Food and Drink

Some undetermined time in the long past, possibly in 1890s Montana, a miner had finished a long and tiring day and needed a refreshing beer. But after aparticularly taxing shift, a beer wasn’t going to cut it alone. He asked the barman for a shot of whisky as well — and washed it down with his pint. It’s hard to call the boilermaker a cocktail, and inventing one certainly wasn’t on the mind of our tired protagonist. To this day, mixing beer and spirits is not generally the province of mixologists; it’s a combination more often favored by partygoers looking to get slammed as entertainingly and quickly as possible.

What do you suppose the grandest wine was in the early 1800s? The wine that populated the sideboards and dining tables of the courts and palaces of Europe? That consoled Napoleon as he moldered on St. Helena? That John Adams judged among “the most delicious in the world?” That Baudelaire apostrophized along with his lover’s lips in Les Fleurs du Mal? That Queen Victoria quaffed nightly after dinner as a digestif? That Hugh Johnson says many kings and consorts preferred to Yquem, Tokay or Madeira? If you said “Constantia, the sweet wine from the eponymous town southeast of Cape Town,” go to the head of the class and collect a golden star reminiscent of the honey-colored, late-harvest Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains that today makes up the wine.

Want to get drunk, fast? To most, that’s the point of the Long Island Iced Tea. It’s not so much a drink as a chemical formula designed to make an enormous percentage of alcohol consumable in a single glass. When I worked at a cocktail bar, a man once ordered two, and I asked if he would like me to hold on the second until his guest arrived. He replied, “No thanks, they’re just for me.” He proceeded to down both within a few minutes, for what surely began either a wild or very bad night. For the unfamiliar, Long Island Iced Tea contains almost every liquor you can imagine and no actual iced tea (though it shares its color).

When someone says “Bordeaux wine” most of us think first of wines from the Médoc, home of Pauillac, Saint-Julien, Saint-Estèphe, Margaux and other celebrated names. For some reason — marketing prowess, perhaps — the great region of Pessac-Léognan, directly to the south in Graves, cheek by jowl with the town of Bordeaux, comes up mostly as an afterthought. This is both odd and regrettable. It is odd because, as a matter of history, Pessac-Léognan takes precedence. I suppose the story begins with the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the future Henry II in 1152. Eleanor brought vast lands from that region of France to the marriage, so there is a sense in which the French wines the English have loved since the Middle Ages were originally English.

I was sipping a beer on the patio behind Ten Cat Tavern with my friend Charlie, debating which was the better Chicago bar: the Long Room up the street, or the Ten Cat. The Long Room was a neighborhood bar that had once been a dive bar. Ten Cat, according to Yelp, is a dive bar now. This requires explanation. For old-school relics like me, calling a tavern a dive bar has not, historically, been a compliment. When we moved into the neighborhood thirty years ago, the Long Room was Blue Bird Liquors, a Chicago dive bar in the traditional mold — a combination packaged-goods store and neighborhood shot-and-a-beer joint. Blue Bird Liquors didn’t have the wall of TVs obligatory in modern bars. Considering how dark it was, I’m not 100 percent sure it had electricity.

For a country like Ireland, as devoted to its faith as to a good party, the fact that St. Patrick’s Day falls during Lent poses a problem. The saint himself is said to have broken his fast during Lent, eating meat instead of fish, for which he was so apologetic that an angel came to give him comfort. Put your meat into a dish of water, the angel said, and it will turn to fish. This Patrick did and was very pleased to see that the angel was right. The meat had turned to fish, and he could partake of it without guilt. The Irish call this miracle “St. Patrick’s Fish,” and feel no qualms about eating a pork roast to celebrate the day. You can also keep a holy day and drink to excess, if you’re drinking for the right reasons. St.