One of my favorites

One of my favorite recipes comes originally from Claudia Roden's Book of Jewish Food. It is called poulet aux olives, and involves the braising of chicken pieces in olive oil, followed by the addition of onions, garlic, ginger, parsley, tomatoes, lemon juice, and finally blanched olives. As the chicken finishes cooking in all this, everything simmers into an aromatic sauce to be served over rice.

I find that braising chicken in this way turns the meat rubbery and, of course, makes the skin soft and unpalatable. So I've tweaked the recipe. I buy a four and a half pound whole chicken, and roast it at 325 degrees for about two and a half hours. (True professionals will gasp that this makes for one mighty overdone chicken, but I don't like having to guess whether the "juices are running clear and the meat is done." I let the bird rest half an hour under a tent of foil after bringing it out of the oven, and it turns out quite nice.)


As the chicken roasts, I use a bulb baster every so often to siphon off the drippings from the pan. Putting them into a pyrex cup lets the fat rise to the top and the clear juices settle below.


About an hour before I want to serve dinner, I begin making the sauce. This is very simple. Saute one or two onions in olive oil until they soften and turn golden.


Then, add a clove or two of minced garlic, and a half teaspoon of ground ginger. (I'm sure freshly grated ginger would be better, but I must admit I have never tried it.) Stir this briefly, just to warm the garlic -- nothing will ruin a dish as fast as burnt garlic will -- and then add some sliced tomatoes.


Now, add the drippings from the pyrex cup, by using a bulb baster again to siphon off the clear chicken juices from underneath the layer of fat floating on top. All this will then go on the back burner of your stove, along with a handful of parsley. It can simmer twenty or thirty minutes or so, until the tomatoes fall apart; meanwhile you can cook some rice and a vegetable.

You can add the olives at any time, really; the original recipe calls for them to be added at the last five minutes of cooking, but I put them in pretty much at the same time as the chicken drippings, just so I don't forget them. I use one small can of sliced black olives and a 7 ounce jar of sliced green olives, both drained of their brine. When the olive sauce is cooked through, and your rice and vegetable are done, it's time to eat.

And what wine will pair with this? I had on hand, European-style, a Vouvray from a reliable producer, Barton & Guestier. It cost less than $8 at the grocery store. The wine has a rich, almost-sweet start, but a dry and somewhat acidic finish that seemed to complement the olives and the ginger, which is probably the signature underlying taste of the dish. Olives and olive oil being things the Jews picked up in their long historic sojourn in Spain, I wonder if a Spanish Rioja would have been a suitable red ....

Illinois makes wine

The excellent website Appellation America notes that Illinois now has its first AVA, that is, its first official American Viticultural Area. AVAs correspond in definition to the much older appellations of European wine-making countries, such as Bordeaux, Chianti, or Rioja: they are both a region where grapes are grown and wine made, and, more specifically, a set of climatic and/or soil conditions in that region, which should and do give the grapes and the wines produced there specific characteristics. The United States has 188 Viticultural Areas, and Canada 21 (called DVAs, or Designated Viticultural Areas).

Illinois' premier AVA is Shawnee Hills, south of Carbondale.


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There are nine vineyards in the area. If you read the full post on Shawnee Hills, you will see that the winemakers anticipate "a potential" for vitis vinifera grapes in the future. One man mentions chardonnay and cabernet franc in particular. But if vinifera only has potential, what are they growing and making wine with now?

They are growing varieties like Seyval Blanc, Chardonel (both white), and Chambourcin (red). All seem to be hybrids, produced by crossing Old World, vinifera varieties, albeit non-noble ones, either with one another or with native American vitis labrusca grapes.

How will the wines taste? Your palate is the best judge. The problem with labrusca varieties, though perhaps not with vinifera blending hybrids, is that they produce wines of grape jelly-like uniformity and sweetness. For some reason, this recognizable --I would call it Manischevitz -- taste of New World wines has for years been described as "foxy." Some authorities say that this bizarre descriptor comes from the fine, white hairs on the underside of labrusca grape leaves, which resemble fox fur. Some counter that foxy comes from the French queue de renard, fox's tail, which is what Frenchmen said when they first tasted New World wine (it doesn't sound as if it was a compliment, although a nice barnyard aroma in a fine wine can be).

A good example of a New World wine, made from non-vinifera grapes, would be Mount Pleasant Harvest Red. This comes from the Augusta, Missouri, AVA, which (Mount Pleasant proudly notes) was the first American AVA ever designated. It even officially predates Napa, California. It would be interesting, when you have a leisurely Saturday afternoon to while away, to try a glass of something labrusca-ish beside a glass of something vinifera, to explore the difference between "foxy" and "fine." And incidentally, labrusca grapes are not to be confused with the wine lambrusco, made from the grape of that name. Lambruscos are sparkling, sweet reds (or whites) from northern Italy; Ca' de' Medici and San Giuseppi are two producers. To me they have a strange, cooked, raisin-y taste, and I wouldn't come running for them. But perhaps I've been unduly swayed by my old friend Frank Schoonmaker, who wrote of lambrusco more than thirty years ago in his Encyclopedia of Wine, "they are Italy's best wine of this class. It is not a class likely to appeal to a real wine lover, let alone an expert."

Oh dear. One so hopes to like what is classy ....

Pizza!

Wine with pizza: for me, pizza means a topping of green pepper, mushrooms, black olives, and spinach. Pepperoni is nice but not vital. No sausage, please, certainly no pineapple -- no "everything" or garbage pizzas as I've heard them called. But what wine?

I have read that it is quite European simply to reach for whatever wine you have on hand to serve with your meal: the whole point of centuries of wine-drinking in Europe is that this is normal, so take what you've got from your fridge or pantry the way you would take a glass of water from the tap. Indeed -- sshhh -- there was a shocking post about a month ago on Vinography announcing that food and wine pairings are a scam. Well, not entirely, but .... Vinography, by the way, is great fun.

What I had on hand with pizza was a Blackstone pinot noir, a Barefoot Zinfandel, and my trusty and well-beloved -- not unlike a medieval squire -- St. Gabriel Riesling. (We experiment slowly in this house.) I tried all three, and it seemed to me they were all acceptable. This has happened before, with other meals. The pinot noir rocked gently along beneath the crust and sauce, the zinfandel zipped along cheerily, you might say, with the pizza's spices, and the riesling was refreshing with the green pepper and the spices too. Compelled to choose, I ended up pouring a glass of the zinfandel.

Pizza being a sort of-Italian meal, a chianti might also have served well, being a red with light body, little tannin, and the acidity which seems to wash down food well. Another good choice would have been a Valpolicella. The first time I tasted one of these, I was underwhelmed. The wine was a light red, looking exactly as if it had been mixed with water, and the first word that came to my mind as I sipped was "plain." Not wanting to give short shrift to it-- and you'll find another interesting post, by the way, on "quality and ignorance" here -- I went home and looked it up in a little reference that I find invaluable, Hugh Johnson's How to Enjoy Your Wine. (To think I almost didn't buy this book a few years ago, because I thought for heaven's sake, how can some authority explain the proper way to enjoy anything! What a fool. But that's another post. Several, in fact.)

Hugh Johnson lists Valpolicella -- once again, European-style, this is a place not a grape -- under the sobriquet "fresh grapey young reds," and advises that they should have "simple childlike vitality" and be served as cool as a white wine, with food or without. They cannot be aged more than a few months, he says, or "the bottom falls out": so if you encounter a Valpolicella that is pre-2007, you will I suppose have a fresh grapey young red that has become "dull and thin." Dear me, what was the vintage of mine, which I thought was a bit plain? I am sorry to say that in my inexperience I forgot to take note of it, and I certainly cannot tell the difference, just by myself, between childlike simplicity and dull thinness.

At any rate, my first and, to date, my last taste of a Valpolicella, and what I learned about it subsequently, serve as a reminder that not all wines have to be the big, thick, inky-purple, throat-burning "monsters" that I suspect we all get over-accustomed to simply by drinking our share of what California produces. "Napa Valley," Johnson says, "made its name with this type of wine -- dark, potent, sweet, tannic, and high-alcohol," all the result of grapes ripened to "sticky blackness" in a warm climate. "Turbo-powered reds" can probably beat up almost any food, even pizza with its busy sprightly tomatoes, vegetables, spices, and cheese. And because they can, and because we think of these Napa-style wines as exemplifying what wine is, we tend to shy away from the very product that is meant to accompany a meal, when it comes to choosing a beverage for our meal.

Lawrence Osborne in The Accidental Connoisseur met a winemaker, an Italian coincidentally enough, who noted what she thought was a long-term taste trend among the wine-buying public. "People associate greater concentration with greater money value," she said, "so wines get sweeter and heavier all the time." She opined that the "great old Chiantis" of the past could not be made or sold now. They would simply taste too sour, too un-winelike.

So what made them great? Experienced wine lovers fear the loss of old traditions and the forgetting of old tastes in a rush to satisfy a growing wine-buying public too ignorant to realize that just a pleasant uniformity in the glass was never the point. Then again, for most of human history, before preservation was completely understood and before refrigeration was available, wine merchants were forced to race against time simply to bring customers something other than vinegar. So at present, we're lucky; sound wine is available, cheaply, anywhere.

Which brings us back to our pizza. Another way to determine what kind of wine might go well with it would be to consider what makes a good match in the things we drink with pizza already. Beer has bubbles and a low alcohol content; pop has bubbles and sweetness; iced tea has light tannin, a little sourness, and a little sweetness. Would we want therefore a riesling, a lambrusco, a Valpolicella? Or even a wine that would have all those characteristics -- my goodness -- champagne? They say it goes with everything.

Wine with boiled owl?

...vanquished chill having suddenly reappeared with immense force and fury, revealed itself as measles. ... Soon after this, all becomes incoherent and muddled. Doctor says my Age is against me, which hurts my feelings ....

... And now, says our Vicar's wife, How am I? Before I can reply, she does so for me, and says that she knows just how I feel. Weak as a rat, legs like cotton-wool, no spine whatever, and head like a boiled owl. Am depressed by this diagnosis, and begin to feel that it must be correct.

Further demand for the Rates arrives, and Cook sends up jelly once more for lunch. I offer it to the cat, who gives one heave and turns away. Go to sleep in the afternoon ....

Robert drives me to North Road station to catch train for Bude. ... We arrive early and sit on a bench on the platform next to a young woman with a cough, who takes one look at me and then says: "Dreadful, isn't it?" Cannot help feeling that she has summarised the whole situation quite admirably....

E.M Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady

Titanic

When Molly at the delightful blog Orangette had the flu and could not write for five days, she was able to make up for it by taking and then posting a lovely and artistic photograph of ... wait for it ... the dirty dishes in her sink. That was in February ("Over and out"). Now she's done it again. I regret to say that my dirty dishes don't look like that, and my un-vacuumed carpets and un-emptied trash baskets over flowing with tissues don't look artistic, either. Not even with the morning sunlight playing over them.

So, being the good history major that I am -- B.A., Purdue University, 2006 -- I turn, raw nose, watery eyes and all, to my fail-safe plan B, the historical anniversary. April 15th: ninety-six years ago today, our not at all remote ancestors woke up to the news that the great steamer Titanic had foundered in the night, in the middle of the north Atlantic. The ship sank in only two hours and forty minutes. The menu for the last dinner aboard was an essay in Edwardian elegance, from the oysters and soup to the fish and roasts, to the vegetables, punch, and game (punch to be served before game, always), to the cold desserts and then the coffee, crackers, cheese, and port and liqueurs served afterward. The wines would have been the appropriate ones that Fannie Farmer and her fellow cookbook and social customs authorities -- and for that matter, Mrs. Wilberforce -- would have known about and therefore left unmentioned. Of course one served sherry with soup, Sauternes with fish, claret with roasts, and champagne with anything you like. There actually were some wines salvaged from Titanic's sinking, though how or when I don't know, and an anonymous collector bought six of these bottles more than three years ago.

Madame Lily Bollinger of Bollinger Champagne is famous for having announced all the proper times for indulging in her product: when happy or sad, when alone or in company, when hungry or not. Definitely when thirsty. I am sure she would have agreed that it is also the correct thing to drink during convalescence. E. M. Delafield's Provincial Lady is treated to it after a dangerous bout of measles: "I am given champagne, grapes, and Valentine's Meat Juice ...should like to ask what all this is going to cost, but feel it would be ungracious."

Ungracious, too, to close without a mental throwing of a wreath on the water, so to speak, for Titanic, that marvel which was supposed to sail majestically into New York on a lovely day in April and never arrived. It is odd to think how few people actually ever saw her. Her survivors, I am sure, were not comforted with champagne; coffee and soup were right. There is, to my knowlege, only one of them left.

Wine with "Salisbury steak"

The most savory preparation for ground beef that I have ever come across includes a combination of chopped fresh lemon zest and grated nutmeg, in surprisingly large quantities. The recipe is called "Cannelon of beef" and it appears in Marion Cunningham's 1986 revision of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook. Lemon and nutmeg make the ground beef taste somehow beefier than other preparations that rely on tomato, thyme, or oregano, or overpowering doses of onion or Worcestershire sauce. Here is the original recipe:

2 pounds ground beef; 1 tsp. nutmeg
<grated rind of 1/2 lemon; 1/2 tsp. salt
2 Tbsp. minced parsley; 1/4 tsp. pepper
1 egg; 2 Tbsp. minced onion;
2 Tbsp. butter, melted; 4 slices salt pork

Preheat the oven to 400. Combine the beef with all the other ingredients except the salt pork (I have also used 2 slices of bacon). Mix until very well blended. Chill, then shape into a roll 6 inches long. Place on a rack in a roasting pan, arrange the slices of salt pork over the top, and bake for 30 minutes. Remove to a warm platter.

In my experience, 30 minutes at 400 degrees is nowhere near long enough to bake a 2 pound, chilled meat loaf, and I hate having to guess whether pink meat is done and safe to eat. That is why I have tweaked this recipe to make good old Salisbury steak -- hamburgers in gravy -- while making sure to keep that savory lemon-and-nutmeg combination.



Last night's dinner, therefore, was simply a pound and a half of ground beef mixed with the zest of half a lemon -- chop it very finely, and it will dissolve in cooking -- some nutmeg, salt, and an egg. I browned the patties in a little olive oil, and then removed them from the pan and sauteed onions, leeks, garlic, and celery in the drippings. Then back everything went into the pan, along with a little wine -- a zinfandel, perhaps no more than 1/3 cup. It simmered slowly for about an hour. For accompaniment, I made mashed potatoes and boiled carrots with butter and a shake more nutmeg.

But what wine will match nicely with this? I had the zinfandel on hand -- Barefoot Cellars, one of my favorites -- and another great favorite, St. Gabriel riesling. Strangely enough, two such very different wines were both rather good with the meal. Zinfandel's spice and weight was the right counterpoise to the beef and the sweet carrots; the riesling's initial sweetness but final dry elegance went very well with more delicate flavors of lemon, leek, celery, and potato. After much sipping and slurping ("I'm deciding which I like better," I said, and my husband said, "Sure you are") I ended up pouring a full glass of the St. Gabriel.

And by the way, after years of trial and error, I can confidently advise on how to mash potatoes. After you drain them, put them back in the pot and mash them dry. Then add the pats of butter and let them melt. Stir everything up with a fork, add whatever milk you like, and stir that. Done. Much easier. No need to attempt to mash down cold hunks of butter, and no need to heat up butter and milk first before adding the potatoes and mashing that -- very French and authentic, to be sure, but haven't you got enough to do to get dinner on the table?

Wine in pictures

If your eyes begin to glaze over at the endless use and misuse of gardening, geologic, farmer's market, and -- what next, car repair invoice perhaps -- terms to try to describe wine, take a look at an ingenious blog called Chateau Petrogasm. The contributors post only images to "explain" their opinions of what they have tasted. On the page up today, most of the wines are grocery store choices -- the image for Yellowtail Shiraz/Grenache is priceless -- and one is a $400 Cote Rotie, a red wine from the northern part of France's Cotes-du-Rhone region (near Lyon).

Further descriptors for a site that is all about non-verbosity seem pointless. Do go.

The noble grapes: merlot

Our delightfully cantankerous friend, Willie Gluckstern in The Wine Avenger -- a book I must praise and recommend for the newcomer, precisely because it is so overheated it is easy to understand -- dislikes merlot almost as much as he dislikes chardonnay. Both are bland, easily oaked, therefore seeming-sweet and ridiculously popular. He points out that a standard wine guide of his own youth paid almost no attention to the merlot grape, and then huffs that those looking for a good example of it in a glass now should instead "get a life."

He exaggerates, of course. But a standard wine guide of a generation ago in my possession, Frank Schoonmaker's Encyclopedia of Wine (1973), also devotes little space to merlot. "Distinguished red grape, nearly as important as the two cabernets in Bordeaux production," Schoonmaker says. In Bordeaux it was traditionally mixed with cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc to give those wines some softness and gentle fruit flavors. Prolific and early ripe, the merlot grape presents "obvious temptations" to the grower. That sounds sinister. Indeed it is, a little. Lots of early-ripening grapes mean a big harvest, unthreatened by frost, and the more grapes, generally, the less flavorful they and their wine are. Think mass-production, nature's way. Schoonmaker goes on to say that merlot, used alone, does make nice wines in northern Italy and southern Switzerland.

Oz Clarke's New Encyclopedia of French Wines (1989) explains more fully that merlot was rated second or third best in Bordeaux because for years, the ability of a wine to age in the bottle -- the definition of class -- was what connoisseurs valued. Merlot grapes, thin skinned and lacking the tannins of a cabernet sauvignon, do not make wines that age well. However, "times change," Clarke says, and merlot became more popular because people wanted the Bordeaux flavor in a wine they could drink now. Jancis Robinson in How to Taste (1983, 2000) corroborates Clarke's assertion that most of the Bordeaux region is now planted to merlot, and that, chances are, any French wine labelled "appellation Bordeaux controlee" is going to be mostly made of that "supple," "plummy," "superficially sweet," grape that grows so abundantly, and lacks the grand dignity of her cabernet friends. They do like her, but these writers might almost call her Merlot the Floozie.

Once again, as with Lawrence Osborne's cogitations in The Accidental Connoisseur, we come up against the question of taste: what should a certain wine taste like, how did it used to taste, is a grape so popular now that it is overplanted and has sacrificed taste, are some tastes richer or more difficult or worthwhile than others. Robinson says delicately that many California merlots, "and there are many California examples -- are extremely light on varietal character to say the least." How does she know? What character are all the varieties supposed to have? Only years of everyday experience, moving us through initial relish to dissatisfaction to experiment to deeper rediscovery, would pave the way for these niceties of judgement. We all move in the same way from our initial youthful tastes in books and movies to more satisfying things.

Robinson recommends what sound like some high-end California merlots instead of the varietally "light" ones, and I'm sure the high end kind (Shafer, Silverado) will reveal themselves by their price. Washington State and Chile are also sources for good-value, good merlots. Even Willie Gluckstern admits with a sniff that you can find merlots for $3.99 in your grocery store, and in fact I have found them. They are from Chile, and seem perfectly nice to me.

Taking refuge in strawberries

I am currently enjoying, in spots, Lawrence Osborne's The Accidental Connoisseur, published by Farrar Strauss & Giroux in 2004. Although his prose is often lovely, Osborne has written here the kind of highly personal travel book -- for it is essentially a travel book -- that I usually find off-putting. Maybe it's because no editor has ever called me to ask me to write a highly personal book on ____________ (fill in the blank). At any rate, I find travel books of the here's-what-happened-to-me-when-I-met-an-eccentric-character-in-the-Tyrol-after-my-car- broke-down variety tend to move quickly beyond the personal, to the self-absorbed, dare we say the untrustworthy, and the dull.

For all his fine prose, Lawrence Osborne does follow this path in The Accidental Connoisseur. A stay in a decrepit anarchist hostel in Italy ... an interview with Robert Mondavi, in which the coolly observant author, for all his surface humility, treats the subject as a kind of multi-legged monster under a microscope ... the winemaking family, again in Italy, whose matriarch loathes electricity. Sure she does. But he redeems himself, in many spots, with real information about wine, information that can at least be double-checked in other people's books.

One of his best passages comes in the chapter "An Idea of France," in which he traces the development of the wine-tasting vocabulary whose expectations create such a burden for me and, I'll bet, for many new wine drinkers. Up until the 1970s, Osborne says, wines were described very simply in terms of social class and sex. Wines had "breeding" or "finesse," or were "coarse." Wines were masculine -- "assertive" and "big" -- or feminine: "soft," "beguiling." (The French have a masculine and feminine version of a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich: Croque Monsieur and Croque Madame.)

Then came one Maynard Amerine, and a "landmark 1976 book which changed all that." The attitude of previous authors like Lichine, that "wines were surrogate humans," evaporated, replaced by the insistence on wine as a product identifiable through associations with plants and animals. Indeed, earlier in the book Osborne quotes a European winemaker who laments that wine used to be a mystery and is now a commodity. And Osborne says, because of this landmark 1976 book:

Wines, in other words, were no longer to be seen in terms of a snobby European-style class system; they were to be seen as fresh, democratic, healthy, and natural. In other words, American. The core of the new vocabulary was fruit.

He then goes on to quote a professor of English at Northern Illinois University, Sean Shesgreen, who wrote an article explaining that the "new wine lexicon" happened to be overloaded with the high-sugar, often tropical fruits of the American grocery store and kitchen, especially any and all berries, plus all sorts of spices and other cooking ingredients, plus "bizarre exotica" like leather and smoke, which we are all supposed to be able to detect in our glass now. To this stew has been added the "psychiatric metaphor." Wines are "chewy" or "diffuse" or have "personality." (This reminds me of the wines called Mad Annie, Fat Bastard, Royal Bitch, Happy Camper, or The Prisoner.)

But where does all this leave us, faced with a glass of wine that we want to enjoy properly? Early on in his book, Osborne meets a winemaker who points out that describing a wine as having "lots of red fruit," for example, is a no-brainer. " 'Guess what? Grapes are a red fruit.' " The anxiety to enjoy wine correctly, soothing that anxiety by learning to smell and taste the right red fruit, is the whole theme of Osborne's book. What is taste? Really, who in the world worries about enjoying a steak or fried chicken correctly? He suggests at the end of this passage that the "florid patois" of modern wine descriptions does a disservice to everyone, "bursting with curiosity about our own tastes" but having no way to experience anybody else's and therefore no real points of comparison. All we have is words. Probably awfully silly ones, lately.

I imagine that the words and the anxiety and the silliness are all bundled up together in one phenomenon, and that is that wine has become popular among large populations for whom it was never a normal part of life. Neither the peasant's carafe nor the lord of the manor's cellar casts any shadow over the average American's -- Osborne thinks, the average English-speaker's -- life. Not having grown up with wine, good or bad, we learn from books and experimentation. The point of words, as Jancis Robinson says too, is simply to remember what you liked and what you didn't like, so that you can repeat a pleasure and avoid what was disagreeable.

What is tricky is that a wine can be beautifully made but still taste bad to an inexperienced person. (Or are there wines, Opus One perhaps, that are "all hat and no cattle"?) And that touches our ego: we'd all like to think we have such class, such taste, that we could recognize a fine wine the way we would recognize and enjoy a filet mignon. I have observed that people new to wine love being told that what they are trying and enjoying now is heavy-duty stuff, a "big" cabernet sauvignon or a flinty white. "It would be like a teetotaler liking scotch," the staff says, and the customer postitively purrs. Then again, customers also purr when they stump the staff. "Do you have an Amarone?" "Why no, I'm afraid I've never heard of it." "Really?"

Class, taste, fine-ness. Uncomfortably snooty words crop up already, and as we travel with Lawrence Osborne we were only trying to understand "what I am tasting and why." No wonder that in the last forty years or so we wine newbies have taken refuge in strawberries and things. I may not know wine, or femininity or aristocracy, but I do know what a strawberry tastes like. Maybe as wine becomes more and more a normal part of the English-speaking person's life, we'll be able to stop expecting every bottle to hold a grimly scientific stew, and learn to see the product instead as a mystery, a surrogate human. Really, that's a beguiling image. After all, who peers at his friends and relations, analyzing them for hints of this and that, and then feels puzzled when they are not there?