Food and Drink Archives

Tuesday

November 14, 2023

Cigars, steak and (alleged) corruption at Morton’s

While Republicans make a symbolic point of permitting smoking in the Capitol complex whenever they’re in power, no one’s lungs really seem to have been in it since John Boehner held the speakership. Back rooms in Washington aren’t what they used to be. So it’s nice that the oddly named Morton’s The Steakhouse — which as a Chicago-based chain is now really Morton’s The 65 Domestic and International Steakhouses — is one place where Washington’s journalists and politicians can still enjoy the complex aromas of cigars, steak and corruption. One person whom it’s almost unavoidable to see at Morton’s is the recently deposed chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, SenatorBob Menendez.

Mary Kate Skehan

Surviving the holidays with Alison Roman

The holidays are here. If you’re like me, you may view the year’s major baking season with slight dread, not because you’re a Scrooge, but because you lack confidence, patience or skill as a baker. Recipe developer and cooking influencer Alison Roman has written a cookbook for people like us, who find the “science” of baking frustrating compared to the “art” of cooking. The cookbook, Sweet Enough, affirms this preference; in a section called “What I Hate about Baking,” Roman lists gripes: “I hate when I mess up and feel like I wasted hours of my life.” Same. But this book, written with non-bakers in mind, is for the most part flexible and forgiving, and may well become your companion this December.

Roger Kimball

A very Sherry Christmas

Early on in his classic Notes on a Cellar Book, the literary scholar George Saintsbury writes that “no reasonable person should quarrel if we begin with Sherry, even as the truly good and wise usually do at dinner.” That was in 1920. Can you imagine anyone writing that today? The answer is no. But that only tells us how fickle are the revolving fashions of taste. For us, Sherry is an antique taste, quaint if not fusty. By and large it’s something that maiden aunts drink between knitting projects and jumble sales. At its best, Sherry has a fading academic aroma. When I was in graduate school, I had a semester-long tutorial on Plato with the eminent Platonist Robert Brumbaugh.

Friday

October 20, 2023

Timothy Jacobson

In praise of corn, a Thanksgiving essential

The Indians, as we innocently called them in the days of my youth, put their name to it: “Indian Corn.” Somehow, “Native American” or “First Peoples Corn” just doesn’t do it, so here let us observe this now-verboten usage. Technically, Indian Corn (known as calico or dent corn too, for its coloration and dents in the kernels) is one variety of maize, first cultivated, they say, in Mexico thousands of years ago. Columbus, who called the natives “Indians” because he was looking for India, brought back seeds to Europe in the 1490s; they did not take. The Plymouth colonists in the 1620s, from whose early travails the American feast of Thanksgiving emerged, grew Indian corn courtesy of the local Wampanoag tribe. It no doubt helped them survive when the English peas ran out.

Jonny Kaldor

The understated perfection of Long Island Bar

I had never given Brooklyn much thought beyond the odd walk over the bridge and down into Dumbo, outmaneuvering the hordes of Instagrammers trying to get that perfect shot of themselves on the cobblestone streets with Manhattan Bridge in the background, perfectly framing the Empire State Building between its nervous legs. What with the tourists and the hipsters it never quite felt like my sort of place, so I happily stayed on the wrong side of the bridge, ignorant of the treasures that were hiding from me. That all changed on a chilly November evening a couple of years ago when my friend Zack invited me to meet up for drinks at his local, The Long Island Bar, nestled neatly between Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill.

Mary Kate Skehan

A one-pan, one-pot Thanksgiving

Our first Thanksgiving together, my now-husband, then-medical-resident-boyfriend worked a shift during the family feast. I made it up to him with Melissa Clark’s one-pan, one-pot Thanksgiving for two. The recipe went off flawlessly and made the constraints of my tiny apartment kitchen feel more like a game-show challenge than a life-or-death struggle. Clark’s 2022 cookbook Dinner in One makes the same promise about 100 different meals. The game-show, can-it-be-done? energy made the Thanksgiving method fun, but could feel tedious on a Tuesday night. Is “one-pot” a theme or a gimmick? Does this constraint serve the cook and the recipe, or is it arbitrary, artificial and unnecessarily limiting?

Roger Kimball

New wines from Devin Nunes

What’s the next big thing in California wine? Everyone knows about the great Cabernets and Chardonnays of Napa. Most people would say that Sonoma is a close runner-up, with some excellent Cabs and Chards and Pinot Noirs, especially in the Russian River Valley. There are Zinfandels, the original plus-size wine, which is the sort of thing people like who like that sort of thing. But let’s travel south to the Central Coast, between San Francisco and Los Angeles. There is plenty of good (if not great) Cabernet and Chardonnay there as well. But the region is perhaps best known for Rhone-style, Syrah-favoring wines. Get ready for something new: some luscious red wines built largely around Touriga Nacional and Tinta Cão, two of the grapes used to make Port in the Douro region of Portugal.

Wednesday

October 18, 2023

Jane Stannus

A culinary tour of southern France and northern Spain

If I’d known what a whole monkfish looks like, I would never have ordered it. It was only weeks later that I saw a picture of the horrid creature: small, wicked eyes, prehistoric head, skin like rusty medieval armor and a gaping mouth overflowing with jagged teeth. Truly the stuff of nightmares. We’d popped over the border from France into San Sebastián, Spain, for a bite of dinner, selecting a spot a stone’s throw from the Baroque exuberance of Santa Maria del Coro. The daily special was monkfish, and for some reason — perhaps an excess of sun that day — the image that came to mind was, inaccurately, that of the innocent red mullet. The daily special in a fishing town is bound to be fresh, so it seemed fair to give it a try.

Wednesday

September 13, 2023

Margaret Mitchell

The Office Lounge is everything a Texas bar should be

The downtown streets of Georgetown, Texas, are a grid of pastel storefronts and Victorian architecture, centering around the domed and columned Williamson County Courthouse (named after the judge known as “Three-Legged Willie”). America’s fastest-growing city looks like a time capsule from the old Southwest. But thirty miles south, Austin — or “Silicon Hills” — is undergoing a tech boom. Microsoft, Musk’s gigafactory and a host of tech startups have unleashed a flood of yuppie commuters into Austin’s surroundings, rapidly transforming not just Georgetown, but what we think of as quintessentially Texan. Rodeos, the Alamo, cowboys and outlaws — will we one day think instead of smartwatches and Bill Gates? I doubt it.

Timothy Jacobson

The joy of baking your own bread

Flour furnishes most everyone’s kitchen. If you’re a baker or breadmaker, you will probably have several five-pound bags of it in the pantry alongside the yeast. If you don’t bake or don’t bake much, you will probably have at least a cup or two of it in the canister on the kitchen counter for thickening the gravy, frying the chicken or making the roux. Most likely, most of it will have come from wheat. Wheat has been with mankind for 10,000 years or so and was first domesticated somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, or, as our old geographies used to say, Mesopotamia, which also, it was hinted, was the neighborhood of the Garden of Eden. Wheat’s genetic diversity made it adaptable to a variety of climes and continents.

Kathleen Willcox

Champagne and America is a love story without end

From the beginning, Champagne has never been just a drink, or a region: it’s a celebration, an occasion, a trophy, a reward; a symbol of joyful decadence and glamorous debauchery; the overflowing drink of the American Dream. In short, it’s a boozy cheat sheet for the zeitgeist and the anxieties and dreams of the people who sip it. And, for the past seventy-five years or so, that zeitgeist has been driven by the United States. “American culture pervades everything,” says Christian Holthausen, a dual French-American citizen and founder of the Paris-based Champagne consulting firm Westbrook Marketing Partners. “Driving through Paris just now, I saw a Coca-Cola machine on one street, and a billboard for Apple on the next.

Mary Kate Skehan

The best cooking podcasts

There comes a time in every home cook’s life when she is separated from her craft. This may be due to illness, incapacity, repairs, renovations or, worstof all, moving house. This month, I moved from Texas to Pennsylvania. Between packing up my utensils and appliances, waiting for the moving truck to make its halting way across the nation, and finally unpacking and reorganizing my tools, I lost my kitchen for four weeks. But benched cooks like mehave a surprisingly satisfying alternative: cooking podcasts. The first podcast I tried is most similar to traditional cooking shows: Food 52’s Play Me a Recipe. Chefs and cookbook authors host episodes in which they introduce a favorite recipe and talk through its ingredients and method, encouraging listeners to pause and rewind as needed.

Roger Kimball

Why dry Sauternes are the next big thing

It is my sense that the popularity of sweet wines like Sauternes, Port, Tokaji and all the German Auslese wines is on the upswing. I am here to tell you about the Next Big Thing: dry Sauternes. Yes, that’s right: dry Sauternes. The supersnazzy, superexpensive Château d’Yquem is the only Sauternes to boast the designation “Premier Cru Supérieur” from the 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines. That exclusive label — along with the probably apocryphal but oft-repeated story that Michel de Montaigne, born Michel Eyquem, had something to do with the property — helps account for its astronomical price. But Yquem has been making a blanc sec since 1959.

Friday

August 18, 2023

Mary Kate Skehan

Girlbossing with the Ambitious Kitchen

I occasionally come across a social media account — usually run by a conservative male — claiming to great fanfare that young women these days don’t know how to cook. They’ve been too busy girlbossing to learn. In my experience, this is wrong. The ambitious women I know are ambitious in every part of their lives. They get the promotion while moving up the Peloton leaderboard, planning their dream wedding and creating flavorful, photogenic meals that Betty Crocker hadn’t dreamed of. For these women, there’s the Ambitious Kitchen. The Ambitious Kitchen was created in 2011 by a Chicago woman named Monique Volz. It has since amassed more than 700,000 followers on Instagram and a cookbook deal for 2024.

Eric Hanson

You seriously expect me to pick one favorite bar?

I was born in Wisconsin and I’ve learned a curious thing traversing it. There appears to be a state law requiring at least one bar at every intersection of its rural roads. I’ve noticed this most often driving at night: there’ll be a neon sign advertising Old Style or Leinenkugel’s hung in the front window of what looks like a farmhouse living room, and several cars nestled up against the house like sucking pigs. There is something homey about a rural bar. The knotty pine, the “first dollar” framed above the cash register, neighbors ironing out local prejudices and asserting the superiority of the Packers despite any evidence — if anyone’s brave enough to produce some.

Raj Tawney

Flour power: a single ingredient can be life-changing

Growing up in a “mixed” American household, of Indian, Puerto Rican and Italian descent, was deeply confusing during my formative years. I came of age in a mostly white suburb just outside New York City. In addition to my foreign-sounding name, I looked nothing like any of my classmates or the kids around the neighborhood. My olive skin, bushy eyebrows and curly hair were more reminiscent of children you’d find in the more ethnically diverse neighborhoods of Queens or the Bronx. My family spent most of our weekends visiting family and doing our grocery shopping in such areas. The array of ingredients that my Puerto Rican and Italian-American mother, Loretta, was searching for didn’t exist in our local Pathmark.

Roger Kimball

It’s always Chablis weather

It is very hot here in New England at the end of July. It was hot a week or two ago in old England, too. I arrived in London via the Eurostar after a week clambering over rotting German gun emplacements and gazing out at the D-Day beaches in Normandy. Sobering. In London, I had taken a small house in a quiet mews in Kensington. After a quick shower, my first act was to nip down to the local Oddbins and collar a couple of bottles of the 2022 Maison Dousset Chablis. It is about £20 (you can get it in the States for around $20-$25), and it was the perfect entry wine. Chilled, it was tartish, citrusy, refreshing: a confident but undemanding tipple.

Monday

July 17, 2023

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Camari Mick is making pastry, not solving crimes

"I was really fascinated with the process, the science behind everything,” recalls Camari Mick, the now twenty-nine-year-old star pastry chef, who studied anatomy in high school. “I love true crime: I was very into Snapped and crime junkie podcasts.” When she approached her parents, however, they asked her to reconsider. “My dad looked at my mom, looked at me, looked back at my mom and looked at me, and said: ‘Are you sure?’” At the time, Mick was running a mini-business from home, making baked goods to sell to friends, teachers and neighbors. “You’re doing really well, you clearly love being an entrepreneur, why don’t you go into this avenue?” her father asked her. His advice paid off.

Peter and Timothy Jacobson

Road-trip picnics are a casualty of our interstate system

Signs announcing roadside picnic tables once peppered America’s secondary roads and highways. Or so we call those byways now. Before the limited-access interstate system arrived in the 1960s, these roads were primary. America then was laced with a tangle of serviceable two-lane, hard-surfaced highways. Look at an old oil-company roadmap, if you can find one, to get the idea. Some roads were federal, some state, but all were emphatically open-access: get on anywhere, pull over wherever you like. They led through cities and towns, not around them; they traversed the countryside more than they cut through it. They required two-hands-on-the-wheel alertness in drivers, who got to know and respect the lay of the landscape.

Mary Kate Skehan

The comfort of drinking at the Hound

In the historic downtown of York, Pennsylvania, near the courthouse where the Articles of Confederation were drafted and a farmers’ market built in the days of horse-drawn carts, you’ll find a curious building called the National House. Constructed in 1828 as a hotel, its porches and airy galleries recall antebellum New Orleans. In its days as a hotel, it hosted guests like Mark Twain and Martin van Buren. Now it’s the home of my favorite bar. The Hound opened in 2012, in the early days of the craft beer boom. Its thirty rotating taps offer seasonal brews from local favorites like Tröegs and Victory, mixed in with ten-ounce pours of funky sour wheat goses or boozy imperial stouts.