Food and Drink Archives

Thursday

May 26, 2022

Let’s hear it for horiatiki

Time to send your kitchen knives out for sharpening. The hot weather is coming, and you know what that means: Greek salad, or horiatiki as the Greeks call it. Is there any pleasure in life quite like dicing tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers with a knife that balances properly in the palm, whose blade possesses just the right steely flex and strength, and — above all — that is properly sharpened? With the right edged tool, it is hard to stop cutting things up for Greek salad. With the right ingredients, it is hard to stop eating it. This is why Greek salad is the perfect dish to make for a dinner party. As your friends buzz about the kitchen, drinks in hand, you can chop away on autopilot, chatting merrily as your cutting board fills with heaped tomato chunks.

Calla Jones Corner

Swimming with the snakes

Perhaps being a Pisces gives me a natural affinity for water. Not all water, mind you. I’ve never liked to swim where I can’t see what’s beneath me. I prefer to believe that my love of water comes from spending so many early summers in our swimming hole in Weston, Connecticut. When my father was making a barn into our house and the surrounding fields into gardens, lawns and terraces, using boulders and rocks from the notoriously rocky Connecticut soil for foundations and borders, he was intentionally creating an unusual home. When he used more rocks to make a swimming hole for dipping his sweaty body, he unintentionally created a watery playground for the family — a summer haven.

Roger Kimball

The learned drinkers

Some of my readers may be unfamiliar with Athenaeus of Naucratis, a shadowy Egyptian-born Greek who floruit somewhere in the Roman Empire during the reigns of Marcus Aurelius, Commodus and Septimius Severus, i.e., around 200 AD. Athenaeus was a rhetorician, grammarian and epicure. But he is known to posterity primarily as the author of The Learned Banqueters (Δειπνοσοφισταὶ), a sprawling, miscellaneous work that touches on, well, just about everything: food, philosophy, fermentation, fabulation and many other subjects, not all of which begin with the phoneme “f.” Henry James called the three-volume Victorian novel a “loose baggy monster.” None was so loose or so baggy as Athenaeus’ compendium. There is a bit of Petronius’s Satyricon (c.

Monday

April 18, 2022

Calla Jones Corner

The assorted joys of nasturtiums

It’s still amazing to me how Instagram photos can bring such unexpected responses. And instantly! It happily happened to me last May and my creative juices — green, yellow, orange — started flowing. I had just posted a photo of the nasturtium pesto I’d made from the flowers and leaves in a nod to the exigencies of Covid-19: self-quarantining, fear of food shopping and the constant barrage of advice for oldies like me to not mix or mingle. I was going to forage for food, fool about with flavor and fun. Within minutes, Caroline, the flower girl at my Swiss wedding fifty years ago, commented, “Do you remember that you and Maman would take me foraging in the meadows above Lausanne for wild nasturtiums for salads?

Timothy Jacobson

In praise of the country store

In our age of branded everything, I suppose it should not surprise that the country store, that artifact of an older rural landscape, should have gotten the treatment too. Play the word-association game with Americans today and for “country store” you’re likely to get “Cracker Barrel™,” the publicly traded chain of folksy restaurants/retail emporia strung along the interstate system and specializing in a long menu of so-called comfort food, clean restrooms and rockers on the porch. Do not be deceived. Lunch at Mosley’s Store in Pintlala, Alabama, sixteen miles south of Montgomery on US Route 31, the old Mobile Road, bespeaks a different reality. It has to do with food, tangentially.

Roger Kimball

Bargain Brazilian wines

Some people think that wine is a serious business. I am often tempted to think that myself, but then I remember an amusing cartoon by James Thurber called “The Wine Snobs.” It shows four people sitting around the dinner table, each holding up a glass of wine. There is an air of resigned dubiousness emanating from the table as whole. But the W.S. himself sports a big smile and says enthusiastically “It’s a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.” Been there, done that. We’ve tasted some pretty fancy wines together in this column, and I hope there will be plenty more to come. At the end of the day, though, wine for most of us is chiefly about pleasure and camaraderie, not connoisseurship.

Thursday

March 24, 2022

Tanya Gold

The real food of Venice

A few years ago, I moved to Newlyn, a fishing village in west Cornwall. I didn’t understand why I moved to Newlyn until I returned to Venice. I take almost all my holidays in Venice, and it is a cliché that Venice only slowly reveals her mysteries. You must fight your way past a mass of Renaissance portraiture and mirrored palaces but the mystery it showed me this time is this: like Newlyn, Venice is a fishing village. Venice got rich in the thirteenth century, monopolized the trade routes to the east for two centuries and covered itself in Istrian stone, which Newlyn didn’t. But it’s still a fishing village, founded by people running away from barbarians, into the mud flats of a lagoon to fish for crabs. It is easy to forget that — unless you look for Venetian cuisine.

Calla Jones Corner

Table talk

I grew up in rural Connecticut, in a remodeled cow barn where my family sat at an antique hutch table for meals. The table with four comfortable Windsor chairs fit into a niche. My sister Christina and I weren’t allowed to join my parents for dinner at the table until we could hold a conversation. For me, that was at five. The rule came from my father, as that was how he’d been brought up. Once, when we were in our early teens, I whispered to Christina, “It’s King Arthur’s round table” — our father’s middle name was Arthur. I must have learned some British history and was probably showing off. My firm but gracious father wasn’t a king.

Jane Stannus

Spring’s perfect roast

When I first moved to the country, I was intrigued by the sight of people walking sheep on a leash round and round the front garden of a neighboring farmer. City girl that I am, I wondered if they were receiving some kind of special therapy. Equine interaction is supposed to help with certain anxiety disorders, why not sheep-walking for, say, insomnia? It turned out, however, that the sheep-walkers were members of the local 4-H club preparing to show their market lambs at the fair, an event I was later privileged to witness. But I was put to the blush when the judge, a tall, competent-looking man in a checked shirt and green boots, commented loudly on the fine chops displayed by the winning entrant.

Roger Kimball

Tastes of paradise

What’s in a name? Sometimes, quite a lot, especially when seen through the benign lens of sentiment. By the time you read this, April, which is not the “cruellest month,” will be upon us and the morning mercury will be edging upward, coaxing forth the crocuses and daffodils. But in the last several days, dawn has come to where I live in Connecticut accompanied by temperatures in the teens and twenties. March has entered clad in its traditional lion’s mane. I feel especially grateful, therefore, that duty called me and a handful of colleagues to Palm Beach, just as February gave way to March, on behalf of the New Criterion, the magazine I edit, and Encounter Books, the other phalanx in my campaign for world conquest.

Sunday

February 20, 2022

Calla Jones Corner

Be my Valentine

I don’t know when my father showed André Fleuridas, a friend, the chunk of jade he’d brought back from Burma, where my father was based as a war correspondent during World War Two. Nor do I know how my parents’ friendship with Bonnie and André Fleuridas began. I can only guess. It might have been through art, as both my father and André were artists, and in Weston, Connecticut, where I grew up, artists occasionally gathered in each other’s studios to draw or paint from live models. Or they might have met at the Weston firehouse where artists, writers, musicians, actors and TV news anchors made up, along with farmers, Weston’s all-volunteer fire brigade.

Timothy Jacobson

Welcome to Waffle House

"Snack bar,” “coffee shop” and such phrases once signified small eateries where customers sat on stools at a counter or in simple booths. Their orders were taken and served by waitresses in white aprons, and prepared by a short-order cook in a white paper cap. Hotel lobbies, railroad-station waiting rooms and airports all had them: private enterprises in public spaces purveying a cup of coffee and a donut, bacon and eggs, ham and cheese on rye, a hot dog, a hamburger, maybe a milkshake or an ice cream sundae. Little of this (for most were mom-and-pops) traveled well into the age of industrialized, assembly-line, eat-on-the-go feeding signified by the phrase “fast food.

James Panero

The pan handler

I have become a pan handler — a handler of cast-iron pans. I can think of few hobbies that are as rewarding as collecting and cooking on cast iron. Skillets, griddles, muffin tins, Dutch ovens, waffle irons, corn-stick pans and much else: there was a time when America produced the finest cast-iron cookware in the world. The iron ore was abundant. So was the coal to melt it. Foundries went up across this great land. American cuisine developed around it. From fried chicken to cornbread, the American menu should still be cooked on cast iron. Southern cooks never forgot this. The same goes for soul food; black America has always prized its cast-iron inheritance. Now I find I have little need to cook on anything else.

Roger Kimball

The heady reds of Avignon

To you and me, “Châteauneuf-du-Pape” means the bold, dark, spicy red wine from the Rhône region of southeastern France, a bit north of the town of Avignon, with bottles usually featuring a glass-embossed representation of the keys of St. Peter. If you were Jacques Duèze, known to history as Pope John XXII, second and longest reigning (1316-34) of the Avignon popes, Châteauneuf-du-Pape meant first of all that “new castle of the pope” he built on the hill overlooking the town. After the popes left, it fell into desuetude and was raided for stone by local builders. During the Revolution, all the buildings except the great tower or donjon were sold off. During World War Two, the Germans attempted to dynamite the structure but succeeded in destroying only the northern half.

Monday

January 24, 2022

Jane Stannus

A load of old crêpes

Eat crêpes on Candlemas, enjoy a year of happiness, says a traditional French-Canadian proverb. Happiness isn’t as easy as eating crêpes on February 2, the cynics will sneer — but then, the cynics haven’t tried dark chocolate crêpe cake filled with hazelnut cream and garnished with golden spikes of candied hazelnut as per Martha Stewart’s show-stopping recipe, have they? Of course they haven’t. Cynics don’t like sweets. But if you can trap a couple (good choices for bait include arugula, dandelion greens and Allen’s double-strength cleaning vinegar) and force-feed them chocolate crêpe cake, you’ll see the cynicism melting away like snow in April.

Philip Hensher

Marmite man

Marmite is one of very few manufactured foods to have become an idiom. British people think of the black stuff as a national idiosyncrasy, entirely unknown to horrified foreigners: there are many videos on YouTube in which outsiders have Marmite inflicted on them for the first time. In fact, there are a large number of pastes based on yeast extract in different countries, each with its passionate devotees. British Marmite may have been the first to go into production, but it did not stay unique for long. A German chemist, Justus von Liebig, influential in the propagation of meat essences, discovered that yeast could be concentrated.

Mary Kate Skehan

The millennial kitchen

However else we may criticize the late 90s and early 00s — its politics, its fashion, its music — this was undeniably the golden age of the celebrity chef. Barefoot Contessa, 30-Minute Meals and The Iron Chef franchises all debuted in the first decade of this millennium, minting stars like Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri and Nigella Lawson. I once found a collection of my brothers salivating over Giada de Laurentiis making meatballs on Everyday Italian, though they’d never demonstrated more interest in cooking than microwaving the odd Hot Pocket. The mid-aughts brought on the glory years of the “hands and pans” videos: the aerial-view clips of disembodied hands assembling cheeseburger pretzel balls or eighteen-layer taco dip.

Roger Kimball

Delicious wines from the Omicron Open

Some people think that it is the job of a wine critic to discover great bargains in the world of bottles and impart the news in hushed but excited tones to the madding crowds. Maybe that’s part of the remit. I incline, however, to this piece of wisdom from George Saintsbury, prosodist to the stars and incomparable, if quirky, cicerone to the fructum vitis et operis manuum hominum, which is to say: wine. “There is no money,” Saintsbury wrote, of the expenditure of which I am less ashamed, or which has given me better value in return, than the price of the liquids chronicled in Notes on a Cellar-Book. When they were good they pleased my senses, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people.

Monday

January 3, 2022

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).

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.