Food and Drink Archives

Wednesday

September 13, 2023

Champagne and America is a love story without end

From the beginning, Champagne has never been just a drink, or a region: it’s a celebration, an occasion, a trophy, a reward; a symbol of joyful decadence and glamorous debauchery; the overflowing drink of the American Dream. In short, it’s a boozy cheat sheet for the zeitgeist and the anxieties and dreams of the people who sip it. And, for the past seventy-five years or so, that zeitgeist has been driven by the United States. “American culture pervades everything,” says Christian Holthausen, a dual French-American citizen and founder of the Paris-based Champagne consulting firm Westbrook Marketing Partners. “Driving through Paris just now, I saw a Coca-Cola machine on one street, and a billboard for Apple on the next.

Mary Kate Skehan

The best cooking podcasts

There comes a time in every home cook’s life when she is separated from her craft. This may be due to illness, incapacity, repairs, renovations or, worstof all, moving house. This month, I moved from Texas to Pennsylvania. Between packing up my utensils and appliances, waiting for the moving truck to make its halting way across the nation, and finally unpacking and reorganizing my tools, I lost my kitchen for four weeks. But benched cooks like mehave a surprisingly satisfying alternative: cooking podcasts. The first podcast I tried is most similar to traditional cooking shows: Food 52’s Play Me a Recipe. Chefs and cookbook authors host episodes in which they introduce a favorite recipe and talk through its ingredients and method, encouraging listeners to pause and rewind as needed.

Roger Kimball

Why dry Sauternes are the next big thing

It is my sense that the popularity of sweet wines like Sauternes, Port, Tokaji and all the German Auslese wines is on the upswing. I am here to tell you about the Next Big Thing: dry Sauternes. Yes, that’s right: dry Sauternes. The supersnazzy, superexpensive Château d’Yquem is the only Sauternes to boast the designation “Premier Cru Supérieur” from the 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines. That exclusive label — along with the probably apocryphal but oft-repeated story that Michel de Montaigne, born Michel Eyquem, had something to do with the property — helps account for its astronomical price. But Yquem has been making a blanc sec since 1959.

Friday

August 18, 2023

Mary Kate Skehan

Girlbossing with the Ambitious Kitchen

I occasionally come across a social media account — usually run by a conservative male — claiming to great fanfare that young women these days don’t know how to cook. They’ve been too busy girlbossing to learn. In my experience, this is wrong. The ambitious women I know are ambitious in every part of their lives. They get the promotion while moving up the Peloton leaderboard, planning their dream wedding and creating flavorful, photogenic meals that Betty Crocker hadn’t dreamed of. For these women, there’s the Ambitious Kitchen. The Ambitious Kitchen was created in 2011 by a Chicago woman named Monique Volz. It has since amassed more than 700,000 followers on Instagram and a cookbook deal for 2024.

Eric Hanson

You seriously expect me to pick one favorite bar?

I was born in Wisconsin and I’ve learned a curious thing traversing it. There appears to be a state law requiring at least one bar at every intersection of its rural roads. I’ve noticed this most often driving at night: there’ll be a neon sign advertising Old Style or Leinenkugel’s hung in the front window of what looks like a farmhouse living room, and several cars nestled up against the house like sucking pigs. There is something homey about a rural bar. The knotty pine, the “first dollar” framed above the cash register, neighbors ironing out local prejudices and asserting the superiority of the Packers despite any evidence — if anyone’s brave enough to produce some.

Raj Tawney

Flour power: a single ingredient can be life-changing

Growing up in a “mixed” American household, of Indian, Puerto Rican and Italian descent, was deeply confusing during my formative years. I came of age in a mostly white suburb just outside New York City. In addition to my foreign-sounding name, I looked nothing like any of my classmates or the kids around the neighborhood. My olive skin, bushy eyebrows and curly hair were more reminiscent of children you’d find in the more ethnically diverse neighborhoods of Queens or the Bronx. My family spent most of our weekends visiting family and doing our grocery shopping in such areas. The array of ingredients that my Puerto Rican and Italian-American mother, Loretta, was searching for didn’t exist in our local Pathmark.

Roger Kimball

It’s always Chablis weather

It is very hot here in New England at the end of July. It was hot a week or two ago in old England, too. I arrived in London via the Eurostar after a week clambering over rotting German gun emplacements and gazing out at the D-Day beaches in Normandy. Sobering. In London, I had taken a small house in a quiet mews in Kensington. After a quick shower, my first act was to nip down to the local Oddbins and collar a couple of bottles of the 2022 Maison Dousset Chablis. It is about £20 (you can get it in the States for around $20-$25), and it was the perfect entry wine. Chilled, it was tartish, citrusy, refreshing: a confident but undemanding tipple.

Monday

July 17, 2023

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Camari Mick is making pastry, not solving crimes

"I was really fascinated with the process, the science behind everything,” recalls Camari Mick, the now twenty-nine-year-old star pastry chef, who studied anatomy in high school. “I love true crime: I was very into Snapped and crime junkie podcasts.” When she approached her parents, however, they asked her to reconsider. “My dad looked at my mom, looked at me, looked back at my mom and looked at me, and said: ‘Are you sure?’” At the time, Mick was running a mini-business from home, making baked goods to sell to friends, teachers and neighbors. “You’re doing really well, you clearly love being an entrepreneur, why don’t you go into this avenue?” her father asked her. His advice paid off.

Peter and Timothy Jacobson

Road-trip picnics are a casualty of our interstate system

Signs announcing roadside picnic tables once peppered America’s secondary roads and highways. Or so we call those byways now. Before the limited-access interstate system arrived in the 1960s, these roads were primary. America then was laced with a tangle of serviceable two-lane, hard-surfaced highways. Look at an old oil-company roadmap, if you can find one, to get the idea. Some roads were federal, some state, but all were emphatically open-access: get on anywhere, pull over wherever you like. They led through cities and towns, not around them; they traversed the countryside more than they cut through it. They required two-hands-on-the-wheel alertness in drivers, who got to know and respect the lay of the landscape.

Mary Kate Skehan

The comfort of drinking at the Hound

In the historic downtown of York, Pennsylvania, near the courthouse where the Articles of Confederation were drafted and a farmers’ market built in the days of horse-drawn carts, you’ll find a curious building called the National House. Constructed in 1828 as a hotel, its porches and airy galleries recall antebellum New Orleans. In its days as a hotel, it hosted guests like Mark Twain and Martin van Buren. Now it’s the home of my favorite bar. The Hound opened in 2012, in the early days of the craft beer boom. Its thirty rotating taps offer seasonal brews from local favorites like Tröegs and Victory, mixed in with ten-ounce pours of funky sour wheat goses or boozy imperial stouts.

Louise Gray

The rise of avocado anxiety

When the gastronomes of the future come to choose the food that best represents our age, they will choose the avocado. The ubiquitous fruit is everywhere: in smoothies, on toast, served at breakfast, lunch and dinner, on t-shirts and all over social media. It represents our ingenuity in supplying exotic fruit to every corner of the globe all year round, our obsession with “clean” eating, our aspiration to eat brunch and our love of anything that — even passingly — tastes a little bit like butter. But it also represents our greed, our hypocrisy, our vanity and our overwhelming anxiety.

Mary Kate Skehan

Cooking with a country music star

A few years ago, I came across a delightful bit of Americana in Hobart Book Village in the Catskills: Naomi’s Home Companion, a 1997 cookbook/ scrapbook from Naomi Judd, the late matriarch of the famous country music family. Because I’m not a country listener and I don’t eat a lot of meatloaf, I didn’t buy the book, its kitsch appeal notwithstanding. Nineties fashion may be back, but its nutritional standards are permanently out of style. Right? I thought of that old Naomi Judd book when a new cookbook landed on the New York Times bestseller list: Y’all Eat Yet? Welcome to the Pretty B*tchin’ Kitchen by country music star Miranda Lambert. The book purports to share recipes from Lambert’s downhome roots and humble upbringing in East Texas.

Roger Kimball

David Bruce, a doctor in the vines

Every good vintner deserves a good origin story. David Bruce, the founder of the eponymous winery in the Santa Cruz hills, has one of the best. When he was at medical school at Stanford in the 1950s, he chanced upon Alexis Lichine’s classic book The Wines of France. Lichine said some fancy and evocative things about the great wines of Richebourg in Burgundy. Bruce padded down to a wine shop in San Francisco and collared a bottle of 1954 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Richebourg. “The minute I opened this bottle of wine,” he recalled, “the whole room was pervaded by this floral, spicy aroma.” Here’s the kicker: “I remember thinking, I guess you get what you pay for.” Oh yeah? He paid $7.50 for the bottle.

Sunday

June 18, 2023

Nicholas Clairmont

Where to drink in Miami

Ask anybody who’s really been in a band what being a musician is like, and they won’t tell you about the moments that make it into the Hollywood biopics. To them, the experience is not the hero-shot onstage, or the girls they picked up after a killer set, or anything you saw in Ray or Bohemian Rhapsody. The reality of being in a band is of driving from place to place. Think of Bob Seger’s baleful “Turn the Page” with its opening lyric setting the place: “On a long and lonesome highway, east of Omaha,” where he’s “ridin’ sixteen hours and there’s nothin’ there to do.” This raises an issue of where to drink in Miami.

James Jeffrey

A dispatch from the olive oil capital of the world

It was an extraordinary sight. For three days, and about seventy kilometers of hiking, there were just endless olive trees covering the fields, hills and mountains stretching to the horizon of the small Spanish province of Jaén. Tucked away in the southern region of Andalusia, this is the country’s powerhouse of olive-oil production. Many people assume Italy or Greece are the largest producers of olive oil. That’s a result of good branding and name recognition, a Jaén-based olive grower told me. After he pulled up alongside me in his dusty car, we walked through the endless olive groves as I was given a tutorial on olive oil production. Spain is the world’s top producer of olive oil.

Roger Kimball

A drinker’s diary

It is a crisp, beautiful spring day as I write. The air is light and clear. The skies are a color I have always thought of as Virgin Mary blue, punctuated here and there by attractively arranged puffs of clouds at their whitest and least threatening. The greens of the verdure are at their most flashing and emerald-like. That freshness will be enveloped by summer fullness by the time you read this, a contingency that makes me conclude that something like an abbreviated wine-diary — some of what Kimball drank during the month of May — might appeal to the connoisseurs and aficionados of the column. Let’s start at the tip-top.

Sunday

May 21, 2023

Madeleine Kearns

Italian cooking lessons in the home of a Venetian chef

My mother advised that I get a plain wedding ring. Diamonds, she said, interfere with a woman’s ability to knead dough. “But I don’t knead dough,” I protested. “You will when you’re married.” I guffawed. And yet there I was, four days into my marriage, in an Albanian chef’s Venetian home, being told in no uncertain terms that while my husband Nick could keep his ring on, mine would need to come off. We had arrived in Giudecca, an island in the Venetian lagoon, by water bus, having spent the day in Padova. There, we’d visited the Basilica di Sant’Antonio, home to first-class relics of the great saint — bones, lower jaw, incorrupt tongue and cartilage from his larynx.

Jane Stannus

The charm of Toronto’s Park Hyatt Writer’s Room

Foie gras doughnuts, check. Rooftop location, check. Framed collection of fountain-pen nibs on the wall, check. Where should a scribbler with aspirations to the higher life turn his feet in Toronto, if not to the Park Hyatt Writer’s Room? At seventeenth-story level, the higher life seems within easy reach. The Writer’s Room is the renovated and rechristened edition of the historic Rooftop Lounge, a famous hotel bar that first opened its doors to the public in the Thirties. Before the renovations, it boasted Toronto’s longest-serving bartender, Joe Gomes, who worked there for fifty-seven years. His fondest memory, he said on retirement, was meeting John Wayne. Everybody who’s anybody seems to have popped by for a drink at some point: Leonard Cohen, Brangelina, Hunter S.

Timothy Jacobson

A parting salute to the swizzle stick

We live in the age of takeaway-everything, a phenomenon amplified since the late, great plague by another barbarism: the drive-thru. You need no longer even get off your derrière to collect the goods. Just lower the power window, flash your phone, then “grab-and-go.” That this is a powerful cultural proposition the conga-line of cars filling multiple lanes at your local Chick-fil-A, where they have it down to a science, will attest. I recall my first innocent meeting with drive-thru, then called drive-in, in 1959 when a bank in the small town where my family lived cut a hole in the wall and installed the requisite sliding drawer. Things have clearly gotten out of hand since. Not all takeaway is created equal.

Mary Kate Skehan

How to become a ‘salad freak’

Imagine a summer morning in Southern California. You rise with the sun in a palm-shaded bungalow and stroll to a nearby farmers market, where the tables spill over with heirloom tomatoes, sweet corn and cartons of juicy strawberries. Your canvas tote filled with the season’s bounty, you return to your sun-dappled kitchen to prepare a farm-to-table feast for all your friends while listening to your favorite vintage records. Sigh. This is the dreamy lifestyle purveyed by Salad Freak: Recipes to Feed a Healthy Obsession by Jess Damuck (Abrams, 2022). I’ve always aspired to be the kind of woman who can “just toss something together,” making a light, fresh, delicious dish with ease, rather than worrying that something will catch fire if I leave my post by the stove.