Food and Drink

Before he was a celebrated travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor (who died in 2011 at 96) was a celebrated special operations soldier. In February 1944 he commanded a raid to kidnap General Heinrich Kreipe, the newly installed German commander of Crete, and take him to Egypt. Leigh Fermor, his fellow officer William Stanley Moss and three members of the Cretan resistance commandeered the general in his car and made a daring trek across the island pursued by the German occupiers. They spent one chilly night on the slopes of Mount Ida.

‘They must be fruit as they’re next to the pomegranates,’ thought I. Then I read the sign: persimmons. Perplexed by persimmons, I asked a Persian friend here in Montecito, California if she knew about them. ‘My grandmother had trees full of them in the fall,’ she told me, waxing lyrical about their sweet, juicy meat covered by a waxy but edible skin. ‘I used to pick them up from the ground and eat them like apples. They always seemed to be smiling at me.’ Her grandmother made jam from them. She told me I’d bought the fuju variety (the hachiya being astringent and less available in Central California).

Take your time. Measure twice. Finish what you start. How will you have time to do it again if you don’t take time to do it right the first time? Work hard at work, then come home. Loosen your tie and relax. Make a highball or mix a cocktail for your wife and yourself. Share the end of the day. We are brothers and we write here of a drink and the man who taught it to us, our father. Teaching us how to make it, he also taught us something of how to live. He was a chemical engineer, and so the formula was important. The drink was the Old Fashioned (or Old Fashion; it doesn’t matter), and this is how he made it.

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday, and not only because it offers an excuse to dine lavishly among friends. It also provides an occasion to live up to its name and give ourselves the pleasure of correcting Aristotle. Man, the old Greek said in a distracted moment, is the rational animal, ζῶον λόγον ἔχον. Clearly, what he meant to say is that man is the ungrateful animal, ζῶον αχαριστίαν ἔχον. Since Thanksgiving is all about enumerating one’s blessings, it is one of those rare opportunities in which everyone’s favorite pastime, virtue-signaling, can be indulged while thoroughly enjoying oneself.

‘Put the hen in a Dutch oven, brown him in butter for 12 minutes. If you have a piano in the kitchen, play the “Minute Waltz” 12 times. Add a little water. Put the lid on and let simmer. When you have finished playing half “The Dance of the Hours”, dragging it slightly, you’re ready to eat like an epicure.’ The Danish-born pianist and comedian Victor Borge is best known for his virtuosity on the keyboard, his wit and his timing. Most Borge fans don’t know that he was also a shrewd gentleman farmer. Julia Ransom Doty, my father’s first cousin, was a food and fashion editor for the Ideal Publishing Corporation, which produced popular, glossy ladies’ magazines back in the Fifties.

Ah, autumn, season of mists and mellow soupfulness, as the poet Keats didn’t quite say. In southern England, where Keats was inspired to write his famous ode to summer’s red-and-golden aftermath, fall mists may stick around all day; but in New England, they burn off with the morning sun, giving way late in the day to heady breezes that blow clean through the soul. It was Geoffrey Chaucer who brought the word autumn into the English language. As sure as ‘Aprill with his shoures soote’ leads ‘folk to goon on pilgrimages’, so October cries out for vigorous outdoor activity followed by autumnal soup.

Just as tastes in female beauty have differed widely through the ages — take a comparative glance at the damsels Rubens featured with those of Botticelli (I leave the Venus of Willendorf out of account) — so, too, does the taste in wine vary through the ages. The British critic George Saintsbury was a giant in the field of literary scholarship. He was also an avid apologist for wine, and his Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920) is a classic in the literature of wine writing. A modern reader, however, cannot help but be struck by the prominent place given to wines that have fallen out of favor today, especially such fortified wines as sherry, Madeira and port.

It was always likely that once the killjoys had done their work on smoking they would turn their attention to alcohol. Sure enough, with the Dietary Guideline Advisory Committee going through its twice-a-decade revision of what, and how much, Americans ought to be eating and drinking in order to look after their health, drinking alcohol is being subjected to the same demonization process that was once applied to smoking tobacco. There is a campaign to lower safe drinking limits in the US, in the same way that they have been lowered in other countries. Worse, there is pressure to eliminate altogether the concept of a ‘safe level’ of alcohol consumption — and make out that every drop brings a drinker a little closer to his or her demise.