Migrant mania | The Spectator

A culinary tour of southern France and northern Spain

If I’d known what a whole monkfish looks like, I would never have ordered it. It was only weeks later that I saw a picture of the horrid creature: small, wicked eyes, prehistoric head, skin like rusty medieval armor and a gaping mouth overflowing with jagged teeth. Truly the stuff of nightmares. We’d popped over the border from France into San Sebastián, Spain, for a bite of dinner, selecting a spot a stone’s throw from the Baroque exuberance of Santa Maria del Coro. The daily special was monkfish, and for some reason — perhaps an excess of sun that day — the image that came to mind was, inaccurately, that of the innocent red mullet. The daily special in a fishing town is bound to be fresh, so it seemed fair to give it a try.

Roger Kimball

New wines from Devin Nunes

What’s the next big thing in California wine? Everyone knows about the great Cabernets and Chardonnays of Napa. Most people would say that Sonoma is a close runner-up, with some excellent Cabs and Chards and Pinot Noirs, especially in the Russian River Valley. There are Zinfandels, the original plus-size wine, which is the sort of thing people like who like that sort of thing. But let’s travel south to the Central Coast, between San Francisco and Los Angeles. There is plenty of good (if not great) Cabernet and Chardonnay there as well. But the region is perhaps best known for Rhone-style, Syrah-favoring wines. Get ready for something new: some luscious red wines built largely around Touriga Nacional and Tinta Cão, two of the grapes used to make Port in the Douro region of Portugal.

Mary Kate Skehan

A one-pan, one-pot Thanksgiving

Our first Thanksgiving together, my now-husband, then-medical-resident-boyfriend worked a shift during the family feast. I made it up to him with Melissa Clark’s one-pan, one-pot Thanksgiving for two. The recipe went off flawlessly and made the constraints of my tiny apartment kitchen feel more like a game-show challenge than a life-or-death struggle. Clark’s 2022 cookbook Dinner in One makes the same promise about 100 different meals. The game-show, can-it-be-done? energy made the Thanksgiving method fun, but could feel tedious on a Tuesday night. Is “one-pot” a theme or a gimmick? Does this constraint serve the cook and the recipe, or is it arbitrary, artificial and unnecessarily limiting?

Jonny Kaldor

The understated perfection of Long Island Bar

I had never given Brooklyn much thought beyond the odd walk over the bridge and down into Dumbo, outmaneuvering the hordes of Instagrammers trying to get that perfect shot of themselves on the cobblestone streets with Manhattan Bridge in the background, perfectly framing the Empire State Building between its nervous legs. What with the tourists and the hipsters it never quite felt like my sort of place, so I happily stayed on the wrong side of the bridge, ignorant of the treasures that were hiding from me. That all changed on a chilly November evening a couple of years ago when my friend Zack invited me to meet up for drinks at his local, The Long Island Bar, nestled neatly between Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill.

Timothy Jacobson

In praise of corn, a Thanksgiving essential

The Indians, as we innocently called them in the days of my youth, put their name to it: “Indian Corn.” Somehow, “Native American” or “First Peoples Corn” just doesn’t do it, so here let us observe this now-verboten usage. Technically, Indian Corn (known as calico or dent corn too, for its coloration and dents in the kernels) is one variety of maize, first cultivated, they say, in Mexico thousands of years ago. Columbus, who called the natives “Indians” because he was looking for India, brought back seeds to Europe in the 1490s; they did not take. The Plymouth colonists in the 1620s, from whose early travails the American feast of Thanksgiving emerged, grew Indian corn courtesy of the local Wampanoag tribe. It no doubt helped them survive when the English peas ran out.

Food & Drink