The Great Reset | The Spectator

Making a raclette

Cheese, potatoes, sausage and bacon for dinner? Let’s just throw in bread and heavy cream for the sake of it. Sounds like a recipe for a heart attack or stroke? Why do the Swiss and French then double up — or even triple up — on these carbs and calories when cold weather comes? The answer is easy and old; the combos are delicious, divine and de rigueur, filling the body’s need for cozy food and energy to shovel snow and ski. The French and Swiss still argue about which country invented raclette.

Roger Kimball

Travels with Herodotus

I am part of an informal reading group with a few friends and colleagues. At the moment, we are reading Herodotus’s Histories (or “Inquiries,” as he might have said had he been writing in English). It’s lots of fun, in part because it is also an excuse to conduct a little wine appreciation class, but also because that old denizen of Halicarnassus — Herodotus lived from around 484 to 425 bc — was possessed of such high-octane and companionable curiosity about the world: what happened when and to whom and with what result. He wanted to know; moreover, he wanted you to know. Herodotus is most famously a major source of our knowledge of the Persian Wars and such signal moments as the Battle of Marathon (490 bc), Thermopylae (480) and Salamis (also 480).

Ben Sixsmith

Tastings from an energy drink connoisseur

A common avenue for conservative commentators seeking an escape from politics is wine criticism. One thinks of Roger Scruton, Kingsley Amis, Roger Kimball and other such sophisticated, cultured men for whom even refreshment is a serious business. Millions of words have been spilled on wine criticism, though, and in the service of a drink a normal man only enjoys when he has finished work and has no need to drive. Who speaks for, say, the chilled caffeinated drink? “Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world,” said Hemingway. The same could not be said of energy drinks, perhaps, but then the same could not have been said of Hemingway. Our moveable feast is a varied one, and each element deserves attention.

Jane Stannus

How to survive eating out

Tennis — as the New England poet Robert Frost remarked in defense of formal verse — is more fun with a net. Creativity does indeed flourish within constraints. Soviet censorship brought about samizdat. Prohibition brought about bathtub gin and any number of fabulous cocktails designed to mask its unsubtle notes of paint thinner. The greatest human spirits would view the new era of show-your-papers dining not as a hardship, but as an opportunity. In our brave new world, some don’t mind handing over papers in exchange for a mess of restaurant-prepped pottage. And yet there are ancien régime sticklers for propriety who think that the use of QR codes to gain access to food indoors is not quite comme il faut (if you’ll pardon their French).

Food & Drink