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

To celebrate At First Glass' first birthday, I thought I'd do what it seems wine lovers tend to do, namely branch out for the day and busily appreciate lots of other examples of life's aesthetic things. Wine leads to food and then to dining, and then, it seems, to fashion and art and interior design and books and movies and, who knows? -- opera, or the phases of the moon, or full circle back to the best chocolate chip cookies ever, or potato chips and dip and your favorite grocery store riesling to accompany the aesthetics of watching Goldfinger and playing Parcheesi on New Year's Eve. (Phases of the moon? Wait a minute, maybe I've had too much riesling already. Good thing I'm not driving.)

But speaking of mixing aesthetics, did you know, for instance, that a person of no less stature in the wine world than Hugh Johnson, absolute authority on the subject, also writes to international acclaim on gardening? At first, I was struck by the dichotomy, and by the idea of anyone's having the time to master both subjects. On second or third thought, it makes perfect sense. Of course. Wine is a pleasure, as is a garden, and of course one must have hobbies and other interests, no matter what one's work. Naturally a person would write books on both. And why not wait for the day when Mr. Johnson also writes on the couture, or when some other famed wine writer also publishes top-notch erotic fiction?

So, in an expansive and celebratory mood, let's devote ourselves for the holiday night to "something completely different:" the hunt for good design blogs, all about houses, clothes, objects, pretty things. Here are six.

Diana:Muse
Absolutely Beautiful Things
The Coveted
This is glamorous
Cachemire & Soie
design*sponge

If nothing else, if several of them fly as high over our heads in the aesthetics department as the most expert wine blogs do in wine, they at least provide us with cache after cache of luscious photographs to look at and enjoy for no other reason than pleasure. If not much in our own household inventory quite compares to what these pros take pictures of, we can at least envision ourselves personally sort of like this, aesthetically:




You know, lolling about, appreciating the idea of things. That's Miss O'Murphy on the sopha, and I can just picture her ready to reach out one plump lazy arm and take up a wine glass, or click the mouse and surf her way to Paris Vogue. Or maybe -- since she is after all at the time of "sitting" for this portrait only fourteen years old -- grope the best chocolate chip cookie ever off a nearby (handpainted) plate. Happy New Year.

Chocolate cake and underage cashiers

The most beautiful little package of potential pleasure the kitchen has to offer: the square of unsweetened Baker's chocolate.

We are lucky enough to have two winter birthdays in our house, one in late November and one in late December. Traditionally, the dessert of choice after birthday dinner is chocolate cake with creamy chocolate frosting, from Marion Cunningham's revision of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook (1986). As she says, this is "a fine-grained, tender cake -- ice water is its secret." Don't be tempted to think that ice water makes a weak or flavorless cake. It is delicious, and not bloatingly rich.

After buttering and flouring two round cake pans, you melt 2 squares of chocolate in a heavy small pan (be careful and remember how quickly chocolate can scorch). Set the chocolate aside to cool, and then cream one stick (1/4 cup) of room-temperature butter, and slowly beat into it 1 and 1/2 cups sugar. The butter-sugar mix takes on a feathery consistency at the end.


Then, mix in 2 eggs and 2 teaspoons vanilla. And why is it that the young cashiers at the local supermarket, who may not even scan a bottle of wine through their register, are allowed to scan a bottle of vanilla extract, which is 35 percent alcohol? It used to be that the customer herself could scan just this one product on the clerk's behalf, wine, but as of this winter, the store has changed both its computer system and, apparently, the rigor of its adherence to inane state liquor laws. Now any cashier under 21 must summon a manager to physically move the bottle of wine past the little electronic eye and so tot up as a sale. While everybody waits, fuming or not. Innocent, seductive vanilla, more potent in its tiny flat brown bottle than any three average wines, is deemed not to be the hazard to fragile young morals that its proof ought to make it.

But we digress.

After the vanilla and eggs are thoroughly mixed in to the butter/sugar, add the cooled chocolate. It always seems, to this chocolate lover, that I am leaving spoonfuls of it in the pan, but it all seems to come out all right.

Meanwhile, you will have mixed 2 cups of cake flour, 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of baking soda, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt in a separate bowl. The use of cake flour does make a difference. Add the flour mix to the batter, and blend.

Now you will add 1 cup of ice water. Mix it in.


Pour the batter into the two pans, and bake the cakes for 25 minutes in a preheated 350 F oven.


While the cakes are baking, address yourself to making Creamy Chocolate Frosting. This is simple. Put 2 more squares of baking chocolate into a heavy small pan, along with 1 cup of sugar and 3 Tablespoons cornstarch. Stir into this 1 cup of boiling water.


Cook and stir until the chocolate melts, the sugar and cornstarch dissolve, and everything becomes smooth and thick. This takes about five minutes. If you make a mistake and your cornstarch turns lumpy, you can always pour the frosting through a fine strainer into a bowl and save the day that way. After the frosting is smooth, add 1 Tablespoon butter, 1 teaspoon of that intoxicating vanilla, and a pinch of salt.


Mix thoroughly, and allow to cool.


When the cake is done, a toothpick inserted in its center will come out clean. And when the cake and the frosting are cool, it will be time to create your birthday masterpiece.


When I used to watch my mother make cakes as a little girl, I remember being disappointed at the rule that one always frosts between the two layers first, and then the sides; I thought of course we want all that delicious frosting plopped right on top right now, don't we? No, we do not. Frosting the middle and sides glues the cake together and hides what tend to be the ugliest parts, the crisp, floury sides.

Then you may frost the top.

And then you may eat, after you sing Happy Birthday. Tea and coffee are fair companions to this, but the best drink of all beside it is, of course, nice cold milk. Whole milk full of fat, please. So appropriate for the youngsters. They are safe anyway because all the alcohol in the vanilla has cooked away. We haven't invited the liquor control commissioners ....

"Eat Swiss!" (have a latke)

Elisabeth Luard, in The Old World Kitchen: The Rich Tradition of European Peasant Cooking, writes that ordinary families in Switzerland could, at least at the time of writing (1987), reasonably expect a knock on their door and a visit from a government official checking up at any moment on the meal they were eating that night. Swiss officialdom worried that the serving forth of traditional foods might fall into desuetude through a combination of immigration and emigration and, well -- desuetude. "Eat Swiss!" was the nation's command.

A typical Swiss recipe that officialdom would have been pleased to see on the table was Rosti, a grated potato cake. Elisabeth Luard's recipe calls for three pounds of grated potatoes to be fried in half a cup of butter, the potatoes turned over and over with a fork during the first twenty minutes of cooking and then allowed to crisp. I attempted this because I love hash browns or indeed any recipe that gives potatoes a browning. (Mashed? Meh.) The results were, as I penned beside my notes, "Glop."

Perhaps I would have done better if I were Swiss and had witnessed my mother prepare them in childhood. In Lucerne. But I think the trouble with this recipe is that it did not call for nearly enough fat. The trouble with potatoes is that they release so much water while frying that you positively must use buckets of hot oil to fend off or contain or sizzle away all that water content -- all that potential glop. What you want to do to make rosti, in fact, is to make latkes. With latkes, the point of the dish is the oil. Smart.



To make latkes, dump some cooking oil into a heavy frying pan. How much? Who cares? A lot. Don't use olive oil, as it starts to burn at too low a temperature and anyway it's too expensive for this peasant meal. Grate your potatoes into a bowl, sprinkle in some salt. Heat the oil. This does not take long, perhaps three or four minutes. (Don't leave the kitchen.) Pick the grated potatoes up in small forkfuls and place them carefully in the hot oil -- you can test its temperature by dropping in a few strings of potato first, as you see at lower right of the photo above. If they sizzle brightly right away, the oil is ready.

And fry away. You will only want to fry three or four latkes at a time. When they look golden and scrumptious, they are done. A few minutes per side is about right. The potatoes in the bowl will turn brown quickly and give off a lot of water, but they whiten up in frying, although the first batch is always the lightest and prettiest. Drain the latkes on paper towels or brown paper, and serve them, of course, with sour cream, applesauce, or both.



There are fancier recipes for latkes, calling for eggs, flour, and even the reserved starch from the oozing potatoes themselves -- how heroic -- but over the years I have learned to do it the easy way. And don't trouble to peel them first. You shouldn't strain yourself.

I do believe that the best accompaniment for these is probably plain hot tea rather than wine. They are so very homely and crispy and comforting. Wine seems on another level entirely. And if you follow them up with (perhaps Swiss) chocolate, you can go on "eating Swiss," too.

In which I taste a 2005 Bordeaux

Chateau Gauthier Medoc 2005, Mme Courrian Christine, Proprietaire. My notes say: cabernet - merlot - petit verdot; red apples (apple skin); rich, smoky (a little); fruit; !!!

According to an article written by Robert Parker in September 2006 for Food & Wine, the greatness of the 2005 vintage in Bordeaux comes from weather conditions that also made great vintages in previous years: 2000, 1990, 1982, 1961. A very warm and very dry, almost drought-condition summer allowed the grapes to ripen to high sugar levels and flavorful complexity and to create high-alcohol, moderately acidic, high-tannin wines good for aging -- and good for Robert Parker's palate which, let us not forget, some people criticize as being horribly uniform and horribly devoted to the promotion of "fruit bomb," "monster" wines. To be fair, vintage notes from no less an institution than the great Chateau Latour agree with his assessment of the (wonderful) effects of the weather in 2005.

The Bordeaux I tried was from the Medoc region, on the left (west) bank of the Gironde estuary, from whence also come great wines with names like Pauillac and Margaux -- and Latour -- on their labels. Parker summarizes the Medoc's 2005 production as noted for "dry extract" (the grapes responded to the lack of water via a natural concentration of their juices) and high tannin. He refers in fact to "sweet" tannins, a new descriptor to me, and says these wines will not be ready to drink for ten to fifteen years.

That's a problem. I drank my 2005 already. Was its taste, chiefly of tangy red apple skins, the taste of high tannins and drought-stressed concentration? Would it have been better in 2018? And where do I place Chateau Gauthier in the pecking order of Bordeaux wines?

CellarTracker includes a handful of members' notes on previous vintages of Chateau Gauthier. Above the notes is a simple table of information where we find some obvious identifications to help place this maker in context. Yes, it's in France, the region is Bordeaux, and the wine is a red blend. Blanks for subregion and appellation are both filled in with Medoc.

Medoc, however, covers a lot of ground, if I may be pardoned the pun. For the more specific categories in the table, designation and vineyard, CellarTracker gives us only "n/a." Since in French law, the more specific the information offered on the label, the higher the standards to which the winemaker has been held and therefore the better the wine, what we have in Chateau Gauthier -- Appellation Medoc Controllee -- is a good wine not exalted enough to shout more specific characteristics to the buyer. It can't, for example, shout Appellation Pauillac Controllee, Pauillac being one of the six really quality-oozing subregions in the Medoc (there are 57 subregions in all of Bordeaux).

If it were a wine that could shout that, if it were, say, Chateau Latour Premier Grand Cru Classe, we would know we were buying a wine not only from a certain subregion in Bordeaux in a year of promising weather, but also from a particular and deeply historic chateau which, for this bottle, had used grapes from a certain vineyard, from vines of a certain age, harvested at a certain yield, and subjected to vinifying techniques and to aging which would bring us pretty close to Bordeaux perfection. (See Kevin Zraly's Windows on the World Complete Wine Course, 2007 edition, p. 119.)

And the experience would cost us some money, of course. I would say at a guess that there isn't any more Chateau Latour 2005 available in the world. Our cantankerous friend Willie Gluckstern, The Wine Avenger, would huff that it is all sitting right now in the cellars of rich orthodontists and plastic surgeons who habitually buy the finest Bordeaux en primeur, as futures. They commandeer the juice when it is fresh off the vine, before it is even bottled, and in fact would have just received their shipments of the great '05 vintage this past summer. According to Chicago Tribune wine writer Bill Daley in his article "Vintage of the Century? Already?" futures of 2005 Chateau Lafite Rothschild sold, in 2006, for $600 a bottle.

The more commonplace stuff, like my Chateau Gauthier, arrived on store shelves this past May priced at between $25-$30 a pop. It was in merry May that I got a chance to sample it. A wholesale distributor brought it in to the store for us to taste and see if we wanted to carry it for our customers. Alas, the store owner turned it down because she felt it was too pricey and also because -- and I quote -- she "doesn't like French wine." Now that the store has closed and I am employed elsewhere, I can give tiny, tiny vent to the astonishment and just slightly chattering rage I felt at hearing that. And I can muse, with a certain, tiny pomposity -- well, is it any wonder the store closed?

At any rate, to get my hands on any more 2005 Bordeaux, even of the humblest, I will have to keep my eyes peeled at wine shops and, dare I hope, at better grocery stores. I can investigate on-line buying but of course that's a problem, since the state of Illinois has fresh new laws about citizens buying their wine from just any old where, without the Illinois wholesale distributors' imprimatur. And for the future -- more puns -- I will have to do a sort of pre-homework where Bordeaux is concerned. The way to have savored a fine Pauillac at the peak of its development this ice-locked winter would have been to buy a few bottles of '82, another legendary vintage, when it was fresh and fairly cheap, in '85. No such luck. No such knowledge, at the time.



Now the 2008 harvest is in, and what was the weather like? And 2009 approaches ... the horizon expands. You can save up for a special purchase, make excited plans, generally live a winey-rich inner life, and all it requires is that you pay a little attention to the summer climate in Bordeaux.

Meanwhile, life goes on. Today's lunch was a grilled cheese sandwich with a glass of 2008 Frontera cabernet sauvignon-merlot blend, $6.99 for a 1.5 liter bottle. That's a magnum of the typical Bordeaux blend, from Chile, a good source of good value cabs and merlots. All the wine writers affirm so. Tasty, too.

Help, I'm chardonnay-phobic

I'm not sure if I will ever be able to enjoy or appreciate chardonnay, unless I grit my teeth and pay the $35 starting price for a true French chardonnay, one of those merely entry-level white Burgundies bearing some lovely and legendary name like Montrachet on its label. Maybe they are, indeed, sublime. In the meantime, I fear my mind has been hopelessly polluted against this, the queen of grapes, by what I've read of it. And what I've tasted. But who knows whether or not my tasting experiences have been completely skewed by my reading?

Wine writers speak of chardonnay being overtreated with oak. When I sniff a chardonnay, I smell only wood. They speak of its taste being intrinsically a bit bland. When I taste it, I taste little or nothing interesting. They speak of its high alcohol content. I, too, find it burns going down. They speak of its being, next to a glorious rielsing, "clunky." I drink a chardonnay, and it clunks right down my throat.

Two days ago, I tried a new bottle, Toasted Head 2007 from Woodbridge, California. The back label said it would remind me of vanilla and pears, and so of course when I sipped it I was reminded of vanilla and pears. I tried to do some independent observing and thinking, too, and so my notes say colorless -- fresh green wood -- pear -- acidic, bitter.

Then I tasted that flavor that I begin to recognize in chardonnays. It comes after I've swallowed, and it's not exactly wood or blandness or clunkiness, but something odd and unpleasant. It's unique and repeated, at least for me. Never yet having been able to put my finger on it, I sat down with my glass and sipped and, by golly, cogitated. A scent, a flavor, a texture all mixed up together ... stale -- old sugar -- stale caramel. And then I hit upon it.

What I don't like about chardonnay is the effect it leaves in the mouth, of burnt popcorn. I would love to have a chemist confirm that there is some chemical reason for this. But the effect I am talking about is almost emotional. Have you ever taken a mouthful of popcorn, expecting all that light hot buttery saltiness, and then found out too late that it's been burned? The shock to the tastebuds is physical, as if disappointment could have a flavor profile. There's a blackened, hollow nothingness. Before you can frown, your mind tells you: this is not popcorn.

That, to me, is chardonnay. Maybe that's just Toasted Head chardonnay, or just that bottle (although I think the wine was sound), or maybe that's what happens to California examples of it. If a French example in that $35 and up price range proves properly glorious, I'll be glad of it. But that's an experiment in cogitation which will have to wait until I'm gainfully employed.

Cauliflower soup with cinnamon

There is no joy quite like the joy of library cast-off book sales. Okay, there are other joys, but no joy quite like this one. At the sale I most recently attended, I scooped up three new cookbooks, one of them being French Country Favorites, published by the Bon Appetit magazine people in 1987. That very afternoon in thumbing through it I found a recipe that I had to try, because it featured cinnamon doing savory (rather than sweet) duty, and I must leap at any savory dish made with my favorite spice. It was "cauliflower soup with cinnamon."



You begin with a head of cauliflower, chopped into florets, and two boiling (not baking) potatoes, also chopped roughly. Saute them for ten minutes or so in about 3 tablespoons of butter. Then add salt, pepper, and one-quarter teaspoon cinnamon.



Then add 4 cups of water, bring to a boil, and simmer gently for only about fifteen minutes, until the vegetables are cooked.



Now you will puree the soup in a blender, and return it to the saucepan to reheat. Add one-quarter cup of whipping cream, and blend this in. The soup is ladled into bowls and each serving is garnished with a sliver of butter, a sprinkle of cinnamon, and some fresh snipped chives if you have them. I regret I didn't have them.



Now. Did I mention the cauliflower? How about Madame du Barry? Or madeira? Then there's the cauliflower ....

This soup is definitely for those who really, really like cauliflower. Madame Du Barry, for instance. La Du Barry, born plain Jeanne Becu, was I believe the last mistress of the French king Louis XV, he of "apres moi, le deluge" fame. The poor lady had her head cut off during the Revolution, because she made the mistake of returning to Paris from London in order to retrieve her jewels from the chaos, and so betrayed herself as an aristocrat. They dragged her screaming all the way to the guillotine. In better times, la Du Barry had been so fond of cauliflower that "the royal chefs created special dishes aggrandizing the crunchy, creamy-hued vegetable," and to this day, preparations called "a la DuBarry also connote any dish that is garnished with the pretty little florets" (from La Bonne Soupe Cookbook, by Jean Paul Picot and Doris Tobias). La comtesse would have loved this soup.

I didn't care for it. I tried amending it with a splash or two of madeira, that unique, strangely salty, tawny, orange and apricot-like fortified wine which I had on hand because I made a special trip to a good wine store to get it. Nothing doing. The cauliflower simply picked up any madeira taste and threw it right out of the pot, and I thought, I am not wasting any more wine in this battle.

So I served the soup forth, luckily having put a chicken in the oven to roast and feed the family with while I experimented with this. It was not a big hit. But who knows? Love of cauliflower (or not) may be genetic. Lots of other people might find the soup delicious. And I have lots more hunting to do, in the cookbook section at the next library book sale.

(picture source)

Sweeet

A pretty bottle, a good price, and a chance to taste both what French law considers "moelleux" -- sweet -- and what it classifies as "vin de pays" or country wine, an everyday drink of somewhat lesser quality than that usually exported. I'm there.

The wine was Baron d'Arignac Vin de Pays du Gers, Moelleux, 2006; from Landiras ($7.99). It glugged rather syrup-like into the glass, and appeared almost colorless there, although it was lovely clear pale gold in the clear, engraved bottle. Its aroma was sweet and reminiscent of riesling, its taste (I quote my notes made on the spot) -- medium body, mouthwatering, floury, noodle-like, faintly nutty. (Noodle-like? That's what I thought.) It had an unexpectedly hard, dry finish. And it was perfectly delicious.

The official legal category of vin de pays (pronounced vahn-de-payee), country wine, was first recognized and added to the "pyramid of categories used to define wine quality in France" in 1979 (Jim Budd, pp. 248-249 in The Encyclopedic Atlas of Wine, Global Book Publishing, 2004). It is a step above basic "vin de table," table wine, and a step below the fine wines that are identified by their "appellation d'origine controlee" (AOC or AC), literally meaning their place of controlled origin. These last are the imports we usually see on our wine shop shelves -- Appellation Bordeaux Controlee, for example. The higher up one goes in the pyramid of wine quality, the more restrictions French law places on the winemaker's product, from grapes to cultivation methods to blends used to the information provided on the label. This is a good system in that it guarantees a Bordeaux, say, will be what we think we are paying for, but not so good in that it stifles innovations among "dynamic, quality-conscious winemakers" (Joanna Simon, p. 161, The Encyclopedic Atlas).

The vin de pays category was introduced, Joanna Simon goes on to explain, "principally to encourage producers of vins de table to raise their standards, especially in the vast Languedoc-Roussillon area in the south, and overall it has worked extremely well." In other words, it seems French makers of table wine -- the equivalent of Ripple, perhaps -- were told, since you'll never reach the exquisite straitjacket of AOC status, you may have the freedom to experiment a bit with grapes and vinifying and labelling, in return for which the law will boost you up to a newer, classier marketing category: vin de pays, country wine. And as for the system working extremely well in the south, well, yes, that would account for my $7.99 bottle of Vin de Pays du Gers at my local liquor store. There on a map is the departement of Gers, bang in the middle of the larger Cotes de Gascogne region. Quite west of vast Languedoc-Roussillon, but still the south of France.

What is frustrating is that just when we think we have herewith puzzled out the rudiments of French wine making categories, they up and change them. According to a recent article from Vinography, the three basic classifications of wine, table wine, country wine, and higher quality wine, will now go thusly: table wine will be called "Vignobles de France," or vineyards of France. Country wine, our vin de pays in the pretty bottle, will be described as of "Indication Geographique Protegee," literally of protected geographic area. And AOC wines will now be called of Appellation d'Origine Protegee or AOP, wines of protected origin.

The laws for winemakers appear not to have changed too much in any category. What seems to be most new for the French is the new permission for lower-tier and middle-tier product to be labelled with the name of the grape. The French, historically, frown on this, again according to the authors contributing to the Encyclopedic Atlas. All those bottles shouting chardonnay and cabernet, "vins de cepages" as the French call them, confuse the issue. "Wine is much more than mere grapes -- it is terroir" (soil, place of origin, p. 161).

For that matter, what is the grape of my vin de pays du Gers, moelleux, from Landiras? According to the website Caves et Vignobles du Gers, it is likely a combination of the colombard, the gros-manseng, and the ugni blanc, which is the same grape the Italians call trebbiano -- itself "the most prolific vine in the world, yielding more gallons of neutral, bland wine than any other grape" (Karen MacNeil, The Wine Bible). Oh dear. One is so anxious for one's taste not to be bland and neutral. I look up the others: colombard, also called French colombard. "Widely planted grape for California jug wines." Oh dear, again. And gros-manseng? It doesn't rate a mention in The Wine Bible. Apparently, it produces sweet and simple bourgeois wines in the south of France, very prettily bottled, it seems. Vin de pays, in fact, country wines or IGPs, which in turn account for half of all the wine bought in the whole country.

As Miles sighs when he is offered a much more fabulous and noble New World selection in Sideways: Well, okay. And by the way, my new Moelleux washed down a chicken fricassee very pleasantly.

Chestnuts 101

Every autumn and holiday season, I vow that I will cook chestnuts this year. I forget why I ever got the idea. Somehow I recall reading a French cookbook, which enthused about chestnuts and made them seem glamorous and wonderful. This year became the year, because I read a post at An Obsession with Food and Wine which dropped broad hints that chestnuts are a pain in the neck. I thought, aha! If a professional has difficulties with them, then I perversely have the courage to try them. So I bought a small bag from the grocery store, brought them home, consulted my cooking bible, Marion Cunningham's Fannie Farmer Cookbook, and set to.

Chestnut instructions always begin with the cutting of a slit or cross on the flat side of the nut.

Then, we drop them into boiling water "for a minute or two." Voila -- they do come out with the shell and skin looking ready to peel.



Then, we peel them. The inner skin is not papery like the skin of a garlic clove, but gluey and rather thick. It also adheres to the wrinkles and bumps of the nut meat. The nuts grow more difficult to peel as they cool, which is why the cookbook recommends another dip in boiling water for the stubborn ones.



My first chestnut came out beautifully. It looks exactly like a little brain, which makes me wonder why chestnuts aren't a bigger deal for Halloween snacking fun.



It took two of us about fifty minutes to peel about a pound or so of chestnuts. I begin to think there is something sensible in the old song's instructions to roast them on an open fire. And none of them emerged as pristine as the first. Perhaps it would be best to host a chestnut-peeling bee whenever you feel the urge to include these in your holiday menu, so that a dozen people can make headway against the little brains while they are still hot.

The next day, I simmered them in a cup of chicken broth,



as the cookbook recipe directed (although it did specify beef broth, which I did not have), and then after 20 minutes, added 2 tablespoons butter and some salt and pepper. All might have been well, but in the final five-minute rush of getting Thanksgiving dinner on the table, I kind of forgot about the chestnuts. They overcooked and turned a tad mushy, and did not look appetizing enough to photograph.

Their flavor was mild, smoky, and unremarkable considering all the effort of preparing them. Needless to say they were far too dry, as dry as a mouthful of unbaked pastry dough -- in fact, to combine them on a fork with cranberry sauce was to create an effect just like pie. Perhaps a new pie crust idea for those with gluten problems?

Derrick at OFW endured Chestnut-aux-pain in the neck and then paired his particular recipe with a wine called a vin jaune ("yellow wine") from the Arbois appellation of the Jura region in eastern France: a 1997 Stephane Tissot, to be exact. This is a wine made from a local native grape, the white Savagnin. The wine sits in a half-full barrel for six years under a coat of natural yeast scum, "during which time" (says Oz Clarke in the New Encyclopedia of French Wines) "it oxidizes, develops a totally arresting damp sourness like the dark reek of old floorboards, and yet also keeps a full fruit, albeit somewhat decayed."

How I do admire professionals, and all they know. We enjoyed our Thanksgiving dinner, complete with Chestnut Meh, with a standby grocery store riesling that I (ridiculously) decanted because the decanter is pretty. Good times.