Frank Zappa said writing about music is as absurd as ‘dancing about architecture’. Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew ask if you could say the same about wine. Our authors make light of their own or any attempts to quantify an ever-evolving liquid essence into words, points or subjective flavor interpretations whilst providing a helpful ‘Lexicon of Usefulness’ to assist the reader’s endeavors.
Some people think that appreciating wine is all about the taste of the beverage. Others, more cynical, think that, at bottom, it is about the efficient ingestion of that complex hydrocarbon that the body converts into sugar, and merriment, as it passes through the system. The name of that compound is ethanol, a type of alcohol produced by the fermentation of certain fruits. If you look up ‘alcohol’ in a sociologically or anthropologically disposed reference work, you’ll find owlish observations to the effect that ‘alcohol plays an important social role in many cultures’. This is a nod to fact that wine is a both a goad to conviviality and a glue binding up the multifarious wounds to our amour propre that are the natural result of the conduct of daily life.
Raclette is the ultimate comfort food. From the French word racler, to scrape, this simple, hearty dish is all Swiss. There isn’t a village in Switzerland, in the Alps, the Jura or the Engadine, where you can’t have raclette. There are even restaurants, called carnotzets, just for raclette, although they usually serve fondue, as well. Many Swiss homes have their own raclette-designated space, often in the basement, sometimes doubling as bomb shelter, featuring fireplace and wooden table, with cozy banquettes. It’s where the Swiss go when they want to soak up carbs for comfort. In the film Heidi, you’ll watch the orphan’s uncle serving her raclette in the rustic chalet during a cold winter’s eve.
Moving back from New York City to Central Pennsylvania has been like the Five Stages of Grief, if only the last stage were eating hot soup with a hard-boiled egg in it on a 90 ̊F day in August, which is what I’ve been doing. In other words, I’m becoming a native again. Moving back to a place as particular as my hometown of York, Pennsylvania appealed after rootless years in a coastal city. From our rich colonial history to our high concentration of snack manufacturers and the pack of wild turkeys that patrols the bike path along the old railroad, York may not be an elite metropolis, but it’s no anonymous suburban wasteland, either. We owe some of that specificity to the Pennsylvania Dutch.
It’s hard to keep up with the French. First they invent a perfectly good culinary term, hors d’oeuvre, which as everyone knows refers to the bite-sized appetizers served at cocktail hour. We Anglos, in keeping with our ancestral custom, duly pirate the word and put it to work in kitchens on three continents. But barely have we wrestled the silent h into submission and gotten the vowels in oeuvre sorted out (is that ue or eu?), when the French — who had permitted their attention to wander for a brief space — deign to take note of our efforts, lifting a single languid eyebrow: ‘What? Hors d’oeuvres? Oh, you mean amuse-bouches?’ Stop the presses, everyone; cancel the cookbooks; send the menus back to the printshop. It’s an amuse bouche now...
Enrique Tarrio, chairman of the Proud Boys, stood for a photo at a recent political rally in Portland, Oregon, arms outstretched in a V, flashing the ‘OK’ sign with both hands, peacocking in a manner reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s victory pose. With a depleted cigarette dangling from his lips, Tarrio wore the fraternity’s black-and-gold Fred Perry polo shirt, a baseball cap reading ‘The War Boys’ and dark sunglasses — part Gen. McArthur, part steampunk hipster. The most curious part of Tarrio’s togs was stuffed in the front pocket of his tactical vest, where the grenade should be: a can of the light, refreshing, low-calorie beverage White Claw.
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.
A Partridge in a Pear TreePartridge pear terrine with lingonberries and cognac, served on Scandinavian bark bread.Two Turtle DovesA miniature coeur à la crème on a large white plate, surrounded by two doves sketched in raspberry coulis.Three French HensHot chicken consommé.Four Calling BirdsThe best-known calling bird (or songbird) is the lark, traditionally roasted and devoured bones and all. But many today prefer their larks ascending, so instead this course features Japanese quail, originally domesticated for its vocal talents and only subsequently introduced into cuisine. Sliced poached quail breast is served on a bed of arugula and endive with pomegranate, walnuts and orange vinaigrette.
Christmas is a truly season of birds. Ornamental peacocks and gilded wrens perch upon the Christmas tree, cardinals and chickadees make themselves at home at feeders and on wrapping paper, and irrepressible robins are ubiquitous. According to a medieval legend recounted in Hamlet, during the season ‘wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated’, the ‘bird of dawning’ (the rooster) ‘singeth all night long...so hallowed and so gracious is the time’. One presumes the medievals had acquired the skill of sleeping through crowing roosters, or perhaps hallowed and gracious would not have been the chosen terms.
‘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.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed his esteem for a lifetime. There are few miracles greater than what rod and reel will conjure from the deep. So it has been for me as I cast away my cares in this uncertain year. In early spring, I delighted for the first time in the freshwater lake fish of New England. In the cooler months, bluegill, pumpkinseed, yellow perch and largemouth bass all swim close to the Connecticut lakeshore. Fishing from the shore in one such lake in Litchfield County, I found that a simple spinning jig or, better yet, a nightcrawler on a hook and bobber are all that is necessary for a strike. These frisky creatures can be as colorful as their names.
‘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.
Americans will drive anywhere, but only immigrants will drive eight hours for groceries. Our community of Syrians and Lebanese trek from western Pennsylvania to Dearborn, Michigan, where a handful of small Levantine groceries sell ingredients too obscure for a Rust Belt supermarket: Cortas rose water, Al Wadi tahini, bags of dried wildflowers for zhourat tea. Eight hours round-trip by the Ohio turnpike, Dearborn is my family’s culinary refuge, and home to America’s largest population of Arab Americans. Henry Ford, also an advocate of driving, was born here on the family farm. The burgeoning auto industry attracted Arabs from the Levant, and Ford gave his employees healthcare, English classes and a trade school.
Radicchio, radicchio, wherefore art thou radicchio? A red-leafed chicory by any other name would doubtless taste as bitter — but it certainly wouldn’t sound as pedigreed. Consider the following bit of dialogue: ‘Would you like a chicory salad?’ The natural response is a hasty, ‘Not just at the moment, thank you,’ the very name of chicory summoning up painful memories of undercooked chickpeas and bowls of foliage into which well-meaning persons have seemingly shaken the broken fragments at the bottom of the cereal box. Compare and contrast with the following overture: ‘Would you care for some grilled Chioggia radicchio embellished with small cubes of buffalo mozzarella and drizzled with a reduction of Balsamico di Modena?
Friday afternoon in the Pita Shack diner in the northern suburbs of Austin, Texas and I was surrounded by Iraqis. There was even a picture of a sweet-looking Marsh Arab girl in her papyrus boat hanging on the wall. It was all unexpected but strangely familiar, stirring memories of Delta-30’s turret-scanning the junction of Red 11 in downtown Al Amarah back in 2004. During the first Gulf War in 1991, the Maysan province around Al Amarah was the site of local uprisings against Saddam Hussein. In retaliation he drained the region’s marshes to deprive the local Marsh Arabs of the waters on which their livelihoods and 6,000-year-old culture depended.
