Big Dope | The Spectator

Hopping through Holy Week

What will Easter 2021 be like? Nothing like 2020, if I have my way. This year, I dream, Easter will be preceded by a Holy Week as solemn as if COVID had never been. Purple-veiled statues will stand solemnly about the church overlooking the Holy Thursday foot washing, a jug of water the only cleansing agent in sight, while a large choir sings the Ubi caritas. The Mass will be jammed with people, as it is every normal year, lovely, unknown people who spontaneously show up, unregistered and untraceable, squeezing in wherever there’s space. Afterwards an altar boy swinging a golden censer will lead the procession through volutes of blue smoke to an altar of repose, swathed in white silk.

Roger Kimball

Georgians on my mind

Long before Achilles chased Hector around Troy and Homer wrote about the οἶνοψ πόντος, the ‘wine-dark sea’, people living in what is today the republic of Georgia were making wine. Archaeologists have found evidence of wine making there dating from 8000 BC: an impressive statement to the inventiveness to which necessity gives birth. Stretching from the Black Sea to the Caucasus Mountains, Georgia is home to a wide variety of climates, types of soil and geographical physiognomies. Today it is home to some 500 varietals, few of which are familiar to westerners (even though many if not most western grapes probably have precursors in Georgia and the Black Sea ‘cradle of wine’).

Timothy Jacobson

Dinner with Judy

How better to lift a torch against late-winter gloom than by conjuring an evening from a time when our country was still a confident going concern, when its culture and ideas bestrode the free world? What with our plague-driven mania for virtual living, it’s hard to get anyone to come to dinner these days. And since she died in 1969, our virtual guest of honor won’t be coming either. But from an era full of entertainment giants, we pick one, the star of stars: Miss Judy Garland. If only in our minds, we invite Judy to cocktails and dinner and then, just maybe if we get lucky, to linger late into the evening around the piano and sing a few of the old songs. This is not a formal affair, just two couples on a Friday evening after work.

Calla Jones Corner

The need to knead

I don’t remember my grandmother, Anna Olson Nelson (Nelsie to her grandchildren), ever measuring out anything for her divine Swedish bread. The recipes must have been kept under the thick, blonde braid that she piled expertly on top of her head. What I do recall, as if it were yesterday, is helping Nelsie bake fläta and limpa every other Sunday in her small kitchen. The heavenly smells of cardamom and fennel wafted throughout her apartment while she tried to improve my Swedish. My mother, Mimi, often spoke Swedish to me and my sister, Chris, when we were babies and my father was with the Office of War Information as a correspondent in China, Burma and India during World War Two. Nelsie was our ‘Swedish nanny’.

Food & Drink