In my late twenties, after much study and soul searching and what not -- admirable, but my goodness, how earnest we are at certain stages in life, and for heaven's sake I was also busy raising toddlers -- I converted to Judaism. To sum up: while I still believe that Jewish theology is correct and that the Jewish intersection with the divine is humanity's only fully authentic one, I learned something from my experience that pretty much defines "rock and hard place." The denomination of Judaism most open to converts is of course the most modern, protestant branch, Reform. That's where I found myself. But any convert to any faith is temperamentally not a protestant. He doesn't want what's "watered down." He wants the old stuff. Any convert goes knocking on doors because he has read old books and been attracted to old, capital O Orthodox ways. But it's that community, the Orthodox, which is least open to converts, and rightly so. As time went on I learned that I had and have no intention of leading an Orthodox Jewish life anyway. (I submit that I gave it a pretty good try for a while.) I just think they happen to be mostly right about the big things. God and man, what happened at Mt. Sinai, and why we're all here and how we should behave toward one another.
The ancient rabbis laid it down that the identity of a proselyte lasts through the third and fourth generation, and I think they were wise to say so. I went to temple and took my children with me, regularly, until over the years and through one thing and another, I decided that sitting between this rock and this hard place was getting too uncomfortable, and the Master of the Universe would have to be content with the fact that I had certainly meant well. Does that sound insufferable? It's okay. Judaism lets you argue with God.
Now, the funny thing is that one area in which Judaism -- orthodoxy, even -- still intersects with my life is in the realm of food. I learned all the kosher laws and I applied them as fiercely as I knew how to my dinner table, at first. No pork, no shellfish, no mixing of meat and dairy products. A cheeseburger is not kosher, nor is veal parmigiana, nor are all those meatloaf recipes calling for a half cup of milk or some melted butter. Technically you shouldn't even put butter on the dish of vegetables you are serving with a meat meal. Technically there are people who won't eat a dairy dessert within six hours of eating meat ("No, thank you, I'm fleischig," I've heard them say). It's all because the Torah commands, three times, not to boil a kid in its mother's milk, and the ancient rabbis made it their business to extrapolate more law from the written law, always seeking to fully understand and obey more and more details inherent in God's will. They extrapolated that Jews must not only avoid the practice in question, but refrain even from preparing or eating meat and dairy products together. As far as that problem is concerned, I used to huff that it seemed our non-Jewish friends had, over the aeons, deliberately thrown milk and cheese into as many meat recipes as they possibly could, just to be offensive. And all this is not to mention the special kosher laws for the holidays, and special laws even about slaughtering and about what cuts of permitted animals are themselves permitted. My husband (who put up with all this for aeons) and I eventually used to joke, as I flipped through ordinary cookbooks looking for something I could make, that there are probably recipes out there for crab-stuffed pork loin cooked in milk and sprinkled with cheese -- "and it's probably damn good!"
There's the rub, or the place where a kind of orthodoxy still intersects with my life. Having self-trained so conscientiously, I haven't prepared bacon or pork tenderloin in years, and I kind of think now I'd like to. Over the years I have relaxed every other aspect of my kashrut observance, and have eaten interesting things "out," but I have not yet taken the plunge backward you might say, and brought home pork chops or "country ribs" to cook for the family. Yet I wonder -- typical Reform-er! -- why innocent pleasures that were forbidden by a desert people thousands of years ago have to remain forbidden now. Life is short. Those country ribs are tasty. Lately I have had a hankering for pancakes and bacon with real maple syrup, which is (pardon the pun) an absolutely divine meal. But besides having self-trained, I also brought up our children to observe at least a little of the kosher laws. So I balk at setting out before them things that I used to say "we didn't eat." More earnestness. I sprinkle cheese on my spaghetti and meatballs, now. They don't. I josh that "after all I haven't boiled a kid in its mother's milk, you know," and I remind them that our ladling of meat gravy over mashed potatoes made with milk and butter was itself never kosher. Rationalizing? Or approaching the whole subject with a humane-ness that is deeply Jewish? The identity of a proselyte lasts through the third and fourth generation. I am a proselyte. They were not.
Another wrinkle is that, in the last several years, we have become a family with two serious food allergies. My husband has celiac disease and our daughter has become lactose intolerant, which means that now when I flip through cookbooks, I am looking to avoid gluten -- noodles, flour-thickened sauces, bread crumbs, and so on -- and any cream, milk, and cheese. Throw in the kosher laws about pork, shellfish, and meat and dairy, and you have a family that can basically eat, together, a lot of chicken and rice. Beef, potatoes, and vegetables are also okay. You have a family whose dinner quandaries would make any life-loving, food-loving French gourmet throw up his hands in despair. Life is short. So much is so tasty. And as a blogger I am now by way of being a food professional, so it bothers me that the recipes I post are kind of heavy on, um, chicken and rice.
What to do? I used to harrumph in agreement with the (usually Orthodox-penned) Jewish books which noted that people will follow fad diets and health diets as if the flames of hell awaited transgressors, but back away from the kosher laws which carry no sanction for violation except "thou shalt be cut off from thy people." Yes, I thought. How weak people are. To be more afraid of Dr. Atkins than God!
I fear bringing on the effects of gluten and lactose allergies. Violating the kosher laws just brings on guilt, which is not the same experience as giving open sores and deep intestinal cramps to family members. As for being cut off from thy people, well. They're still there. I'm still here. I question how profoundly we ever met. And another funny thing -- the whole scenario is just a riot -- is that, as I have told my children, it's not really the case that all treif foods are so delicious. Bacon is fried salt and chemicals. Pigs are raised so lean now that pork has little more flavor than a factory-grown chicken breast. It's just that a willingness to eat it opens up useful recipe possibilities. Nobody makes chicken breast with sauerkraut, beer, and apples. And crab ... well, there you have me stymied. I remember crab being very good.
And I've forgotten to mention wine. Wine. It's all treif, all of it from Carlo Rossi Chablis to Chateau Latour '61 to all that Spanish-bistro airen to the nineteenth-century Madeiras in historic Charleston cellars. Not kosher, unless it was made under rabbinic supervision and says kosher on the label. The point of the kosher wine laws was to insure that Jews in antiquity did not seem to endorse paganism by drinking a wine made by non-Jews, and therefore very likely intended to be poured out in libations to a god. That was all. Wine, for its own sake, was always a good thing.
And wouldn't you know it? This morning I was thinking of preparing for myself a secret breakfast of pancakes and real maple syrup, and maybe just a couple of slices of bacon from that package left in the fridge. Life is short. The kids are at school. Who needs to know? Dr. Atkins?
No such luck. It was gone. I had my usual cafe au lait and bread and butter, guilt-free. It was pretty tasty.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Sunday, March 22, 2009
The noble grapes: syrah/shiraz
We may as well begin, more's the pity, with the lovely legend that is apparently not true.
Syrah, the grape, is so named because it came originally from Shiraz, in Persia. The vine was brought back from the Near East by a Crusader in the thirteenth century, one Gaspard de Sterimberg. He became a hermit and lived in a hut on a hillside in the Rhone valley in France, where syrah grows at its best. In fact syrah's most famous (and deeply expensive) wine is called L'Hermitage, after the recluse's home.
Sigh. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Wouldn't it be positively delicious if it turned out all this is true? It's possible, you know. Even though it seems we are forever learning that the grand things of the past really didn't happen, still each new cohort of professional historians has to earn its various Ph.Ds doing something. More often than not it seems they earn them by disproving whatever the previous cohort said, no matter what it was. Each generation gets to be brave, and call it "revisionism."
Of course, each generation can't rightly be revisionist without proof of its new contentions, and the proof is always in the written record. In the case of syrah, the problem with the legend -- the mucky old "mere reality," as Oz Clarke puts it -- is that the words shiraz and Hermitage, in reference to this grape and its wines, do not appear in historical records until long after the Crusades and long after the thirteenth century. (Anyway, what would Crusaders have been doing in Persia? Much too far east, surely. The Levant was about as far as they got.) It seems syrah was simply indigenous to the northern Rhone, that French Huguenots emigrating to South Africa in the seventeenth century took it with them, and then for some reason called it shiraz after planting it upon their arrival there. And the wine made from syrah in the northern Rhone valley was not called "Hermitage" or "Ermitage," in writing on paper, until the sixteenth century. That's what matters -- when do we see the words on paper? We tend to forget the first lesson of the subject of history, learned with luck in first or second grade. Pre-history means history before writing; it's the writing down of things that proves they ever existed. As the great Jacques Barzun says, history is not, for instance, a traveling display of dishes from the Titanic come to a big-city museum. History is "an event and a document." Your grocery store receipt, stamped with all those prices for wine and the place and date, is a primary source.
Anyway, for our purposes time has gone by and though we may never know why these words were chosen to go together, still now syrah, shiraz, and Hermitage link. The grape produces heavy, thick, "burly," fruity, "manly" wines, wines that, at their best, should age ten years or so in the bottle before being drunk. As is true of vinifera anywhere, climate and yield have their effect. The relatively cooler weather of the Rhone valley produces less lushly ripe grapes, and therefore syrahs of more acidity and less, shall we say, fruit-bombiness than are to be had under the blazing suns of South Africa, Australia (thither did South African immigrants bring their "shiraz"), and California. Heavy pruning is especially necessary for syrah, so that the few grapes left on the vines get all those nutrients and all that flavor.
There are a few technical details to file away in the memory. Syrah is the only red grape permitted in famed Hermitage, just as it is the only red grape of those wines called Cote Rotie, another (let us not forget the European style of naming wines for places) very small district of the northern Rhone. Strangely, a trace of white grapes, either marsanne, roussanne, or viognier, are allowed in both. There are also fully white Hermitages. There is no white Cote Rotie.
Further south along the Rhone, syrah is itself a blending grape, used to give power to the (red) grenache, mourvedre, and cinsault making up all those romantically named and even more romantically-spelled wines -- Chateauneuf du Pape, Gigondas, Vacqueyras and, what you are more likely to find in your local liquor store, Cotes-du-Rhone and Cotes-du-Rhone Villages.
In buying an Australian shiraz, the names you are ideally looking for are Penfolds Grange (winery), or Barossa Valley or McLaren Vale (places). For South African shiraz, you are looking for the name Stellenbosch. And no wine book discusses syrah/shiraz without mentioning the "Rhone Rangers" of California, a "loose-knit" group of ambitious young winemakers who got interested in syrah in the 1980s. Names like Joseph Phelps and Bonny Doon both rate a mention in books, and are likely to show up on liquor store shelves.
And how does it all taste? My past notes on Syrahs/shirazes I Have Known range from toast-jelly-hot-plum (Terra, Barossa Valley, Thorne Clarke Wines 2004) to tart-chocolate-raspberry (Barefoot Cellars, California 2005) to strong-leather-smoke (The Gorge, Hunter Valley, David Hook 2004) to vegetal-bare feet-Chinese food (Au, Barossa Valley, Aussie Vineyards 2004). None of these examples had aged for ten years. Obviously none, I am sorry to say, were French. The writers I have read seem to agree that the syrahs they have known put them in mind of leather, meat, smoke, and above all black pepper; but then Jancis Robinson also says burnt pencils, so I would hazard a guess that neither I with my small sampling nor none of us can be too far off in any case. The pepper flavors, especially, seem to be there for a reason, a chemical reason. Last summer, Harold McGee in his Curious Cook column wrote of the discovery of the chemical rotundone in shiraz grapes, rotundone being also present -- being, in fact, the most important aromatic -- in peppercorns. People who can smell rotundone (some of us can't) are able to detect it "at the level of parts per billion," McGee says, making it noticeable indeed. Too much of it gives flavors going beyond pepper and entering the realm of burnt rubber and Band-aids. Not easy to pair with dinner, whether a Rhone feast of garlic or a California vegan platter or, who knows, a bowl of hermit's gruel.
Syrah, the grape, is so named because it came originally from Shiraz, in Persia. The vine was brought back from the Near East by a Crusader in the thirteenth century, one Gaspard de Sterimberg. He became a hermit and lived in a hut on a hillside in the Rhone valley in France, where syrah grows at its best. In fact syrah's most famous (and deeply expensive) wine is called L'Hermitage, after the recluse's home.
Sigh. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Wouldn't it be positively delicious if it turned out all this is true? It's possible, you know. Even though it seems we are forever learning that the grand things of the past really didn't happen, still each new cohort of professional historians has to earn its various Ph.Ds doing something. More often than not it seems they earn them by disproving whatever the previous cohort said, no matter what it was. Each generation gets to be brave, and call it "revisionism."
Of course, each generation can't rightly be revisionist without proof of its new contentions, and the proof is always in the written record. In the case of syrah, the problem with the legend -- the mucky old "mere reality," as Oz Clarke puts it -- is that the words shiraz and Hermitage, in reference to this grape and its wines, do not appear in historical records until long after the Crusades and long after the thirteenth century. (Anyway, what would Crusaders have been doing in Persia? Much too far east, surely. The Levant was about as far as they got.) It seems syrah was simply indigenous to the northern Rhone, that French Huguenots emigrating to South Africa in the seventeenth century took it with them, and then for some reason called it shiraz after planting it upon their arrival there. And the wine made from syrah in the northern Rhone valley was not called "Hermitage" or "Ermitage," in writing on paper, until the sixteenth century. That's what matters -- when do we see the words on paper? We tend to forget the first lesson of the subject of history, learned with luck in first or second grade. Pre-history means history before writing; it's the writing down of things that proves they ever existed. As the great Jacques Barzun says, history is not, for instance, a traveling display of dishes from the Titanic come to a big-city museum. History is "an event and a document." Your grocery store receipt, stamped with all those prices for wine and the place and date, is a primary source.
Anyway, for our purposes time has gone by and though we may never know why these words were chosen to go together, still now syrah, shiraz, and Hermitage link. The grape produces heavy, thick, "burly," fruity, "manly" wines, wines that, at their best, should age ten years or so in the bottle before being drunk. As is true of vinifera anywhere, climate and yield have their effect. The relatively cooler weather of the Rhone valley produces less lushly ripe grapes, and therefore syrahs of more acidity and less, shall we say, fruit-bombiness than are to be had under the blazing suns of South Africa, Australia (thither did South African immigrants bring their "shiraz"), and California. Heavy pruning is especially necessary for syrah, so that the few grapes left on the vines get all those nutrients and all that flavor.
There are a few technical details to file away in the memory. Syrah is the only red grape permitted in famed Hermitage, just as it is the only red grape of those wines called Cote Rotie, another (let us not forget the European style of naming wines for places) very small district of the northern Rhone. Strangely, a trace of white grapes, either marsanne, roussanne, or viognier, are allowed in both. There are also fully white Hermitages. There is no white Cote Rotie.
Further south along the Rhone, syrah is itself a blending grape, used to give power to the (red) grenache, mourvedre, and cinsault making up all those romantically named and even more romantically-spelled wines -- Chateauneuf du Pape, Gigondas, Vacqueyras and, what you are more likely to find in your local liquor store, Cotes-du-Rhone and Cotes-du-Rhone Villages.
In buying an Australian shiraz, the names you are ideally looking for are Penfolds Grange (winery), or Barossa Valley or McLaren Vale (places). For South African shiraz, you are looking for the name Stellenbosch. And no wine book discusses syrah/shiraz without mentioning the "Rhone Rangers" of California, a "loose-knit" group of ambitious young winemakers who got interested in syrah in the 1980s. Names like Joseph Phelps and Bonny Doon both rate a mention in books, and are likely to show up on liquor store shelves.
And how does it all taste? My past notes on Syrahs/shirazes I Have Known range from toast-jelly-hot-plum (Terra, Barossa Valley, Thorne Clarke Wines 2004) to tart-chocolate-raspberry (Barefoot Cellars, California 2005) to strong-leather-smoke (The Gorge, Hunter Valley, David Hook 2004) to vegetal-bare feet-Chinese food (Au, Barossa Valley, Aussie Vineyards 2004). None of these examples had aged for ten years. Obviously none, I am sorry to say, were French. The writers I have read seem to agree that the syrahs they have known put them in mind of leather, meat, smoke, and above all black pepper; but then Jancis Robinson also says burnt pencils, so I would hazard a guess that neither I with my small sampling nor none of us can be too far off in any case. The pepper flavors, especially, seem to be there for a reason, a chemical reason. Last summer, Harold McGee in his Curious Cook column wrote of the discovery of the chemical rotundone in shiraz grapes, rotundone being also present -- being, in fact, the most important aromatic -- in peppercorns. People who can smell rotundone (some of us can't) are able to detect it "at the level of parts per billion," McGee says, making it noticeable indeed. Too much of it gives flavors going beyond pepper and entering the realm of burnt rubber and Band-aids. Not easy to pair with dinner, whether a Rhone feast of garlic or a California vegan platter or, who knows, a bowl of hermit's gruel.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Cream of tomato soup
This tomato soup is one of only two recipes that I have ever found useful from the great, classic Joy of Cooking, otherwise the most overrated cookbook I have ever owned, I am sorry to say; the other useful recipe is one for challah, the Jewish sabbath bread, a dense brioche which in fact goes beautifully with this soup. The Joy is more for entertainment purposes than for practical use, I think. Being introduced there to galantine of turkey, clambakes, or real turtle soup was lots of fun, but that West African Beef Stew still rankles as a disaster from our early married years, and the Angel Cookies -- plain meringue affairs for whose sake, the authors insisted, "many a copy of the Joy has been sold" -- were a tasteless mess.
But I mustn't be shrill. This soup is very fine.
It begins with with a few onions slowly cooked in half a stick of butter. While they soften, in a second large pot bring 6 cups of water to a boil, with two or three potatoes peeled and cut up in the pot. A splash of white wine added to the stewing onions, just when they are beginning to caramelize, will provide a zing of flavor.
Add the onions to the potatoes when they have come to the boil. Gently simmer the onion, potato, and water mixture for 30 minutes. Then, add a can of stewed tomatoes, a teaspoon of salt, 2 teaspoons of sugar, some thyme, paprika, and a few fresh basil leaves. Bring all this back to a boil and simmer it gently for 20 minutes.
Now comes the tedious part. The soup must be put through a blender in batches, and poured into a separate clean pot. (Remove the basil first, or its flavor, shredded, will be too strong.) When it is all blended smooth, put a cup of heavy cream into the empty, original potato-boiling pot. Scald the cream. Then, begin ladling the pureed soup into the hot cream.
Once you have gotten a few ladlefuls of soup into the cream, you can simply pour the rest in.
Reheat it thoroughly, and you are ready to serve. It only requires, to make it perfect, a grinding of fresh pepper in each bowl.
This is obviously a rich soup which really only needs a green salad or that challah to go with it. When I am feeling ambitious, however, I have also served grilled cheese sandwiches alongside, or, as I did tonight, double-baked potatoes (baked potatoes with their insides scooped out, mashed with butter, milk, and grated cheese, and then piled back into the shells and baked again for 20 minutes in a 425 oven, to heat them through and brown them a little).
A rich chardonnay would be the right wine with this, I think. If you have a few Godiva chocolate truffles left from your birthday shopping spree last week, by all means have them for dessert. If the day has been astonishingly warm, and robins are chirruping in the dusk, and people are out-of-doors, talking, and the actual smell of a barbecue wafts in from the neighbor's backyard, reminding you deliciously of summer, why then -- not all, but many things are right with the world.
But I mustn't be shrill. This soup is very fine.
It begins with with a few onions slowly cooked in half a stick of butter. While they soften, in a second large pot bring 6 cups of water to a boil, with two or three potatoes peeled and cut up in the pot. A splash of white wine added to the stewing onions, just when they are beginning to caramelize, will provide a zing of flavor.
Add the onions to the potatoes when they have come to the boil. Gently simmer the onion, potato, and water mixture for 30 minutes. Then, add a can of stewed tomatoes, a teaspoon of salt, 2 teaspoons of sugar, some thyme, paprika, and a few fresh basil leaves. Bring all this back to a boil and simmer it gently for 20 minutes.
Now comes the tedious part. The soup must be put through a blender in batches, and poured into a separate clean pot. (Remove the basil first, or its flavor, shredded, will be too strong.) When it is all blended smooth, put a cup of heavy cream into the empty, original potato-boiling pot. Scald the cream. Then, begin ladling the pureed soup into the hot cream.
Once you have gotten a few ladlefuls of soup into the cream, you can simply pour the rest in.
Reheat it thoroughly, and you are ready to serve. It only requires, to make it perfect, a grinding of fresh pepper in each bowl.
This is obviously a rich soup which really only needs a green salad or that challah to go with it. When I am feeling ambitious, however, I have also served grilled cheese sandwiches alongside, or, as I did tonight, double-baked potatoes (baked potatoes with their insides scooped out, mashed with butter, milk, and grated cheese, and then piled back into the shells and baked again for 20 minutes in a 425 oven, to heat them through and brown them a little).
A rich chardonnay would be the right wine with this, I think. If you have a few Godiva chocolate truffles left from your birthday shopping spree last week, by all means have them for dessert. If the day has been astonishingly warm, and robins are chirruping in the dusk, and people are out-of-doors, talking, and the actual smell of a barbecue wafts in from the neighbor's backyard, reminding you deliciously of summer, why then -- not all, but many things are right with the world.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
A noble jug
A one-and-a-half liter bottle, in the grocery store sale cart for $6.50 -- and beyond that, a Sutter Home Zinfandel -- qualifies, I think, as a "jug" wine.
Not only was it essentially a jug, it was an old jug. Vintage 2001. Would it, I wondered, show the characteristics of having aged in the bottle, as a wine of real class would do?
Amazingly enough, it did. I don't suggest that this bottle was anything to render Chateau Latour '61 ridiculous, but it had aged. Its color bore that telltale brownish tinge, instead of being entirely the mulberry purple of a young wine, and its aromas were no longer of barbecue sauce or strawberries or red apple skins, but of brine (think olive juice) and prunes and raisins, a little port-like even. It retained some acidity, but those mouth-shriveling tannins (think plain black tea) seemed to me almost gone -- it flowed down the throat much "thinner," and more "drinkable" I suppose, than the freshly released zinfandels which often resemble gulps of liquid cinnamon cake.
The wine, therefore, had done what good wines first began to do when they met the happy, combined inventions of the glass bottle and the cork stopper in the seventeenth century; it had done, on a grocery store shelf, what fine Bordeaux, Burgundies, and rieslings are laid down in cool cellars to do. And it's Sutter Home. These are the people whose success appalls wine world professionals (see a fairly recent post from Vinography on "the truth about American wine drinking"). Sutter Home are the people who invented white zinfandel.
So I take this wine's humble quality, so to speak, as a small piece of evidence in support of the view of some wine writers, that there is more good basic wine being produced now than our vinegar-swilling ancestors could have dreamed of. Very fine wine will always be in a different category, all small production and tiny yields and centuries of experience with the terroir and every grape a bursting jewel of flavor in those expensive little French oak barrels, but still, nothing more than good grapes and sound winemaking went into this eight-year-old bottle of Sutter Home Zin. Also nothing less. For $6.50 per 1.5 liters, we're the ones who benefit, when we want something nice to go with dinner.
And speaking of quality, an aside: the American Wine Blog Awards have been announced! Congratulations to all the winners. I had the cheek to nominate myself for Best Writing on a Wine Blog, but I, alas, was not picked as a finalist. From the pool of finalists in all categories, the winners are:
Best Writing on a Wine Blog: Vinography
Best Graphics or Presentation: The Good Grape
Best Single Subject Wine Blog: Lenndevours (on New York state wineries and wine)
Best Business/Industry Blog: The Wine Collector
Best Winery Blog: Michel-Schlumberger's "Benchland Blog"
Best Wine Reviews: Bigger Than Your Head
Best Overall Blog: Vinography
Tom Wark at Fermentation invented these awards three years ago, and next year will hand off ownership of and responsibility for them to one of their current sponsors, the Open Wine Consortium. I do think that next year, someone in charge of these things should have the cheek to create a category just for, um, Best Wine Blog by someone with less than twenty years' experience in the industry who lives in the suburbs and generally buys wine of $8 or less -- the Sutter Home price level that appalls the professionals -- per bottle. People start wine blogs every day, think how big and competitive and exciting that category would be. I probably wouldn't stand a chance in it.
Not only was it essentially a jug, it was an old jug. Vintage 2001. Would it, I wondered, show the characteristics of having aged in the bottle, as a wine of real class would do?
Amazingly enough, it did. I don't suggest that this bottle was anything to render Chateau Latour '61 ridiculous, but it had aged. Its color bore that telltale brownish tinge, instead of being entirely the mulberry purple of a young wine, and its aromas were no longer of barbecue sauce or strawberries or red apple skins, but of brine (think olive juice) and prunes and raisins, a little port-like even. It retained some acidity, but those mouth-shriveling tannins (think plain black tea) seemed to me almost gone -- it flowed down the throat much "thinner," and more "drinkable" I suppose, than the freshly released zinfandels which often resemble gulps of liquid cinnamon cake.
The wine, therefore, had done what good wines first began to do when they met the happy, combined inventions of the glass bottle and the cork stopper in the seventeenth century; it had done, on a grocery store shelf, what fine Bordeaux, Burgundies, and rieslings are laid down in cool cellars to do. And it's Sutter Home. These are the people whose success appalls wine world professionals (see a fairly recent post from Vinography on "the truth about American wine drinking"). Sutter Home are the people who invented white zinfandel.
So I take this wine's humble quality, so to speak, as a small piece of evidence in support of the view of some wine writers, that there is more good basic wine being produced now than our vinegar-swilling ancestors could have dreamed of. Very fine wine will always be in a different category, all small production and tiny yields and centuries of experience with the terroir and every grape a bursting jewel of flavor in those expensive little French oak barrels, but still, nothing more than good grapes and sound winemaking went into this eight-year-old bottle of Sutter Home Zin. Also nothing less. For $6.50 per 1.5 liters, we're the ones who benefit, when we want something nice to go with dinner.
And speaking of quality, an aside: the American Wine Blog Awards have been announced! Congratulations to all the winners. I had the cheek to nominate myself for Best Writing on a Wine Blog, but I, alas, was not picked as a finalist. From the pool of finalists in all categories, the winners are:
Best Writing on a Wine Blog: Vinography
Best Graphics or Presentation: The Good Grape
Best Single Subject Wine Blog: Lenndevours (on New York state wineries and wine)
Best Business/Industry Blog: The Wine Collector
Best Winery Blog: Michel-Schlumberger's "Benchland Blog"
Best Wine Reviews: Bigger Than Your Head
Best Overall Blog: Vinography
Tom Wark at Fermentation invented these awards three years ago, and next year will hand off ownership of and responsibility for them to one of their current sponsors, the Open Wine Consortium. I do think that next year, someone in charge of these things should have the cheek to create a category just for, um, Best Wine Blog by someone with less than twenty years' experience in the industry who lives in the suburbs and generally buys wine of $8 or less -- the Sutter Home price level that appalls the professionals -- per bottle. People start wine blogs every day, think how big and competitive and exciting that category would be. I probably wouldn't stand a chance in it.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Barbie's 50! (I'm not)
Taking my cue from Sucharita, I discuss what happens on one's birthday.
Of course, one gets up late (because one doesn't have to be to work until 1 pm), and there are presents on the table. There's also a card with a Star Trek theme, and a computer chip inside preserving the voice of Mr. Spock warning of "absolute annihilation" if all the candles on one's birthday cake are lit at once. One opens two gifts, and saves another for the evening. A bottle of wine (riesling), two packages of chocolate, and the glorious Mrs. Beeton's cookbook! -- in a spanking new edition, to be savored and studied and cooked from forever.
Then one spends the morning goofing around, sparing time to visit the local bakery and buy -- with a gift of birthday money -- two chocolate-covered strawberries and no less than four chocolate eclairs. For later.
Then one has to get ready to go to work. Then one has to actually go to work. Such excitement! In the middle of the shift, five hulking teenagers -- well, not hulking exactly, but they do take up a lot of space -- flood and spill and exude into the store, and settle in to visit with one's teenaged coworkers. After two or three minutes of this, a customer pulls into the parking lot, and one then tells the five teens it is time for them to leave. They practically swallow their tongues with astonishment, but do leave. Co-workers then get huffy and don't speak for an hour, but eventually recover.
Home. What should be awaiting one but dinner, "fashionably late" at 7:30 pm, delicious baked fish and a better rice pilaf than I've ever made, and broccoli soaked in butter as it should be. The riesling, to accompany. Afterward, a nice big piece of the best chocolate cake to be had, carry-out, from a local Mexican restaurant. And a candle in it. Children and husband sing. One manages to avoid blinking for the photograph. And then, that saved present: what could be better than a few favorite movies, to study and consult forever? We picked The Illusionist.
Nearly midnight. One really must go to bed. Just a nightcap, a little glass of a powerhouse California zinfandel called Seven Deadly Zins. Another great favorite at Ye Olde Wine Shoppe. Barbecue -- plums -- velvet, my notes say, and if my notes seem cryptic or unhelpful, let me offer the late hour and the 14.5% alcohol level as an excuse. And all that chocolate.
Tomorrow? The celebration continues. One has long, long planned to make a special trip to buy a special treat, a new bottle of a hideously expensive French perfume that will last for years and so prove a terrific investment in the long run. Tomorrow one has the day off, so one may as well rob the bank first, and then go. And one hasn't yet even touched the eclairs.
Of course, one gets up late (because one doesn't have to be to work until 1 pm), and there are presents on the table. There's also a card with a Star Trek theme, and a computer chip inside preserving the voice of Mr. Spock warning of "absolute annihilation" if all the candles on one's birthday cake are lit at once. One opens two gifts, and saves another for the evening. A bottle of wine (riesling), two packages of chocolate, and the glorious Mrs. Beeton's cookbook! -- in a spanking new edition, to be savored and studied and cooked from forever.
Then one spends the morning goofing around, sparing time to visit the local bakery and buy -- with a gift of birthday money -- two chocolate-covered strawberries and no less than four chocolate eclairs. For later.
Then one has to get ready to go to work. Then one has to actually go to work. Such excitement! In the middle of the shift, five hulking teenagers -- well, not hulking exactly, but they do take up a lot of space -- flood and spill and exude into the store, and settle in to visit with one's teenaged coworkers. After two or three minutes of this, a customer pulls into the parking lot, and one then tells the five teens it is time for them to leave. They practically swallow their tongues with astonishment, but do leave. Co-workers then get huffy and don't speak for an hour, but eventually recover.
Home. What should be awaiting one but dinner, "fashionably late" at 7:30 pm, delicious baked fish and a better rice pilaf than I've ever made, and broccoli soaked in butter as it should be. The riesling, to accompany. Afterward, a nice big piece of the best chocolate cake to be had, carry-out, from a local Mexican restaurant. And a candle in it. Children and husband sing. One manages to avoid blinking for the photograph. And then, that saved present: what could be better than a few favorite movies, to study and consult forever? We picked The Illusionist.
Nearly midnight. One really must go to bed. Just a nightcap, a little glass of a powerhouse California zinfandel called Seven Deadly Zins. Another great favorite at Ye Olde Wine Shoppe. Barbecue -- plums -- velvet, my notes say, and if my notes seem cryptic or unhelpful, let me offer the late hour and the 14.5% alcohol level as an excuse. And all that chocolate.
Tomorrow? The celebration continues. One has long, long planned to make a special trip to buy a special treat, a new bottle of a hideously expensive French perfume that will last for years and so prove a terrific investment in the long run. Tomorrow one has the day off, so one may as well rob the bank first, and then go. And one hasn't yet even touched the eclairs.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Cheese and mushroom casserole, 1956
One would think the combination of white bread, cheddar cheese, and canned mushrooms would be positively ghastly -- that to a refined mind it would shriek "bourgeois 1950s glop" right there on the plate. It does holler 1950s, but having tried it and gussied it up just a little, I can promise that it is delicious.
The recipe comes from a small pamphlet called Cooling Dishes for Hot Weather, published by the staff of the Culinary Arts Institute in Chicago in 1956. Last summer we found the pamphlet at our favorite antique mall in downtown Crown Point, Indiana, just across the street from the landmark courthouse where so many young couples, including an aunt and uncle of mine, used to elope. People could get married there without so much as a by-your-leave -- literally -- pretty much 24/7, as we say now. My aunt was eighteen, my uncle seventeen. It was 1937. Then they had to toddle back to Chicago and tell their parents. The earth shook.
Anyway, the casserole. You start simply by buttering a one-and-a-half quart casserole dish, and then cutting six slices of white bread in three pieces each. Layer a few of the "fingers" of bread in the bottom of the dish.
Next, you will layer in half your quantities each of mushrooms and cheddar cheese. The recipe calls for only one 4-ounce can of mushrooms, about half a cup, and half a pound of cheese in all. I opted for fresh oyster and fresh baby bella mushrooms instead, and more of them. I sauteed about two cups of them, total, in olive oil until they released some of their juices.
The casserole, half assembled, looks like this (I also used a variety of store-bought grated cheese):
To finish, add another layer of bread fingers and the rest of your mushrooms and cheeses. Top with the remaining bread, and then dot this with 2 Tablespoons of butter, in several pieces. Remember this is the 1950s. No one is worried about cholesterol. Have some red wine, and whistle while you work. Sinatra, or Nat King Cole, preferably.
Next, you will pour over all a custard that you have made from 2 beaten eggs, the mushroom juices plus enough milk to make 1 cup of liquid, and a few sprinkles of salt, pepper, and paprika -- a half teaspoon of the salt and paprika, and an eighth teaspoon of pepper, to be precise.
Bake the casserole in a preheated 325 degree oven for 30 to 40 minutes, or until it is "puffed and lightly browned." It doesn't exactly puff, but the bread on top toasts prettily. Like so:
And then scoop it out and eat it, like so:
I only zoom in to the photograph because those of us who like both food porn and mushrooms will probably like mushroom porn as well.
And what wine to serve with this? I think a nice, thick "fruit bomb" red would do, perhaps the same red you've been sipping, while you cook, in deference to your arteries. The kind of jammy, California style red which wine writers fear is taking over the whole world of red wine, like those space pods that conquer humanity in 1950s science fiction movies. Once you pour and then sit down to the table, a salad and maybe a soup, if you are ambitious, will probably be all you'll need to round out the meal.
I'm curious about the ladies who ran the staff kitchens at the Culinary Institute, ladies with charming names like Melanie de Proft, Hazel Beman, and Mitzi Okamoto. Whatever happened to them? Are they well known among true food aficionados? I wonder who in the world has ever also possessed a copy of Cooling Dishes for Hot Weather, and made from it things like Cheese-Mushroom Casserole, or Orange Marlow Refrigerator Pie. What's really delightful is that on our last visit to the antique mall across the street from that important courthouse, we found three more pamphlets from the Institute. All have the same look -- simple drawings of happy people in formal clothes, cooking and eating -- and all were prepared under the watchful professional eye of Miss de Proft, circa that banner year of 1956. I look forward to exploring The Southern and Southwestern Cookbook, Sunday Night Suppers, and especially Entertaining Six or Eight. (Six or eight? We'll see ....)
The recipe comes from a small pamphlet called Cooling Dishes for Hot Weather, published by the staff of the Culinary Arts Institute in Chicago in 1956. Last summer we found the pamphlet at our favorite antique mall in downtown Crown Point, Indiana, just across the street from the landmark courthouse where so many young couples, including an aunt and uncle of mine, used to elope. People could get married there without so much as a by-your-leave -- literally -- pretty much 24/7, as we say now. My aunt was eighteen, my uncle seventeen. It was 1937. Then they had to toddle back to Chicago and tell their parents. The earth shook.
Anyway, the casserole. You start simply by buttering a one-and-a-half quart casserole dish, and then cutting six slices of white bread in three pieces each. Layer a few of the "fingers" of bread in the bottom of the dish.
Next, you will layer in half your quantities each of mushrooms and cheddar cheese. The recipe calls for only one 4-ounce can of mushrooms, about half a cup, and half a pound of cheese in all. I opted for fresh oyster and fresh baby bella mushrooms instead, and more of them. I sauteed about two cups of them, total, in olive oil until they released some of their juices.
The casserole, half assembled, looks like this (I also used a variety of store-bought grated cheese):
To finish, add another layer of bread fingers and the rest of your mushrooms and cheeses. Top with the remaining bread, and then dot this with 2 Tablespoons of butter, in several pieces. Remember this is the 1950s. No one is worried about cholesterol. Have some red wine, and whistle while you work. Sinatra, or Nat King Cole, preferably.
Next, you will pour over all a custard that you have made from 2 beaten eggs, the mushroom juices plus enough milk to make 1 cup of liquid, and a few sprinkles of salt, pepper, and paprika -- a half teaspoon of the salt and paprika, and an eighth teaspoon of pepper, to be precise.
Bake the casserole in a preheated 325 degree oven for 30 to 40 minutes, or until it is "puffed and lightly browned." It doesn't exactly puff, but the bread on top toasts prettily. Like so:
And then scoop it out and eat it, like so:
I only zoom in to the photograph because those of us who like both food porn and mushrooms will probably like mushroom porn as well.
And what wine to serve with this? I think a nice, thick "fruit bomb" red would do, perhaps the same red you've been sipping, while you cook, in deference to your arteries. The kind of jammy, California style red which wine writers fear is taking over the whole world of red wine, like those space pods that conquer humanity in 1950s science fiction movies. Once you pour and then sit down to the table, a salad and maybe a soup, if you are ambitious, will probably be all you'll need to round out the meal.
I'm curious about the ladies who ran the staff kitchens at the Culinary Institute, ladies with charming names like Melanie de Proft, Hazel Beman, and Mitzi Okamoto. Whatever happened to them? Are they well known among true food aficionados? I wonder who in the world has ever also possessed a copy of Cooling Dishes for Hot Weather, and made from it things like Cheese-Mushroom Casserole, or Orange Marlow Refrigerator Pie. What's really delightful is that on our last visit to the antique mall across the street from that important courthouse, we found three more pamphlets from the Institute. All have the same look -- simple drawings of happy people in formal clothes, cooking and eating -- and all were prepared under the watchful professional eye of Miss de Proft, circa that banner year of 1956. I look forward to exploring The Southern and Southwestern Cookbook, Sunday Night Suppers, and especially Entertaining Six or Eight. (Six or eight? We'll see ....)
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