At First Glass

Meme: vintage liquor ads

2010-02-07T05:19:00.000-06:00

From Italy, this time. And I happen to have it framed and hanging in the house, long since. Who knew?

Image from Enjoy Art

2005 Artesa cabernet reserve

2010-02-05T20:07:00.002-06:00

My notes, for what they are worth:

Very dark -- licorice -- opened up to caramel flavors -- not terribly fruity -- restrained (I think?). Acidic -- still, lots of sweetness
2nd day: can there be an austere licorice bomb? Cabernets don't have a vivid aroma, to me ... Toasty, burnt caramel aftertaste with food
The use of French oak = "taut," "cedar" (Jancis Robinson, How to Taste)
The use of American oak = "vanilla," "sweet" (ditto)

So, can there be an Austere Licorice Bomb? I can almost see this as a proprietary name on a wine label, although I would defy any graphic artist to come up with an appropriate design.

The one characteristic of cabernet which puzzles me, because wine writers all seem to agree on it and I don't see why, is its scent. Or lack thereof. Experts speak of the grape's unmistakable black currant aromas, just the thing for people who want a lushly smelling wine. I find a cabernet's scent weak to the point of non-existence, nothing like a chianti's horsiness, a riesling's lemon and clove, or a sauvignon blanc's grapefruit. If you're lucky you might get a big whiff of barbecue sauce, but that's not fruit.

And then there is the challenge of identifying cabernets that have been vinified in the French or the California style. California cabs are all thick, jammy, high tannin and high alcohol, grape-strudels-in-a-glass; the best French cabs are thinner, subtler, meant to be aged until those rich attributes -- if they've managed to attain them, in Bordeaux's shall we say, subtle climate -- have become all elegance, refinement, and structure. But while we puzzle over this, we should keep in mind that winemakers have been sampling each other's product, and making decisions, and taking stands, and not least of all looking at their spreadsheets, too. So there are California cabernet growers who want to produce subtle, French style wines, and there are Bordelais who make fruit forward, "global reds" to catch that share of the market trained by Robert Parker to like "huge" wines. If he can't see through it, he gives it 91 points, I've been told.

When you drink Artesa, or any cabernet that is obviously of a certain class, which have you got? Subtle or huge? French or California? Putting your nose in the glass and trying for that first clue, "explosive" black currant aromas, may prove a disappointment. And is it masculine or feminine? (To me, this old fashioned way of thinking about a wine is more interesting and challenging than identifying endless fruit-basket flavors.) Is jamminess and power "masculine" because it knocks your socks off, or is it feminine because it's lush and sweet? Are elegance and refinement feminine because they can be construed as quiet, or are they masculine because they an be thought of as pared down and undecorated? Can subtlety knock your socks off? (And could that be another cute proprietary label name? If so, I get credit.)

You see how wildly important it is to get this right. For the sake of a shared vocabulary and all.

The wine, in sum: very good. A bit austere and licorice-like, though. Have it with something luscious and -- feminine. Artesa, by the way, is owned by the Spanish firm Codorniu, famed for their cava; this cabernet retails for about $44.

Northwest pecan treats

2010-02-04T07:22:00.002-06:00

These bar cookies rank as just about the best, richest, and most special I have ever tasted, which says a lot considering they don't have any chocolate. The original recipe comes from a magazine which I'm sorry I can't identify, because I have only a photocopy of the magazine page. It's of recent vintage, less than five years old. The magazine in turn credits "the Mountain Home Lodge in Washington state" for coming up with the bars.

These treats, basically a shortbread crust topped with pecan pie filling plus pecans and dried fruits, will be very sweet if you follow the recipe exactly. Sugar is called for in the crust, and sugar, corn syrup, and vanilla in the custard. You might hold back on the last 1/4 cup or so of one of those sweeteners, or skimp a bit on the vanilla. Also, the original recipe asks for only one-third cup of dried fruits, which seems not nearly enough; I used a full (6 oz., I believe) bag of tart cherries and half a bag of cranberries.

The bars are rich and delicious, and -- again, in the original recipe -- only deceptively difficult to make. Never mind all the folderol about lining your pan with tin foil and then greasing that, and lifting the bars out of the pan with the foil. Lightly butter a 15 x 10 x 1 jelly roll pan,and then pile the shortbread dough into it and pat it out flat.

Northwest pecan treats

3 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup (2 sticks) cold butter
4 eggs
1 and 1/4 cups dark corn syrup
1 (and 1/4) cups sugar
2 tsp vanilla
3 Tbsp melted butter
2 and 1/2 cups pecans, chopped
1 bag dried tart cherries
1/2 bag dried cranberries

Preheat the oven to 350 F. In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, and salt. Cut in the butter with a pastry blender, two knives, or your hands until the mixture resembles coarse meal or small peas. (It should start to feel rich but not greasy to your hands). Pat it into a greased jelly roll pan, and bake it for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, in the same bowl, combine the eggs, corn syrup, sugar, melted butter, and vanilla. When the crust has prebaked, sprinkle the pecans and then the dried fruits over it and spread them out evenly.

Pour the custard slowly over all. Return the pan to the oven and bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until the filling is set.

"Frequently asked questions" lol ;p

2010-02-02T02:11:00.002-06:00

Okay, maybe one person asked them. Maybe I even thought of a few myself.

I checked out your profile and I see you've been on Blogger since May 2006. But At First Glass' archives only start in December 2007. What's the deal?

I experimented with a blog of book reviews beginning in May 2006, but I couldn't seem to get the hang of it. (Lacking fifty million visitors an hour right away, I probably thought "this isn't how it's done.") I shut that one down and then started At First Glass a year and a half later. Then I started a few more just for kicks. Blogger, bless its heart, still gives me credit for having been around since the moment I opened any account whatsoever.

What's the quote, or blog description, under the title? -- about the girl named Miss Pommery?

It's from the great old movie The Philadelphia Story. Towards the end, wealthy ice goddess Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) gets drunk and makes a spectacle of herself with another man (James Stewart) on the night before her wedding to the parvenu stuffed shirt, George Kittredge (John Howard). In hashing things out the next morning, in front of witnesses no less, the affianced agree " 'she'd had too much to drink.' " Too much Pommery champagne in particular. But the witnesses defend her behavior, and anyway Tracy has learned to enjoy having "feet of clay," too. The script goes something like this:

Liz: You see Mr. Kittredge, it really wasn't Tracy at all. It was another girl, a Miss Pommery '26.

George: You'd had too much to drink.

Tracy: That seems to be the consensus of opinion.

George: Will you promise me never to touch the stuff again, Tracy?

Tracy (hesitating): No, George, I don't think I will. You see, there are certain things about that other girl, that Miss Pommery '26, I rather like ....

Are your sidebar links all sponsored ads?

No, none of them are. Some are links to myself, and some are links to wine-industry professionals who have simply suggested "my readers might like this." A few represent link exchanges -- I'm listed at (as luck would have it) The Wine School of Philadelphia, for example. I used to be a part of the ad networks BlogHer and then FoodBuzz, but in both cases I decided the ads were too unattractive to warrant the few dollars a month they brought me in revenue.

Are you earning any money blogging?

No. I earned about $25 in a year with BlogHer, and had earned about $5 or $6 in a few months with FoodBuzz before I took those ads down.

How much does it cost you to own the domain name www.atfirstglass.com?

Ten dollars a year, paid to Google.

What made you become a -- well, a food writer?

You mean, for lack of a better word? Funny you should ask. I have always been a writer. And even as a teen I liked reading cookbooks. I can remember an older brother, who shall remain nameless, stalking past one day while I was absorbed in The Farmer's Daughter Cookbook and asking me "Whaddya reading a COOKBOOK for?" And I always enjoyed the food parts of novels -- Scarlett O'Hara's honeymoon indulgences in Gone With The Wind, for example ("fish baked cunningly in oiled paper and limes...."), or Dorothy's first breakfast in Oz (bread, butter, spring water, and fruit.)

That must have been some indication of where my tastes lay. When I began blogging, because I had a whopping six months in the wine industry under my belt and I wanted to earn big money like all the other bloggers, I found those indications reinforced. I found, a little to my own surprise, that I appear to have foodie-ism in my inner hard drive. It's a most congenial thing to have encoded there. Of course it's congenial for lots of reasons to lots of writers, but even though it might seem too girly, unchallenging, and monotonous a subject to concern a grown up -- strawberry shortcake is strawberry shortcake, after all -- there are serious reasons why food writing attracts, I like to think, pretty good minds.

Mainly, food and drink are an honest subject to write about. You are not agonizing over the invention of a new plot (fiction), or carefully diluting your opinions in the struggle to be loftily objective, incredibly prescient, and forgotten (nonfiction, politics). You are not doing a lot of navel gazing and calling it "creative non-fiction." Though you'll do research like any other pale academic, you will at least research things that other people can eat and drink, not abstractions and theses that might have embalmed you in an academic journal if you were lucky and had stayed in school.

There. Besides, Lin Yutang, with five thousand years of Chinese civilization behind him, says that thinking and writing about food is absolutely among the most civilized and serious topics to which poor, puny, hungry man can devote himself. He says, of the Chinese:

We are unashamed of our eating. We have "Su Tungp'o pork" and "Kiang bean curd." In England, a Wordsworth steak or a Galsworthy cutlet would be unimaginable. ...

The Chinese accept food as they accept sex, women, and life in general. No great English poet or writer would condescend to write a Cook Book, which they regard as being outside the realms of literature and worthy of the efforts of Aunt Susan only. But the great poet-dramatist Li Liweng did not consider it beneath his dignity to write about the cooking of mushrooms and all kinds of vegetarian and non-vegetarian foods. Another great poet and scholar, Yuan Mei, wrote a whole book on cooking, besides writing a most wonderful essay on his cook. ...H.G. Wells, who of all English minds is the one most likely to write about English food, evidently cannot write it, and no hope is to be expected from the less encyclopedic minds ... (My Country and My People, 1935).

Okay. What kind of traffic does your blog get?

According to Google analytics, in 2009 about 10,000 visitors landed at At First Glass. I think that's considered very low traffic. I'm not even sure whether individual people found me, or whether most of this traffic was search engines "dinging" the site automatically while trawling the web for fresh content. If those visits were actual people, then I get two or three hundred readers a week. Unfortunately, the average visit length seems to be about fifty seconds. I hope this doesn't mean I'm a bore. My Google page rank is 4 out of 10; high powered blogs like Orangette (among the best known food blogs in the world) or Fermentation rank 6 of 10. My subscriber count, according to Feedburner, hovers at about 70 all the time. My goal and delight would be to break 100 there.

Do you have any formal culinary training?

Good heavens, no.

Do you have any formal wine training?

Good heavens, no.

What sparked your interest in wine?

I did read one book, Leslie Brenner's Fear of Wine, B. Y. O. W. S., Before [finding work at] Ye Olde Wine Shoppe. But it was working there that did it. After a very brief and unpleasant stint in a medical office, I went job hunting on purpose in a local, swanky southern suburb -- there are only a couple of them -- hoping to be taken on at some swanky, scarf-draped boutique. None of them were hiring, but the wine shop was. I began to learn. All the good things encapsulated in a bottle of wine, sensuous pleasure, history, food, nature, religion, human conviviality, culture, aesthetics, the challenge of everlasting learning, have conspired to keep my nose in the glass.

What's your favorite wine?

It's early to say yet, and of course I have never tried the sublimities of Burgundy or Bordeaux, but I think it might be Chianti.

What's your favorite Star Trek episode?

It's a tie between Mirror, Mirror and Journey to Babel. Yes, City on the Edge of Forever is excellent, but I prefer the episodes that take place on the Enterprise. That's the most truly alien environment the crew ever cope with. By the way, have you noticed how often in TOS (The Original Series) officers and men relax over a good stiff drink? So red-blooded of them.

Image from Wikia divertissement (a Star Trek geek site -- in French!)

Meme: vintage liquor ads

2010-01-30T08:14:00.004-06:00

Once again, found in Found in Mom's Basement.

I like, or perhaps I should say I'm intrigued yet surprised by, the sinister feel of this ad for Hennessy cognac.

The woman is so obviously trapped, by layers and layers of things in the picture: the bottle and glass and hands, and the pouring liquid framing her of course, but also the record player, the dog, the lamp, the plant, the angle of the couch and the magazines on it, the angle of her own elbow. She might be some sort of creature in an experiment, and the mad scientist is the one measuring out a dose of something new, whose effects on the subject can only be guessed. Even the yellow color is sickly and unfestive.

And mind you, all this strikes me even though I'm not the type to see male chauvinist advertising industry bugbears everywhere.

Brussels sprouts with green grapes

2010-01-28T16:27:00.003-06:00

This is a simple recipe, from Morrison Wood's Through Europe With a Jug of Wine (1964). Woods wrote a food column called "For Men Only" for the Chicago Tribune from 1946 through at least the publication date of this book, and he used both the column and his travels to produce this and two other best selling cookbooks, With a Jug of Wine (1949) and More Recipes with a Jug of Wine (1956).

Through Europe reflects a near-two year, early '60s sojourn on the continent. Woods and his wife traveled in style, back in the days when wealthy people sailed to Europe, and then spent months at a stretch motoring through Ireland or renting apartments on St.- Jean-Cap-Ferrat, because that winter in France had turned so cold and stormy. His tone grows a little bit monotonous and even prissy sounding at times -- lots of "and then Mrs. Woods and I stayed at this charming old hotel" -- but after all his purpose is to give recipes, and he does that with few frills. Many of the recipes are unusual, and all seem to be primary source documents taken from working professional chefs of the time. If some of the dishes, like spaghetti carbonara, are now standard cookbook fare, it may be because writers like Woods helped make them so.

Brussels sprouts with green grapes is not standard cookbook fare. Woods ate it, he says, in Belgium.

Prepare 1 pound of Brussels sprouts. (Pull the two or three darkest green outer leaves from each. They contain what Madeleine Kamman calls "the offending oils" that make this vegetable too strong for many people's taste. Woods asks you to soak the sprouts in heavily salted water for 10 to 15 minutes before draining them and removing loose or yellowing leaves.)

Bring 1 and 1/2 cups chicken broth to a boil, and then drop in the sprouts. Cover and cook over low heat for 15 to 20 minutes, until they are almost tender. Then, stir in 1 cup of green grapes, 2 Tbsp butter, and salt and pepper to taste. Cook for 5 to 7 minutes longer. Drain off any remaining liquid and serve.

To win three days in Italy ...

2010-01-24T09:01:00.002-06:00

Yes, dear readers, this is logrolling, but "we're all sensitive people" as Marvin Gaye puts it, and no harm is done.

(Did I mention that this week, the store temporarily lost the satellite feed that normally pipes in the Muzak? Silence in a big grocery store is, after a while, eerie, so one day someone decided to tune in a local soft jazz radio station. Hearing "Let's get it on" at 9:30 in the morning in aisle 15 was comical to say the least, and even more so when the chirpy prerecorded announcements about sales in the meat department, etc., came through and drowned out Marvin. Later on the same chirpy, prerecorded ads drowned out some breathy sex kitten warbling about "the Sweetest Taboo." Then someone shut the radio off.)

Megan from TorreBarolo contacted me to suggest my readers might like to know about the property she owns in Italy's Langhe valley, in Piedmont, in the town of Barolo. Yes, that Barolo, where the grand, nebbiolo-based wine is made (though only in those years when the grapes are fine enough to deserve the name). TorreBarolo is a seventeenth-century five story tower, the top three floors of which Megan rents out to vacationers. At the moment, she is holding a giveaway: anyone who becomes a fan of her Facebook page before January 31st -- that's next Sunday -- is automatically entered for a chance to win a 3 night stay between February 5th and March 31st of this year. You'll find more details at her blog, here.

The Langhe is a little-visited area of Italy, she writes, blessed with gorgeous scenery, well preserved medieval hilltop towns, and a unique regional cooking style. Alba, famed for its truffles, is fifteen minutes away, and Asti, famed for its sweet moscato wine, is -- by the look of the map on her website -- perhaps another fifteen minutes beyond that. Hiking trails, wineries, weekend markets, and a new golf resort and spa ten minutes from Barolo will all keep any traveler as busy as he'd like.

Seriously: you might want to take up Italian golf.

For more on the Langhe, its food, wines, festivals, and sights, do visit Megan's website, and go to Facebook to take a chance on winning that three day stay in the tower.

You've got a week.

The four cakes

2010-01-23T05:14:00.001-06:00

The consumer services department of General Foods Corporation employed a very good writer, in 1953, to craft the preface to the baking pamphlet Cake Secrets, a collection of recipes for General Foods' own Swans Down cake flour. The writer's name was Frances Barton, and this is just a little of what she had to say:

"Fun and admiration all your life ... from a few mornings in the kitchen.

"You can be nine or ninety, rich or poor, a famous career woman or the queen of a little white house in the country.

"But when you go out into the clean, quiet kitchen and set forth your shining cake pans ... or shoo away a wistful man lured in by the oven's perfume ... or carry high a candle lit masterpiece to the strains of Happy Birthday (or maybe to wolf whistles and double O's) ... that's when you wouldn't change places with any woman in the world.

"And the secret of it all is just this: cakemaking really isn't one bit hard to learn!"

Opposite Miss Barton's text is this great picture:

The pearls, the dress, the coiffure, the candles, the cake, the silver ewer and the flowers, the plates and cups, the woman beaming -- this is an altar, and she is a priestess. And doesn't it make you want to go and learn all about cake?

The subject is more involved than you might think, perhaps more involved than I know. There are, it seems, at least four basic types of cakes. Butter cakes are those made with butter or some kind of fat, usually solid -- shortening, margarine, sometimes vegetable oil. They are leavened with baking powder or baking soda. These are the cakes most of us plan to make for birthdays and celebrations. They're also the ones we bake when we buy a box mix, and just add oil, water, and maybe eggs.

Sponge or foam cakes 1) lack this fat, and 2) get their leavening only from eggs, either separated or not. Angel food cakes are a special category of sponge cakes, made without even the richness of egg yolks. True angel food consists only of flour, egg whites, sugar, and flavorings. The classic European genoise, in its turn, is an extra special category of sponge cake that starts with whole, unseparated eggs, which are barely poached in warm water while still in their shells and then cracked open and beaten whole with sugar. Before the resulting batter can be made too fluffy with beating, flour and then melted clarified butter are folded into it, and then it's baked. It's quite a tour de force, as explained in Madeleine Kamman's New Making of a Cook. Read this post, at One for the Table, to relive one woman's experience of making genoise as a sort of entrance exam for a cooking class taught by Madeleine herself.

Chiffon cakes are a third basic type of cake. They've got a little American history behind them, which seems worth a nod since I am not sure how many people actually make the cakes themselves these days. The pamphlet Gold Medal Jubilee Select Recipes, published by the Gold Medal flour company in 1955, exulted in them. These were "the first new cake of the century -- new in taste, new in texture, and new in eating quality." The Gold Medal people justly exulted since they had introduced Chiffon cake to the world as a Softasilk cake flour recipe just a few years earlier, in 1948. In February, to be exact. They in turn got it from a California insurance salesman who, in 1927, had created a cake recipe that combined a butter cake's richness (and its guaranteed, baking-powder rising), with a sponge cake's egg-white lightness, and threw in ease of preparation to boot. His secret ingredient was salad oil, which to me means olive oil. Regardless, the use of any oil meant, as you began your baking day, no more softening and painstaking creaming of butter. Although, come to think of it, a liquid-fat, eggy sponge cake sounds a bit like that extra special genoise. Plus ca change, perhaps.

In any case, the insurance salesman who invented chiffon kept it a closely guarded secret for twenty years, even as it became something of a local (Los Angeles) sensation and he found himself called upon to prepare it for swanky Hollywood gatherings and famous Hollywood restaurants. The archivist for General Mills who answered my questions in an email last September picks up the story -- and by the way, we should remember that several of the characters in the story are all one. General Mills, General Foods, Gold Medal flour, Softasilk flour, the pamphlet writers for Cake Secrets and Gold Medal Jubilee, and Betty Crocker all, shall we say, took home paychecks signed alike. Oh, and the inventive, flour-bestrewn insurance salesman's name was -- wait for it -- Harry Baker. The archivist says:

"Over the years, Baker struck up a 'friendship' with Betty Crocker while listening to her radio programs. Deciding that she would be the one to share the recipe with American homemakers, Baker traveled to Minneapolis (home of Betty Crocker and General Mills) to share the recipe secret with the Gold Medal Home Economists. The home economists adapted the cake recipe to typical home-baking techniques, created flavor variations and introduced the cake recipe to the world." Ten years later, she concluded, "Betty Crocker introduced a Chiffon Cake [box] mix in two flavors (Orange and Cocoa)."

It seems almost bathetic to come down from these complex and exciting Jazz Age heights to the simplicity of the fourth type of cake, tortes or Torten. They are all Old World elegance and sophistication. Tortes are flourless, made with ground nuts, egg whites, and bread or cake crumbs. Madeleine Kamman in The New Making of a Cook writes that these cakes reflect the economical thinking of bakers who did not want to waste, on cakes, flour that should have gone into bread; so they baked with leftover crumbs instead. Vienna, she says, has been Torten's home since the 18th century.

Now by sheer delightful luck I happened recently to find and buy, at a library cast-off book sale, the December 1987 issue of Gourmet magazine. Among its terrific articles -- on nutmeg, some small museums of London, the rums of Puerto Rico, a Swiss Christmas tree shop -- we find Barbara Kafka's "Great American Cakes." She carries on our story, writing of the special place that cakes have in the American kitchen, along with other comestibles that are not just treats but great food: grilled steaks, corn on the cob, "extravagant tossed salads," pies, cookies, and more. "These are the cakes that are really ours," she writes, "and they don't exist in quite the same way anyplace else." And she agrees with Cake Secrets, and its be-pearled priestess in the picture above, that there was a time when fine homemade cakes "were a cook's special pride -- until the advent of cake mixes and working women."

She shepherds all our varieties together under the name layer cakes, and that makes sense not only because it's the vernacular but because it reminds us that most of these delights are meant to be stacked, frosted and filled, in all sorts of free form ways. There's a reason. "These endless creations were the home cooks' response to America's abundance of fine white flour, the invention of baking powder around 1850, and the development of freestanding stoves with easy to use ovens. What all this meant was that cakes would rise and bake evenly and could be produced relatively rapidly and reliably."

And then they could be stacked, filled and frosted. Gold Medal Jubilee also claims that in the Smoky Mountains, layer cakes were called stack cakes, and were traditional at weddings. Each guest brought a layer to add to the Bride's Stack Cake, the eventual height of which therefore reflected the bride's popularity. Rather a harrowing test to face on one's wedding day, surely. Perhaps people were kind, and brought extra.

Whatever cake you plan to make next, to reward yourself after all this rigorous study, you could hardly do better than to grace it with this chocolate frosting, which Kafka offers up as a childhood favorite. It leaped out at me because it calls for, good golly, a stick of butter and eight, eight squares of baking chocolate. I'm sure Harry Baker, and Miss Barton of the wolf whistles, would be proud.

Barbara Kafka's chocolate frosting, 1987

1 stick butter
8 oz. unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped coarse
3 cups confectioner's sugar
2/3 cup milk
1/2 tsp coarse kosher salt
1 tsp vanilla

Melt the butter with the chocolate in the top of a double boiler, stirring until smooth. Let cool.

Sift the sugar into a large bowl. Scald the milk, and beat it in to the sugar along with the salt and vanilla. Beat until smooth.

Add the chocolate mixture and beat until smooth. Then, either place the bowl in a larger bowl of ice water and continue beating until the frosting is cool and of spreading consistency, or chill the frosting, covered, for 30 minutes to an hour until it is spreadable. Makes 2 and 1/2 cups, enough to fill and frost two 8 or 9 inch layers.

The noble grapes: cabernet sauvignon

2010-01-18T06:39:00.003-06:00

At long last, we complete our survey of the noble grapes, which we haven't pursued since studying a bit about syrah last March. And we end, perhaps fittingly, with the granddaddy of them all, the masculine ne plus ultra of grapes (as our first one studied, chardonnay, seems to be the ne plus ultra, feminine) -- cabernet sauvignon. King Cab, oenophiles call it.

There seems not much to say about it except that it's delicious, powerful, fairly easy to grow given long-lasting hot weather for its late ripening season, and that it makes wines of great, masculine class and recognizable quality anywhere it is planted. It also beefs up the attributes of other, thinner wines, and so is the go-to partner for shyer reds, especially in the New World. Oz Clarke writes, in Grapes and Wines:

"King Cab, they call it. King Cab the colonizer, the conqueror. Cab the corrupter of other cultures, laying waste other grape varieties and other wine styles round the world with the brutal power of its broadsword, from Tuscany to Bulgaria, from Chile to Spain.

"Yet at the same time Cabernet Sauvignon is the consumer's friend. It was the first grape to give such upfront flavours to red wine, flavours that were so easy to recognize and admire, that they turned on generations of drinkers who'd never come near a bottle of red before."

The flavors discussed by wine writers generally run to blackberry, black currant, cassis (same as black currant), plum, and in older fine cabernets, cedar wood and cigar box. If you taste something more like green pepper, you have a wine made either of underripe fruits -- that late ripening habit can be a problem if fall comes early -- or, according to Karen MacNeil, simply a poorly made wine (The Wine Bible).

With all due respect to the experience and judgment of these writers, I wonder about the constant comparisons they make, when speaking of cab, to these "black" fruits. When was the last time anyone ever tasted or even saw a black currant? Recently I was able to taste a black currant wine, and the last thing it brought to mind was cabernet sauvignon. I wonder if wine writers are not perhaps swayed by the color of the wine more than anything else. In an older book, Plain Talk about Fine Wine (1984), author and winemaker Justin Meyer suggests sharpening your palate by tasting wine from a black glass. See what you think, he says, when you have no clues about color. It would be a useful experiment. Pretend I'm the teacher, or rather Justin Meyer is, and this is a test question: "what does a cab taste like? -- do not use any visual descriptors." I do not, unlike the poet, drink with mine eyes.

Anyway, cab is king not only for all the above reasons but also for the devolutionary reason that it is one of the prime grapes of Bordeaux, and Bordeaux remains "the motor of the wine world" (Hugh Johnson's Pocket Guide, 2010). "To know wine, you must know French wine, and to know French wine, you must know Bordeaux" (Wine for Dummies, McCarthy and Ewing). The right soil, climate, grapes, and centuries of winemaking experience have all contributed to making Bordeaux incomparable, particularly that left bank, the Haut-Medoc with its famed classed growths, its Latours and Margaux; when you buy an inexpensive, easy-drinking cabernet from Chile or anywhere else, you are buying it because the winemakers there, who can only dream of miraculous Bordelaise style results, are at least testing for themselves the heft of that powerful, consumer-friendly French broadsword.

The grape itself is a child of interesting parents. A generation ago, when Frank Schoonmaker was writing his Encyclopedia of Wine, he said simply that there were two cabernets, our cabernet sauvignon and the more prolific cabernet franc, vinified in France's Loire valley and bearing on its labels, as it still does, Loire place names like Bourgeuil and Chinon. (Are you fond of history? In thinking of the Loire, think King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, circa 1200, think The Lion in Winter. " 'There's to be a Christmas court. Where?' " " 'At Chinon.' " In those feudal days the Loire was Henry's possession, as Aquitaine to the south was Eleanor's. Come to think of that, Bordeaux was Eleanor's birthplace and her capital.) And -- Schoonmaker explained -- the reader ought not to be confused by the California wine called Ruby Cabernet, made from a single grape, a new cross between a cabernet sauvignon and the lesser known carignan.

Today, Ron and Sharon Herbst are able to state, in The New Wine Lover's Companion, that our King Cab has been discovered to be botanically the natural offspring of Chinon's own cab franc and, curiously, the white (Bordeaux) grape sauvignon blanc. How on earth can a red grape plant and a white grape plant get together and produce a new, red grape that is better -- fuller of all the good flavors, plus the acids and tannins that promote ageworthiness in wine -- than either parent? A botanist I am not, so I can only guess that sometime in the late 1600s, which is when King Cab seems to have appeared in the fields, some enterprising French bee must have gone dashing about pollinating things, and so made us all the happier for it. The good people at the Viticulture and Enology Department, University of California at Davis, are the ones who have demonstrated this, via DNA splicing and mapping and so on. They are wonderful. Oenophiles know that place, incidentally, simply as UC Davis, and it's a holy of holies.

If you want one characteristic of this interesting, this kingly grape child to remember, to help you understand what it does in your glass, remember that cab is the small grape with the thick skin. Its ratio of solids to juice is therefore high, and this accounts for its high tannin levels and deep color -- and for the fact that it is not always one of the nicest wines to drink young (Jancis Robinson's Wine Course, 2003). In Bordeaux, it is blended and calmed with other reds like merlot and cabernet franc; where it swirls proudly unblended, as in Napa or Australia, it can prompt even in the most sympathetic wine lovers (here, Robinson), epithets like "initially monstrous in their tannins" or "more like cold remedies in their youth."

What's the answer? Buy now, drink later. Or, snap up a California cab on your grocery store shelf whose vintage date says 2006 or 2005 or even earlier. They are not too difficult to find, since many people avoid Napa cabs because of their expense (they tend to start at $20 a bottle). If you want to drink it now, even that few years' aging will probably prove a help, and another year might make it even more enjoyable. Of course there is no lack of "jammy," "friendly," "fruit bomb" cabernets, vintage 2009 -- that they are becoming the norm horrifies experienced wine lovers -- but drinking them now may just confirm Jancis Robinson's observations, and make you wonder how well Robitussin pairs with a meal. Michael Broadbent's phrase "global red" also comes to mind. Recall that ideally we're looking, among all our noble grapes, for that elusive quality ...

...finesse.

Image from The Pursuit of Harpyness

P.s. Have we actually completed our survey of the noble grapes? We seem to have forgotten chenin blanc, upon whose nobility both Michael Broadbent and Karen MacNeil agree. And Broadbent adds muscat to his list, which is unusual to say the least.

If no one minds

2010-01-15T06:54:00.004-06:00

If no one minds, I think I'll do my baking here. Since last spring, I have enjoyed writing as the Chicago Baking Examiner for Examiner.com. However, as of this month the good people at Examiner will more thoroughly insist -- as they have always strongly encouraged -- that we Examiners "write locally," and will impose sanctions, good and bad, for writing less than locally. The positive sanction is, we get an extra dollar per locally relevant article.

Naturally there has never been much that is newsy or local about baking. A cookie recipe is a cookie recipe. We Food and Drink Examiners prattle happily on, writing down recipes that work equally as well in Boise as in Chicago. "Most of what you guys are writing is not local," the hard-worked Channel manager tells us forthrightly. And lays out the new policy and the sanctions.

Faced with a sort of new Prime Directive, I have decided I don't care to really get into the job of volunteer journalist on the local baking industry, interviewing pastry chefs, keeping track of special sales, announcing where unique ingredients for a really local cookie recipe may be found, and so on. I'd rather just bake. So I'm retiring, and wish everybody in the Denver headquarters, and elsewhere, Godspeed.

But I've done some rather nice things at Examiner, and I feel like sharing. One of my proudest achievements so far, if no one minds my saying so, was this: Pecan torte with mocha filling and sauce Jose. As per Examiner.com guidelines, I broke the epic up into four installments. Trusting that my dear AFG readers have the requisite attention spans, here it all is.

And don't worry. This is still a wine blog. It's just a wine blog where, if no one minds, we also save room for dessert.

Pecan torte with mocha filling and Sauce Jose (a rum-infused whipped egg cream), is a convoluted 1930s-era set of recipes, coming from Edith Key Haines' Cookbook -- that's the whole title -- published in 1937 and sitting on the shelves of the Chicago Public Library's main branch on State Street (fourth floor).

Getting ready for the recipes means making a shopping list. By the way, you'll also need a nice, long, free Saturday or Sunday afternoon, and a willingness to dive in and have some fun with a cake that -- who knows? -- maybe not ten people have made since Mrs. Haines published her book seventy-three years ago. That, to me, is one of the mysterious, almost spiritual thrills of retro cooking. Who else has ever made this, who exactly? And when?

For the torte:

6 eggs, separated (you will beat and use the egg whites)
1 cup powdered sugar
1 cup ground pecans
1/2 cup zwieback crumbs
the zest of 1/2 lemon, grated
2 teaspoons lemon juice
2 Tablespoons rum

For the mocha filling:

4 Tablespoons ground coffee
4 and 1/2 Tablespoons flour
pinch salt
1/3 cup sugar
2 egg yolks (you will not need these 2 egg whites)
1 Tablespoon butter

For Sauce Jose:

1 egg, separated (you will beat and use the white)
3/4 cup powdered sugar
1 Tablespoon melted butter
3 Tablespoons rum
1 cup cream

Assuming you have kitchen staples like flour, sugar, powdered sugar, and butter on hand, the somewhat unusual ingredients you might need to run out and buy are pecans, zwieback, lemons, rum, cream, and more eggs. You'll need 9 in all.

The Torte

6 egg yolks
1 cup powdered sugar
1 cup pecans, ground
1/2 cup zwieback crumbs (graham cracker crumbs will serve)
the grated rind of 1/2 a lemon
2 teaspoons lemon juice
2 Tablespoons rum
6 egg whites, beaten stiff (save this step for last)

Butter and flour 2 cake pans -- Mrs. Edith Key Haines says 7 inch, I used 9 inch (and reduced the baking time, of course). Preheat the oven to 325 F.

Beat the egg yolks with the powdered sugar until thick and pale colored. Add the pecans, zwieback crumbs, lemon rind, juice, and rum, mixing after each addition. Beat the whites until stiff, and fold them in to the yolk mixture. Pour into the pans, and bake 30 minutes for 7 inch pans, 20 minutes for 9 inch pans. Remove from pans and cool on racks.

The mocha filling

In her Cookbook, Edith Key Haines also recommended an orange filling, but mocha seemed a better choice to me. She also advised, even insisted upon, the use of a double boiler here. For the sake of full disclosure, I'll admit -- well, let me just echo her advice. The experienced baker may think he can dispense with the slow-simmering bain-marie and use a heavy-bottomed saucepan instead, but Mrs. Haines was right. Use a double boiler. The alternative is having to strain out the lumps in your mocha filling, when all along you might have saved yourself the trouble.

4 Tablespoons ground coffee
4 and 1/2 Tablespoons flour
1/3 cup sugar
pinch salt
2 egg yolks, beaten
1 Tablespoon butter

In a small saucepan, bring 1 and 3/4 cups water to a boil. Add the coffee, stir, turn off the heat, and let steep 5 minutes. Strain out the grounds and reserve the coffee.

In the top of a double boiler over simmering water, heat 1/4 cup of the coffee, plus the flour, sugar, and salt. Mix and stir until smooth. Add the remaining coffee and simmer, covered, 15 minutes.

Pour a little of the hot mixture into the beaten egg yolks to temper them. Then add the yolks to the rest of the coffee mix in the double boiler and continue heating for 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from the heat, and beat in the butter in small pieces.

When the filling cools, spread it between the pecan torte layers. The recipe does not make enough to fill and frost the torte as you would a conventional butter cake. For a topping, you'll make and serve the Sauce Jose.

The sauce Jose

1 egg yolk
3/4 cup confectioner's sugar
1 Tablespoon melted butter
3 Tablespoons rum (or a mix of 2 Tablespoons brandy and 1 Tablespoon kirsch)
1 egg white, beaten stiff
1 cup heavy cream, whipped

Beat the egg yolk until thick and light colored. Gradually add the powdered sugar, beating to make a shiny thick paste. Beat in the melted butter. Add the rum and stir. Fold in the egg white gently, and then fold in the whipped cream. The sauce will be light, thick, and rather loose.

Spoon it at once over the torte, one slice at a time. Refrigerate the remaining sauce.

Whipped heavy cream breaks down in 24 hours, so you should plan to eat up all this sauce soon. It is very good ladled over fresh summer berries as well as the cake. Sauce Jose is gluten free, although of course the torte and filling are not.

And congratulate yourself on your achievement. What wine will you have with this? People don't pair wine with desserts enough. A charming, sweet riesling? A gentle, companionable malbec? Your choice, no sanctions.

A new meme for the New Year: vintage liquor advertising

2010-01-11T05:08:00.003-06:00

Found at -- appropriately enough -- Found in Mom's Basement.

2006 Bivio chianti

2010-01-09T05:23:00.000-06:00

How can you tell what vineyard a wine came from, if the small print on the label says "Vinted and bottled by G.I.V. S.c.a.r.l. Gaggiano Poggibonsi -- Italia"? They sound as if they are a wholly owned subsidiary of James Bond's evil nemesis, SPECTRE.

I suspect the more important information on the label may be "Imported by Bivio wines, Sonoma, CA." This was a very pleasant little wine, albeit crafted I think with the American market in mind, from the bright orange label with the drawing of the Vespa scooter on it, to the jazzy fruit flavors masking what a stronger Chianti can be. If you like the gamy, horsy personality of Chianti, and the tartness, you may find that after a first promising whiff of the stables, Bivio has wandered off to the raspberry bushes and stayed there. But that's all right. It's even cute, because according to the label, Bivio means "fork in the road."

Retail: about $13.

2004 Wild Oak merlot

2010-01-03T06:16:00.001-06:00

From St. Francis winery, Santa Rosa, CA (Sonoma County).

First day: "Surprisingly brownish, cinnamon-candy color -- charred (faint) aroma -- very acidic -- apple skins, caramel -- faint green pepper -- needs opening up?"

Next day: filled out, fruitier, more complex and elegant. Very good.

It was delicious with a hearty creamed dish for dinner, but I would be embarrassed to admit what exactly was the dish that was creamed. Let's just say your mom probably would have made it in the fifties, particularly if she was in a hurry to get something on the table for supper. I do think, though, that a cream sauce is a good red wine's best friend.

And on the topic of tasting notes, I wonder, would it be all right to compare wines to books? The fruit and flowers descriptors are getting tiresome and they put off newcomers who, often very sensibly, complain they "can't taste all that" in a wine. Straightforward reports of tannins and acids are honest but don't convey the pleasures in the glass. Abstractions like "fully evolved," "opulent," "harmonious," and "broad-shouldered" -- I have Michael Broadbent's Vintage Wine open to page 113 -- only serve the hugely experienced. I am sick to death of the 100-point scale: people obey it slavishly because it looks logical, wine wholesalers use it to sell wines even though in bandying it about, they might as well be talking Esperanto ("it's a great wine, Spectator gave it 89 points" -- And?), and anyway, as a savvy customer recently observed, the 100 point scale is not even really a 13 point scale, it's a 5 point scale. No one wants to hear about rated wines unless they score above 87; and yet, no wine floating in the stratosphere above 92 points is going to be available outside the palaces of Dubai, Tokyo, or Manhattan. Probably most of it is still in the cellar at Screaming Eagle. Their website, incidentally, is forbidding but fun. FAQ: can I visit the property? "No." I'm reminded of Steve Martin in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. "Well then, can I use your underwear to make soup?"

But as I enjoyed my merlot last night -- there's a spareness to merlots, it seems, a reticence that demands some patience to savor -- I thought, what's it like? And the image that occurred to me was of a good, serious, contemporary novel. Any one of quality, well made, complex, rewarding. More, if wines can resemble books, then what wines are graphic novels? Which are bodice rippers, which are fantasy, which are science fiction, which are Harlequin romances, which are Tom Clancy thrillers, which are Shakespeare? Which one is War and Peace?

Could such comparisons, such a rating scale, be as meaningful as the ones that rely on numbers, supermarket similes, or even emoticons? ("It got a 'Stephen King' at At First Glass.") I don't know, but I know where to start.

White zinfandel = can only be this. Or vice versa.

At First Glass turns two (and has a cocktail)

2009-12-31T08:46:00.003-06:00

For a while now I have had in my possession a copy of American Bar: The Artistry of Mixing Drinks, by Charles Schumann (Abbeville Press, 1995). This is the book that I picked up for a song at a used book warehouse, and that the gifts catalog Acorn was selling for over eighty dollars this fall, just in time for the holidays.

Since I have little knowledge of spirits or cocktails, American Bar has been a great study aide for the liquor section of the wine aisle. The book is, however, peculiarly organized. All its five hundred individual drinks recipes come first, followed by the explanatory material describing drinks categories, and then by very basic information defining the many liquors in the world. (By the way, is there any substance which mankind has not tried to ferment? -- he would ferment water and rocks if he could.) Lastly comes information concerning bar equipment and The Bartender. I believe an American publishing firm would have changed all this a bit, and insisted on a homegrown book's chapters being entirely flip-flopped; perhaps Abbeville hadn't the time to bother in this case, or perhaps they reasoned that the audience for this volume wouldn't mind the charm of a more European arrangement. For while Abbeville may have had a New York address, American Bar certainly reflects its provenance -- Wilhelm Heyne Verlag GmbH & Co., KG Munich (1991).

Munich is also the location of Schumann's, owned and run by the famous, no, the legendary Charles Schumann, author not only of this book but of Schumann's Bar Book and Tropical Bar Book. When you open this one, almost the first thing that confronts you is a photograph, circa 1991, of the man himself. It's because of a glance at it that I'm sure I would never have the nerve to walk into Schumann's myself, still less to actually order a drink there. He looks rather fearsome, if not definitely downright scary. He looks as if he had been in his share of barfights already and would be glad to hold his own in a few more. A newer photograph shows him looking exactly the same, only with sweeping and magisterial silver hair and, granted, a slightly wider smile. Still, in his brief remarks on Dealing with the Public he writes, "the bartender is neither emcee nor circus director ... discreetly the bartender lets the undesirable guest know that this is not the place for him." Emphasis mine.

Dear me. But it is fun to read the reports of people who have screwed up the courage to venture into his precincts. There's a collection of old reviews of the tourists' experience at Schumann's at a website called Toytown Germany ("for Germany's English speaking crowd"), and another set of reviews, still older, at World's Best Bars. These latter seem to come from more hardened travelers. The gist of all the reviews is: legendary, expensive, great drinks, jam-packed, if you're in Munich you must go.

One comment, at Toytown Germany, is sophisticated enough and complete enough to be worth quoting in full. An anonymous who called himself "'Ratbert' " responds, in January 2007, to two women, one of whom had a glorious time at the bar, one of whom felt snubbed by the rude staff:

I think you two ladies perfectly summed up the Schumann´s experience. The first time I was in (the old) Schumann´s I met the owner personally, complimented him on his bar and his world famous cocktail book and found him to be friendly and professional. I have since seen him on several occasions and whether in one of his bars, walking the streets of Munich or (believe it or not) at dinner in Venice, have always found him to act with the same professional courtesy that one would expect from (whether you agree or not) a legendary barkeeper. Now, are most of his staff of the same caliber? Clearly not. Their names are not on the menus and it is not their reputation at stake. Some of the staff are rude and pompous, but hey, which of Munich´s many "institutions" (be they shopping, dining, or drinking) are not guilty of arrogant staff? If you are a tourist without a clue, well, let´s just say that there are places in Munich where you will be made to feel more welcome by the staff; but if you are there when the owner is working, I assure you that he will make you one of the finest `dry martinis´ you are likely to find on the planet - whether you realize it or not.

That last little dig about not knowing whether or not you've been served a great martini struck me as very a propos, since I have American Bar open in front of me and I've noticed one or two things about the master's work. For one thing, his drinks are amazingly small, surely. Measurements typically are "3/4 ounce," "1/4 ounce," "1 and 1/2 ounces," and even drinks which belong in a big glass -- and he includes a sketch below each recipe of the proper glass for it -- are obviously only "big" because they include lots of room for a non-alcoholic component. His Harvey Wallbanger, to be served in a highball glass, is only 3 Tablespoons of vodka and 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of Galliano. The rest -- a whopping 3 and 1/2 ounces -- amounts to about 7 Tablespoons of orange juice, assuming I've done my conversionary arithmetic right. I don't doubt it's delicious, but I suspect the average person fixing himself a H. W. at home, and merely "eyeballing" the measurements, is probably going to pour himself much more booze. That person will probably also be chagrined, if he should happen to visit Schumann's, at the expense of what little he's getting. Perhaps he'll chalk it up to the falling dollar.

And there are certain drinks the master won't make, out of respect for the ingredients he is using. "I personally never pour vodka and gin together," he notes below the recipe he nevertheless grudgingly includes for the original Long Island Iced Tea, which has itself evolved, at least among some commercial producers, into any mucky combination of any four liquors you like plus caramel coloring. A hangover in a glass, as customers call it ($16.99 for a 1.75 liter jug). But that's not all the master won't make. He also won't pour together "gin and whiskey, vodka and whiskey, gin and brandy, or vodka and brandy." He won't mix gin with tequila or rum, either. ("Why would one mix those?") It all must let out I don't know how many commonplace drinks from Schumann's legendary menu. He also is appalled by very sugary concoctions, and who can blame him -- "even the list of ingredients makes me queasy" -- he is wary of excessive fruit and vegetable garnishes in or on drinks and commands that the bar not resemble a farm stand, and he absolutely declares that no martini shall be enhanced by anything but a whole green olive, with pit. "What place do stuffed olives have in a martini?" Emphasis his. And, in bold red print, in the Julep category: "Fruits do not belong in a julep!"

Why, why, and why not? Mr. Schumann's pronouncements all come down to this, a respect for the potables that go into drinks, most especially for the painstaking care and time that mankind has devoted to his fermented and aged and mixed and fortified and triple-distilled and otherwise doctored wheats, ryes, grapes, apples, rice, barleys, sugar cane, raspberries, agave plants, potatoes, coffee, molasses, corn, juniper berries, any and all green leafy things, and on and on, you name them. From all the possibilities for any one drink, he says, impose the guiding, classic order and pick three: the basis -- a gin cocktail should taste of gin -- the modifier -- "to determine which direction the cocktail is going" -- and the flavoring agent, which "rounds the cocktail off and brings it to completion." Shaking and stirring each have their purpose, as does either crushed ice or cubes, or the use of an electric blender or a cocktail shaker. Be aware of the effect of the cocktail and the hour of the day, too. Oh, and when you have made your work of art, keep in mind that "it is not at all suited to little umbrellas or national flags." It all gives new meaning to the exhortation to drink responsibly.

From his menu of five hundred "diverse recipes that strike me as more than sufficient" and which adhere to his classic requirements -- evidently he's never gone surfing the web for ideas, and found such an atrocity as the Bloody Tampon -- I think I'd pick the Sombrero to welcome in the new year. Here it is, and be respectful:

Sombrero

1 and 1/2 ounces brandy (3 Tablespoons)
1/4 ounce ruby port (1 and 1/2 teaspoons)
3/4 ounce cream (about 1 and 1/2 Tablespoons)

Stir the liquors over ice cubes in a mixing glass. Strain them into a sherry glass (in other words, keep out the ice). Carefully top with cream.

For further information: a useful glossary of terms in liquor, from a very bare-bones but interesting site called Taste of the Southwest.

Looking back:

At First Glass turns one (and goes on a field trip)

A not-port

2009-12-29T07:32:00.001-06:00

Adriano, 2005, from the port maker Ramos Pinto, in Portugal's Douro Valley; it brings back memories of a similar wine called Altano. Made of the four grapes that make port: touriga francesca, tinta roriz, tinta barroca, and touriga nacional.

Image from Maisons Marques & Domaines (the importer)

My first impressions were of meatiness, and faintly, of cinnamon; which in turn brings back memories of customers and sundry nice people shaking their heads and marveling that they can't taste "all the things you're supposed to taste" in wine. It's okay, I'm not necessarily tasting meat and cinnamon even the next night, myself. Now I'm sensing more the "freshness" and "lively tannins" that Ramos Pinto's website tells me I'll sense. Perhaps now is a good time not only to remember the best wine writers' admissions that suggestibility plays a huge role even in their professional perceptions, but also to remember author Lawrence Osborne's contention that modern wine tasting's rigid, fruit-and-flowers metaphors are only about as old as the 1970s, and reflect the newly enophilic, comfortable middle classes' familiarity with the supermarket, as opposed to the wine buying upper classes' old familiarity with things -- and old wine descriptors -- like "breeding" or "commonness."

But the wine. It's juicy, shrinks the mouth first with its tannins and then fills it up again with the reaction to its acidity. (Why is saliva such an ugly word? from the Latin salix, derived from willow; it seems there is a glucoside extracted from the barks of willows and poplars, and for heaven's sake why shouldn't there be? -- and it's got something to do with the helpful digestive juices in our mouths.)

Suggested retail, $13. For the wine, not your juices.

Challah

2009-12-25T07:12:00.003-06:00

Once in a while, it happens that Christmas falls on a Friday or Saturday. In that case, you might be celebrating a different holiday, for which you'll want challah, the traditional Jewish sabbath bread. This recipe comes from The Joy of Coooking, and is in fact one of the few I ever found in the Joy that was really much use. (I'm told the pre-World War II editions are better than the mid-1970s edition.) The other is cream of tomato soup, to which challah makes a beautiful accompaniment.

To begin, you'll need 6 cups of flour, 1 Tbsp salt, 3 eggs, 1/4 cup vegetable oil, 3 Tbsp plus 1 more tsp sugar, and 2 packets of dry yeast.

Mix the flour and salt in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, mix the eggs, 3 Tbsp sugar, and oil -- use a combination of part vegetable oil and part olive oil if you like, since olive oil alone gives too strong a taste.

Meanwhile, place the 1 tsp sugar in a Pyrex measuring cup, and measure into it 1/4 cup warm water. Sprinkle the yeast over the water, stir it in, and let it stand and bubble for 5 minutes.

Add the yeast mixture to the flour and salt. Then, stir two cups of warm water into the egg mixture, and pour that carefully into the bowl with the flour and yeast. With everything in one bowl, mix and stir until you have a sticky dough that you can maneuver from the bowl onto a floured tabletop.

Flouring the table, the dough, and your hands as needed, begin to knead the dough. Knead for ten minutes, until it becomes smooth and satiny (as the cookbooks all say. And it will).

Put the dough in an oiled bowl to rise. Cover with a clean towel. Let it rise for about an hour in a warm place. The large amount of yeast and sugar means that challah rises quickly.

When it has risen, punch it down and divide it in half. Knead each half just a little, to get rid of any stickiness. Then, divide each half into three pieces, and roll them out into longish tubes. They shrink up as you work, but don't worry.

Braid the three sections, and lift the braid onto a cookie sheet. Do the same with the other half of dough.

Cover the braids with the towel again, and let them rise about half an hour in a warm place. Preheat the oven to 400. Brush the dough with an egg wash, either of an egg yolk mixed with water or (simpler), a beaten egg.

Put the bread in the oven, and bake for 15 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350 F, and continue baking 15 minutes more.

The whole process takes three hours from start to finish, but, as with so many recipes that sound time consuming, it does not require what you might call three hours' work work. And the bread is so good with anything -- any meal, as the base for any sandwich, certainly as a Christmas party offering. Need we say, it will go with any wine?

And as for French toast, well. Next up, with the leftovers of this bread, will be Jinx and Judy's "Eve's toast," from The How to Keep Him (After You've Caught Him) Cookbook (p. 38). This is a French toast fried in an orange flavored batter and topped with honey-dipped oranges. I think they call it Eve's toast to conjure up images of delectable, wicked temptation, and so on.

Comment spam (in Romanian?)

2009-12-21T06:53:00.001-06:00

I believe it's called comment spam when a comment arrives in your inbox that is clearly not generated by a person, but by a computer or software system trawling the web for the right places to plug in a preformatted (advertising) message.

Still. When it's in Italian, it just seems so pretty.

"Restaurant Pizzerie Vechile Coline Iasi va ofera un meniu select pentru evenimente si mese festive, in cadrul unui ambient nascut din eleganta si meticulozitate.

"Va asteptam sa va petreceti atat o seara linistita si deosebita in cadrul ambientului nostru dar si in compania serviciilor noastre de catering.

"Festiv - nunti, cumetrii, reuniuni, aniversari, petreceri corporate, revelion, etc.

"Corporate - conferinte, receptii, congrese, traning-uri, lansari, intalniri de afaceri, festivitati de promovare a produselor, inaugurari de sedii, etc."

But look again. Is that Italian? Romanian? It's the romance language that everyone forgets, after they have cudgelled their brains for memories of high school foreign language instructions, and dutifully listed French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese in the Latinate roster. And where is Iasi? Good grief -- is there such a thing as Romanian wine? Why not?

I know NO-thing, but "I lah-rn, Mr. Fawlty, I lahrn."

Treat yourself: chocolate glazed rum fudge brownies (from three cookbooks!)

2009-12-20T06:40:00.002-06:00

Betty Crocker's Ultimate Cookie Book (1992) is the main source for this Ultimate Brownie. I chose the recipe because it calls for no less than 5 squares of baker's chocolate,

plus the addition of chocolate chips to the batter. Lacking chocolate chips just this one day -- I promise I'll have them next time -- I opted to add a sprinkling of rum to the finished pan, an idea taken from Jinx Kragen and Judy Perry's fun 1969 The How to Keep Him (After You've Caught Him) cookbook. This book leaped out and shouted "Buy me!" from the shelves of the local thrift store, because on one of my cookbook research trips to the Chicago Public Library a few months ago, I had found and copied down some recipes from the gals' previous effort, Saucepans and the Single Girl (1964). Browsing through that book, I could just imagine the two of them toddling around the big city in pencil skirts, careful coiffures, and high heeled pumps, buying groceries and liquor for a chic weekend dinner party brimming over with eligible bachelors. With How to Keep Him, they had evidently picked their bachelors and become wives and moms -- and no-nonsense ones at that. You want Rum Fudge Brownies? Sprinkle some rum over a pan of store-bought, box-mix brownies. You're done, and Jinx and Judy are free to go on psychoanalyzing Your Mate: "Western men have long been fascinated by the shy, gentle women of the Orient. It's no wonder, really, that Japanese women are so desirable. A well bred Japanese girl is trained from childhood in modesty and service ...." Therefore, make sukiyaki. This is from the chapter called "Rekindling the Flame."

Dim memories do stir, here, of a time somewhere about the Johnson and Nixon years when some suburban rendering of sukiyaki was fashionable. Still, Jinx and Judy's rum fudge angle is a little easier to adopt. And, as we're treating ourselves, why not cover our brownies with a chocolate glaze, from Marion Cunningham's Fannie Farmer Cookbook?

It was an adventurous afternoon.

Chocolate glazed rum fudge ultimate brownies (from three cookbooks)

For the brownies:

5 squares baker's chocolate
2/3 cup butter (10 and 2/3 Tbsp)
1 and 3/4 cups sugar
2 tsp vanilla
3 eggs
1 cup flour
1 cup chopped nuts
1 cup chocolate chips

Melt the butter and the 5 squares baker's chocolate over low heat in a small saucepan. When completely melted, remove from heat.

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Butter a 9 x 9 x 2 pan.

Mix the sugar, vanilla, and eggs in a large bowl.

Beat in the chocolate mixture and combine well.

Beat in the flour until just blended, and then add the nuts and chocolate chips, if using.

Spread the batter in the pan.

Bake 40 to 45 minutes, or just until brownies begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. Cool completely.

While they are baking, make a free form Chocolate glaze (this is based on two frosting recipes from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook).

1 square baker's chocolate
2 Tbsp butter
1/2 cup sugar
about 1/4 cup milk
about 1 tsp cornstarch
a dash vanilla (less than 1/4 tsp)

Melt the chocolate and butter in a small saucepan (you can use the same one you started the brownies with). Add the sugar and blend. The mixture will be grainy, so add the milk and blend; then add the cornstarch a little at a time, and cook until the glaze is the consistency you want. Finish by adding the vanilla. Remove from heat.

Sprinkle 2 Tbsp rum over the finished brownies. Cut into squares and place them on a platter. Plop, smooth, and/or dribble the glaze over them, depending on how thick you made it.

Eat. Share. (No really.)

M.F.K. Fisher took it as blindingly obvious that no one in his right mind would think of pairing chocolate with red wine -- which is precisely the pairing that is considered wonderful and fashionable now. By the same token, most wine writers say that of course one never drinks a fine dry sparkling wine, least of all a champagne, with sweet desserts, but I see no reason not to. Why not a refreshing light prosecco with these brownies? Or, if we must venture into red wine territory, why not a briny, raisin-y tawny port?

Treat yourself.

Labels

2009-12-16T08:06:00.006-06:00

I've never tasted this wine, but the label is lovely. You can find it, and more, at Wine Label World.

It's a sweet white from France's Loire Valley, specifically from the Coteaux du Layon AOC (Appellation d'Origine Controlee -- a precisely defined growing area, one of fifty within the Loire valley). The producer is Domaine de Baumard, the grape variety chenin blanc. In years of fine weather, the grapes for this wine are not harvested until they are superripe or even botrytised -- attacked by a beneficial fungus, botrytis cinerea, which shrinks them and concentrates their juices -- so the fact that this particular pretty label carries no vintage year may indicate that the weather was not terrific and this wine is therefore a little more ordinary than not. However, the Loire is known for its fine white wines, so we should be careful how we bandy about the word "ordinary."

The grapes that make the Loire's fine white wines are primarily chenin blanc and sauvignon blanc; many wine drinkers will recognize the name Vouvray as mentally translating to "chenin blanc," and Sancerre and Pouilly-Fume as translating to "sauvignon blanc." Karen MacNeil, in The Wine Bible, goes over the ground:

Like Champagne, the Loire exists on the fringe of the lowest temperatures at which grapes can ripen. This is a plus in warm years. When the grapes get enough heat and sunlight to ripen, the cool climate gives the wines of the Loire their elegance and haunting precision (the result of high acidity). In great years the best wines can have such dynamic tension they seem poised on a tightrope. In French, their refreshing vigor is described as nervosite. ... Vouvray, Coteaux du Layon, and Quarts de Chaume epitomize the complexity that chenin blanc, planted in the right place, can achieve.

A map of France will be helpful here.

Since I flatter myself that I am now deep in the study of Italian wine, I do fear getting muddle-headed by veering off, even for a moment, to other places. What actually first struck me about that pretty-as-a-peacock label, when I found it at Wine Label World, was that it belongs in my PREWIAKDS (Pink Rose Euphoric Wine Imagery Anti-Killjoy Defiant Seduction) Club and Virtual Gallery. And that led me to think a little more about labels.

Though it may render me the most ridiculous curmudgeon, I have a quibble about wine labels. The trouble with them, when they are given a lot of artistic thought and all dressed up and prettified, is that they reinforce many consumers' expectation that wine is a uniform product. And that means that the consumer, perhaps disappointed one day in his search for his favorite label, goes away without buying anything, and therefore without trying or learning anything new. He goes away without an appreciation for wine as a half man-made, half nature-made product, part of whose charm lies in its unpredictability and its miraculous dependence not only on nature's caprice or kindness, but on the skill, effort, and accumulated experience of all winemakers. It's natural to want to drink your favorite wine again and again, but the Cute Label, pleasing the eye and revealing nothing, obscures the fact that there is something of an experiment going on in this bottle -- and there always will be. Wine is not supposed to be a finished, perfect product all the time. If your eye-catching label disguised a pinot noir, why not try another pinot noir when you can't find that one? No? -- because it won't be the same?

And there are so many cute labels. Marketing departments, bless them, work very hard on them for a reason. Each one can be a kind of little trap from which the consumer may or may not realize he is permitted to escape. At least the French peacock label has lots of information on it too, in the European style.

Ah well. Good thing, in a way, that the world does have bigger problems than whatever your local neighborhood wine curmudgeon can think up.

More labels, anyone?

Irish potatoes or colcannon

2009-12-09T04:29:00.002-06:00

If you're looking for comfort food against a raging winter storm, this could hardly be simpler. Leeks, celery, or cabbage -- or any combination of same -- are cooked in butter

and then mashed into mashed potatoes. I found that one leek and a quarter of a cabbage, sauteed to tenderness, were enough to nicely augment seven or eight smallish potatoes, mashed with butter and milk. Add salt and a generous dose of pepper. The Settlement Cookbook also recommends drizzling melted butter over them.

Good with any roast meat, any poultry -- anything.

A "blind" tasting of the under-$10s

2009-12-06T05:08:00.002-06:00

Consumer Reports' December 2009 issue has an interesting article on choosing good, affordable wines for this economically challenged holiday season. The magazine found several examples, domestic and imported, of each of six major varietals -- cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, riesling, etc. -- in the under $10 range. The wines were sampled in a blind tasting by "our experts," who sipped and judged each bottle without knowing either the winemaker or the exact price.

The resulting tasting notes, touching on the usual topics of fruit flavors, sweetness, acidity, and so on, help guide the reader to a cost-efficient and pleasing personal choice. What's most interesting about the project, however, is the fact that almost all the wines that end up identified are, of course, grocery store and liquor store stalwarts: Chateau Ste. Michelle, Fetzer, Frontera, Yellow Tail, Lindeman's, Dancing Bull. Given that the premise of the round up was "let's keep this under $10," the people in charge could scarcely not have arrived at this or a like collection. Which leads me to ask, in a nice way of course, what is the point of a "blind" tasting of these types of wines? At this price point, we are going to discover sound, decent product and that is all. But, to be fair, that is a great deal -- for we are therein going to find proof that those wine writers are right who say there has been no better time in history to be a wine drinker than now, when it's the ordinary wine that is very good. Far better than what our ancestors knew, who had to drink it even when it was vinegar, because few other liquids were safe.

However, some studies have shown that people who taste wines "blind" can still be swayed in their opinions on flavor if they are told that some of what they are swirling and sniffing is expensive. (Knowledge about high prices actually stimulated the area of the brain that governs the experience of pleasure.) So, I'd be very intrigued by a wine round up in which the experts, gathered before a collection of grocery store wines, were told -- maybe truthfully -- that two or three of the anonymous ones were in fact a Chateau Margaux, a Dr. Pauly riesling, or a Penfolds Grange (famed Australian shiraz -- feel free to spend $200 to $600 for a bottle). The challenge of being able to pick out which were really exalted would be irresistible, a princess-and-the-pea style proof of each Expert's experience and innate class. And what grocery store wine, if any, would get any prizes? Would any taster have the confidence to say, "I think they're all pretty much Gallo. And not bad at that." Or, "I think they're all '06 Burgundies -- maybe one is a Rhone vin de pays."

It's further interesting to see, in this tasting project, that the wines which did earn any unusual comments were a Chilean cabernet sauvignon from Frontera and two 2007 German rieslings. The cabernet was, at about $4, "the cheapest wine Consumer Reports had ever recommended," and the two rieslings both come from producers -- St. Urban's Hof and S. A. Prum -- which are at least grand enough to show up in my German Wine Guide (Armin Diel and Joel Payne, Abbeville Books, 1999.)

Does this matter? I took it as an omen of their stature, but perhaps I was premature. A digression: I found my German Wine Guide recently at my favorite used book warehouse. Is it all right to consult a ten-year-old book, on the assumption that it will contain some information that remains constant? My particular grocery store's riesling's producers, for example, Schlinkhaus and St. Christopher, do not seem to show up at all in the Guide. I presume it's because, whether now, ten years ago, or ten years from now, most of them hail, hailed, and will hail from huge wine making areas boasting those mass-production habits that preclude their ever being more than what Jancis Robinson frankly calls "Germany's shame" -- the QbA, sugar water riesling. A QbA wine, or a Qualitatswein bestimmter Anbaugebiet, is simply a wine of a certain level of quality guaranteed to have come from one of thirteen (large) regions, anbaugebiete, in Germany. No further promises given, about grape blends, flavor, value, or anything else. I imagine that it's considering what rieslings can be which prompts Ms. Robinson to resort to the rather strong epithet "shame" for those that don't try hard enough.

Consumer Reports' two German rieslings were QbA wines anyway; hence the danger of my judgments being premature. Just because their producers show up in my ten year old Guide does not mean those two wines are, so to speak, the peas beneath the princess' mattress. Still, their being singled out, along with a Chilean cabernet, even in an under-$10 blind tasting would seem to offer a little more proof of what wine writers mean when they talk about whole categories of wines being unusually good values. German rieslings, especially once beyond QbA status, and Chilean wines in general always earn a mention among the experts. So do Rhone reds, and guess what? -- where I work we've got six on our shelves, whereas we carry no proper red Burgundies (two white) and only one Bordeaux. We can afford to get in a little Rhone by the case, and give it shelf space while waiting for one customer in a hundred to show an interest; probably no grocery store within miles can afford to carry the Burgundies that are produced in much smaller quantities to begin with, and then snapped up in wealthy areas far away before you can say "south side." For their part Fetzer, Yellow Tail, Gallo, and yes, QbA German wines are good values because the companies responsible make it their business to get large amounts of uniform quality product on the shelves at a good price.

The other kind of good value, in the sense of a more interesting, better made wine selling for less than it could be worth, has everything to do with reputation and the market's demand. Wine writers delight in these little anomalies, offering the same gladsome advice: sshhhh: snap up those wines before everybody else scanning the lower shelves figures out what they've been missing, and prices rise.

St. Urbans Hof
S.A. Prum
Frontera (Concha Y Toro)

Wine as sculpture

2009-12-01T06:02:00.000-06:00

Strange carafes, indeed, from artist Etienne Meneau.

Do they remind you of tree limbs? Balloon sculptures? Otherworldly, many-legged animals?

How would their use affect your red wine?

And -- I hate to be pedestrian, but -- how on earth do we clean them?

For more photos and more of Etienne Meneau's art, see Strange Carafes.

A toast

2009-11-30T11:46:00.000-06:00

In honor of the 135th anniversary of the birth of Sir Winston Churchill (November 30, 1874): his favorite, Pol Roger Champagne.

And a quote, just one of many that we could choose:

"Some regard private enterprise as if it were a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look upon it as a cow that they can milk. Only a handful see it for what it really is - the strong horse that pulls the whole cart."

A Thanksgiving necessity: creamed onions

2009-11-26T05:00:00.001-06:00

Creamed onions were not on my family's Thanksgiving table when I was growing up, but I have added them to my menu because I found them listed among the suggestions for the feast at the back of Miss Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School Cookbook (1896). They seemed so authentic and historical as well as delicious-sounding, and easier to attempt than oyster soup (first course) or fruit pudding with sterling sauce (sixth course).

So here they are. You begin very simply, with fresh whole pearl onions. Drop them into boiling water and simmer them for three or four minutes. Drain them, run cold water over them, and then peel them by cutting off the root ends and squeezing the onion out of its skin. By this procedure you will probably squeeze the onion out of its first layer or two of flesh, as well. It looks and seems wasteful, but can hardly be helped.

Over the years I've learned a variety of ways to simplify the rest of the story. The best and richest way to prepare creamed onions is to make a standard cream sauce, based on a roux of equal parts melted butter and flour stirred into a bubbling paste, to which milk is added; stir and cook until the sauce is smooth. Proportions for this are easy to remember: 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour will need 1 cup of milk, 4 tablespoons each will need 2 cups of milk, and 5 tablespoons of each will need 3 cups. Once the sauce is done, you can put the onions to finish cooking in it -- they are done in about five more minutes -- and then leave them to stay hot on a back burner, until you are ready to serve them.

Or, if you have a gluten allergy problem, you can cook the onions in milk themselves,

and then when you are ready to serve, thicken the milk with a free form, GF (gluten-free) flour and water slurry. You can also simply sprinkle potato flour over the bubbling liquid, and stir it in until it dissolves. Keep on adding a little more potato flour until the cream is as thick as you want it. Both these methods serve the purpose, although these sauces don't cling to the onions as nicely as a traditional sauce does.

Salt and pepper and a dash of nutmeg are all that is needed to finish any of them.

Now you may move on to the rest of your dinner. Don't forget to give thanks, really.

My second Barolo

2009-11-22T17:00:00.000-06:00

Not to be confused with my first Barolo, of course.

Azienda Agricola Sordo Giovanni, Castiglione Falletto, 1995.
Found in a rack in the liquor storeroom, below all the Smirnoff flavored vodkas. Covered with dust. Another example of why people stay in the wine business.

Color: beautiful. Indescribable. The glowing russet-brown of autumn oak leaves, as if seen shimmering through crystal. The aroma: Band-aids. (Yuh-oh.) Nail polish remover, faintly. (Yuh-oh. Perhaps I'm imagining things.) The texture: absolute silk in the mouth.

The flavor: cherry compote, albeit old and mature. Leather, faintly. So thin, so delicate, so elegant.

Paired with a chicken risotto, luscious with real chicken broth, olive oil, butter, cheese, and big pieces of chicken meat. My goodness, who knew that the alcohol content of this wine is 13.5 percent? But one must have a second glass, regardless. And then as Lucia would say, voyaging through Italy -- "goodnight, Georgino. Me so, so sleepy. "

P.S. Ought one to have a chocolate doughnut, afterward?