Food and Drink

Spring is the traditional season of rebirth and renewal. However my spirits are revived, not by budding flowers, but by flashes of yellow and red leaves and the touch of chill in the air that signals the arrival of fall. Fall, of course, means the return of college football – and that means the return of football tailgating. In recent years, I’ve found myself growing less interested in what transpires on the field or the final numbers on the scoreboard. What really matters are the essential pregame rituals, for that’s where the real victories are won. Peak tailgate season arrives in October, when the afternoons are still warm but it’s cool in the morning when you arrive at the lot and start erecting pop-canopies and setting out coolers and folding chairs.

In the late 18th century, scurvy was killing around 50 percent of British mariners on long-haul journeys – more than shipwrecks, battles and all other diseases combined. Between 1500 and 1800, the illness had claimed roughly two million sailors’ lives. On the disastrous 1740 expedition around Cape Horn led by Commodore George Anson, of the 1,854 men who departed, only 188 returned. The vast majority had died from scurvy. By the mid-18th century, the Royal Navy was desperate for a remedy. They noticed that, contrary to their struggles, the Dutch were losing hardly any men to the illness.

In the last installment of these cheery chronicles, I had occasion to mention aligoté, the second most widely planted white grape in Burgundy. I say “second most,” but it is a distant second. Only about 6 percent of Bourgogne is planted with that ancient grape, a crossing of pinot noir and gouais blanc, a nearly extinct varietal known as the “Casanova of Grapes” because it is a parent of scores of grape varieties. Until fairly recently, aligoté was second in another sense as well. It seldom ripened fully by harvest time and the resulting wine, though taut and full of mineral notes, tended to be a bit astringent. It’s usual fate was as the muscle behind the cocktail kir, the elegance being supplied by crème de cassis. Two things changed that: nature and nurture.

Oh my word. Will August never end? February is the shortest month and August is by far the longest, a full 17 days longer than any other. At least it feels that way. Nothing happens in August. The month has no holidays, since there’s nothing to celebrate. The business world grinds to a halt amid last-chance beach vacations and general summertime torpor. Emails go unanswered. Meetings are canceled for lack of attendees. Those who do make it into the office arrive late and duck out early, since no one’s around to notice. It’s not just in offices, either. Civic groups and charitable organizations avoid staging events during this cruelest of months, knowing attendance will be poor. Even the world of barbecue largely comes to a standstill.

Geoffrey Madan (1895-1947) was an English aesthete of the first water. Although he fought and was wounded in the Great War, his main passions were quiet: wine, old silver, and books, especially books. Madan was an accomplished classicist – he procured a schoolwide holiday while at Eton for his account of the establishment written in Herodotean Greek. He published no books. He did compile a large collection of aphorisms, mostly in English but many in other languages. A selection of these were published in 1981 by Oxford under the title Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks. In one of the handful of entries Madan himself contributed to this chrestomathy, he described the collection as “an anthology of the forgotten sayings of great men, and the great sayings of forgotten men.

The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, never knew of Anthony Bourdain, I’d guess, but he understood his type well. Bourdain, who died in 2018, was an oversocialized leftist. A man who, to avoid a deep sense of guilt and worthlessness, overidentified with the system and presented conformity with its values as a kind of rebellion. That might sound complicated, but it’s really not. “Generally speaking,” Kaczynski once wrote, “the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle.

As someone born and raised in the American South, I’ve never understood why people consider barbecue a summertime food. If you do it right, barbecue is cooked outdoors over a wood fire. It’s frequently eaten outdoors, too, whether at a friend’s backyard gathering or at barbecue joints with picnic tables outside. Barbecue isn’t exactly the lightest food, with all the well-marbled brisket and thick slabs of ribs – not to mention hearty sides such as mac ’n’ cheese. Just thinking about eating a big barbecue platter on an August afternoon makes me want to lie down in a cool room to nap. Still, in the minds of magazine editors and television producers, at least, “barbecue season” starts with Memorial Day and runs through Labor Day.

I have always wondered whether The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton’s piscine classic, would have enjoyed its wide and longstanding recognition absent the antique spelling “compleat.” I somehow suspect that a book titled The Complete Angler would not have made the same impression, especially on modern readers. First published in 1653, the book went through many editions in Walton’s life and after. It is a charming, leisurely guide, “not unworthy,” as its original title page observed, “the peruſal of moſt Anglers.” (Those long “s”es add a little something, don’t you agree?) It is said that Walton, a staunch anti-Cromwellian, good fellow, was particularly fond of the saying “Study to be quiet.

There’s something special about raising a glass with people you’ve built history with. For us, Dos Hombres has always been about friendship, craftsmanship and creating moments that bring people together. As America turns 250, we’ll be toasting to the freedom to build something of your own, the people who’ve been with you from the beginning and the simple joy of slowing down long enough to appreciate it all. Ingredients for one serving 1 oz Dos Hombres Blanco Tequila 60ml cranberry juice 1 oz Cranberry Juice (sweetened) 1/2 oz Aperol 1/2 oz Fresh Lime Juice Add all the ingredients into a mixing pitcher with ice. Shake well and strain into a large rocks glass rimmed with salt and chili powder.

If you’ve ever lived in Marseille – where the habit of exaggeration is imbibed with mothers’ milk – you’ve heard about the sardine that blocked the port. But that’s nothing compared to the pistachio that took over the world. In late 2023, Dubai chocolate, a new kind of chocolate bar filled with pistachio cream, tahini and crunchy, toasted phyllo pastry, went viral. Chocolate brands, bakeries and purveyors of fine foods were quick to jump on the trend. Coffee chains began offering pistachio chocolate drinks (iced Dubai-chocolate matcha, anyone?) and delectable pistachio bomboloni – soft donuts filled with pistachio cream – came back on the menu in Italian restaurants.

Some years ago, I edited and provided an introduction and notes for an edition of Walter Bagehot’s book Physics and Politics (1872). The book has nothing to do with physics in the modern sense of the word (though an argument could be made that it does bear on the original meaning of the Greek word physis, nature. Rather, its elaborate subtitle sheds light on the book’s content: “Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of ‘Natural Selection’ and ‘Inheritance’ to Political Society.” Bagehot was writing a scant dozen years after the publication of On the Origin of Species.