The joke's on us | The Spectator

The bucolic Beaujolais

To every thing, saith the Sage of Ecclesiastes (and Pete Seeger), there is a season. There is a time for white tie and tails, footwear by Lobb, and the impeccably tailored business suit or long satin frock with appurtenances from Tiffany. There is also a time for lounging about in loose-fitting cotton trousers and boat shoes. You have on your artfully battered panama hat and sunglasses, and that book you are reading, while full of pictures and conversations, as Alice would have demanded, boasts charm, not charts or spreadsheets. Its story will not be on the test. It’s the same with wine. There is a time for the exquisite Montrachet or Cheval Blanc, the Bollinger RD, Krug, or Dom Pérignon.

Calla Jones Corner

Spending Labor Day on the Cape

A few days before Labor Day I tend to get nostalgic for the sixty-five summers I spent in Chatham on Cape Cod. The feeling starts slowly, especially during our after-dinner, three-generation family strolls around the Chatham Lighthouse in the charming Old Village. If it is our last evening before returning to Europe, my father would be broiling the last steak. The stroll begins with a nip in the air and the gently falling, silver leaves from the trees that line small streets. There isn’t any traffic; residents of the Old Village walk. Later, when my mother had two bionic knees, she was still lovingly called the “fastest woman in town.” Now she strolls with the rest of us. We are savoring another tradition, after a summer filled with golf, tennis, swimming, boating and feasts.

Jane Stannus

On constant gardening

Let nobody sneeze at the horticultural arts. Francis Bacon devoted a moderately famous essay to the topic, beginning by pointing out that the very first garden designer was Almighty God. The garden, Bacon argues in his 1625 treatise, offers the purest of human pleasures. As a civilization approaches its peak, its creative geniuses tend to focus on perfecting architecture before finally, at the apex of its development, turning to the art of the garden. With a name like Bacon, Sir Francis might be pardoned for devoting especial attention to the kitchen garden, whence hail so many excellent pairings for salt-cured pork — roasted cabbage with bacon and pine nuts, for instance, or the inseparable bacon, lettuce and tomato.

Mary Kate Skehan

Eating well at a time of inflation

Inflation having topped 9 percent this summer, Americans are looking for ways to cut their spending. Rising prices at the grocery store are impossible to avoid, but we can learn to adjust. There’s no better inspiration than M.F.K. Fisher. Fisher, a food writer who hung around with Julia Child and James Beard during her lifetime, felt the pain of wartime rationing acutely. Her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf addressed the problem of hunger — “the wolf on the doorstep” — with a few clever recipes and a great deal of philosophy. Survival of the crisis, she predicted, would require first and foremost an attitude of abundance. Fisher ascribes virtues like honesty, dignity and nobility to simply prepared foods.

Teresa Mull

In praise of liquor stores

Pennsylvania’s liquor laws are... vintage. But not in a single-malt Scotch kind of way that means they improve with age. The state legislature did move the needle to the right side of draconian in 2016, but the Philadelphia Inquirer’s 1983 assessment of “Pennsylvania’s backwardness” being “a hangover from the administration of Republican governor Gifford Pinchot, who was elected on a ‘dry’ platform in 1930,” remains accurate. The Inquirer reported that after Prohibition was abolished in 1933, Pinchot led a special session to establish the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board and “state stores” to make the purchase of alcoholic beverages “as inconvenient and expensive as possible.

Food & Drink