The belle of aisle 15, and other random thoughts

My goodness, time still flies when you're being professional. At the grocery store we are in the middle of what's called OND, October-November-December, in other words, the busiest time of the year. Today is Halloween and it's a Saturday, so it will be a day when we count on impulse buys and good sales to help us "blow out" lots of merchandise. The corners of the receiving dock, which runs the whole back length of the store, are piling up with Christmas product of all kinds. Since the back of the house operations, you might say, are staffed mostly by men, certain weeks of OND even get certain epithets of their own. "B----- to the wall" (it rhymes) describes the week before Thanksgiving, I'm told. God knows how they describe Christmas.

So: random thoughts. To my surprise, the belle of the wine aisle -- no, it's not me -- is of all things, vermouth. It sells amazingly well, two cases a week of Gallo's brand, plus a decent enough amount of Tribuno. Martini & Rossi does not move too much, and Noilly Prat hardly at all.

The bread and butter of the liquor department (if you'll excuse the grocery store metaphor here): vodka and gin. In addition to all that vermouth, it would seem that someone somewhere is still drinking classic martinis.

My favorite customer so far: the little old lady who just wanted a little bottle of vodka, because her friend said the best health regimen you can follow as you get older is to soak raisins in vodka, and when they are well-soaked, to eat no more than seven raisins per day. Why, her friend went on vacation and forgot her supply of raisins, and just didn't feel right the whole time! -- But we couldn't find a really small bottle of vodka. Oh well. She bought the standard size anyway. We agreed if you run out of raisins, you can always drink the vodka.

And speaking of classic drinks, I was able recently to pick up, at the local discount book warehouse, a copy of Charles Schumann's American Bar for $7.99. I have been studying it at night, to learn more about spirits and liqueurs. And a good thing, too, because yesterday I had customers asking about Cherry Heering and cachaca, and I was able to not be completely ignorant about both. And who knew? American Bar is for sale through the catalog Acorn -- for $85.00! If you can get yourself to the big half-empty strip mall near the corner of 178th and Torrence Avenue, within sight of the huge Torrence Avenue interchange on to the I-80/94 expressway, why, I can get it for you wholesale.

And, as you move from O to N yourself this weekend, enjoy another video on the Paso Robles harvest, from Dina Mande at Paso Harvest Films.

Pasoharvestfilms Ep 10 - Austin Hope & Harvest Festival Weekend from Dina Mande

Moroccan meat loaf

This Moroccan meat loaf, from Simply recipes, has become a kind of base or mother recipe in our house, because of the delicious five-spice combination it taught me to add to many other beefy or meaty dishes: generous spoonfuls of paprika, cumin, and curry -- it makes you feel so virtuous to actually use those spices up, while they are still fresh, in less than a year -- plus smaller but equal parts of cayenne pepper and cinnamon. (Just a quarter teaspoon of each will do.) Moroccan meat loaf also gives you a chance to use the ground lamb you bought at the local specialty meat market, which unfortunately doesn't sell duck breasts. Ever.

Moroccan meat loaf

It's a huge recipe, calling for no less than three pounds of meat -- two of ground lamb, one of ground beef. Mix the meats together in a bowl. Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Heat 2 Tbsp olive oil in a heavy skillet, and then add 1 carrot, 1 onion, and 1 stalk of celery, all diced; plus about 6 cloves of garlic, diced; and a 3-inch piece of fresh ginger, diced. Cook for about five minutes, until the vegetables start to soften.



Next, add your new magic Moroccan five-spice powder (with salt and pepper, of course):

1 and 1/4 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
1 tsp each curry powder, ground cumin, and sweet paprika
1/4 tsp cayenne powder
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon



Mix and stir the spices into the sauteeing vegetables, just for a minute or two until the spices release their aromas. Then remove all from the heat and let it cool for five minutes.

Stir the vegetable-spice mixture into the ground meats. Mix in 2 eggs, 1 and 1/4 cup bread crumbs (or not, if you are keeping this gluten free), 1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro, and 2 Tbsp chopped fresh mint (or not, if your grocery store didn't have it that day). The original original recipe also calls for saffron, which Elise of Simply Recipes omitted because she doesn't like it. So there.

After mixing the meat loaf thoroughly, put it in a greased 1 and 1/2 quart loaf pan, which you then place in a second pan. This pan you will fill with water, to reach halfway up the sides of the nested pan. Place this arrangement carefully in the preheated oven, and bake the meatloaf for 1 and 1/2 hours, or until the meat is cooked completely. Let it rest for 10 to 15 minutes, and then unmold it onto a serving platter. If you wish to augment matters with a pomegranate barbecue sauce made with pomegranate molasses (wha-ha?), you will find the recipe back at the source. Elise says that isn't necessary, and I believe her.


Can you see both pans, and the water level?

The meatloaf is delicious with almost anything -- some rice, some polenta, some fresh tomatoes; perhaps for your accompanying wine you'd like an inexpensive and unambitious riesling or gewurztraminer, which will know its place at the table: it will be more interesting than tea, but also smart enough not to try to really compete with cayenne and cinnamon.

And for handy future reference, that very useful Moroccan five-spice combination is:

1 tsp. curry powder
1 tsp. sweet paprika
1 tsp. ground cumin
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp cinnamon

Norma Shearer's apple shortbread meringue, updated with Pama

This may take a few minutes.

Last week I learned about a recipe contest sponsored by the good people making Pama, the pomegranate liqueur (the packaging alone is lovely). To enter this contest -- and anyone can do so -- you must create an original appetizer, entree, or dessert featuring at least 3 Tablespoons of Pama, and submit the recipe to the company's Facebook page by November 15th. The grand prize is a trip for two to the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colorado, next June.

What does this have to do with Norma Shearer? Not much, but I'll make it fit.

Occasionally I like to take the train downtown and visit the Chicago Public Library, to have a look at the cookbook section on the fourth floor. I pluck from the shelves the oldest and oddest books I can find, and copy down recipes from authors with names like Jinx Kragen (Saucepans and the Single Girl, 1965), or books firmly titled Food For Men (by Glenn Quilty, 1954).

On my last excursion to the library, I caught sight of a thin black book spine squeezed in among all the others, its lettering all worn away from the passing years. I took it out and found I had in my hands something called What Actors Eat When They Eat!, published in 1939. It's a substantial collection of recipes ostensibly offered up by the big Hollywood stars of the day, including one of the biggest, Norma Shearer. Of course, what the book also is, is a genuine production of the old Hollywood studio system, whereby the public's adored favorites were made by their employers to behave themselves, dress appropriately when out, make pictures as assigned, get married and/or have their names used to sell cookbooks as needed, and otherwise carry on more or less like extremely glamorous civil servants who knew on which side their bread was buttered. All in all, not a bad system, and I'll bet they enjoyed more true privacy than their poor, liberated, paparazzi-harassed professional descendants do now.

At any rate, on Norma Shearer's page we find, beneath her well coiffed and bejeweled studio photograph, two desserts, one for "Chocolate Antoinette" and one for "Porcupine Dessert with Vanilla Sauce." Chocolate Antoinette is not very interesting, simply a good chocolate pudding covered in a meringue. The "Antoinette," of course, refers to her movie Marie Antoinette, released in 1939. All the recipes in the book pertain somehow either to the stars' roles or to their backgrounds or tastes, real or perceived. Clark Gable submits a manly "Hunter's Breakfast," Merle Oberon something suitably exotic. And so on.

Miss Shearer's second proffered dish, the Porcupine Dessert, is a little more intriguing, and it's this which is going to lead us eventually to our pomegranate liqueur contest. Porcupine Dessert is essentially a simple shortbread crust, such as you would bake to go beneath a lemon bar or a date bar recipe, piled with a stewed apple-raisin-and-sherry filling, and then topped again with a meringue. To render the whole thing a "porcupine," the instructions say to cover the meringue with precisely arranged slivered almonds to represent the animal's spines, and then add two raisins for the eyes, finishing with grated pistachios to represent the grass he is sitting on. The resulting mental picture strikes me as ghastly and unnecessary. Besides, what was the connection between Norma Shearer and porcupines? Could it have been some sort of reference to her birth in Canada? -- albeit Montreal hardly qualifies as a wilderness outpost overrun with porcupines.

I have summarized the recipe loosely, but not much more loosely than it is in the book. The authors gave "Chocolate Antoinette" the full treatment, with measurements and proper directions; "Porcupine dessert" is thrown off in the casual way of really old cookbooks, which make assumption that the reader understands this:

Bottom: One cup flour, one-half cup butter, one-fourth cup sugar. Mix well together and bake. Filling: Apples, raisins, citron, sherry, and sugar. Cook long and slowly. The filling is piled high on the bottom crust, covered with meringue and long pieces of almonds ....

And that's it.

I think -- and here comes our entry, with trepidation, into the pomegranate liqueur contest -- I would replace the sherry with Pama, or PAMA as it apparently should be called, and perhaps mix the apples with more fruits. Berries and dates might be nice. After assembly, the meringue topping should be briefly browned in the oven.

And that's it. The question is, would this constitute, as the contest rules insist, an original creation? What Actors Eat When They Eat! is almost, almost out of copyright, and anyway the Porcupine thing is not a recipe as we accept them now. This may require deep thinking.

And who was Norma Shearer, actually? One of my favorites, to begin with. She was a bit like the Demi Moore of her day. A very big star and a big moneymaker, pretty in a sort of determined, angular way, half of a high-powered Hollywood marriage, and a terrific onscreen weeper. In 1938, when Gone With The Wind was about to go into production, she was for a while considered the absolute shoe-in for the part of Scarlett O'Hara. But rumor had it that the very character was going to be rescripted to fit her, and her weepiness. In a private letter, author Margaret Mitchell acknowledged this as a jaw-dropping development which would "thereby [make Scarlett] a poor put-upon creature instead of a hellion." The public, too, was not enthusiastic about Norma Shearer for this role, and in the summer of 1938 she graciously withdrew from consideration for the part -- or her studio made her do so, or made her be gracious about it, or some combination of those circumstances. Or so it seems. She may have been powerful enough in her own right by then to make her own decisions and write her own announcements. She said, according to the Hollywood papers, "I have decided that I should not play Scarlett. I am convinced that the majority of fans who think I should not play this kind of character on the screen are right. I appreciate tremendously the interest they have shown." For the quotes here, consult Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With The Wind" Letters, 1936-1949, edited by Richard Harwell and published by Macmillan in 1976.

And for a taste of Miss Shearer's poor put-upon screen work -- a rather harsh judgment, I think -- watch The Women, Marie Antoinette, Romeo and Juliet, Idiot's Delight, or The Divorcee. There were many more, but I'm not sure how easy it will be to find gems like The Stealers (1920) or He Who Gets Slapped (1924). Better, perhaps, to spend the time baking porcupines.

In which I upload a video (re: the California harvest)

Recently, independent filmmaker Dina Mande-Gould contacted me to suggest that my readers might like to know about her short web video series on this year's harvest in California's Paso Robles wine country. I visited her site, Paso Harvest Films, looked at her most recent posting, Episode 7, and found the film delightful. If you're fond of armchair traveling and want to have a peek at a real California winery, from the fields to the tasting room in films shot just in the last month, you might like this.



The winery featured is Clautiere, run since 1999 by former fashion designers/welders/landscape designers/restaurant owners Terry Brady and Claudine Blackwell. On the website's map, Clautiere is shown just east of the town of Paso Robles, which itself is located on California's southwestern coast about midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. That's a big stretch of territory to pore over, with your bifocals or without them -- but look for Pismo Beach ("and all the clams you can eat," as Bugs Bunny would say) and then move your finger north just a bit. You should find Paso Robles.

The town lies at the heart of the AVA, the American Viticultural Area, of the same name. It's in San Luis Obispo County, which is not an AVA itself, but which is part of the million-acre Central Coast AVA, and which -- the county, that is -- also contains the AVAs of Edna Valley, Arroyo Grande Valley, and York Mountain in addition to Paso Robles. Paso Robles is itself an amply sized AVA, weighing in, you might say, at over 600,000 acres. Compare the tiny size of El Dorado AVA, on the other side of the state in the Sierra Foothills, or Cole Ranch to the north in Mendocino County, which boast only about 400 acres and 60 acres respectively and produce, well, all those enchanting looking little wines that we none of us are likely to find on our grocery store shelves. A glass of Windwalker, anyone?

The point of all this name dropping is to fix, in my own mind, exactly whence cometh the California wines whose label appellations do show up frequently enough to start to sound familiar. Many labels, even on grocery store shelves, say Paso Robles. Quite a few even say Edna Valley or Arroyo Grande. Have you seen or purchased, for example, Adelaida Cellars, Claiborne and Churchill, Eberle, or Treana wines? They all hail from Paso Robles, where cabernet and zinfandel grow well, incidentally. And that makes them neighbors of Clautiere, which you can visit, virtually, above.

Thanks to Dina Mande Gould for her "shout out" as all the cool people say. I look forward to sharing more of her films, and I'm proud to announce I'm even sort of topical with this one. Her ten web episodes on the harvest were intended be finished in time to help celebrate the Paso Robles Harvest Wine Weekend from October 16-18 -- which event began, um, yesterday.

An image for the Chateau

A 2008 Ruffino Chianti, $10.99. Fine, elegant, exactly what you expect, no less -- and no more? Would this image say what I mean, at Chateau Petrogasm?

"In what deestrict of Italy 'ave you voyaged most?"

The above is a quote from one of the six most delicious novels ever written, all comprising the Mapp and Lucia saga of the great, the superbly great E.F. Benson. The splendid BBC production filmed in the mid 1980s, wherein almost every actor was perfect for his role and the town where the show was filmed perfect too, was called by the same name; the six collected novels can sometimes be found in an omnibus edition, Make Way for Lucia, but if you own the individual copies then you are the proud possessor of Queen Lucia, Lucia in London, Miss Mapp, Mapp and Lucia (in which the Titanesses meet!), The Worshipful Lucia, and Trouble for Lucia.

Throughout the books Lucia is forever maintaining the fiction that she can speak Italian, and of course every time she is caught out in her lie -- meeting or more often avoiding native Italian speakers, usually managing to sail away still trilling "buona notte!" -- she simply recovers from the blow to her scholarly reputation by some brilliant excuse. How could she be expected to understand the Neapolitan dialect, spoken by that opera composer "who is like a huge hairdresser"? She couldn't understand his English, either. Does that mean she does not know English?

No indeed. The huge hairdresser/composer, Signor Cortese, is one of the first to discover that Mrs. Lucas (the wife of Mr. Lucas and therefore La Lucia, just as the wife of Signor Giocondo was La Gioconda, better known as Mona Lisa) -- does not really know a shred of Italian. They attend a party together in Queen Lucia. He accosts her with a rapid-fire question she can't answer. She replies "Si, tante grazie." He looks puzzled and asks:

" 'In what deestrict of Italy 'ave you voyaged most?' "

And everybody snickers, while Lucia answers " 'Rome -- adoro Roma' " and her equally hapless husband perks up and inquires (in Baedeker Italian) of the famous composer " 'whether he was not very fond of music ....' "

Cortese happens to be the name of a grape, too, a white grape used to make fine wines in Italy's Piedmont region, and I wonder if this is a little joke on author Benson's part, or simply meaningless happenstance. He does have a gift for easy references to practically anything in the whole corpus of Western knowledge, musical, Biblical, liturgical (his father was the Archbishop of Canterbury), historical, or literary. There is a minor character in Lucia in London, for instance, named Rex Greatorex, and you would think surely he's made that one up, until you leaf casually through your old abridged copy of Samuel Pepys' Diary one day and find there was a Greatorex, in real life seventeenth century London. Ecco!

Signor Cortese's pointed query about the deestricts of Italy comes to mind because I have decided I really must learn Italian wine. In her Wine Bible Karen MacNeil recommends studying one grape variety at a time, so as to become thoroughly familiar with each before moving on, but I find that approach a bit dull. Studying a country at a time seems more fun, and carries with it the opportunity of armchair travel.

(Incidentally, while stocking wine at work the other day I did have a sort of wine knowledge epiphany -- although it's one that more experienced oenophiles would probably laugh at. There I was, kneeling down, peering into the dim recesses of the lower shelves, "fronting and facing" the jug wines, when I thought: surely none even of the noble varietals are that remarkable in character, such that a Cavit, Bolla, Livingston, Gallo, Beringer, Woodbridge, Glen Ellen, Leaping Horse, Sutter Home, Yellow Tail, Black Swan, Turning Leaf, or what have you chardonnay, or pinot grigio, is going to be truly different from every other jug of that single varietal. What keeps consumers brand-loyal to their own particular jugs?

I dare to say a varietal, a merlot, is a merlot is a merlot -- unless it is grown in those places and vinified in those ways which mankind has learned does make a difference in the final pleasures of a glass of that varietal. You want a real merlot, full of character, at its best, so as to understand the point of liking them? You probably want a Pomerol, a Bordeaux from the appellation where our French friends have been making and drinking merlot for many a long year. A riesling? You probably want something from the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer, where our German friends ... you get the idea. My gigantic epiphany that Jug Wines are Necessarily Tasteless (because mass-jug production Waters Down whatever interesting flavors the Grape Ideally Has) underlies what wine writers reflect upon, so calmly, when they notice the gap between what they love and review and what the average American drinks. It seems, from glancing at his archives, that blogger Alder Yarrow posts annually on this discrepancy. He posts annually on it because he responds every year to the Restaurant Wine report, which comes out each fall, loaded with information on the popularity of jug wines (read his latest reaction here, from September 19). I'm humbled, he writes, to know that it's Americans' taste for Sutter Home white zinfandel that keeps the whole wine industry afloat, and I'm grateful to have access to the very different kinds of wines that I do. (He lives in San Francisco.)

I believe him when he says he's humbled and grateful. But it's funny. The people buying and drinking the jug wines are doing exactly what wine writers say they should, what they say Europeans have always done. Drinking what they like, and treating wine as a part of everyday life. What they are missing is the epiphany-like experience of tasting a wine that soars beyond product and becomes, well, something that well-drunk people have epiphanies about. Mr. Yarrow thinks that, every year, some American wine drinkers must jump the jug ship and start buying wines that say Pomerol on the label, and he finds that prospect encouraging.)

All this massive digression has led us far from where I wanted to go, and that was Italy. The reason I have decided I must learn Italian wine is because it seems to me, of all those varietals and all those jugs and then all those Pomerols and other, um, San Francisco-type wines circulating up in the stratosphere above our plonk-y heads, it's Italian wines that truly seem different, different enough to catch the eye and startle the tastebuds of the person who lacks decades of well-drunk experience. Chiantis, for example. They're not too much more expensive than a notch-above-jug, Lodi red wine, and yet they remind me of raspberries, olives, and horses. I find that very intriguing after my umpteenth bottle of shiraz or cab or cab shiraz, once again going down more or less like barbecued chocolate syrup. Italian wine ... don't the words themselves trill crisp and luscious off the tongue? No wonder Lucia stood fascinated by it all. And then that recent prosecco, for example. Delicious, why -- it made me enjoy an extra dry sparkling wine. Why are Italian wines different?



In what deestrict of Italy shall we begin our voyage? I can't decide whether to start in the north, in the heavyweight wine production areas of Piedmont or the Tre Venezie, or in Chianti's home of Tuscany, or in the south, in Sicily with its ancient Greek ruins and its marsala or nero d'avola. What would Lucia do?

" 'Me must fink,' " she would say, in the baby language that she and her best friend and cavaliere serviente, Georgie, occasionally indulge in. Oh, and as for almost every actor being right for his role in that splendid BBC production, the only one miscast was the nice lady playing Olga Braceley, Lucia's first nemesis. Why an overmade-up, beefy, six-foot laughing hyena, when Olga was written as beautiful, gentle, kind, and sweetly happy? Me must fink.

This is why people stay in the wine business

Samples.

It's all about the samples. The more you sample, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more you enjoy the wine and want to stay in the wine business, to learn more about even better wines, and be better able to appreciate more samples. It's wonderfully circular.



I've been able to try close to ten new and, for me, somewhat high end wines in just over a month; one was five years old and one was ten, and that's unusual, too. Most wines on the grocery store or liquor store shelf are, of course, fresh from the bottler, and meant to be drunk up right away. So, what adds to the beauty and interest of all those samples is that not only is there always something a wholesale distributor wants you to carry in the store, maybe two or three things for you to try, but there's always some aging thing tucked away in the back room, purchased, buried and forgotten until inventory time, when everything is dusted off and counted again. Why look! A Benziger cabernet from 1998 -- we sold all the rest, it's probably past its prime, but try it -- and here's a Napa Cellars '05, that should be just about right. And then Wholesaler X is asking us to try these, here's a pinot noir, another cabernet, here's two chardonnays -- one's in a new "green friendly" lightweight bottle -- and here's a prosecco. Brand new. Let me know what you think.

I'd be glad to. I don't know of too many other businesses in which this kind of homework features so routinely and pleasantly. Maybe if you work at a bakery or florist's shop, you carry home the excess. But, after a certain point, how much more is there to learn about a doughnut or a carnation? Wine is different.

And the prosecco was absolutely delicious. LaMarca was the brand, an extra dry sparkling wine from Italy. It was my first experience of actually enjoying a very dry wine. I begin to "get it." Funnily, though, it seemed to lose all its lively fruit flavor within just a few hours of the bottle being opened; so I announced this very same puzzlement and complaint on Facebook, and I got an answer right away, but I'm sorry to admit I forget who the answer came from. It was either the nice people at Snooth or the nice people at Local Wine Events (I'm a fan of both). Whoever it was explained that proseccos are very delicately flavored to begin with, and since most of our sense of "taste" comes from the aromatics we smell, any bubbly wine tends to lose those aromatics quickly as its own bubbles effervesce them away. Ah so.



Which means, of course, I'm going to need more samples.

P.S. A little more on spotting an "authentic" prosecco, from Blog au vin.