Spectator Life

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.

Radicchio, radicchio, wherefore art thou radicchio? A red-leafed chicory by any other name would doubtless taste as bitter — but it certainly wouldn’t sound as pedigreed. Consider the following bit of dialogue: ‘Would you like a chicory salad?’ The natural response is a hasty, ‘Not just at the moment, thank you,’ the very name of chicory summoning up painful memories of undercooked chickpeas and bowls of foliage into which well-meaning persons have seemingly shaken the broken fragments at the bottom of the cereal box. Compare and contrast with the following overture: ‘Would you care for some grilled Chioggia radicchio embellished with small cubes of buffalo mozzarella and drizzled with a reduction of Balsamico di Modena?

Friday afternoon in the Pita Shack diner in the northern suburbs of Austin, Texas and I was surrounded by Iraqis. There was even a picture of a sweet-looking Marsh Arab girl in her papyrus boat hanging on the wall. It was all unexpected but strangely familiar, stirring memories of Delta-30’s turret-scanning the junction of Red 11 in downtown Al Amarah back in 2004. During the first Gulf War in 1991, the Maysan province around Al Amarah was the site of local uprisings against Saddam Hussein. In retaliation he drained the region’s marshes to deprive the local Marsh Arabs of the waters on which their livelihoods and 6,000-year-old culture depended.

Batavia, New York H.L. Mencken mocked the authors of I’ll Take My Stand, the classic 1930 manifesto of Twelve Southerners, as ‘typewriter agrarians’. The gibe was partly fair and partly not, but then a strict adherence to fact is a disability in a humorist — it is what adds those warning braces to his title and makes him that deadliest enemy of the lively reader: the ‘humorist’. Always self-reproving, never self-improving, Jason Peters, a scapegrace professor of something-or-other at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, gemstone of the Quad Cities, is no ‘humorist’. Though his new book is titled The Culinary Plagiarist, he is no keyboard kebabist either.

I walked into a party with a friend a few years ago and told her I felt uncharacteristically uncomfortable. ‘That’s because you’re not carrying a pie,’ she said. It’s true; I usually have a pie as my calling card. The offering of a homemade pie makes no one unhappy. It’s a nice presentation, sure, but the handoff is magical, a conjuring the baker does when deciding whether the recipient is a pumpkin or cherry pie kind of guy. People think you’re being generous when you show up with pie, but really it’s quite selfish. First, baking carries me away. Second, I love to see people’s faces when handing them pie.

I remember being taken aback when reading, in Geoffrey Madan’s delightful Notebooks, a cynical remark by Lord Lyons: ‘If you’re given Champagne at lunch, there’s a catch somewhere.’ Au contraire, my dear Lord. But then that same peer stated that ‘Americans are either wild or dull.’ Obviously he was an unreliable source. Lily Bollinger, former manager of the Champagne producer, admirably summed up my own view. ‘I only drink Champagne when I’m happy,’ she said, ‘and when I’m sad. Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company, I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I am not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it — unless I’m thirsty.

In a valley of the Catskill Mountains near the tiny village of Hobart and not much else, there’s a farm with a red barn and a trickling spring-fed stream. Chickens and geese roam through the yard, cows and their young graze in the pasture, and a vegetable garden thrives on the hillside. If this sounds idyllic, you’ve never spent a week on a working farm. I recently had the opportunity, mostly by accident. I thought ‘housesitting’ with two friends in the mountains meant a few chores: watering the plants, say, or feeding the cats. Roxbury Mountain Maple Farm turned out to be home to 130 chickens, 50-odd chicks, 30 cows, 12 ducklings, six roosters, five geese, four ducks, three cats and two dogs.

When you find one, you’re sure to find more. No, not roaches. Clams. In shallow, sometimes reedy bay water, you walk like a duck through a mud and sand mixture until you feel something hard underfoot. It could be a rock or it could be a root. But if God wills it, it will be a clam. You dig down, sometimes six inches into the muck. If, at bottom, there appears a hardshell clam (M. mercenaria) — with a white-gray-beige shell striated and sometimes mottled — then chances are there are more about. Many more. This past Fourth of July a team of us set out in three boats from the top of New Jersey’s Barnegat Bay. The first spot proved a bust, yielding fewer than 10 clams among more than a dozen clammers. We upped anchor and spun around to another site.

Last week I was suspended from Twitter and subsequently plummeted headlong into a deep depression. What would I do with my life now? At first there was a little solace in the fact that Titania had also had her account deactivated, but then she got hers back and has been crowing over it ever since. Just goes to show, trans women are the most targeted and vulnerable people in society today. On Saturday morning, having spent the past few days feeling oppressed and marginalized, I decided I needed a pick-me-up and headed out to treat myself to a detoxifying smoothie from Floozy Suzie’s Juice Bar. Floozy is a friend of mine from uni who works as a drag queen by night and pulped superfood vendor by day.

What do the works of Le Corbusier, driftwood on the beach and French cherry tart have in common? Well, all three are improved by being set on fire. That’s uncontroversial when it comes to two items on the list, but perhaps you’re inclined to quibble about the tart. Resist the temptation, messieurs-dames, for I have an irrefutable authority up my sleeve: Julia Child, the lady whose Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) was hailed by legendary restaurateur George Lang of Café des Artistes fame as the volume that ‘not only clarified what real French food is, but simply taught us to cook’.

According to the Book of Genesis, Man was not made to be alone. No, nor is wine. Just as man is (as Aristotle reminds us) essentially a social animal, incomplete without the society of his fellows, so wine requires food to flourish. There are exceptions to these rules, no doubt, but they remain exceptions. Untangling this truth is one of the primary tasks that the distinguished wine importer and writer Kermit Lynch has pursued since he set up shop in the 1970s. One of the most delightful books about wine that you will ever read is Lynch’s Adventures on the Wine Route, first published in 1988 and spruced up for its 25th anniversary a few years ago.

Your morning coffee is now an ethical minefield. Sure, you’ve remembered your reusable cup and are smugly avoiding adding to the 2.5 billion disposable cups dumped each year. But, ma’am, which milk would you like in your latte? Asked this question in my local coffee shop, I panic. Obviously not dairy, thanks to the methane-burping cows that produce it. Coconut is imported and food-mile heavy. Aren’t almonds causing drought in California? And isn’t the Amazon being razed to make way for soya plantations? Oat milk then, except I don’t like the taste. And isn’t coffee a pretty unethical product all told anyway? I recently stood at the counter for a full 20 seconds, lost in a moral milk maze.

When Cockburn heard that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was calling for a boycott of Goya, he wondered what the dead Spanish painter had done wrong. Fortunately, a member of the Latinx community was on hand to explain in non-gendered grammar that it’s Goya foods that we must shun. Goya sells high-quality food at low prices. But Robert Unanue, its CEO, made the mistake of expressing approval of President Trump. America, Unanue said, is ‘blessed’ to have Trump in charge. ‘Oh look, it’s the sound of me Googling how to make your own Adobo,’ Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. So the bean is banned. The salsa is censored. The flan is forbidden. The guac is gone.