A toast

In honor of the 135th anniversary of the birth of Sir Winston Churchill (November 30, 1874): his favorite, Pol Roger Champagne.



And a quote, just one of many that we could choose:

"Some regard private enterprise as if it were a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look upon it as a cow that they can milk. Only a handful see it for what it really is - the strong horse that pulls the whole cart."

A Thanksgiving necessity: creamed onions

Creamed onions were not on my family's Thanksgiving table when I was growing up, but I have added them to my menu because I found them listed among the suggestions for the feast at the back of Miss Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School Cookbook (1896). They seemed so authentic and historical as well as delicious-sounding, and easier to attempt than oyster soup (first course) or fruit pudding with sterling sauce (sixth course).

So here they are. You begin very simply, with fresh whole pearl onions. Drop them into boiling water and simmer them for three or four minutes. Drain them, run cold water over them, and then peel them by cutting off the root ends and squeezing the onion out of its skin. By this procedure you will probably squeeze the onion out of its first layer or two of flesh, as well. It looks and seems wasteful, but can hardly be helped.



Over the years I've learned a variety of ways to simplify the rest of the story. The best and richest way to prepare creamed onions is to make a standard cream sauce, based on a roux of equal parts melted butter and flour stirred into a bubbling paste, to which milk is added; stir and cook until the sauce is smooth. Proportions for this are easy to remember: 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour will need 1 cup of milk, 4 tablespoons each will need 2 cups of milk, and 5 tablespoons of each will need 3 cups. Once the sauce is done, you can put the onions to finish cooking in it -- they are done in about five more minutes -- and then leave them to stay hot on a back burner, until you are ready to serve them.

Or, if you have a gluten allergy problem, you can cook the onions in milk themselves,



and then when you are ready to serve, thicken the milk with a free form, GF (gluten-free) flour and water slurry. You can also simply sprinkle potato flour over the bubbling liquid, and stir it in until it dissolves. Keep on adding a little more potato flour until the cream is as thick as you want it. Both these methods serve the purpose, although these sauces don't cling to the onions as nicely as a traditional sauce does.



Salt and pepper and a dash of nutmeg are all that is needed to finish any of them.

Now you may move on to the rest of your dinner. Don't forget to give thanks, really.

My second Barolo

Not to be confused with my first Barolo, of course.

Azienda Agricola Sordo Giovanni, Castiglione Falletto, 1995.
Found in a rack in the liquor storeroom, below all the Smirnoff flavored vodkas. Covered with dust. Another example of why people stay in the wine business.


Color: beautiful. Indescribable. The glowing russet-brown of autumn oak leaves, as if seen shimmering through crystal. The aroma: Band-aids. (Yuh-oh.) Nail polish remover, faintly. (Yuh-oh. Perhaps I'm imagining things.) The texture: absolute silk in the mouth.

The flavor: cherry compote, albeit old and mature. Leather, faintly. So thin, so delicate, so elegant.

Paired with a chicken risotto, luscious with real chicken broth, olive oil, butter, cheese, and big pieces of chicken meat. My goodness, who knew that the alcohol content of this wine is 13.5 percent? But one must have a second glass, regardless. And then as Lucia would say, voyaging through Italy -- "goodnight, Georgino. Me so, so sleepy. "



P.S. Ought one to have a chocolate doughnut, afterward?

I know NO-thing

(Image from guardian.co.uk.)

But it's a very good wine. Light, satiny and berry-like, with a slight olive-brine taste that I always like and that seems to show up in -- Italian wines? Chiantis especially?



Cantine Rosa del Golfo (I think I understand that -- it's the producer), Salento, Scaliere 2006 Negroamaro.

The voyage continues.

Mastering fried potatoes

Even the best cookbook authors are forever telling us that fried potatoes need fussy treatment. After peeling and chopping, we are told, commence to soak the potatoes in salted water, or no don't, but yes do pat them completely dry, use this much butter or that much, add the potatoes to the hot fat a few at a time or all at once, turn the heat up or down, cook slowly until they are "blond," no, first cook them fast to brown them, turn and flip, cover the pan, don't cover the pan. Use this sort of potato, no, instead use that sort of potato. It would be ideal to find this sort of potato, but of course it's only available in Europe, probably Paris.

And the cookbooks never, but never, tell us the plain truth. To make good fried potatoes you need bucketloads of oil. That is all. The only cookbooks which come close to this sublime truth are those offering latke recipes for Chanukah, wherein the point of the food anyway is the oil. Fried potatoes do not brown because of any fussiness you've done to them, nor because they've turned blond first and then have crisped up via contact with the bottom of the pan, or been soaked or not soaked; they brown by the action of the hot oil bath washing all around them from the beginning. Like so:



I might have remembered this lesson from a previous experience, but in that case I was still struggling with finely grated hash browns, which seem to exude more water than any other treatment of potato has the effrontery to do, and of course it's the water content of potatoes that presents the frying problem that cookbooks ignore. Tonight I happened to be in too much of a hurry to bother grating potatoes, but I thought, why not try the Chanukah, bucketload-of-oil treatment with these, too?



And by golly, the oil bath washed around them, and they didn't stick to the pan, and they browned beautifully. That's all.

(They were very delicious with a little stew of chicken breast meat and aromatic vegetables. Any lovely white wine of your choice would also go well with them.)

V is for Valpolicella, or: the blind leading the bl --

Or, "ancora imparo," as Michelangelo is said to have claimed when he was well up in his eighties. "I am still learning." I have no proof that he actually said such a wonderful thing, except via the jewelry and doo-dads catalogs that sell necklaces imprinted with this slogan, which claim he said it and therefore wouldn't you like to wear it around your neck, stamped on sterling silver.

Or, speaking of the blind leading the blind, "in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Said Erasmus. All of this leading to a question, commonly repeated in wine books written for beginners: is it a place or a grape? Valpolicella, in this instance. And, in the world of wine, when can you be sure that you have at least progressed to half-blindness?

Valpolicella is a place, which I know because I have a wine encyclopedia open in front of me at the Vs and because I have continued my sporadic armchair voyaging in the deestricts of Italy, thereby encountering one or two other books which tell me the same thing. However, when the nice young wine wholesale sales rep in the store pointed out one of his company's products to me, taking it off the shelf and telling me that this is a new kind of super-Tuscan, he told me it was a blend made from cabernet, merlot, and valpolicella grapes. Plus I'm almost sure he told me the same wine was a super-Venetian the last time I saw him.

One hesitates to correct people, first because it's rude and usually unnecessary (they rarely care), and second because, in the world of wine, one can never be sure also that the person one is talking to might not, in fact, himself be the one-eyed king. Italian wines especially are tricky in this regard -- they especially tend to shift out of focus, you might say. After all, montepulciano, as pretty a word as valpolicella, is both a grape and a place.

But I do think the nice young sales rep is mistaken about this one. A sidebar in the World Atlas of Wine helpfully notes that it's easy to remember V is for Valpolicella, the Veneto, and Venice. This means that we are far from Tuscany, just for a start. The Veneto is the region around the city of Venice, and Valpolicella is a district within the Veneto, west of Venice near the city of Verona (another V!) whose wines are called therefore "Valpolicella." We also happen to be near Padua here, ancient birthplace of the Roman historian Livy, setting of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, and artistic paradise, although what city in Italy is not an artistic paradise? -- come for the Giotto frescoes at the Arena Chapel, stay for Donatello's Gattamelata, which in 1453 was the first life-size man-on-horseback bronze statue to be cast since antiquity. And as for things to see and do in nearby Venice -- good grief -- .

Anyway the grapes used for Valpolicella are mostly corvina, molinara, and rondinella, a few of those obscure varieties which grow only in Italy and make Italian wine so interesting. Perhaps that was what the young sales rep meant by the "valpolicella" grape.

But my goodness, who can blame him if he was a bit confused? Valpolicellas have that effect, even if we know in the big picture it's a wine named for its place. But let's count them all.

• There's a simple, straightforward Valpolicella, "light, fragrant, and fruity," according to the New Wine Lover's Companion. I've tasted it and I can agree to that. In fact, if you are accustomed to heavy, chocolate-and-barbecued-blueberries California red wines, you might be startled at a Valpolicella's thinness.
• Then there is Valpolicella superiore, slightly higher in alcohol content and aged for at least a year. Valpolicella classico comes from an interior zone of Valpolicella, boasting better, "more steeply terraced vineyards" that catch more sunlight. In the Veneto, after all, we are talking about northeastern Italy, near Slovenia and Austria, where, as in other northern viticultural climes, sunshine and ripening are a problem.
• Then we move on to more letter V confusions. Scanning your liquor aisle shelves, you may come across a wine called Recioto della Valpolicella, and one called Amarone della Valpolicella. The first, recioto, is a wine made from Valpolicella's usual grapes after they have been dried to a concentrated sweetness first, producing a sweet wine;
• -- the second, amarone, is that same recioto wine, this time fully fermented, thanks to the Valpolicella region's natural yeasts, to complete dryness (amarone means bitter -- see the article on the Veneto in Wine, by Andre Domine, 2003).

We should pause here and take note that in fact other wines can be made by the recioto method, the method of only pressing the grapes and making wine from them after they have dried -- off the vine -- to sweet raisins first. There can be "recioto" soaves and recioto proseccos. Recioto, according to Karen MacNeil in The Wine Bible, comes from a colloquial Italian word meaning "ears," and refers to little side-bunches of grapes that can stick out like ears from a main bunch, capturing more sunlight for themselves and ripening more. They are used for recioto wines, or else the entire bunch is, if all of it is ripe enough. And throughout Italy, sweet wines are made from ripe, dried grapes, whether the bunches ever developed little "ears" or not. This method is called appassimento, and the generic term for the wines passito.

• Shall we move on? There is yet another style of Valpolicella called ripasso, but it is difficult to track down because for some reason, Italian law forbids the word to be used on labels. A ripasso is a Valpolicella wine made and fermented as usual -- neither recioto nor amarone -- and then put in casks still holding the sludge of yeasts and grapeskins from a previous batch either of recioto or amarone. Two or three weeks' sitting on this sludge, the lees, gives what would have been that "light and fragrant" Valpolicella more complexity, tannins, and deeper color. Since you can't hunt your liquor store shelves for the word ripasso, the Herbsts of The New Wine Lover's Companion offer three producers of it, to begin with: "Boscaini's Le Canne, Masi's Campo Fiorin, and Santi's Castello." Be aware that the Companion was published in 1995 and again in 2003, so this information may not be as accurate as it was.

There. We've studied our Vs. When we venture west, to the Piedmont, we will study our Bs, even though we can't forget there's a B here in the Veneto, too (Bardolino). It's a place. Surely.

Beer, again

I do envy beer drinkers. "Having a beer" just sounds relaxing and refreshing. Except for real beer connoisseurs, and of course they exist, it seems one does not, with beer, worry over the experience as one can with wine -- as in, will I understand what I am drinking? Will I detect the hints of raspberries, tar, earth, and leather? Is the temperature right? With what shall I pair it?



No. Instead, you just have a beer. I indulged recently because a customer at the store raved about a particular brewer, and said, judging by our brief conversation, that he was sure I would like this one. The bigger boutique sellers are overrated and unimpressive, he said. Among other brief lessons he also said that you can always tell the difference between a lager and an ale, by pouring each into a clear glass, and inspecting them. A lager, of whatever color, will be clear because lagers are so filtered; an ale will be cloudy because they are not. I'm not sure he's quite right. My beer was clear, but said "ale" on the label.

Well, at any rate, I had a beer over the weekend. I gave it two pours into the glass, just like he said, to develop a good head and let it oxygenate and give off some of the gas that gives you gas if you slurp it down from the bottle. And I drank some. I suppose it was very fine, but alas, the pleasures of beer escape me. If you want to replicate the experience, dissolve one aspirin in a glass of water, and drink that. I've had different beers before, the "hoppy" ones, and to replicate those, I'd suggest you dissolve a dozen aspirin in water, and drink that.

I have an elderly colleague, legendary in the south side's wine business, who has been kindly asking me every time he comes in to the store how I am getting on. When I first started I confessed to him my lifelong ignorance of beer. He was laboring along beside me lugging a case of wine, dressed in his dapper suit and tie, trench coat and newsboy cap, aged eighty-six (he, not the cap) -- and he shrugged with a slight grin. "You haven't missed anything." I felt reassured.

Being rueful about beer also reminds me of this scene from the old novel I Claudius, in which two barbarian brothers holler at each other (across the Weser River in A.D. 16) about their different tastes in refreshing liquids. The one brother, loyal to the Romans, has become a wine snob:

HERMANN: You're wrong, brother. That wasn't me. You must have been drinking again. You were always like that before a battle: a bit nervous unless you had drunk at least a gallon of beer, and had to be strapped to the saddle by the time the warhorns sounded.

FLAVIUS: That's a lie, of course, but it reminds me what a barbarous gut-rotting drink your German beer is. I never drink it now even when there's a great consignment come into the camp from one of your captured villages. The men only drink it when they have to: they say that it's better than swamp water spoilt by German corpses.

That tasting note is a bit unkind, I fear. Aspirin-water would have been quite sufficient.