Deception

If you love Bette Davis, and of course you must, you will have seen the wonderful Deception, in which she plays a pianist reunited with her great love (Paul Henreid, a cellist), who must also fend off the jealousies of her older mentor (Claude Rains), a wild-eyed and fabulously successful composer.

The movie is a different Bette Davis vehicle, in that it gives her something to do besides cry, die, or renounce things or people. Or be completely wicked. All three lead actors have good, meaty speaking parts, and really seem to be playing off each other as characters who, as is true in life, do not know what is going to happen next. When they play musical instruments, they really seem to play, Bette the Appassionata of all things. And there is a delightful dining scene, in which Claude Rains has the time of his life ordering and re-ordering an elaborate meal for the three of them, just before a performance of his own cello concerto by the hapless Henreid, who crumples into a tangle of nerves as the evening wears on.

Rains' character is famed and great, and they are in a French restaurant, so there is no question but that he can either order whatever he wants, or else the chef is so superb that anything he is doing in the kitchen tonight will be sublime. Or both. Rains inspects and snuffles a platter of freshly dead partridges to start with, and approves; then he decides that they must have a trout before the partridges, and the birds must not be served plain, a l'anglaise, but must be stuffed with a forcemeat of pork, pullet livers and truffles, moistened with a half glass of dry Madeira. He insists on pronouncing truffles "troofles," which is no doubt correct. And then the partridges could be served aux choux, but that would take too long. But before that, a canape? Or soup? What soup? Is there a parmentiere tonight, or a petite marmite?

And what of the wine? A Hermitage, or a soft Burgundy? Let it be a Hermitage '14 ... and a salad and a "kickshaw," something sweet, for Bette at the end if she wants it. But what if the Hermitage is not right with the partridges? ("I really am most uncertain.") Perhaps ... a woodcock. A woodcock! Then, they could all have a Vosne-Romanee, or even a Romanee Conti, and the woodcock could be served, why, a la Vatel, or a la Perigord. "The greater the pleasure, the more important to preface it with a good meal," he purrs in explanation, while Bette and Paul slug back martinis and wait.

We'll note that in this movie, all the wines are French, and not a mention of a varietal passes Claude Rains' lips. An "Hermitage '14" would be a wine from the Rhone valley, made, if red, primarily of the syrah grape, and if white, of marsanne and roussanne. They are, says Oz Clarke in The New Encyclopedia of French Wines, among the finest France can produce, the white Hermitages especially capable of the kind of aging that Rains' character is asking for (in 1945) when he wants a wine thirty years old. All the other wines he mentions -- a "soft Burgundy," a Vosne-Romanee, a Romanee Conti, are made from the pinot noir grape, indeed are all Burgundies. Vosne-Romanee is a village having no fewer than five grands crus vineyards around it, that is, vineyards legally classified as of topmost quality ("great growths"). Romanee-Conti is one of these. It makes the most fabulous and expensive wine in the world, "the cloud-capped pinnacle of Burgundy for many very wealthy Burgundy lovers," the only comparable bottle being perhaps a Chateau Petrus -- this is a Bordeaux, made from the merlot grape. But Romanee Conti only produces 7000 bottles a year, 580 cases or so, from its four and a half acres of land. As Clarke notices, "there are sure to be at least 7000 well-heeled Burgundy fanatics desperate for a slurp at any price" in any year. We can only hope they don't slurp immediately because this wine, too, must be aged. Ten years, fifteen years, whatever it takes to bring its orgy of flavors and smells to satiny, brown sugar and earth -- and troofles -- maturity.

I'd like to know what the scriptwriters knew about wine when they wrote dialogue for a sophisticated character who is meant to have the world at his fingertips. An hour's research in a library would enable the most rank amateur to find and copy out the words "Romanee Conti." The wine has been fabled for a long time. In his (not very good) book on the subject, Richard Olney wrote that the vineyard took on the added "Conti" in the late eighteenth century, when a prince of that name bought it up and reserved the entire production to himself. But the screenwriters do have Rains mention his Burgundies with roughly correct, greater and greater specificity, and then there's Hermitage, too, which would have been a little more obscure. And all those foods he knows -- marmite and parmentiere, and a "kickshaw." (Properly pronounced kickshaws, from the French quelque chose, literally a little "something.") Were Deception's screenwriters at ease with all this information to begin with, and did they expect the audience, in 1945, to sit back and relish it all, or were these references bookish things intended to float far over everyone's heads, and render Rains' character a hilarious dilettante?

Do rent a copy of Deception, and if you like, use the English language subtitles to help keep up with all the food references in the dining scene. Rest assured that in the end, Claude Rains gets his. And I think I will spoil nothing when I add that the final line in the movie -- " 'You must be the luckiest woman in the world!' " is understated perfection. A kickshaw.

In which I make a wine cellar, and it turns out to be a mistake

The first bottle I put into it was Nina Negri Inferno -- Valtellina Superiore 2002. Delicious, finishing like currant and raspberry jam -- velvety.



Unhappily, this is the basement of a hundred-and-fifteen-year-old (we think) house. Humidity doesn't begin to describe what lurks in the air down here. (Think of it ... the bricks were laid when Queen Victoria was a doughty 74-year-old grandmother, just a few years away from celebrating her Diamond Jubilee. And the wooden steps up from our basement are warped in the middle, from generations of use.)

Even with my cellar up off the floor, my bottle of Inferno -- which I soon rescued from the depths and opened because someone who should know told me that the wine is at its peak now -- tasted like a basement. I don't think the bottle was corked. There was just enough whiff of rain-soaked cardboard to make me doubt my judgment, certainly to rethink my definition of a wine cellar, and to ruin the bottle. For the moment, then, I am reduced to my usual expedient, drinking what I buy ....

My First Barolo

Yesterday I was lucky enough to arrive for work just in time to take part in an impromptu wine tasting, being held under the hopeful gaze of two wholesale distributors anxious for us to like and buy their product. Seven Italian wines stood open on the counter top, and I had already missed the first five. The charming Italian gentleman in charge of matters poured out the first five for me in quick succession -- thank God I had made a substantial lunch -- and each one seemed delicious. There was a prosecco, a light white from the arneis grape (new to me), then a light red which I'm sorry to say I forget, then a Montepulciano, then a Valpolicella. Both our wholesale distributors soon packed up all these wines and carried them off to their next account, so I did not have time to note labels or take pictures. After the first five we tasted one more, heavier red, and at last, a Barolo.

A Barolo is a legendary wine of northern Italy's Piedmont region, made of the Nebbiolo grape, but only when the vintage is judged excellent.


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"Powerful, deep-colored, and long-lived," said Frank Schoonmaker in his Encyclopedia of Wine more than a generation ago. Another one of my favorite sources, Willie Gluckstern in The Wine Avenger, writes of having tasted one many years ago, and of its indescribable, sumptuous earthiness. They are to be had no more, he (evidently) exaggerates, because they have all been bought up as investments by rich orthodontists who keep them in their cellars and probably drink diet Red Bull instead. At our little impromptu sales-tasting yesterday, my colleague who has thirty years' experience in the wine industry gazed humbled and admiring at the Barolo. That color, that aroma ... a lovely, lovely wine, for the price, he added.

My sampling of the Barolo was the seventh wine, as I have said, in a quick succession of tastings, and anyway I do notice that whenever I taste wine, I tend to like whatever I tasted first, best. Perhaps that's simply a question of the palate and the mind being freshest then. And I was busy thinking that this impromptu tasting had already taught me one thing, that the gentleman in charge knew what he was doing. The progression from light and sweet to heavy and dry was perfectly controlled -- I could, as it were, feel the wines progressively saying something different in my mouth, and louder each time, as I went along. And at the store we do wash our glasses with soap and water, which my colleague says should not be done, only the health department has rules about that.

What I am leading to, of course, is disappointment in the fabled Barolo. I fear I smelled chlorine, and the taste of the wine was thin and unremarkable. So was the color. Of course I agreed with everyone else who adored it, because we all know about Barolo, and one doesn't want to be a barbarian. After the nice wholesalers had gone, I asked my colleague whether I'd go to hell if I don't like Barolo, and he said no, of course not, "it's probably just too big for you."

Now this was annoying. Too big? Only the night before I had tasted a high-end but probably not legendary California merlot, Sbragia, which was everything I should have thought an excellent red should be -- all those indescribable things, berry, spice, earth and leaf, subtlety, lushness, joy. Why is Barolo considered better than that?

Wine snobbery and wine ignorance are such strange things, yin and yang, like a bickering married couple who need each other desperately and don't know it. I left my pour of Barolo out on the counter top to "open up," because I was determined to give it another try, determined to like the damn thing. But who knows? Perhaps nine knowlegdable people out of ten would have agreed with me that the previous night's merlot far outclassed it. Perhaps this particular maker of the wine is infamous, among knowledgeable circles, for not doing all he could with it. In the last year (it's a year ago today I started work at the wine shop, in fact), in myself and in other people, in new customers and established customers, in colleagues retail and wholesale, I have seen the yin and yang of snobbery and ignorance play out. It's amazing how quickly it starts, sometimes. Everybody wants to like what is best -- Barolo! in hushed and portentous whispers-- but everybody also wants to be secretly experienced enough to shrug at the best and say it's not that good. And then everybody wants to take a turn secretly shrugging at the poor soul who doesn't realize, for heaven's sake -- it's okay to have an opinion, but that was Barolo. Of course it doesn't taste like a California wine. Get a clue.

Why wine should bring out this unpleasant little streak in human nature continues to puzzle, but it is great fun to watch. It's a streak of jealousy, really. Very odd. Other gustatory pleasures, fried chicken for example, do not bring this out, though I gather Authentic Texas Chili Recipes do. Anyway, -- yes, that Barolo did "open up" in my glass, a little it seemed. It took on softer caramel notes, and it did linger on the tastebuds as wines don't do very often. I am not sure when I will ever have a chance to taste, still less afford to buy, another Barolo. But at least I can say I've tasted it, for what it's worth.

Retro

I'm very fond of the fashions of the 1950s -- adult fashions, not poodle skirts and jeans -- and also of fifties retro kitchen ware. Somehow, on a beautiful summer Sunday, and Father's Day no less, while Dad has taken Junior to the movies and the girls are out shopping, it seems completely appropriate to make a grilled cheese sandwich on white bread and eat it out on the back porch. It is vital to tuck slices of fresh tomato into the sandwich and to salt it just before eating. If you drip tomato juice down your front, it's o.k. because you are wearing your Sunday grubs anyway. The plate is nice and solid, and has a design of cherries in the center.



With this you'll want either a glass of iced tea or a glass of whatever wine is left in the fridge -- would that it had been left from last night's dinner party, where you wore your new sheath dress and peep-toe red pumps! Anyway, what I had left in the fridge was a "super-Tuscan" from Castello di Lucignano, a 70% sangiovese, 30% cabernet sauvignon blend of 1998 vintage. It was nice and tart and freshly berry-like. To sip it from what looks like an old parfait glass also seemed retro and appropriate. Or maybe just goofy.



Afterward, there was nothing to do but go take a nap, while the Father's Day roast cooked in the oven. Perfect.

The noble grapes: pinot noir

Pinot noir instantly brings to mind the movie Sideways: this is the grape and the wine that Miles loves, the sun and the moon and stars, as opposed to the dark matter he loathes (merlot). He rhapsodizes about pinot's delicacy and need for special treatment, and about its grace and subtlety in the glass, so different from the cabernet sauvignon's brawny power. "It's not a survivor," he says.

Of course he is also talking about himself and his friend Jack, but we need not pursue tired old sophomore year Lit. class analogies any further. The pinot noir grape is, it seems, not so much fragile as just weirdly difficult to grow. And, with apologies to Miles, it is a survivor. Oz Clarke in The New Encyclopedia of French Wines writes that pinot noir may have been among the first wild grapevines that mankind isolated and grew deliberately, at least two thousand years ago. It has kept its wildness, he says. It tends to mutate readily, and has a hard time "setting" fruit. The wine grower therefore prunes the vines not in order to reduce growth, as with other varieties, but to encourage it; but when he succeeds and gets lots of bunches on his vine, the grapes then lack distinction and give poor juice. The grapes themselves grow very tightly packed -- pinot comes from the word for pine cone, a reference to the look of the bunches -- which invites rot.

The prime underlying challenge for the pinot grower is that the variety ripens early. What he wants, then, is a steadily cool climate which will help make a sort of growing-season-in-miniature, slotted in to the early part of the agricultural year when other grapes are perhaps just flowering and fruiting, with a whole summer of flavor-inducing sunshine and rain, and then the fall harvest, in front of them. (Mind you, the information that "pinot ripens early" has come to me from books. At a tasting of rieslings and other German wines that I attended this past spring, I'm almost sure I remember a German wine grower telling me that pinot ripens late.)

In either case, what a cool climate does mean, for any variety it seems, is a grape high in acidity. (Heat plus sunshine equals sweetness and prolific growth. Hence, heavy, high-alcohol Californian and Australian reds, and lots of them.) This acidity is good for bottle aging, not so good for drinkability now. Pinot also happens to have a light body, little tannin, and shall we say "subtle" fruit flavors. Throw in the fact that the place where pinot eventually comes to perfection in spite of every obstacle, Burgundy, is also a quite small area capable of little production, and you have a combination of factors that can make an expensive, tart, "watery" disappointment to connoisseurs and ordinary wine drinkers alike. But they can also combine, and do, to make the most "glorious" and "fabled" wines in the world. They make not only solid good red Burgundies, but such legends as Vosne-Romanee, Romanee-Conti, Gevrey-Chambertin, and Pommard. The point used to be that you did your homework about the best vintages, bought them and laid them down, and kept your fingers crossed with regard to Burgundies' "notorious unreliability."



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Do any of us have the patience to buy a bottle of pinot noir and put in the basement for five years, or ten? The hard part would probably be just getting over the first few weeks, when the memory of the purchase is fresh. After forgetting it, we likely would not miss it, just as we don't chew a lip and think about all the other things sitting in the basement. After three or four years, rediscovering it would be a delightful treat; and having lived without it all that time -- and think how expensive such a purchase would be now! what a steal it was! -- we would certainly have the strength to wait another year or two, or even more. Especially if we had already had been treating ourselves to other, older bottles, which we had put away in just this spirit years before, giving us a never-ending supply.

If only. Well, one can always start. Besides, the good news is that the winemakers who grow pinot, amid all their difficulties, are nevertheless trying to make a wine that we can drink now. Jancis Robinson in How to Taste suggests Russian River or Central Coast California pinot noirs, and Oregon pinots of course. Cool climates are the common denominator in both places. And in Burgundy itself, the ancient grape's ancient home, a winemaker quoted in Eric Asimov's The Pour acknowledges he and his colleagues "have to respect" many consumers' love of "fleshy" wines with little astringency, and presumably vinify some pinot to be a little more such. Funny how he describes what the fabulous pinot noir is not.

I don't stagger under a weight of experience when it comes to pinot noir, and have certainly never tasted a Romanee-Conti. Of my most recent samples, I have liked a Blackstone and a Talus pinot noir. I should add that I've overheard wine wholesale reps laugh at Blackstone's quality, apparently because it is served in restaurants. And just in the last few weeks I was disappointed in a Robert Mondavi Reserve pinot, because it seemed tart and watery. So it seems I'm absolutely on the right track.

Wine Blogging Wednesday -- Rhone whites

Dr. Debs at the blog Good Wine Under $20 is the host for this month's Wine Blogging Wednesday, and her choice for the month was Rhone whites. Once again, as with the first WBW that I participated in a month ago (Old World rieslings), I was lucky enough to be able to taste just the right wine at the store.

What came my way was a beautiful-looking bottle, all clear and gold, and cream-and-gold labelling, of Caves des Papes Cotes-du-Rhone 2006. This was a blend of Clairette, Bourboulenc, Viognier, Roussanne, Marsanne, and Grenache (presumably white grenache) grapes. Interestingly, the bottle in question either had a typographical error on its label, or else there are two kinds of this particular producer's wine, and a stray bottle of one got into our case: because all the other labels announced "Heritages Cotes-du-Rhone Caves des Papes," and my specimen said "Heritages Caves des Papes Cotes-du-Rhone."

At any rate, I was glad to try it, both for the sake of participating in WBW and because to know wine, one must know French wine.


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Its color was the loveliest clear, soft gold. Its aroma was delicious, sweet, having almost a riesling-like lemon cake and cinnamon freshness. (I'm told that's the viognier.) In the mouth it was perhaps medium-bodied -- remembering that the wine experts' rule of judgment on this is that "full-bodied" is equivalent to the feel of cream, "medium-bodied" to the feel of milk, and "light-bodied" to the feel of skim milk ... and here, unhappily, my enjoyment of the wine began to fall away. I tasted wood, and then more wood. I'm not sure I trust myself on this. Reading about all the fuss over oaked or unoaked wines can make me imagine I am tasting oak where perhaps there is none at all, and I have literally done so.

Finally this Rhone white, after a woody swallow, left behind a bitterness and acidity that delighted my colleague partly for its own sake and partly, he noted, because that final acidity is so often vinified out of wines these days, especially American wines, so as to make them appeal to the American palate, which dislikes acidity. To me this combination of sweet smells, rich body, oak, and acidity was not refreshing but unpleasantly thick and gummy.

I suspect, though, that the wine, if not to my taste, was well made. (Wine experts also say that you must sometimes distinguish between what is good and what you like. As with art or music, some wines may not be appealing but are nevertheless properly, even sublimely, done. With education and experience, one hopes to understand and like the sublime.) Its progression from aroma to body to finish, the unfolding of its components, seemed orchestrated and calmly ready. Over the next several days, I went on tasting it as we held it in the store to sample for customers. And it declined exactly as a wine is bound to do, and as I usually can't seem to recognize in other opened wines, especially reds. (What exactly does "tired" taste like?) On the second day, its lovely smells were halved in force, and so was its feel in the mouth and its woodiness; by the third day, its aroma had descended to something resembling cake frosting, and in the glass it was merely blank.

All in all, an interesting experience of a wine completely new to me. As for its being refreshing for summer sipping, I don't think so. There's a big difference between enjoying a white wine on the deck during a humid suburban Chicago afternoon, and savoring a Rhone white paired with typical Rhone foods under the gorgeous and ancient Rhone sun. Karen MacNeil in The Wine Bible writes that the classic pair to many southern European or Mediterranean red wines is lamb, and I can well believe that even this white would go well with lamb, too.

Trying to get to know French wines can be frustrating because as you find them, sip, and read, it seems you learn again and again that the best of them probably remain out of reach. A sensuously shaped bottle, a soft gold liquid, an elegantly printed label full of those tantalizing and proud French words, all conspire to make you think that here you have a prize, a standard, a bottle of what wine should be. And your specimen may very well be perfectly fine. Those European wine laws, bless 'em, are there to guarantee that the label is telling you the truth and you have bought the wine you want from the region displayed. But as you read -- The Wine Bible, say -- and encounter long lists of "the best producers" none of which feature your sample, you begin to reason that if your sample was for sale locally, if it was affordable, then it won't have been what the connoisseurs rave about. It will have been an everyday quaff, instead, -- which is half the point of wine enjoyment, and also perfectly fine. We come full circle, and prepare to start again.

Summer-cool

With summer weather at last here, my culinary challenge is once again to think of three months' worth of family dinners which will not heat up the kitchen, or overtax what I might call the summer stomach, too much. The daily round of sandwiches, pastas, and grilled meat and potato salads will become a bit tedious by early July. I had, therefore, the brilliant idea of going to the library to hunt up a cookbook from a hot-climate country, to search for new ideas there. Why not, for example, Spain?

Alas, my public library owns no Spanish cookbooks, or perhaps they were all checked out by people already thinking along the same lines I was. I did find The Food of Portugal, by Jean Anderson, published in 1984. Wouldn't Portugal, Spain's neighbor, also be a hot-climate country with a great repertoire of interesting, refreshing summer recipes?

As it turned out, at least by the evidence of this book, No. It is an excellent book by the way, but as I thumbed through it and noted down recipes that I will be glad to try next fall, it occurred to me that perhaps our ancestors didn't bother worrying about whether or not a summer meal would heat up the kitchen unbearably, or be "too much trouble." Of course I know that people living in sweltering countries have always taken refuge in dishes of cucumbers, yogurt, melons, or chilled salad-soups, but the following passage, on a boy making pao (bread) in summer, caused me to reflect that our ancestors' thinking may also have been "after all we must eat, what difference does it make if we get a little hotter preparing food?"

One reason the country breads of Portugal have such thick brown crusts and moist, chewy interiors is that they are baked at intense heat in brick or stone ovens filled with steam. I shall never forget visiting a village bakery, on a
blistering summer's day, just as the baker's apprentice was pouring cold water into a vent in the oven wall. It vaporized on contact, sending great clouds of steam into the oven -- and raising the humidity of the bakery to near sauna proportions.

Or rather their thinking may have been, what difference does it make if the baker's apprentice gets a little hotter preparing food. When we read old cookbooks, we probably don't credit just how much of the work of cooking in past eras was done by professionals and their apprentices as well as by household servants, if not slaves. Little details tell. In Victorian London, cooks for aristocratic families suffered (and drank) in windowless basement kitchens, because windows were taxed and the well-to-do felt no compulsion to pay the freight for yet another window just to air and light the kitchens. Then again, one of the most splendid recipes I have ever come across -- and prepared -- is Rice and Pecan Loaf with Onion Sauce from Marion Cunningham's 1986 revision of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. "An old Southern tradition, utterly simple and delicious," she comments. Indeed it is, although the simplicity is in the mixture of ingredients, not in the preparation. After several tussles with it, all of them successful I am glad to say, I broke the recipe down into five steps and penciled them in the back flyleaf of the book: 1) make white sauce, cook rice, chop pecans; 2) blanch onions, cook in butter; 3) grease loaf pan, assemble rice and pecan loaf, preheat oven; 4) bake onions in white sauce, bake loaf; 5) finish onion sauce. I forget how long the whole process takes.

It is a wonderful and rich concoction, and something that I have not prepared in years. My guess is that the old-fashioned Southern lady of the house, say Scarlett O'Hara's mother in 1850 (or 1950), was not slaving away in the kitchen making this herself. No more was the Portuguese lady slaving away helping the baker's boy make pao. When we modern American women clamor after recipes that are EASY and QUICK and DELICIOUS and NEW, as all the magazine articles blare excitedly at us, we forget that three of those words tend to be non-sequiturs (or would it be oxymorons?) in the kitchen. Most old and fine recipes still carry about them the whiff, the savor, of a time when either the cooking was done by servants for masters, or the cooking was done by the ordinary (farm) family for itself -- and the farm family had a lot of native help and God willing, supplies on hand.

In either case, time and effort were not a problem. It is surprising how many old recipes call for a food item to be cooked twice. The rice and pecan loaf is like that; so are Julia Child's French green beans blanched to keep their color and then sauteed to finish cooking. So is The Food of Portugal's "Arroz de Pato," duck simmered and then the meat pulled off the carcass and roasted crisp while the duck broth is used to boil rice -- which is then packed on top of the duck meat, and the whole covered with an egg sauce, dotted with sausages, and baked again. Being frugal, re-using broth, was also natural. The cookbook has a lovely recipe called Carrots Sintra-style, Cenouras a Moda de Sintra. You boil chopped carrots in beef broth, and then make a sauce for them from a roux combined with the broth/carrot cooking water. The sauce is further enriched with beaten egg yolks. Meals featuring dishes like this and the duck would have been simpler, all-day but not terribly onerous processes in the farm kitchen, where beef scraps, garden vegetables, and poultry were at hand, and perhaps grandma was there to supervise everything while minding the baby or washing pig entrails. Today, carrots Sintra gives rise to the immediate thought: oh God, I would have to make beef broth. That takes hours. In July. Or, oh God, thrice-cooked duck. In July.

That all the cooking chores should fall upon one person in a servantless household, while we know nothing of farming but our markets overflow with rich out-of-season food, is a situation at which our ancestors probably would have goggled. In her post World War II-novels, English writer Angela Thirkell's mature female characters look gravely at the young married women of a new generation, who want to do all their own housework, plus cook, plus look after their own children. This is considered a specifically American innovation, and an exhausting one. (Possibly it just took a while for the innovation to cross the Atlantic. Readers familiar with the Little House on the Prairie books may remember that they are almost plotless because they are so taken up with loving descriptions of Ma's work -- her huge daily breakfasts and her fall preserving chores, and her butter tinted gold with carrot juice and made in a special mold unlike anyone else's.)

At some point in our cookbook reading we'll be told that the French, of course, have the answer to the easy-new-quick-delicious and even summer-cool conundrum figured out. One buys one's bread, and a perfectly made dessert, some fruit, or a perfect cheese; and then dinner is simply a matter of a quickly seared fish, a vegetable terrine. Voila. Let the baker and his apprentices work for you, and the pastry chef and so on, a la portugais so to speak. One eats to live, loves to eat, but does not necessarily live to cook. Our French friend Madeleine Kamman noticed some time ago that she had to adjust her cookbook writing and her expectations to a new world, in which the American woman is simply not willing to spend all that much time in front of the stove. Perhaps an Old World innovation -- oh God, I'm not grandma washing pig entrails -- crossed the Atlantic, in its turn, longer ago than we realize.

So most of the recipes of The Food of Portugal will have to wait until cooler weather prevails. There is a simple one, though, Morangos em Porto, which will take advantage of the seasonal strawberries that so many food bloggers are writing about now. It sensibly combines -- remembering how sour they are -- strawberries with sugar and ruby port. You let the mixture steep in the refrigerator for a few hours, and then serve it in clear glass goblets with a sprig of mint. What came before, your summer-cool dinner, is something I'm afraid I can't advise about with much confidence.

Rubbery shiraz?

If you, by chance, first discovered Harold McGee because he was mentioned with admiration in a 1970s edition of The Joy of Cooking, then you will be delighted to run into him -- so to speak -- again, here. He'll give you an explanation of why that shiraz you just tried tastes unaccountably and crazily like rubber. It's not your imagination.

News For Curious Cooks: Curious Cook in the New York Times: Band-Aids, Shiraz Wines, and the Essence of Pepper

That's ALL

Madeleine Kamman, in her gigantic New Making of a Cook, explains how to make vegetable soup. "... they are all made according to the age-old principle: Bring water -- not stock -- to a boil, add the vegetables, bring back to a boil, and turn down to a simmer as long as you like. That's all."



There's nothing more reassuring than professional permission -- from a Frenchwoman, no less -- to keep things as simple as possible in the kitchen. When I make this vegetable soup I like to keep some of the vegetables cut big, so that I can fish them out before serving. I may want the nutritive value of lots of carrots and leeks, without having the soup so chock full of them that it's hardly soup anymore but a stew instead. Another alternative is to puree the soup before serving; but perhaps I don't feel like dirtying the blender, and anyway, always beware pureeing celery. You'll end up with millions of tiny, tiny chopped celery strings.



A vegetable soup, even enriched with an "egg" of butter (a piece of butter the size of an egg) and as much milk or cream as you like, may not be quite enough dinner for the family. I eked this one out with a spinach quiche, from Doris Tobias' and Jean-Paul Picot's La Bonne Soupe Cookbook. This turned out to be rather in the nature of an experiment. Since we are a family with a gluten allergy, cooked rice had to replace the quiche's usual pastry crust.



Cooked spinach then went on top of the rice, and -- too frugal for words -- the spinach cooking water went into the soup. Incidentally, I observe author Richard Olney's instructions in preparing fresh spinach. Do not, he says, pay any attention to those cookbooks which tell you to simply rinse the spinach and cook it in a pan with no more moisture than that clinging to the leaves; this will give you a mass of embittered greens sitting in a little puddle of blackened liquor full of the vitamins you have leached from the spinach. Instead, bring a pot of water to boil, drop in the fresh spinach, and watch it wilt almost instantly. It is cooked. And then the cooking water goes into your soup.



The heart of a quiche is simply four eggs and about 2 cups of milk and/or cream, plus salt, pepper, and one of your best friends in the kitchen, nutmeg. It's not just for Christmas eggnog.



You're going to pour the quiche batter on top of the crust (however you define it) and the spinach, or whatever other filling you have chosen, and bake it in a 375 oven for 25 minutes, according to La Bonne Soupe; 45 minutes, in my experience. Maybe my oven is wonky. Then, just as you are finishing eating your soup,



the quiche is ready. Our rice crust was not as felicitous an experiment as I would have liked, but there were compensations.



Who knew, for example, there was a hole in this pan, that I have been using for over 20 years? It dripped as I was putting it into the oven, and I thought, my hands aren't that unsteady; it can't be slopping over. I quickly placed a cookie sheet under it, baked my quiche, and rejoiced in the treat of knowing I wouldn't have to wash the pan later. Out it went after dinner, empty and dirty, right in the garbage. It might have been one of Chin's thirty-three happy moments.

And the wine? A light pinot grigio again, with a good freshness and simple melon "cut" to accompany the soup and the thick, eggy quiche. A dry rose would also have been very nice.