Succession | The Spectator

The learned drinkers

Some of my readers may be unfamiliar with Athenaeus of Naucratis, a shadowy Egyptian-born Greek who floruit somewhere in the Roman Empire during the reigns of Marcus Aurelius, Commodus and Septimius Severus, i.e., around 200 AD. Athenaeus was a rhetorician, grammarian and epicure. But he is known to posterity primarily as the author of The Learned Banqueters (Δειπνοσοφισταὶ), a sprawling, miscellaneous work that touches on, well, just about everything: food, philosophy, fermentation, fabulation and many other subjects, not all of which begin with the phoneme “f.” Henry James called the three-volume Victorian novel a “loose baggy monster.” None was so loose or so baggy as Athenaeus’ compendium. There is a bit of Petronius’s Satyricon (c.

Calla Jones Corner

Swimming with the snakes

Perhaps being a Pisces gives me a natural affinity for water. Not all water, mind you. I’ve never liked to swim where I can’t see what’s beneath me. I prefer to believe that my love of water comes from spending so many early summers in our swimming hole in Weston, Connecticut. When my father was making a barn into our house and the surrounding fields into gardens, lawns and terraces, using boulders and rocks from the notoriously rocky Connecticut soil for foundations and borders, he was intentionally creating an unusual home. When he used more rocks to make a swimming hole for dipping his sweaty body, he unintentionally created a watery playground for the family — a summer haven.

Jane Stannus

Let’s hear it for horiatiki

Time to send your kitchen knives out for sharpening. The hot weather is coming, and you know what that means: Greek salad, or horiatiki as the Greeks call it. Is there any pleasure in life quite like dicing tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers with a knife that balances properly in the palm, whose blade possesses just the right steely flex and strength, and — above all — that is properly sharpened? With the right edged tool, it is hard to stop cutting things up for Greek salad. With the right ingredients, it is hard to stop eating it. This is why Greek salad is the perfect dish to make for a dinner party. As your friends buzz about the kitchen, drinks in hand, you can chop away on autopilot, chatting merrily as your cutting board fills with heaped tomato chunks.

James Panero

Zabar’s is still thriving

You might expect Zabar’s, the world-famous “appetizing” store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, to have become a shadow of its former self. This seems to be the case for most of New York’s other independent specialty shops. Fairway, Balducci’s, H&H Bagels, Dean & Deluca: the food purveyors of my youth have gone kaput. They were bought, leveraged, expanded, overextended and oversold. They expired past their sell-by dates. But somehow Zabar’s survived. For the Upper West Sider, Zabar’s is our Yale College and our Harvard. Like many I make my way down to 80th Street and Broadway most weekends for continuing education. I head to the appetizing counter and take a number.

Food & Drink