Food and Drink

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

Beaujolais is the ideal summer wine

It’s been a while since we have traveled to Beaujolais, that ancient wine growing region along the Saône River north of Lyon. Since summer is nigh, it’s time for another visit. Beaujolais is an ideal summer red wine. It is almost always made exclusively from the Gamay grape, a cross between Pinot Noir and an ancient white varietal called Gouais. It is light, flowery, full of pleasing acidity and fruitiness, satisfying by itself and notably food friendly. Of course, anyone who writes about Beaujolais these days has to begin by issuing a little advisory, like the Surgeon General’s warning on packs of cigarettes and certain medications. A few decades back, Beaujolais was plagued by scandal.

beaujolais

Wednesday

Calla Jones Corner

The joy of French school lunches

Since moving to France, one of my greatest pleasures has been rushing to pick up my two grandchildren from the tiny schoolhouse in the village of Monthelie. I can’t wait to hear about what they had for le déjeuner. Le déjeuner scolaire, a three- to four-course lunch, subsidized by the government, is sacrosanct. The French even have a phrase for socializing and eating together: la commensalité. They know that “a family that eats together, stays together.” I remember when America, where I used to live, understood that, too. Rarely do you see the French eating lunch or dinner alone in restaurants, bistros or cafés. The exception is for une pause café or morning coffee, when the French do prefer to be alone with a croissant, newspaper and quite possibly a cigarette.

Jane Stannus

The beauty and complexity of salmon

Britain’s most popular fish comes with batter, not scales – but America can virtuously say its favorite fish is salmon. Salmon and tilapia, according to AI, but you must never take AI at face value. Nor tilapia, for that matter. Stop me if I’ve already recounted the sad tale in these august pages, but I once – disastrously – tried to serve my relations tilapia. I bathed it in lemon-butter sauce, sprinkled chopped garden-fresh chives on it and nestled it among roasted tomatoes, olives and little baby potatoes in their skins. I even called it whitefish. I really gave it a fair shot. But pointed questions quickly came sailing toward me. What is this fish? What do you mean, tilapia? Where does it live? What does it eat? What are its desirable attributes?

salmon
Ross Anderson

The Sazerac: an old favorite… from New Orleans

As the Super Bowl rolled into New Orleans, with Kendrick Lamar and his flared jeans in tow, I was thinking about the many contributions that this small Louisiana city has brought to the cocktail bar. There’s the creamy green Grasshopper, the French Quarter’s whiskey-based Vieux Carré, the tropical rum punch Hurricane and, of course, the comically difficult Ramos Gin Fizz – which blooms up in a tower of egg-white froth. But perhaps the oldest, most widespread and most conventional is the Sazerac: it is considered one of America’s oldest cocktails, having been served in New Orleans from the late 19th century.

Roger Kimball

Is Alsatian wine primarily French or German?

Among the minor aporia bedeviling the universe is a question about Alsatian wine. “What is it?” someone asks. “Wine from Alsace,” comes the answer. “But where is Alsace?” This is where things get fraught. The answer is not latitude and longitude (for the curious, Grok offers 48.57º N and 7.75º E for Strasbourg, a plausible anchor for the area). The answer is not found in geography either. “West of the Rhine and east of the Vosges mountains” is all well and good. But it does not impinge upon the real question, which is a question of identity. Not to belabor the point, but should we think of Alsace as primarily French or primarily German? With that, as Jeeves might have said to Bertie Wooster, rem acu tetigimus.

alsatian wine

Thursday

Jane Stannus

The small town in Ontario with a world-class chocolatier

I’m sipping Madagascan hot chocolate out of white-and-gold Haviland Limoges, and nibbling on Venezuelan milk-chocolate bonbons, under an oil painting of Queen Victoria. I am on a visit to Guild Chocolates, “the finest chocolate shop in Petrolia,” in southern Ontario. The town’s population was circa 6,000 at the last census and on a Saturday morning, the chocolate shop is the place to be. During my visit, a sign on the Dickensian, wood-paneled storefront clearly indicates the shop is temporarily closed, but people keep turning the door handle and popping their heads in hopefully. Jaclyn Sanders, proprietor and chocolatier, calls warmly and apologetically out to them. Jaclyn opens her shop only one day a week: Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

chcolate
German
Hannah Moore

Why German-origin Americans keep quiet about their culinary contributions

Irish Americans are arguably the most ostentatious in their national celebrations. It is hard to imagine any other group getting a day off work and spending it turning the Chicago River green. I wrote of my own Irish pride in these pages last year. March 17 was the highlight of our social calendar. My grandfather inaugurated our city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, which still runs in Great Falls, Montana, today. Montana — especially Butte — is famous for its Irish population, which makes up 15 percent of residents. But there is a significantly larger ethnic group in Montana, whose traces of national pride are almost imperceptible. According to a US Census Bureau survey in 2020, 24 percent of Montanans claim German ancestry.

Ventoux
Roger Kimball

The excellent wine of Mount Ventoux

On April 26, 1336, the poet Petrarch, accompanied by his younger brother, climbed up the windy slopes of Mount Ventoux in the Rhône Valley. He said that he was the first person to climb that Alps-adjacent peak, which isn’t quite true. But it may well be true that he was the first person to go mountain climbing for fun. Petrarch wrote about his outing in 1350 in a famous letter called “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux.” The twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (speaking of mountains) wrote that Petrarch’s climb marked “one of the great moments that oscillate indecisively between the epochs,” namely between the medieval world and the Renaissance. Today, we like mountains. They mean picnics, sight-seeing, natural beauty.

Monday

Sean Thomas

Why did Spain leave behind such terrible food?

I can still remember it: probably the worst seafood dinner of my life. A slice of fish that was simultaneously cold, hot, dry, crumbly and rubbery, surrounded by overcooked vegetables and accompanied by a mysterious whiff of cigarette smoke. It was so repellent that even though I was famished, I summoned the waiter, returned the dish and retired to my room, there to endure a dinner of Pringles from the minibar. What made it worse was that I was in a celebrated fishing port. All I had to do was look out the window and I could see trawlers bringing in some of the world’s finest fish from some of the planet’s richest seas. It was dismaying, saddening, deflating and left me starving. What it was not, however, was surprising.

Spanish
Meursault
Calla Jones Corner

The fine wines of Meursault

In November, I was privileged to attend the 91st Paulée de Meursault. There are three coveted invitations at that time of year in this part of Burgundy: the world-famous wine auction held in Beaune and the luncheons called la Paulée de Beaune and la Paulée de Meursault. La Paulée de Meursault celebrates the fine wines grown in this small village. It is home to eighty wine-growing families and the area is known for its charm and terroir, that unique blend of soil and climate that has been producing exceptional white and red grapes for centuries. I had heard from our family about this festive celebration ever since our daughter and son-in-law moved to France fifteen years ago to work in wine.

wine
Roger Kimball

Wine highlights from Inauguration Day

I write a few days after the Big Event in Washington, DC on January 20, 2025. For us deplorables, it was a celebratory occasion. I am told that non-deplorables entertained different feelings that day. Since they had been used to having the run of our capital city, I can understand their sentiments. But, perhaps by some process of selfselection, very few non-deplorables were in evidence at the haunts I visited during my stay. Every hotel, restaurant and event space I stopped off at was full of red caps — yes, those red caps — and the mood was almost giddy with anticipation and glee. It brought to mind a passage from one of my favorite Psalms, number 23: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Friday

Timothy Jacobson

Ship shape: Normandie, the biggest French restaurant of all

These pages recently carried a lament for the little French restaurant, and the loss from the cities they once graced of a certain element of gentility and, yes, class. On the same subject, let us consider another era when class was valued more highly, and which produced the classiest, and the grandest, French restaurant of all. This requires a journey. In July 1936, a Chicago family, relations of mine, embarked on an unrushed two-month European vacation. A meticulous Thos. Cook & Son-Wagons-Lits, Inc. itinerary routed them first to France, then Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Holland and finally to England. It was a thoroughly first-class affair.

French
Felix Turner

How beer cracked France

Only a fool tries to guess exactly what awaits at a French karaoke bar. But on a Saturday night in Avignon, I wasn’t expecting to find a crowd of twentysomething hipsters drinking American-style IPA and singing “Mr. Brightside” and “Friday I’m in Love.” France, in all its stereotypical glory, has always been a wine country. Edward Lear wrote no limericks about a “young man from Saint-Étienne, who liked drinking Old Speckled Hen” but things are changing. France has the most breweries in Europe and beer is now the most bought alcohol in supermarkets, though if you ask a middle-aged Frenchman why young people are embracing beer instead of burgundy, you are met with the most Gallic of shrugs and a “bof... je ne sais pas.” So, why are they doing it?

beer
Ross Anderson

The Bloody Mary deserves more than brunch

Regular readers of my cocktail column probably get the formula by now: I give a short history of the drink in question, probably with an anecdote about my time in bartending, then provide a classic recipe, following by various flavor and format variations. But the Bloody Mary doesn’t fit neatly into that structure. For one thing, the drink’s origin has never been firmly established — given that it started as a spiked tomato juice, how could there be? Do we really care who invented the vodka-cranberry? The Bloody Mary is the same way. It probably came around during the 1920s, gaining popularity in the 1930s. By 1939, you see the first real mentions of it in print.

Bloody Mary
Roger Kimball

The best winter wines

Winter is a natural moment for a little recherche du temps perdu. For my band of serious thinkers, the usual aides-mémoire are not petites madeleines dipped in tea but some of the various wines the holidays afforded us. Wordsworth said that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” The jury is still out on the accuracy of that neatly phrased observation. But regardless of its pertinence to the art of poetry, its pertinence to the art of wine appreciation can hardly be gainsaid. With that in mind, I offer, as a minor public service, a brief recollection of some of the wines that a beneficent providence vouchsafed us as the winter solstice came and went and the house was redolent of evergreen and wood fires.

winter

Thursday

Ed Zotti

My thoughts on Malört

It was January in Chicago and the forecast was for heavy snow followed by bitter cold — high time, I thought, for a shot of malört, the most undrinkable beverage on earth. Or so I’d always heard — and therein lies a tale I didn’t expect to tell. Chances are you’ve never heard of malört, formally known as Jeppson’s Malört, Carl Jeppson being the Swedish immigrant who invented the liqueur a century ago. However, it’s legendary in Chicago, where it’s commonly described as a rite of passage. That tells you a lot right there. Lest there be any doubt, readers are invited to search for #malortface on X, formerly known as Twitter, or Instagram or Flickr.

Malört
mocktails
Ross Anderson

Strong stuff for a Dry January

If you spent your holiday season right, you’re reading this magazine with a hangover, fueled by seasonal excesses in eggnog, wine, whisky and other alcoholic indulgences. January is the month to clean out, to convince yourself you’re going to start running regularly this year, burn off some of the holiday fat and detox your thoroughly tox’d body. However, just because you’re having a dry January doesn’t mean it should be a dreary one — and there are some great drinks to fuel you through it. So most of this month’s drinks will be mocktails; fortunately the non-alcoholic scene is not what it was a few years ago.

Kyè
Roger Kimball

The master Kyè

Last month we took a quick trip to Tuscany. Among the wines we sampled was Sassicaia, the fabled Cabernet blend from Bolgheri on the Tuscan coast. I said that the wine was an “instant sensation,” but an alert reader pointed out that it was only when it was sold commercially, in the late 1960s, that it took the wine world by storm. Before that, it was the private province of its creator, the marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta, who began experimenting with Bordeaux grapes in the 1940s. I also said that Tignanello was another superlative Super Tuscan from “the region.” But that same alert reader noted that while the region was Tuscany, Tignanello comes not from Bolgheri but from Chianti, several miles to the East.

Thursday

Jane Stannus

How to host the perfect Christmas party

Cool guests, hot food; cool music, warm hostess: the recipe for the perfect party, and the motto of Perle Mesta, one of the most successful postwar Washington hostesses. Good King Wenceslas, a model host of even greater status, lived out this motto in legendary style centuries earlier. His guests were cool, if not downright frozen; their host was warm of heart (and sole, as the page discovered on treading in his footprints). The food was hot, for the king ordered up pine logs along with the flesh and wine. As for the music, the rude wind’s wild lament must have been on the cool side — though jollier tunes would surely have prevailed once the king and his fellow diners made it back to the royal fireside.

Christmas
Paris
Lara Prendergast

Catching my breath in Paris

September felt like a long month — and I needed to escape London. The Spectator had just been sold — and while the transition from one editor to another brought excitement, it was also exhausting for everyone. Paris felt like the perfect retreat. And of course, the Eurostar is the fastest — and most enjoyable — way to get there from London. A friend of mine lives near the Gare du Nord, and as she was in London for a night, I borrowed her keys, jumped on the train and arrived in Paris as evening fell. Alone and hungry, I made my way to Les Deux Gares, a stylish hotel nestled between Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est. Designed by Luke Edward Hall, whose aesthetic is unmistakably English, the restaurant inside is quintessentially French — and superb.