa, and Japanese-Peruvian Nikkei cuisine. The most famous dishes comprise ingredients from the country’s multitude of dramatically different microclimates, with more than 3,000 types of potatoes in array of colors and shapes growing alongside corn linking back to the Incas’ agricultural legacy.

Ah, autumn, season of mists and mellow soupfulness, as the poet Keats didn’t quite say. In southern England, where Keats was inspired to write his famous ode to summer’s red-and-golden aftermath, fall mists may stick around all day; but in New England, they burn off with the morning sun, giving way late in the day to heady breezes that blow clean through the soul. It was Geoffrey Chaucer who brought the word autumn into the English language. As sure as ‘Aprill with his shoures soote’ leads ‘folk to goon on pilgrimages’, so October cries out for vigorous outdoor activity followed by autumnal soup.

Just as tastes in female beauty have differed widely through the ages — take a comparative glance at the damsels Rubens featured with those of Botticelli (I leave the Venus of Willendorf out of account) — so, too, does the taste in wine vary through the ages. The British critic George Saintsbury was a giant in the field of literary scholarship. He was also an avid apologist for wine, and his Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920) is a classic in the literature of wine writing. A modern reader, however, cannot help but be struck by the prominent place given to wines that have fallen out of favor today, especially such fortified wines as sherry, Madeira and port.

It’s seven in the evening and you’re working late. You’re interrupted by the soft rumble of hunger pangs, an unmistakable reminder that you haven’t eaten dinner yet. There’s this newish fusion restaurant a couple of blocks away that you’ve been wanting to try, but haven’t had the chance to. Every time you’ve walked past, it’s buzzing with activity. So you look the restaurant up on Yelp to see if it’s worth your time and money. You launch the app and search, only to be hit with an alert emblazoned with an ominously large exclamation point: ‘Business Accused of Racist Behavior’ The R word. It’s the new scarlet letter. You’re so taken aback that you almost forget that you’re hungry.

Americans will drive anywhere, but only immigrants will drive eight hours for groceries. Our community of Syrians and Lebanese trek from western Pennsylvania to Dearborn, Michigan, where a handful of small Levantine groceries sell ingredients too obscure for a Rust Belt supermarket: Cortas rose water, Al Wadi tahini, bags of dried wildflowers for zhourat tea. Eight hours round-trip by the Ohio turnpike, Dearborn is my family’s culinary refuge, and home to America’s largest population of Arab Americans. Henry Ford, also an advocate of driving, was born here on the family farm. The burgeoning auto industry attracted Arabs from the Levant, and Ford gave his employees healthcare, English classes and a trade school.