Strawberries in port

It's a simple recipe, from Jean Anderson's The Food of Portugal. Steep fresh sliced strawberries in sugar -- a few teaspoons, or to taste -- and one quarter cup of ruby port. Eat. Mrs. Beeton essentially agrees, in her book written more than a hundred years before, but her recipe calls for sherry or madeira, and she means you to preserve the strawberries by the quart "in perfectly dry glass bottles." Preserve, for how long? She doesn't say. Perhaps her readers understood, one preserved them until the following winter.

Strawberries are a strange fruit. People rave about how good they are, and snap them up when they are on sale at the grocery store this time of year, oh how wonderful, such a harbinger of spring -- I snap them up too, two quarts for $5 -- and yet they are so confoundedly sour. Madeleine Kamman in The New Making of Cook says sternly, "Unless you grow your own, you have absolutely no idea what a truly delicious strawberry tastes like." Mass production of varieties sturdy enough to withstand shipping and to look good and red right now has resulted in berries which are "nothing more than bundles of colored fibers with almost no taste whatsoever." She suggests starting your own strawberry patch from heirloom seeds. As fragaria are prolific, "you will soon find yourself" overrun with strawberries.

She may be right about that. My own experiments with strawberry plants in pots on the porch steps was not a success, but the confinement to pots may have been my mistake. No sooner would a small white berry begin to blush the remotest shade of pink, than overnight some hungry creature with a brain to think with would eat it. Bird, rabbit, squirrel, who knows what. I gave up, just as I have given up with poppies, which have also failed to survive predators here. But, if you give your strawberry plants more room, you may find, as Madeleine claims and as the first settlers in Virginia discovered, that before too long you are tripping over all that deliciousness, tripping over the "heart seed berry," wuttahimneash, as the Indians are supposed to have called them. In his book Food Waverley Root describes the strawberry patch on his own farm exactly answering to the account of the fruit given by "one of the first Englishmen to reach Maryland: 'wee can not sett downe foote but tred on strawberries.' "

He, too, says the wildly growing kind are delicious beyond expression, but too small and fragile even to be picked and brought into the house. They must be consumed on the spot, in the fields or woods. And yet, throughout his long article on this, "one of the most popular fruits in the world," he also records both old opinions that the cultivated strawberry was not much of an improvement on the wild kind, and old recipes matching the strawberry with something which would, do we dare say, improve its flavor. Circa 1540 sugar, cream, and wine all were called upon (wine for men, cream for women). Circa 1860 Mrs. Beeton agrees with this too, and includes among her strawberry recipes one for a pint of berries dressed with 2 ounces of sugar and some Devonshire cream. "Most delicious," she says.

It's a quibble, but I wonder: if cultivated strawberries are not an improvement on the wild kind, then how good really are the wild kind? (Define "not an improvement." Does that mean just literally what it says, or does it also mean "much worse"?) And why all the sugar and cream in centuries past, when presumably everybody's strawberries were much closer to their delectable woodsy origins? Have they perhaps always been confoundedly sour, and we just don't want to admit it because they look so good? Waverley Root writes that strawberry seeds are the "scarcest finds" of any berry seeds at Stone Age sites. For whatever reason, even primitive man apparently didn't eat them much, when they were at their wildest. Tiny, fragile, hard to find, impossible to preserve and alogether too much trouble for the hungry caveman's reward, Root suggests. Though he doesn't mention sourness.

I do still snap them up during the spring time sales. They are thirst quenching and pretty, and when we dip them in sugar they taste good. The cynic in me thinks that what they actually do is lend a pleasant red tartness to the sugar. And they reassure me that at least with this, the kids are Eating Some Fruit. If Waverley Root's information circa 1980 is still correct, and it seems to be, what we are eating and what most people eat around the world -- sugared, creamed, port-ed, madeira-ed, or not -- is Fragaria ananassa, a hybrid of two varieties, Fragaria chiloensis and Fragaria virginiana. The two were mated, so to speak, by accident in the 1740s in gardens along the coast of Brittany when old F. chiloensis plants, imported from Chile by a French scientist and mysteriously barren for years, suddenly received new plant-y neighbors in the form of F. virginiana. At long last, the female version of one strawberry had met the male version of another, and F. ananassa was born.

Whether the offspring is a credit to its parents is another quibble. But never mind. Have some port -- hunt for the gourmet's delight, fraises de bois -- hunt for the seeds of F. vesca or F. moschata, both ancient, wild and the only types to grow true from seed, and both, strangely, "disliked by birds."

Toffee-coffee-chocolate chip bars

I do bake, as my little hint on the sidebar brags, at Examiner dot com, but some baked goods are so simple and delicious that I'd like to share them as enthusiastically as possible. Besides, discussing Toffee-coffee-chocolate chip bars gives me a chance both to explore the etymology of some basic food words, and to ponder the joys of wine with dessert. Last weekend, we finished up our grilled-outdoors dinner with toasted marshmallows and sauvignon blanc, and it was delicious.

These bars come from Good Cookies Plain and Fancy, by Annette Laslett Ross and Jean Adams Disney, published by Doubleday in 1963. It's one of those straight-from-another-universe cookbooks which presumes that "busy mothers" nevertheless bake and want to bake and are proud of baking well. "Cookies that will go to school," the authors warn in one chapter opening, "should be the keep-fresh kind (for busy mothers may find once a week as often as they'll have time to bake.)" The little unpunctuated hints at the head of each recipe also bespeak a quainter time -- creamy good, little folks' treat -- though thankfully they are fully spelled out. Usages like rich 'n' chewy always annoy me.

"Coffee flavored," announces the subheading for these simply titled Toffee Bars. As I had leftover coffee sitting handy when this recipe caught my eye, I was further intrigued.

The recipe begins with the greasing of a 9 inch square pan and the preheating of the oven to 350 F. Then, you will melt 1/4 cup of butter in a heavy pot, and stir 1 cup of brown sugar into it until it is dissolved.



This, cooked brown sugar and butter, would seem to be toffee, a British variation of the word taffy, whose etymology is otherwise unknown. If I understand my dictionary correctly, it is not to be confused with caramel, burnt (white) sugar, a word which comes to us from Latin via French, and apparently simply means sugar cane (canna mellis). And what is the difference between the sugars? Brown sugar contains molasses, itself a product of sugar cane refining, either residual or added back to white sugar. White sugar is free of it. In recipes brown sugar is always measured packed, as you see above.

Cool the sugar and butter mix, and then add to it 1 egg. In a separate bowl, combine 1 cup of flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Add this to the butter mix alternately with 1 teaspoon of vanilla and 1/4 cup of strong, cold coffee. Blend well, and then stir in 1/2 cup nuts, if desired, or as I did, 1 cup of chocolate chips.



Bake about 30 minutes.



Not too sweet, with those chocolate chips sunk delectably to the bottom of the pan, these bars would be good of course with tea or coffee or milk. But wine with dessert, not some special choice but whatever wine you had with dinner, can also be excellent and much more interesting.

It's funny. In one of her books, M.F.K. Fisher specifically lists red wine with chocolate as an archetypical abomination. And yet it is just this combination which seems to have become all the rage these days in newspaper articles and at wine shop tastings (we staffed one ourselves, back in the day). She explains, or rather she doesn't bother to explain:

"... ten million men rush every noontime for their ham-on-white and their cherry coke. ....It might be good if you could go to them, quietly, and say, "Please, sir, stop a minute and listen to me. Can you imagine eating bananas and Limburger cheese together? ... Ah! It is horrible? Then how about mutton chops with shrimp sauce? And try herring soup with strawberry jam, or chocolate with red wine" (from "Pity the blind in palate," Serve it Forth).

With a bit of experimentation I've found that I kind of like pinot noir with apple pie, or a jammy shiraz with pecan pie squares, and I did enjoy that sauvignon blanc, all crisp and white, with toasted marshmallows. I fancy champagne or prosecco would be very nice with, say, strawberry shortcake and whipped cream. And with these toffee coffee chocolate chip bars?



I'm still thinking. WWMFKD?

Our ghastly purple dinner, or coq au vin

It started out well enough, and I had such good intentions.



My aim for the evening was to make, finally, really, successfully, coq au vin. It is a classic French dish of course, chicken in red wine, the very name of which reminds me of my high school French class. I seem to remember we planned an authentic French dinner as a kind of celebratory good bye to senior year and all that, and one of the items some brave soul was going to prepare was coq au vin. Somebody else volunteered to make buche de Noel. I daresay she is still at it.

I aimed to make le coq now, despite previous, downright routine, unhappy experiences with the entire point of the dish and the evil nemesis of my kitchen career, braised chicken pieces. Why shouldn't I try one more time, since I had as my guide the superb Madeleine Kamman, and her enormous New Making of a Cook? On page 834 she offers "Un coq au vin soigne," A well-prepared coq au vin. Of it she says in a sidebar that this "authentic and old recipe, made without any shortcuts," came to her from her great aunt, a professional chef trained by a chef, born in the 1820s, who had reputedly worked "in Careme's kitchen."

Careme! What a blessing also that I happen to own the Winter 1971 issue of the old hardback magazine Horizon, which includes Morris Bishop's article on Marie-Antoine Careme. He ought to step into my culinary hall of fame anyway. This was the man, chef de cuisine to Talleyrand, Czar Alexander, the Prince Regent of England, and Baron James Rothschild in succession, who revolutionized what must have been still very medieval cooking habits in aristocratic European kitchens. Careme banished smothery brown gravies and clashing spices from the dinner table, serving instead perfectly cooked meats in their own juices, seasonable unfussy vegetables, and fresh fruits. He also invented nothing less than "that feather-light paste that is one of the noblest expressions of French genius." Bishop does not elaborate, but he means puff paste.

So I felt encouraged. Madeleine Kamman's recipe, descended in the fourth generation from the master, requires two days if you want to do it right. It begins with a sauteeing of small white onions, pancetta, and then mushrooms -- each separately -- all to be set aside as garnish until the real cooking is done on the second day.

On that day, you saute carrots, onions, shallots, garlic, and parsley stems in clarified butter, set them aside and then make a reduction of their drippings along with Primary Veal Stock, itself an achievement, and two bottles of red wine. Then you brown the chicken legs in more butter, and add the wine reduction to them to finish cooking them. As they cook, you dry out slices of fresh bread in the oven, and then fry them in more clarified butter in preparation for serving.

When the chicken legs have finished cooking you remove them to a platter, thicken the cooking juices with a buerre manie ("handled butter" -- equal parts of flour and soft butter mashed together and added to a sauce), add yesterday's saved mushroom garnishes to the sauce, and heat all through. Then you strain the garnishes out of the sauce, place them around the chicken pieces, and process the sauce in a blender with one-third of a chicken liver and 2 tablespoons of creme fraiche. When this new sauce is smoothly pureed, you strain it into a new saucepan and flambe it with a quarter cup of heated cognac. (I presume this cooks the chicken liver.) Then you ladle the sauce over the chicken and garnishes, and serve everything up with the fried bread slices.

Oui, bien sur, as we used to say in French class. Of course I simplified the recipe, and of course the chicken pieces were both underdone and partly rubbery, and of course I should have known better from the get go. There are other ways to use up tired bottles of poor quality red wine. Why don't I start a vinegar barrel? And yet, I fail to see how even Careme's version can avoid the most horrific effect of coq au vin, which is red wine's rendering of chicken meat purple. This is before it turned color. Shade your eyes:



It got worse. Even my side dish for the night emerged from a purple hell. I reasoned that for all the work of preparing coq au vin (pas) soigne, I may as well go easy on myself in other departments and make use of a leftover cauliflower creation which had been pretty good the night before, and which sat expectantly in the refrigerator. I had simply drizzled the whole thing, nicely steamed, with melted butter and chopped walnuts. Unhappily, the walnuts dyed the cauliflower a faded blood-brown color overnight; and so the whole dinner was purple, dreadful dreadful dreadful purple.

The accompanying wine? I forget. Does it matter? Madeleine Kamman suggests a cabernet franc. I'm sure that would be fine.

I shall now master the 1855 Bordeaux classification

And as Groucho would say, "there's not a thing you can do about it, I've had three of the best doctors in the East!"

All wine books summarize the famed 1855 classification nicely. In that year, Emperor Napoleon III, himself an interesting fellow -- the product of a marriage wherein the first Napoleon had joined his brother to his stepdaughter -- asked the authorities in Bordeaux to draw up a short list of the district's finest wines in preparation for an Exposition in Paris. Different wine authors today give slightly different details. His imperial highness may have asked the winegrowing chateau owners themselves for the list, and they for fear of creating mutual jealousies may have fobbed the job off on the local Chamber of Commerce; or he may have asked the Chamber of Commerce first, who then fobbed the job off on local wholesale wine merchants who knew their product.

In any case, the list of the very greatest Bordeaux was made, and of the hundreds of winemaking operations in the area, it ranked only sixty-one chateaux. Determinations of quality were based on the prices these wines fetched in the market. It was a sensible way of doing things: it would be as if the Chicago city council should be asked to list the best department stores in the city. Powerhouse European couture boutiques would crowd the top, followed by the swankier stores and so on down to K-Mart, if our council cared to pursue the matter that far. The Bordelais did not. Judging quality merely by price may at first seem cart-before-the-horse presumptuous, but if we've ever treated ourselves to an exalted shopping experience, as exalted as a Bordeaux shopping experience would be, we know that that judgment is usually very right.

The sixty-one "classified" chateaux were divided up into five subcategories, again determined by prices fetched. They were simply called "premier crus" (first growth), "deuxieme crus," and so on. Of those sixty-one, only four were allotted "first growth" (shall we say, "most expensive"?) status. These were Chateau Margaux, Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, Chateau Latour, and Chateau Haut-Brion. One hundred and eighteen years later in 1973, one more chateau, Mouton-Rothschild, was elevated to first growth status following twenty years, or was it fifty, of "nagging" (according to Jancis Robinson) of the French authorities on the part of its proud owner, the Baron Phillippe de Rothschild. This represents the only change ever made to the 1855 classification.

Wine writers are careful to emphasize that the list and the judgments were made based on market prices, and further to emphasize that the term "cru" should really be mentally translated as "classification" only. Hugh Johnson, in his book Vintage, is the only one to imply that "first growth" also has something to do with the "classed" or classifed growths being numbered so because they were among the first ones there. And where is there? Let us open a miraculous window, and spy upon Bordeaux.


View Larger Map

We are looking down on the area northwest of the city of Bordeaux called the Medoc, with the blue Atlantic to the west and the blue-gray estuary of the Gironde emptying into that. (Incidentally, that rivers normally empty into oceans is something I always have to remind myself of. I am not only a landlubber, I'm a Chicago landlubber. Engineers reversed our river long ago, and it flows from the lake inland, which makes sense to me.)

This region of the Medoc was swamp up until the 1600s, when Dutch engineers, originally commissioned by the French king Henry IV and long experienced in hauling the Netherlands out of the sea, drained it. The Dutch had become Bordeaux's best customers following the drop in trade with the English consequent to what seemed the later French monarchy's endless wars, and were only too happy to help get more wine for themselves by creating more land where grapes could be grown. More land meant more opportunity for land ownership and chateau-building by a rising class of nouveau riche merchants, politicians, and lawyers in the area, native born or not; more wine meant more trade and more prosperity for all.

This seems as good a time as any to sketch, a little, the very large topic of that English connection to Bordeaux, to the city and the wine. One of the most romantic figures of the middle ages, Eleanor of Aquitaine, brought the city as well as the entire duchy of Aquitaine, a chunk of southwest France bigger than the official kingdom "France" then, as her dowry to her second husband, King Henry II of England. Through this marriage and its establishment of a dynasty, Bordeaux remained an English possession for three hundred and one years, from the wedding day in 1152 to the battle of Castillon and ultimate French victory, on July 17, 1453. The French king who repossessed the city was none other than Charles VII, who had been crowned through the efforts of Joan of Arc twenty-four years earlier. Strangely, the day of the battle was the anniversary of his coronation.

In those intervening three centuries, however, Bordeaux you might say learned to speak English and like it, and learned particularly to like a vigorous wine trade with England. For their part wealthy Englishmen learned to like Bordeaux the beverage, which they called "claret" from the word clairet, a tribute to the wines' once-typical light color. Before the modern era, Bordeaux was made from many different types of grapes, often in mixtures of red and white, and the best wines -- or, as Hugh Johnson says, those that appealed most to English taste -- were only allowed to ferment with their skins for a day, thus remaining pale red.

But we had been working our way toward the topic of what makes the "first growths" first. First in price in 1855, yes, we understand. But Bordeaux had always made good wine. A soft riparian climate and protective forests to the south bless the countryside with warm summers and mild winters. The Romans tended vines here, and a thousand years after that, Queen Eleanor brought a taste for her homeland's wine to her new kingdom. What Dutch engineers and keen-eyed Frenchmen saw in the newly drained Medoc another five hundred years after that was not just some more good land for more "Gascon" wine, but perfect land for superlative wine. They saw rocks and gravel. A bit south of the Medoc is the region called Graves, actually named for the word for gravel; this is the appellation of one of the sixty-one original classed growths, Chateau Haut-Brion, whose wine incidentally Samuel Pepys tasted on April 10, 1663, and pronounced "of a good and most particular taste." This seems to be the first tasting note, ever, for the first wine ever marketed under the name of a chateau. He called it "Ho Bryan." Yes. Grape vines love rocks.

Johnson summarizes: "The old aristocracy [who owned the swampy Medoc in small parcels] was not unwilling to sell its rights over such marginal fragments. The name of the game was consolidation. What is immediately striking is that the first estates to be consolidated remain the first-growths to this day. It must have been very clear to these ambitious investors that the best vineyard land was the most unpromising-looking gravel" (Vintage, p. 206). These ambitious investors must have been able to see the rocks and gravel through the water, because Johnson says the consolidation began even before those Dutch contractors got their royal drainage concessions. The lands that became Chateau Margaux were already being bought up and collected by one family by the 1570s, the lands of Latour by the 1590s (p. 206). The kingly nod to begin drying out the Medoc only came in 1599 (p. 205).

Long before 1855, therefore, the finest chateaux in Bordeaux were well known and had not arisen by sheer luck but were built by people who knew what they were doing. Drawing up the list of sixty-one may have been fairly easy. All the estates except one -- Pepys' Haut-Brion, as it happens -- are located not just in the Medoc but almost entirely in four smaller appellations of the Medoc, called (moving northwest from Bordeaux the city) Margaux, St. Julien, Pauillac, and St. Estephe. Pauillac seems to be the absolute jewel, owning the distinction of three "first growth" chateaux: Lafite-Rothschild, Latour, and that Mouton-Rothschild promoted in 1973. Many of the great chateaux have hyphenated names whose English half reflects their founding by enterprising seventeenth- or eighteenth-century English merchants more than at home in English-flavored Bordeaux. Boyd, Brown, Palmer, Barton, Talbot, and Lynch all leap off the labels, startlingly un-French.

If you can ever possibly afford these wines, what are they made of and what will you be tasting? The red grapes used -- and something like 85 percent of all Bordeaux is red wine -- are cabernet sauvignon, merlot, cabernet franc, and a small amount of petit verdot and malbec. The white grapes used are semillon, sauvignon blanc, and a small amount of muscadelle and ugni blanc (also called trebbiano). What you will be tasting, it seems, is something very unlike the California "fruit bomb" reds, made from the same grapes, which stand so temptingly ubiquitous and inexpensive on our grocery store shelves. "Silky" is a term Karen MacNeil in The Wine Bible often uses for them; she also uses terms like "soaring elegance," "wonderfully generous," "wonderfully structured," "precision," "refinement," "superbly elegant," "hedonistic." They are going to be, probably, at once lighter and much more tannic than we who know the "jammy" stuff will be used to. Silk would not come to mind if one was busy chewing over a mouthful of slopping-over-fruit; and it's Bordeaux's tannins, seeming un-California-friendly but helping it to age for decades, that would probably call to mind structure and precision.

And would you believe that there was another classification of Bordeaux, also in 1855, but this one concerning only the sweet white wines of the regions of Barsac and Sauternes? These are as superlative as Bordeaux's reds, so the Emperor and the Chamber of Commerce saw that they deserved ranking too. It would be as if the Chicago city council decided to rank the department stores of the tony north suburbs as well. Further, would you believe the wines of Graves were classified in 1953 and 1959, and that so far we have not even crossed the Gironde, to visit the right bank regions of St. Emilion (first classified in 1954), and Pomerol? This last appellation was never classified, "thankfully," the wine writers say -- even though it is from here that the near-divine Chateau Petrus comes.

We could venture, you know, into all this now, but I think we will wait. (To venture into it now might require consultation with a fourth doctor.) And be happy! -- the 2008 vintage is rumored to be a good one.

Oxtails with grapes

Amazing is a much overused word, but here I will indulge. This amazingly good recipe, which at first seems too outlandish to bother with, strikes me as excellent confirmation of the suspicion, inspired by Mrs. Humphrey below, that great food often must come from the experiments of hungry anonymous people throwing into the pot whatever they had on hand. A charming French name also helps lift any recipe into the realm of deliciousness.

This is "La queue de boeuf des vignerons" -- oxtail in the style of the vinegrowers -- and it comes from South Wind Through the Kitchen: The Best of Elizabeth David. A stew of oxtail, bacon, and the basic vegetables and Mediterranean herb combinations of carrot and onion, garlic, bay leaf, thyme and parsley, all stewed together leisurely while you are busy with other things, would just cry out for the addition of two pounds of white grapes, wouldn't it? I would think so, if I were a hardworking farmer looking forward to a harvest time lunch break, and walking by those big hampers of grapes and thinking suddenly, why not? "Lovely" and "divine" Mrs. David comments. She is right.

The recipe begins with the steeping of "at least 2" oxtails in cold water for at least 2 hours, to soak out the blood. I did this but did not see that it made any difference. Perhaps oxtails were sent to the market in different condition when Mrs. David was writing, than they are now.

Then, you will chop 2 large onions and 4 large carrots into dice, and put them in a heavy pot with either a 4 ounce piece of salt pork or some bacon, or perhaps 4 Tablespoons of butter. Turn on the heat, and simmer this mixture "until the fat from the bacon is running," or until the vegetables soften a little, about 10 minutes.



Now, put in the oxtail pieces, and the bouquet of 2 bay leaves, parsley, thyme, and 2 crushed cloves of garlic. Season the meat with salt and pepper. Cover the pot and cook gently for 20 minutes.



Meanwhile, pluck the 2 pounds of green grapes from their stems and and crush them all lightly in a bowl (I used a potato masher). Add the grapes to the pot. Place a sheet of tin foil over the pot, and then cover it with the lid. Remove to a very slow oven (290 F), and bake for a minimum of three and a half hours. The meat should be falling off the bones or "it will not be good," and that's true.



The resulting gravy is very fatty. Mrs. David recommends fussing with the gravy a bit more than I care to -- put it through a sieve, and so on, whereas I prefer to serve stews in all their carrot-cluttered glory -- but if you have time it would be good either to put the sauce into a clear cup and siphon it away from its layer of fat with a bulb baster, or else plan to make the dish a day ahead so you can chill it and peel the fat away easily before serving. The vivid green grapes cook down and melt away to almost nothing, leaving a rich but not sweet sauce.

Mashed potatoes with a breath of horseradish might go very well with this, and a nice little white wine is a good accompaniment. Amazing.

Culinary hall of fame: Sylvia Windle Humphrey

Coriander; fold it in a coffee filter and staple it closed to add to soups or stews

Sylvia Windle Humphrey deserves inclusion in my little hall of fame simply because of her charming name. Can't you just picture her in long Edwardian skirts, writing elegant cookery books by gaslight, and then moving sedately off to a charity function on the arm of the distinguished Mr. Humphrey?

In fact, we must move her forward in time, closer to our own era. She was the author of A Matter of Taste, published by Macmillan in 1965. My copy of this book is yet another of my library-book-sale, cast-off, jacket-less, one dollar treasures. It is a cookbook, filled with unusual recipes whose sources she thanks gracefully in her brief acknowledgements (why were authors so much briefer about acknowledging people then?) -- brief but tantalizing. Who was Mimi Ouei, and does the Artistic Cooking School of New York still exist, and can anyone find a copy of Sir Alan Herbert's Two Gentlemen from Soho?

No matter. I include Mrs. Humphrey in my Culinary Hall of Fame only facetiously for her name but really for having had the brains to write a book just on seasonings, to explain what seasoning food means (as opposed to flavoring it), and if nothing else to teach the reader the difference between spices and herbs. I was perfectly ignorant about that. Spices, she explains, like cinnamon or nutmeg, are tropical. Herbs are the weedy plants, such as rosemary or basil, from temperate climates. All share characteristics helpful to food: they literally irritate the mouth, or they exude an aromatic oil, or they excite the taste buds in specific ways, sweet or bitter or sour, without chemically altering food. Or they might do a combination of two, or all three together.

Her basic information goes further. At the top of the spice pyramid, in terms of expense and deliciousness and glamor, she places as does all mankind saffron, cardamom, and pepper. At the top of the seasoning pyramid, in terms of exemplifying an almost mystic total usefulness, she puts three items I would not have thought of: lemon, ginger, and vanilla. Mrs. Humphrey argues that these are the queens of all seasonings, and she makes her argument (and starts her book) in part by reporting a taste experiment with peaches, "after Brillat-Savarin." To a professional chef, an acquaintance with Brillat-Savarin and a studying of peaches may be routine matters. The home cook gazes admiringly at Sylvia Windle Humphrey and thinks, the lady knows her stuff. Another reason to put her in my Hall.

The book also includes leisurely information on the herbs as garden plants, and makes the reader want to run out and pester the staff at the local Home Depot's nursery department as to when they'll get in a supply of costmary, sweet woodruff, or angelica. And did you know that you can use anchovies -- not a garden plant -- to improve eggs or broccoli or "almost anything that is not a sweet"? Throughout her book in fact she encourages the reader, even if not in so many words, to try practically anything in cooking with herbs and spices, as long as it is not clearly an idiotic idea. This makes sense. When you observe the ingredient lists of some recipes, especially old classic ones, you are, after all, forced to conclude that hungry and thirsty people must have put in the pot or cup whatever they had on hand, and hoped for the best. Why else should beef stews include garlic and wine and allspice, etc., etc., or why should a mug of coffee include whiskey in Ireland, chocolate in Vienna, and cardamom in Turkey? Then again, why not include coffee as an ingredient in "Chili meatballs with rice"? Mrs. Humphrey does.

And she has nice things to say about wine. One gets the impression that somebody annoyed her on this point, for she has to unburden herself before she can go on to quotes from Apicius and then to recipes. "The preconceived misconceptions about the usefulness of wine in cooking are so deep that it is hard to root them out. A faint air of moral superiority frequently goes along with the 'We don't like the taste of wine in food,' or 'Of course the children don't care for wine in the things they eat....' " Yet we all keep little bottles of lemon, almond, or vanilla extract, at 85%, 85%, and 35% alcohol levels respectively, on hand for months in our cabinets, and cook from them without thinking of any complications, moral, culinary, or otherwise.

She is a treat. I have prepared her Braised Celery, have just introduced coriander into my soups and stews ("how have we in America lost track of this mild, inexpensive way to give spirit to our foods?"), and look forward to making a baked chocolate-cinnamon pudding called Africanella. And, with Mrs. Humphrey as my teacher, I have just yesterday reformed a family recipe to make the best chili of my experience. I will call it Chili a la Sylvia Windle, and offer it to you for your own improvements and your own moniker.

In a Dutch oven, soften, in olive oil, 1 onion, chopped, 1 green pepper, chopped, and 1 red pepper, chopped. Cook gently and stir in a small handful of fresh thyme sprigs, a small handful of fresh sage leaves, 1 bay leaf, 5 whole cloves, and 1/4 teaspoon each of cayenne pepper and cinnamon.

Remove the vegetable herb mix to a bowl, and then brown 1 and 1/2 pounds ground beef in the pot. When it is browned, spoon off and discard all the fat, and return the vegetable mix to the pot. Add 1 large can of tomato puree, 1 and 1/2 teaspoons chili powder, and 2 teaspoons brown sugar. Add salt and pepper, a can of black or kidney beans if you can do this without The Children shrieking about it, and simmer all gently for about 40 minutes.

Serve with practically any starch -- brown rice, noodles, corn bread -- except I suppose potatoes. But then, why not potatoes?

Grape-growing, ancient Rome

Need I mention the starting, planting, and growth of vines? I can never have too much of this pleasure -- to let you into the secret of what gives my old age repose and amusement. For I say nothing here of the natural force which all things propagated from the earth possess -- the earth which from that tiny grain in a fig, or the grape-stone in a grape, or the most minute seeds of the other cereals and plants, produces such huge trunks and boughs.

Mallet-shoots, slips, cuttings, quicksets, layers -- are they not enough to fill any one with delight and astonishment? The vine by nature is apt to fall, and unless supported drops down to the earth; yet in order to keep itself upright it embraces whatever it reaches with its tendrils as though they were hands. Then as it creeps on, spreading itself in intricate and wild profusion, the dresser's art prunes it with the knife and prevents it growing a forest of shoots and expanding to excess in every direction.

Accordingly at the beginning of spring in the shoots which have been left there protrudes at each of the joints what is termed an "eye." From this the grape emerges and shows itself; which, swollen by the juice of the earth and the heat of the sun, is at first very bitter to the taste, but afterwards grows sweet as it matures; and being covered with tendrils is never without a moderate warmth, and yet is able to ward off the fiery heat of the sun.

Can anything be richer in product or more beautiful to contemplate? It is not its utility only, as I said before, that charms me, but the method of its cultivation and the natural process of its growth: the rows of uprights, the cross-pieces for the tops of the plants, the tying up of the vines and their propagation by layers, the pruning, to which I have already referred, of some shoots, the setting of others. I need hardly mention irrigation, or trenching and digging the soil, which much increase its fertility.

As to the advantages of manuring I have spoken in my book on agriculture. The learned Hesiod did not say a single word on this subject, though he was writing on the cultivation of the soil; yet Homer, who in my opinion was many generations earlier, represents Laertes as softening his regret for his son, by cultivating and manuring his farm. Nor is it only in cornfields and meadows and vineyards and plantations that a farmer's life is made cheerful. There are the garden and the orchard, the feeding of sheep, the swarms of bees, endless varieties of flowers. Nor is it only planting out that charms: there is also grafting -- surely the most ingenious invention ever made by husbandmen.

I might continue my list of the delights of country life; but even what I have said I think is somewhat overlong ....

Cicero, On Old Age