Jane Stannus

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.

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?

What do the works of Le Corbusier, driftwood on the beach and French cherry tart have in common? Well, all three are improved by being set on fire. That’s uncontroversial when it comes to two items on the list, but perhaps you’re inclined to quibble about the tart. Resist the temptation, messieurs-dames, for I have an irrefutable authority up my sleeve: Julia Child, the lady whose Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) was hailed by legendary restaurateur George Lang of Café des Artistes fame as the volume that ‘not only clarified what real French food is, but simply taught us to cook’.

‘A nickel will get you on the subway,’ the saying goes, ‘but garlic will get you a seat.’ Garlic’s always possessed a pungent reputation — according to the explorer Robert de la Salle, the area of modern-day Chicago was so full of Allium tricoccum, our native wild garlic, that the Algonquin called it Che-ka-kou, ‘place of the smelly onions’. But it was Lucky Leif Erikson who brought the first bulbs of Allium sativum, the kind of garlic you buy at the grocery store, to the settlements of Vinland in Newfoundland and along the shores of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The Vikings didn’t remain chez nous, but garlic did, carving out a niche for itself as is its wont.

Looking to impress your girl in NYC? Order her some Omakase berries from Oishii. Although they’ll probably be the most expensive strawberries you’ll ever buy in the States, a pack of eight, hand-delivered to you at a secret rendezvous in the Oculus at the World Trade Center, will still only set you back $50. That, as you’ll know if you’re inclined towards thrift in courtship, is significantly less than a dinner date within the same city precincts. Word on the street is that these berries are so good (a subtle hint is provided in the company name, Oishii, which means ‘delicious’ in Japanese) that you can be served a single one as dessert at a Michelin-starred joint in Manhattan and not feel gypped.

Hoping to win an election in 2020? If you’re not above buying votes, take a tip from the poet Juvenal, who described — disapprovingly, it is true — how Roman politicians in the second century used to bribe the lower classes with free sourdough bread and cutting-edge entertainment. (Yes, the Romans knew how to make sourdough — there are a few burnt loaves still around in the ruins of Pompeii). Nowadays it’s the millions of workers in the tech industry that you’ll have at your feet if you mention sourdough, but they want to bake it themselves, so you’ll do better handing out free workshops, countertop flour mills and Emile Henry bakeware.

‘Seacuterie’ is a crime of a word. It looks OK in writing, if you don’t think about it too much, or if you’re the kind of person who approaches words like a scientist observing a new strain of bacillus. A linguistics student would point out that seacuterie is a portmanteau word, in which segments of multiple words are cut loose from their motherships and roped together into rafts of new meaning, producing such fantabulous and indispensable neologisms as ‘sheeple’ and ‘frenemies’. ‘Seacuterie,’ he’d tell you, is a portmanteau of ‘sea’ and ‘charcuterie.’ That’s all very well, but portmanteau or no portmanteau, ‘seacuterie’ sounds silly when you say it aloud.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?’ Bertie Wooster was once heard to groan. Does cheese matter in a time of coronavirus, climate panic and tariff wars? These pressures can lead anyone to succumb temporarily to Sartresque nausea. Fortunately the gentleman’s gentleman was at hand with a steadying dose of sanity: ‘There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter.’ And there is no time at which cheese does not matter.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. It’s summer in Wokeville, California, and the denizens congregate in their backyards, popping open craft beers and passing around kelp-flavored rice chips as the Beyond Meat burgers sizzle on the solar-powered grill. As Brad Paisley would say, it’s just another American Saturday night. Er. Wait. Not sure I caught that right. Backyards, yes. Craft beer, yes. Rice chips, well, OK. But did you say Beyond Meat? I am sorry to report this, dear residents of Everywhere Else, but yes, that’s what’s cooking in Wokeville these days.