In which I buy a weird shaped bottle

It was a fat-bottomed bottle, deep green, antique looking and charming. The price of this Cotes du Rhone white, $6.99 at a local liquor store, was also charming.

My first impressions: a plain, glowing pale yellow color; syrupy in the glass; in taste, bread-like, dry, seeming to fill the front of the mouth with a certain bitterness; a faint whiff of nuts. As if you could drink an oily nut-bread.

If you care to log on to the website of Cellier des Dauphins, you will get your first indication that what we are drinking here is a French version of a Gallo or a Sutter Home wine. That is not intended as a slur on Gallo or Sutter Home or Cellier des Dauphins, either. This is after all an AOC wine, from an Appellation d'Origine Controllee, meaning its production has at least legally met certain quality standards applied to wines in the top tier of the trade, above both "country wine" and "table wine." It's perfectly quaffable.

No, to look over Cellier's website and mentally translate what you see as Sutter Home a la Francais is simply to acknowledge and add up a few pertinent items. See the photos of huge banner ads for Cellier, at soccer stadiums and Formula One racetracks; read the announcements of production and sales figures for this brand -- and it is a brand, not a little chateau by a river producing exquisite stuff three cases at a time (10,000 hectares under cultivation, 3,600 vine growers, 60 million bottles sold annually); and then remember the attractive price of less than $7 at my local suburban liquor store. All this adds up to a wine which is obviously not some breathtakingly rare thing that I should have saved properly, and then brought out and opened only at a perfect celebratory moment. In fact I drank it with a little plate of leftover stuffed grape leaves and fried kibbeh -- a breaded deep-fried morsel of ground lamb and rice -- brought home from a new local restaurant, a place specializing in Mediterranean food. It seemed a pretty good match. In a day or two, the wine turned almost as bland as water.

What was I drinking? The Rhone valley, northern half as well as southern half, is known far more for its red wines than its whites. At the very top end of the scale, you may hunt for and find expensive and legendary reds like Hermitage and Cote Rotie (syrah based, "king and queen" of the north, as Simon Woods puts it in The Encyclopedic Atlas of Wine), and Chateauneuf du Pape, made primarily from grenache, in the south. The best white wines of the Rhone, in either direction, are made of viognier, marsanne, and roussanne -- "white Hermitage," Woods explains, "stands as one of the world's least well-known great wines, marsanne its preferred grape." Similarly, the southern Rhone produces a white Chateauneuf du Pape, made of roussanne. These are finer wines because they come simply from good, flavorful grapes, some of them, like viognier, tending to that fussiness and delicacy which drives grapegrowers mad but does produce that First Cause characteristic for magical wine, namely low yield. Apparently the members of the kingdom Plantae all think alike, whether crabgrass or orchids or vitis vinifera. Quantity does not equal quality. If you like me, dare me to grow.

That "quality white wines are hard to find [in the south] outside of Chateauneuf du Pape" means that by the time we climb down to inexpensive white wines in this area, wines not announcing New Castle of the Pope on their labels (really), we are facing uninteresting, high yield grapes -- white grenache, clairette, and bourboulenc -- and so wines that are agreeable enough but should certainly be drunk young. "Within a year of release," Mr. Woods says. My 2005 Cellier des Dauphins, of white grenache and clairette according to the information on the website, was perhaps already a bit tired in the bottle.

And about that bottle. I suspect that the good people running the Cellier, or at least running the marketing department, may be less interested in selling the wine than in selling the bottle. It is cute. I saved it and put it on a windowsill. And photos of that shape get pride of place on the website's entry page. In clear glass, filled with a rose wine, it is especially pretty. No harm in that.

Chicken fricassee

Revised, May 7, 2011.

In that fun old movie, Life With Father, Clarence Day (William Powell) strolls down the stairs of his house with his wife Vinnie (Irene Dunne) on his arm, and asks her, in the midst of some swirling upheaval with the servants that he has caused, whether they can't have "chicken fricassee tonight for dinner." She replies only that he must know "chicken has gone up, it's eight cents a pound!"

The plot of the movie unfolds such that the Day family and guests all end up dining at Delmonico's instead, but the way he almost smacks his lips over chicken fricassee does make it sound good. It sounds like just the sort of rich, comforting fare a New York gentleman of 1883 would want to come home to. In her reworking of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, Marion Cunningham agrees it is "a great old-fashioned dish, the essence of chicken in a creamy sauce."



It is, however, another recipe which calls for the braising of chicken pieces, that is, browning them in melted butter or oil and then adding water, some usual soup vegetables (onions, carrots, and celery), and simmering all until the chicken pieces are done. Then the chicken is taken out of the broth and the broth used to make a sauce in a separate pot, where a roux of butter and flour is bubbling. The addition of a cup of cream and 2 Tablespoons of lemon juice finish off this sauce, and dinner is served.

It makes for an efficient production, with one step leading logically to another and no effort wasted. I can well imagine the Day's cook, stout Margaret, bustling about in the kitchen in her draggy Victorian skirts and getting all this ready for a family of six in about an hour, meanwhile teaching the new servants their business.

But I have never perfected the art of braising chicken pieces. I can never quite get the browning right. Everything is pale, the chicken skin becomes soggy, the meat rubbery. For braising recipes, I have learned to prefer roasting a whole chicken and making any sauce separately. To capture the chicken flavor needed, I keep pouring off the juices from the roasting pan into a clear Pyrex cup. Their fat rises to the top and I can then siphon off the good juices from below with a bulb baster, incorporating them into the sauce.

Chicken fricassee is a bit different from some braising recipes, however, in the very large amount of broth it produces for you to use (after browning in fat, "pour on boiling water to cover the chicken"). To replace that, I made a chicken broth of my own. It was a Sunday afternoon. Nothing easier. Chicken pieces, onions, celery, carrots, and water, salt and thyme, brought to a boil, skimmed, and simmered for three hours or so.



This big pot of soup will give you not only the 1 and 1/2 cups of broth you need for the lemon cream sauce, but also enough liquid to cook the rice to go with dinner. Before you know it, while your roast chicken rests on a plate, you will be multi-tasking, like so:



Above, butter melts to begin the roux for the sauce, while the remains of the chicken stock boils to cook the rice. A pot of water boils in the back, for some green beans.



Of course, done my way, chicken fricassee is no longer a fricassee. It is a roast chicken with a lemon-flavored bechamel alongside, and it amounts to nothing that any accomplished chef would be impressed with. (I only just realized this, much to my mortification, when I a)planned to submit this very post to a foodie website that desires original content, and b)noticed that this same post gets some of the highest traffic numbers of anything else I've written here. As Mr. Day would put it, "Oh GAD!")

Mortifications aside, now Mr. Day would be summoned to the table. I think he would be pleased. As to the foodie website, he might growl as he did over the children's catechism, "What do you want to fool with that for?" The lemony sauce over the rice simmered in chicken broth is utterly divine. If only Margaret had had more help in the kitchen, she could have produced an even robuster Victorian meal, including a soup to start, and perhaps rice croquettes with currant jelly, and asparagus on toast, and some sort of dessert to follow -- prune whip perhaps. (These are all from the menu suggestions of the 1896 edition of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School Cookbook, Marion Cunningham's source material).

Mr. Day, who spoke French so fluently at Delmonico's, would also know what wine to drink with this. I wonder if he would have turned to "hock," i.e. Hochheim wine, i.e. wine from the vicinity of Hochheim in Germany, i.e. riesling. This hock was a later, generic British term for the Rhine wine -- i.e., German wine -- that they had generically dubbed "Rhenish" throughout the middle ages. The British, as Michael Broadbent writes in Vintage Wine, "have been importing Rhine wines for a thousand years. Not only were the wines palatable but transporting them was relatively safe and easy: down the Rhine, pausing only to pay robber barons a toll, and a short hop across the North Sea." By Victorian times, excellent German wines were fashionable and expensive, on both sides of the Atlantic to be sure, more renowned and sought after than the finest Bordeaux. Hock entered the American language too at some point, for in his late-1960s Encyclopedia of Wine Frank Schoonmaker noted "it is still legally possible, under American regulations, to manufacture California and indeed New York and Ohio Hock." From what grapes these treasures were vinified, Schoonmaker does not say, but if they existed in 1883 I doubt Mr. Day would have had them on his table. ("Oh, Gad!")

The original recipe for Chicken Fricassee follows, for those who would like to tweak it to suit themselves. Or for those who know how to braise a chicken.

5-pound chicken, cut up;... 1 carrot, sliced
1/4 pound of butter;... 1 bay leaf
2 Tablespoons oil;... 4 Tablespoons flour (gluten free is fine)
1 small onion, sliced;... 1 cup heavy cream
2 ribs celery with leaves, chopped;... 2 Tablespoons lemon juice

Rinse the chicken and pat it dry. Heat 4 Tablespoons of the butter with the oil in a dutch oven, and brown the chicken on all sides. Lower the heat, pour on boiling water to cover the chicken, and add the onion, celery, carrot, and bay leaf. Cover and simmer 40-45 minutes. Remove the chicken to a platter and keep warm.

Strain the broth and remove any surface fat. Bring the broth to a boil and reduce to 1 and 1/2 cups. Melt the remaining 4 Tablespoons of butter in a saucepan. Stir in the flour and cook for 2-3 minutes. Slowly add the cream and the broth, stirring and simmering until thick and smooth. Add the lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste. Spoon over the chicken and serve.

A great wine job goes begging

Now this would be perfect. Retail wine shop manager, responsibilities to include store management, sales growth, wine club development, creating public and private events, managing marketing campaigns, running the office. More than five years' retail experience required, plus familiarity with PowerPoint, Excel, and so on. Working knowledge of wine expected (there's a test). Also required: a committment to 45+ hour workweeks, including nights, weekends, holidays, as well as a willingness to face the onerous and expensive commute into downtown Chicago every day. Everyone just calls it "the city." I recall a writer to a newspaper's editorial page summed it up perfectly once: it's a "semi-navigable megalopolis." (And it wants the Olympics? I think not.)

Not so perfect a wine job, then, for me. But it was posted on Winejobs.com more than a month ago. It's back, and is already slowly being buried under the subsequent postings of new jobs there, most of the rest, as usual, located in California. Why is this one going begging? The talent must be out there. Wine is a growing industry. The store is called Just Grapes. I encourage you to apply.


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French breakfast puffs...

... reminding us that it's not all about dinner, and food and wine pairings. Your day, after all, starts with breakfast -- add a mimosa, if it's the weekend -- and these muffins will start you off very very happily.



The recipe comes from my seventh-grade Home Economics class, courtesty of Mrs. Pemberton, a sweet little old lady who taught "home ec." back in the days when, well -- sweet little old ladies still taught home ec. We begin with 1/3 cup butter, at room temperature, creamed together with 1/2 cup sugar. Then add 1 egg and blend.



Then add the 1 and 1/2 cups flour, 1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt that you have mixed in a separate bowl. Once that is blended into the butter mixture, finish off the batter by adding 1/2 teaspoon vanilla and 1/2 cup of milk. Beat batter well. It will be stiff enough to hold the wooden spoon upright.



Then fill greased muffin tins, or paper muffin cups, about 2/3 full. Bake for 20-25 minutes in a preheated 350 F oven.



As soon as they are done, take them out of the pan and roll the tops first in a shallow bowl of 1/4 cup melted butter, and then in a second shallow bowl holding a mix of 1/4 sugar and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon.

This recipe is supposed to make 12-18 muffins; I must be doing something wrong because I find the batter is so rich it only makes nine. And by the way, if you find you cannot fill all your muffin tins with batter, fill each empty section with a quarter inch or so of water before putting the pan in the oven. I recall reading somewhere that you should do this, both to prevent the pan from warping and to make up for the humidity lost when a baked-goods recipe does not produce the volume you expected. Is it really necessary? Who knows? I do it. And in what sense are these French Breakfast Puffs really French? Who knows? It makes them sound as good as they taste.



They are just heavenly. Under Mrs. Pemberton's direction a class full of seventh-grade girls could prepare and bake these, and clean up, in a forty-minute period. Since you are not rushing off to math or science afterward, you may find you can be a bit more leisurely about it. Perhaps you'll have time to mix up that nice mimosa.

Charoset pie

When it comes to cooking there seems to be a magic threshhold that some people can cross, and others cannot, or perhaps it's not a threshhold but an entirely different psychic room, which some cooks simply are not interested in, while others see it and explore it naturally right away. I'm talking about the ability to move beyond following a recipe, or even whipping up a basic "something" having learned a basic technique -- a filled omelet is a filled omelet -- to venture into the realms of inventing a new dish. Grant Achatz, chef at Alinea, famously recreated the peanut butter and jelly sandwich as an appetizer involving a peeled, baked grape and a breath of peanut butter wrapped in some sort of lacy toast and served, two grapes to a plucked bunch, in a futuristic wire cage (see the article by Pete Wells from a back issue of Food & Wine).

Of course, in turning to Grant Achatz as an example, we are turning instantly to an entirely different level of kitchen functionality you might say. Sheer genius? Food writers seem to agree. For somewhat lesser souls, it may be the combination of natural inclination and culinary school that helps thrust them over the threshhold, or into that other psychic room, where invention replaces mere (if happy) instruction-following. As a home cook, I can safely attest I have never created a really worthwhile new dish. I've tried, oh, every five or six years or so. There is just always something missing. Have you ever seen a celebrity wearing a dress of her own design? It's like that. Look twice, and you can just tell. She is likely wearing a block of fabric with some sort of detail that she considers daring: a neckline, a gather. She doesn't know the fundamentals of creation in this particular art. Maybe, apart from novelty's occasional charms, she is fundamentally not interested in this particular art, that psychic room, which after all is fine.

All this leads to charoset pie, my most recent attempt to create something new. Charoset is one of the ceremonial foods eaten at the Passover seder. It's a free-form mix of apples, raisins, nuts, dates, cinnamon, and wine, and represents the mortar used by the ancient Hebrew slaves in building Pharaoh's cities and monuments. It also seems to be a carryover from the real dining habits of the ancient Romans -- the seder goes back a very long way, and let us not forget that the Jews were a most visible minority in the empire -- who liked to begin dinner with mixed vegetable and fruit relishes like this one. It is the tastiest thing on the seder plate, but unhappily every year, after a few mouthfuls, the remaining cup or cup and a half of it goes to waste. What to do? This year, I had a brain wave (as the characters in Mapp and Lucia always say when they are "being psychical" over a rubber of bridge). Why not treat leftover charoset as a pie filling?

I used a basic recipe for pecan pie, from Marion Cunningham's 1986 Fannie Farmer Cookbook. Her filling is made with 3 eggs, 3/4 cup sugar, 1/8 teaspoon salt, 1 cup dark corn syrup, and 1 teaspoon vanilla. (As you see it's very sweet.) To this, you add 1 cup broken pecan nutmeats. I substituted about 1 and 1/2 cups of my leftover charoset. It all went into a pre-made pie shell, which in itself is not kosher for Passover; a more observant baker would want to create a pie crust without chametz (without leavening of any kind, since Passover is the feast of unleavened bread).

I baked the pie, per the cookbook instructions, at 425 F for 10 minutes, and then finished baking it at 350 F for about 40 minutes, until the filling set. As a culinary student would probably know, as Chef Achatz would have foreseen, strange things happened to it. The apples floated to the top of the pie and gave off a lot of water, which made the corn syrup filling unpleasantly soft. The crust turned too brown. There weren't enough nuts to give it crunch. But, by golly, the kids ate the whole pie over a couple of days -- did I mention it is very sweet? -- and so I accomplished my purpose. This year's charoset did not go to waste. "Next year, in" ... well, not in Jerusalem. Next year in culinary school?

Could there possibly be a wine to serve with it? A Sercial Madeira once accompanied Alinea's "pbj." Naturally -- this is the driest and lightest Madeira, made from the Sercial grape, and is a rare wine today (rare enough to yet show up on exclusive restaurants' wine lists), because so many Sercial vines on the island of Madeira were destroyed by the parasite phylloxera in the 1870s. According to the Wine Lover's Companion, much of Madeira's land was subsequently planted with a lesser madeira-making grape, the Tinto Negro Mole. It has only been since the 1990s that the classic Sercial has begun to make a comeback, in acres planted and in wine made. Because European laws require that any wine labeled with a grape variety must include 85 per cent of that grape in the bottle, madeira makers have an incentive to plant and make true Sercial Madeira, as opposed to a "Sercial-style," inferior grape product. As it happens I can go to my big, local discount liquor store, only a forty-five minute drive one way, and find there a wine called a "Charleston Sercial Madeira" -- the real thing? -- for about $43 a bottle or about $500 a case. So even this is rather dear.

In lieu thereof, I can also try a glass of inexpensive grocery store pinot noir, whose acidity and fruit I find go rather well with a number of desserts. Especially apple pie.

Le sot sauvage

Sometimes, you know, you let the family fend for itself for dinner. (I declare sometimes they prefer it. Yay! microwaved hot dogs on a paper plate! And then we can do what we want.)

In my case, fending meant a sandwich of last night's leftover roast chicken, on nice store-bought wheat bread -- I say, wheat bread -- with mayonnaise and a little salt. And potato chips. And a little glass of 2007 Sutter Home sauvignon blanc, at something like $8.99 a one-and-a-half liter (jug) bottle.

In spite of all this ordinariness there is something important about a leftover roast chicken, or indeed about any roast chicken, and that is that of course you will want to find in it, if you have not done so already, the delicacies: the oysters. Madeleine Kamman, in The New Making of a Cook, explains. The "oysters" of any poultry are "the delicious little nuggets of meat located in the two depressions of the lower backbone located just above the tail. ... in French they carry the descriptive name of sot-l'y-laisse, meaning 'a fool leaves it there.' " (Our English word sot, meaning drunkard, derives from this French word for fool.)

It's a bit tricky to photograph the back end of a chicken, upside down, so as to get a look at the depressions where the oysters are, without all of it looking kind of repulsive. But here goes. The hollow on the left has already been harvested; over the small ridge of bone to its right is the remaining oyster.

You may savor these on their own when the chicken is hot from the oven, if you don't mind being quietly selfish about it and not sharing them with the family. They are so tender and scrumptious that hiding them in a sandwich next day seems an injustice. Madeleine Kamman recommends saving the oysters from any chicken, turkey, or duck before cooking the whole bird, and freezing them until you have enough to make a stew just of sot-l'y-laisse. I've never had the patience for that yet.

As for the Sutter Home jug sauvignon blanc? It was rather agreeable. Karen MacNeil in The Wine Bible writes that what you are looking for in a sauvignon blanc is bound up in the meaning of that French word, too -- sauvignon, from sauvage, "wild." She says, "it's a fitting name for a vine that, if left to its own devices,would grow with riotous abandon. Riotous can also describe sauvignon's flavors. These are not nicely tamed tastes. Instead, straw, hay, grass, meadow, smoke, green tea, green herbs, and gunflint charge around in your mouth with wonderful intensity."

Wonderful intensity does not jibe too well with "rather agreeable." My notes, in which I try to capture first impressions, mention kiwi, white grape, apple -- the burnt-popcorn afterburn of oak (?) -- acidity. Perhaps Sutter Home's California climate and rich soil lead, as so often they do, only to flaccid wines from this noble grape that otherwise thrives in chillier Bordeaux and especially in the Loire valley (where it makes Sancerre and Pouilly-Fume) and in New Zealand. MacNeil points out that "many California winemakers go out of their way to downplay" sauvignon's character, fermenting it in oak barrels and generally striving to create a soft, "fig and melon," chardonnay-style wine. Why? Because the American wine drinker does not want to taste in his glass the ultimate efflorescence of a good sauvignon blanc, and that, it seems, sometimes actually approaches cat pee. She is not the only authority to use this descriptor. They all do it. Sauvignon blanc is fun that way. I must pause to wonder -- how did wine writers describe the wine in a more genteel age, when no one in his senses used such vulgarity in print? Is this what "gooseberries" used to mean (another sauvignon simile)?

A final, small note of trivia about those oysters. In the enchanting movie Amelie, the middle-aged man to whom Amelie first acts as a guardian angel is shown doing what he loves best, buying and roasting a chicken once a week, and once a week faithfully digging down into it -- a cumbersome approach, surely -- for the precious oysters. At the end, he happily shares them with a new-found grandson. Really, he's sauvaged-ly generous.

Brisket Arcadia

Another library book sale treasure, picked up for one dollar about a year ago, was this, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1958:



It is the "companion volume" to Thoughts for Food, which I have not yet been lucky enough to find. Thoughts for Buffets, however, must have been popular, as the library recently sold a second cast off copy in another book sale -- sold it to us, as it happened. I couldn't go to the monthly sale and so I asked my daughter to look out an interesting old cookbook for me while she was there. "Pick any one that looks good," I said. Not knowing my collection, she brought home, once again, Thoughts for Buffets. Great minds must think alike, I told her.

Among the carefully arranged menus, recipes, and advance preparation schedules for dozens of buffets, there is a delicious and simple winter stew called Brisket Arcadia. (I love the fact that old cookbooks were written by literate people who knew enough to call a recipe Arcadia, and assumed the reader and cook at home would know, too. Arcadia was a pastoral region of ancient Greece, and has always been a byword for peaceful simplicity.) As long as you take care to block out seven hours to prepare this meal, you'll find the actual work involved is almost nothing.



Start with a brisket of beef. Season it with salt and pepper, add water to cover, bring it to a boil, and simmer for 30 minutes.



Then add 1 cup of dark corn syrup, 3 or 4 white potatoes, halved, and a pound of prunes. Simmer for 3 hours.



Then add 2 large sweet potatoes, halved. Simmer 3 more hours. Be sure the meat is always covered with liquid, and DO NOT STIR, the recipe exhorts. "Shake the pot from time to time to be sure the meat is not sticking. The meat and potatoes should be a luscious red-brown when prepared." (They are.)



Serve it forth, as even older cookbooks say, with the meat surrounded by the potatoes and prunes. Brown rice would be an excellent accompaniment, unless like me you find that you are all out of brown rice at the moment. Luckily, there is a new, adventurous (for us) vegetable to go with the new, adventurous dish. We had mashed rutabaga with butter, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and cream. My thirteen year old son actually reached out for it. And ate it.



Our accompanying wine was Agua de Piedra, a delicious, uber-cheap Argentinian malbec (Daniel Fernandez, Mendoza 2006). A wine of meat and fruit flavors happened to be just right with a meal of meat and fruit. The malbec grape, formerly put in red Bordeaux, is now scarcely grown in France and has become instead Argentina's pride. At $5.99 a bottle, I'm proud of it, too.

Virtuous leftovers -- and an "aha" wine pairing

I spent a virtuous week last week, not only trying a new recipe I had always planned to try, but making great use of leftovers. I made a boeuf bouilli for the first time -- this is a simple "boiled beef," much like pot roast except you pile meat and vegetables into a pot, cover them with water, and cook, not browning the meat first. Years ago, I owned a James Beard cookbook in which the recipe appeared, and of it, Beard commented that "many a man with a sophisticated palate would choose simple bouef bouilli as his favorite meal." The remains of it, not things like the potatoes and turnips but the broth and beef, went into a spaghetti sauce the next day.

Then, a chicken fricasee -- chicken with lemon cream sauce -- left me with too much lemon sauce on my hands. Much too much. It served to spruce up a few lunchtime helpings of leftover rice, and then it did duty as the cream sauce you really must have over those nice fried salmon cakes that make such a quick, easy dinner after work.

And then along with the salmon cakes and the lemon cream sauce, I was lucky enough to enjoy an "aha!" wine and food pairing moment. A friend of mine put this well. Of course we'd like to match food and wine agreeably, and some pairings are classic. But often we don't know what we're doing, and it's so subjective that it seems taking other people's advice doesn't make any sense for a start. Often we buy a "big," tannic, over-oaked California "fruit bomb" which, all the experts with long memories and long faces will tell us, doesn't really complement anything. My friend said she never really "got it" until once, in a restaurant on a business trip, she happened to order some sort of regional specialty, fish, with a local wine. It wasn't mysterious, it just tasted fine together, instantly. As she said afterward, "I got it."

What I happened to pair with my salmon cakes and lemon cream sauce was simply the last mouthfuls swishing around in the bottom of a bottle of grocery store red ($9.99) called, appropriately, Red. It has big splashes of red on the black label. My daughter who likes CSI says those are ninety degree splashes, like blood dropping straight down. It's made by St. Francis Winery in Sonoma County, California, and is a blend of merlot, cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, and zinfandel. The cabernet franc grape is hard to find in grocery store or liquor store inventories, so I was glad to come across this wine and get a chance to at least taste something of its style.

Cabernet franc is a traditional blending grape for red Bordeaux, and also is vinified alone in France's Loire valley, where it makes fruity, acidic reds called Chinon, Bourgeuil, and St.-Nicolas-de-Bourgeuil. I have had my eye peeled for cabernet franc ever since reading Willie Gluckstern rave about it in The Wine Avenger. (When it comes to food-friendly wines, he said, you want acidity, the stuff that makes your mouth water for more food. For a white you want acidic riesling, not "clunky" chardonnay, and for a red you want acidic cabernet franc, not clunky old merlot. He did kind of go on and on.) Although cab franc was listed only as the third of the four grapes in this blend, I think it made itself known, and it made the aha! pairing. That rich berry-ness and yes, acidity, were just right with the richness (and acidity) of salmon, cream, and a bit of lemon. It tasted fine, instantly. I got it.

It so happens that while I was being virtuous with leftovers and having aha! wine and food pairing moments, I also poked my nose into foodbuzz, the social networking site for food and wine bloggers (or anybody). Among all the gadzillions of blogs you can surf there, you can find How To Cook Gourmet, by Chef Kathy. She tells us, on her food and wine pairings page, that "wine should be matched with the dominant flavor of the dish, which in many cases will be the sauce." Well, my goodness. Yes, I see it now. Another aha moment. Or, perhaps (murmur savoringly) ... ah-so.



(The beginnings of boeuf bouilli.)

Truly, deeply awful

The color of ruby Kool-aid, the taste and texture of cough syrup. $5.99 at the grocery store -- or was it $5.49?

Kids, don't try this at home.