Democratic death cult | The Spectator

In praise of the Acropolis Museum Café and Restaurant

In the global poker game of cultural repatriation – otherwise known as who nicked what from whom – the Greeks seriously upped the ante with the opening of the Acropolis Museum in 2009. This lavish display of archaeological treasures in a light-filled building designed by the Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi is, alongside the recently opened Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, an exemplar of such a building’s mission to educate and inspire. In the tradition of polemic buildings, it is also a $200 million plea to return the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum to Greece.

Rich Cromwell

Don’t let science stop you from baking

Sometimes, cooking is art. Other times, it’s science. When it comes to baking, both are involved, which is what can cause problems for those who are otherwise skilled in the kitchen. Whereas throwing together ingredients and tossing them in the slow cooker or on the grill can produce delicious results, baking demands precision. I have experienced great successes when making a host of dishes that don’t require me to get overly scientific A little too much sugar in the dough can cause cookies to flatten, caramelize or end up burned. Setting an oven to the wrong temperature – or failing to preheat – can produce bread or cakes that are unevenly cooked.

Roger Kimball

Revisiting the Devin Nunes winery

Anyone who writes about wine for a while finds himself coming back to old friends as the years go by. This wine here was actually fuller and more sumptuous in that vintage five years ago, while that wine over there really came into its own in the most recently released vintage. Just as with people, some wines with early promise somehow go astray and never amount to much, while others that were disorganized and introverted when young suddenly blossom and turn outward as they age, the magic sunflowers of viticulture. Most writers about wine will have similar stories. It’s a bit rarer for most of us, however, to get in on the ground floor and stand by while a new vineyard, fawn-like, is born, manages to stand up on its own and then goes trotting off.

Jane Stannus

There’s more to pumpkins than you might think

There’s a famously untranslatable expression in Virgil’s Aeneid: lacrimae rerum. Latin scholars, always fond of threshing things out, have devoted reams of analysis to proving just how untranslatable it is. As is typical of academics, however, they go to lots of trouble to establish its utter untranslatability – and then turn around and translate it anyway. When pumpkins aren’t being cozy, they generally denote a sense of emptiness or artifice Word for word, lacrimae rerum means “The tears of things” (or, depending on your school of thought, “The tears for things.”) But each scholar has his slant on the sadness.

Food & Drink