The Matt Gaetz Show | The Spectator

Delicious wines from the Omicron Open

Some people think that it is the job of a wine critic to discover great bargains in the world of bottles and impart the news in hushed but excited tones to the madding crowds. Maybe that’s part of the remit. I incline, however, to this piece of wisdom from George Saintsbury, prosodist to the stars and incomparable, if quirky, cicerone to the fructum vitis et operis manuum hominum, which is to say: wine. “There is no money,” Saintsbury wrote, of the expenditure of which I am less ashamed, or which has given me better value in return, than the price of the liquids chronicled in Notes on a Cellar-Book. When they were good they pleased my senses, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people.

Mary Kate Skehan

The millennial kitchen

However else we may criticize the late 90s and early 00s — its politics, its fashion, its music — this was undeniably the golden age of the celebrity chef. Barefoot Contessa, 30-Minute Meals and The Iron Chef franchises all debuted in the first decade of this millennium, minting stars like Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri and Nigella Lawson. I once found a collection of my brothers salivating over Giada de Laurentiis making meatballs on Everyday Italian, though they’d never demonstrated more interest in cooking than microwaving the odd Hot Pocket. The mid-aughts brought on the glory years of the “hands and pans” videos: the aerial-view clips of disembodied hands assembling cheeseburger pretzel balls or eighteen-layer taco dip.

Philip Hensher

Marmite man

Marmite is one of very few manufactured foods to have become an idiom. British people think of the black stuff as a national idiosyncrasy, entirely unknown to horrified foreigners: there are many videos on YouTube in which outsiders have Marmite inflicted on them for the first time. In fact, there are a large number of pastes based on yeast extract in different countries, each with its passionate devotees. British Marmite may have been the first to go into production, but it did not stay unique for long. A German chemist, Justus von Liebig, influential in the propagation of meat essences, discovered that yeast could be concentrated.

Jane Stannus

A load of old crêpes

Eat crêpes on Candlemas, enjoy a year of happiness, says a traditional French-Canadian proverb. Happiness isn’t as easy as eating crêpes on February 2, the cynics will sneer — but then, the cynics haven’t tried dark chocolate crêpe cake filled with hazelnut cream and garnished with golden spikes of candied hazelnut as per Martha Stewart’s show-stopping recipe, have they? Of course they haven’t. Cynics don’t like sweets. But if you can trap a couple (good choices for bait include arugula, dandelion greens and Allen’s double-strength cleaning vinegar) and force-feed them chocolate crêpe cake, you’ll see the cynicism melting away like snow in April.

Food & Drink