American oligarchy | The Spectator

Raclette sports

Raclette is the ultimate comfort food. From the French word racler, to scrape, this simple, hearty dish is all Swiss. There isn’t a village in Switzerland, in the Alps, the Jura or the Engadine, where you can’t have raclette. There are even restaurants, called carnotzets, just for raclette, although they usually serve fondue, as well. Many Swiss homes have their own raclette-designated space, often in the basement, sometimes doubling as bomb shelter, featuring fireplace and wooden table, with cozy banquettes. It’s where the Swiss go when they want to soak up carbs for comfort. In the film Heidi, you’ll watch the orphan’s uncle serving her raclette in the rustic chalet during a cold winter’s eve.

Roger Kimball

The screw-top letters

Some people think that appreciating wine is all about the taste of the beverage. Others, more cynical, think that, at bottom, it is about the efficient ingestion of that complex hydrocarbon that the body converts into sugar, and merriment, as it passes through the system. The name of that compound is ethanol, a type of alcohol produced by the fermentation of certain fruits. If you look up ‘alcohol’ in a sociologically or anthropologically disposed reference work, you’ll find owlish observations to the effect that ‘alcohol plays an important social role in many cultures’. This is a nod to fact that wine is a both a goad to conviviality and a glue binding up the multifarious wounds to our amour propre that are the natural result of the conduct of daily life.

Lisse Garnett

Noble Rotters

Frank Zappa said writing about music is as absurd as ‘dancing about architecture’. Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew ask if you could say the same about wine. Our authors make light of their own or any attempts to quantify an ever-evolving liquid essence into words, points or subjective flavor interpretations whilst providing a helpful ‘Lexicon of Usefulness’ to assist the reader’s endeavors.

Jane Stannus

Holy spirit: how the monks make Chartreuse

Trivia time. Put down the magazine, look away from the page and name as many green liqueurs as you can. Well? Did you get crème de menthe? Award yourself a point. Absinthe? Sorry, no point; absinthe contains no sugar, and is therefore a flavored liquor, not a liqueur. Note the difference in spelling: liquor can serve as a base to which sweeteners and flavors are added to form liqueur, but technically the one is not the other, and the other is not the one. What about Chartreuse? If you guessed it, well done: the Queen of Liqueurs claims the distinction of being the only naturally green-colored liqueur in existence.

Ed Zotti

Fresh food, fresher air

One takes the chance, in writing about al fresco dining during winter, of getting pigeonholed as that guy who always goes on about how cold it is in Chicago. But if I’m to write about food and drink at this time of year, there’s no attractive alternative, unless you want to hear about my puttering in the kitchen making spaghetti, and how exciting is that? With indoor restaurant dining forbidden due to the pandemic, the remaining choice is the outdoors — the ideal setting, in this challenging time, for the intrepid individual to demonstrate boldness without being a complete idiot about it, always a fine line. The question is, how?

Food & Drink