At First Glass turns three -- and has a hot buttered rum

Believe me, At First Glass had far more refined plans for the third-year anniversary of the blog. The anniversary happens to coincide almost perfectly with the 300th post -- we've reached 303, but we'll just round off, and not count a few that weren't so good -- so At First Glass had actually gone out shopping in preparation, and had bought a treat for the 31st of December. (Excuse the speaking in the third person, but we have been feeling slightly feverish all week. We also have an annoying cough, which makes us feel snappish.) We bought a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet, thinking to savor it, and write all about it, and learn all sorts of new things by at long last exposing ourselves to a terrifically fine French wine. A white Burgundy. A classic; a standard-bearer.

But man proposes, God disposes, as Landseer titled his gruesome picture of polar bears devouring the soft parts of a sailing ship in a horrid Victorian Arctic midnight. (See the blog Visions of the North for a good look at the painting.) At First Glass got a cold and fever and sore throat. At First Glass has been living on tea, toast, cough drops, hard boiled eggs, chicken broth, and tea lately. With some tea and toast and cough drops thrown in. We were also idly surfing the 'net looking for home remedies -- must we really gargle with hot water and apple cider vinegar? -- when suddenly we remembered. We couldn't sleep; we hearkened back.

We hearkened back to a childhood cold, and sleepless nights and a childhood remedy resorted to at last by dear old Dad. Hot buttered rum. (In the interests of full disclosure I should explain that Dad and Mom were both of the generation busy raising seven and eight and ten kids per household, whose pediatricians -- they were called "doctors" in those days -- quietly allowed a drop or two of whisky even in Baby's bottle, to buy one night's respite from colic hell.) I don't recall that we ever kept rum on hand in the otherwise fairly well-stocked liquor cabinet, so I'll bet it was actually hot buttered whisky. But no matter. Even then I must have been destined to be a food writer, albeit politics and literature will always seem so much grander topics, because I know I made a mental note of the recipe. Or perhaps I just wanted to impress the other fifth-graders with what a hardened boozer I was ... anyway I recalled it now. I could see the mug in my memory, steaming up into my face and smelling powerfully, the pat of butter melting and swirling away on top. The liquid was blazing hot and tasted awful. I couldn't have choked down too much of it. But I'll bet I slept. As far as I know, the decoction amounted to nothing more than hot water, whisky, butter, and perhaps a little cinnamon.

Last night's quick recipe for hot buttered rum was equally casual. A mug of water zapped to boiling in the microwave, a good glug of rum (why yes, we do have a little on hand in this house), a spoonful of cinnamon and sugar, the pat of yellow butter swirling and melting on top. You can stir the butter through, but it still leaves your lips lightly greasy. This time I was able to down most of the mug's contents, even though I am not a rum fan. It was desperation time. The object was sleep, not taste.

It worked fairly well. Unhappily, alcohol seems to wake you up, hours later, as thoroughly as ever it sent you off to dreamland. I wonder if Baby noticed that too? Anyway it turns out one may find quite elegant recipes for hot buttered rum on line, boasting delicate additions neither Dad nor I had thought of. Brown sugar and vanilla, which after all is more alcohol, are among the best of them.

(A hint for the Young Housekeeper. Even if we do have a cold, of course we can't drink hot buttered rums all day. And we might find ourselves getting tired of tea, tea, and more tea. A quick solution, more palatable than you might think, is simply a cup of piping hot water, dosed with a drizzle of honey and perhaps a squirt of lemon. So nice for the raw throat.)

Emeril Lagasse's Hot Buttered Rum [for a crowd]

* 1 stick unsalted butter, softened
* 2 cups light brown sugar
* 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
* Pinch ground cloves
* Pinch salt
* Bottle dark rum
* Boiling water

In a bowl, cream together the butter, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and salt. Refrigerate until almost firm. Spoon about 2 tablespoons of the butter mixture into 12 small mugs. Pour about 3 ounces of rum into each mug (filling about halfway). Top with boiling water (to fill the remaining half), stir well, and serve immediately.

Hot buttered rum [for the solitary sufferer] (from About.com)

* 1 small slice soft butter
* 1 tsp brown sugar
* optional spices to taste: ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg, allspice
* vanilla extract
* 2 oz dark rum
* hot water

Preparation:

1. Place the butter, sugar and spices at the bottom of an Irish coffee glass or mug.
2. Mix well or muddle.
3. Pour in the rum and hot water.
4. Stir.

Random thoughts -- and authentic Christmas egg nogg from the old South

"...a mark on our calendar, or a crash of bells at midnight maybe, reminds us that we have only recently been created." -- Clement A. Miles

The Chanukah bunny, you must know, already paid his visit to our house some weeks ago. Nevertheless he must have emailed Santa or someone before tumbling exhausted into bed re: today's date, for this ranks as the whitest Christmas to which I have ever awakened. 

Lately I have been enjoying reading Clement A. Miles' Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan (1912) -- a work and an author not to be confused with Clement Moore of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" fame, of course. Miles' book drags on a bit with his everlasting enumeration of caroling traditions in upper Thuringia, and what eatables the peasants in Sicily traditionally laid out for the return visits of the dead on all souls' day. However, I have learned from him. He is the first writer I have come across to explain, albeit not very clearly, that Christmas as a feast of the birth of Jesus could not be established until after the early Church had decided on Jesus' true nature. Certainly, the 25th of December was, he says, a festival of the winter solstice 

... the Dies Natalis Invicti [day of the birth of the unconquered sun], probably first celebrated in Rome by order of the Emperor Aurelian (270-5), an ardent worshipper of the Syrian sun-god Baal. With the Sol Invictus was identified the figure of Mithra, that strange eastern god whose cult resembled in so many ways the worship of Jesus, and who was at one time a serious rival of the Christ in the minds of thoughtful men. ... What more natural than that the Church should choose this day to celebrate the rising of her Sun of Righteousness ...!

Natural, but not until the Council of Nicea (325 A.D.) had settled a swirling early Christian controversy, decreeing that Jesus had been born the son of God and did not merely become such in adulthood after his baptism by John the Baptist, could Christmas -- Christ's mass -- exist. Without the Council establishing "the Catholic doctrine of the perfect Godhead of Christ," there would have been little excitement, and nothing of the supernatural, in celebrating the birth of an ordinary (and do we dare remind ourselves, Jewish) baby, no matter if his being did absolutely change at the age of thirty.

Then there is the weather of Christmas. Miles notices:

Again, without the idea of winter half the charm of Christmas would be gone. Transplanted in the imagination of western Christendom from an undefined season in the hot East [since the true date of Jesus' birth is unknown] to Europe at midwinter, the Nativity scenes have taken on a new pathos with the thought of the bitter cold to which the great Little One lay exposed in the rough stable ....

Last year a local radio talk show host complained about the ubiquity of the bland "Happy Holidays" greeting people use now. "It's Christmas," he said. "No one celebrates the joy of cold weather." He's right, of course, and Christians should not feel obliged to emasculate their language so as not to offend Jews or Muslims or anyone else who celebrate something else, or nothing at all, in December. Still, I can't think of any other holiday that remains so complexly bound up with other things besides the birth of a savior -- very temporal things, weather, astronomical observations, the angle of the sun in the sky, and with plain survival, with food, at the time of the year when both seem most iffy. Nor do I know of other civilizations, trapped in the same wintry latitudes as the Christian west, which fight off snow and cold with as weirdly exuberant a holiday. To read Clement Miles is to learn that, before they heard of Christ's mass, our pagan European ancestors were already long in the habit of celebrating a series of winter feasts beginning almost as soon as mild autumn weather went away in early November, and concluding only with the first hints of spring in February. It's as if they faced General Winter with a military maxim engraved in their heads: when surrounded and outnumbered, attack.

And anyway, what of that bland "happy holidays" greeting? Listening to endless versions of the song of the same name at shopping malls should remind us that the phrase, if it is traceable to that song and therefore to the 1942 movie Holiday Inn, literally wishes the listener happy holidays throughout the year ("may the calendar keep bringing happy holidays to you"). The movie, in turn, is about a hotel that is only open on holidays. Remember the painful scene in which Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire celebrate Lincoln's birthday by donning blackface and singing "Father Abraham" with a gaggle of awkward little black children? When the movie used to be broadcast on television, that number was often deleted. The point being that  when someone wishes you happy holidays, really he is wishing you a happy everything, Halloween, Valentine's Day, you name it. (By the way, Holiday Inn's Thanksgiving number, "I've got plenty to be thankful for," also is not one of Irving Berlin's best.) So literally the greeting isn't just spineless, it's goofy.

Now after all these random thoughts, let's make some eggnog. I have a recipe for it, spelled "Egg Nogg," which comes with strict instructions: "This," Martha McCulloch Williams says, "is the only simon-pure egg nogg. Those who put into it milk, cream, what not, especially rum, defile one of the finest among Christmas delights."

She should know. The cookbook is Dishes and Beverages of the Old South, originally published in 1913. Of Southern cooking, she continues, "it was through being the best fed people in the world, we of the South Country were able to put up the best fight in history, and after the ravages and ruin of civil war, come again to our own. We might have been utterly crushed but for our proud and pampered stomachs, which in turn gave the bone, brain and brawn for the conquests of peace."

Very well. Egg nogg, simon-pure, and a Merry Christmas to all.

• 18 eggs, separated
• 6 cups sugar
• 1 quart whiskey 
• 1 quart brandy
• lemons or oranges
• nutmeg

"Have all ingredients, eggs, sugar, brandy, and whiskey, thoroughly chilled before beginning, and work very, very quickly. Beat the yolks of eighteen eggs very light with six cups of sugar, added a cup at a time. When frothy and pale yellow, beat in gradually and alternately a glassful at a time, a quart of mellow old whiskey, and a quart of real French brandy. Whip hard, then add the whites of the eggs beaten until they stick to the dish. Grate nutmeg over the top, and rub the rims of the serving glasses with lemon or orange rind cut into the fruit. The glasses should be ice cold, and also the spoons. Fill carefully so as not to slop the sides, and serve at once. 

"If wanted for an early morning Christmas celebration, beat up yolks and sugar the night before, stand on ice along with the liquor, and keep the unbeaten whites likewise very cold. At morning freshen the yolks a little, then add the liquor, and at last the whites newly frothed. This is the only simon-pure egg nogg ...."

(If you want to try this for a much smaller crowd, you might halve the ingredients, or halve them again, or even again, supposing you only want to experiment for yourself. Could you use, say, 2 or 3 eggs, 3/4 cup sugar, and 1/2 cup each of the liquors?)

2004 Poggio alla Badiola, Toscana I.G.T.

The label says Poggio alla Badiola (knoll of Badiola), but once again, satisfactorily identifying Italian wines is a little like satisfactorily identifying everybody associated with S.P.E.C.T.R.E. in the old James Bond movies. Above the name Poggio alla Badiola stands the crest of Castello di Fonterutoli, which in turn is part of the estates belonging to the Mazzei family, whose name you see at the bottom of the label. They have been in business since 1435, at least.

Venture to Mazzei's website and find more. One of the family's great patriarchs was a certain Ser Lapo Mazzei, who lived, made wine, and conducted business in the late 1300s. The first known use of the term "chianti" dates, it seems, from a contract signed by him in 1398. Among his correspondence, he leaves to posterity also this excellent advice: " 'don't concern yourself about the cost of the wine, though it be high; its goodness is restorative.' " (It's almost as if he is saying you may have to spend some money.)

Four hundred years later, the family gave us another superstar in their Filippo, who planted vineyards at Monticello at his friend Thomas Jefferson's request, and incidentally put into Jefferson's head the idea that "all men are created equal." The founding father was much struck, and added the thought in turn to the Declaration of Independence. Mazzei assures us it is so, while Italian-American boosterism sites and blogs agree. This gem of a story appears to have its origins in a paper written by a scholarly nun, Dr. Margherita Marchione, who purposely researched the matter in 1976 so that Mazzei's contributions to the republic could be honored in time for the Bicentennial. It's not that he was unknown before that; the rather clumsily named blog Librizzi Ancestors in my Heart  lists other occasions when he was similarly honored, usually by politicians who, I daresay, had reasons of their own for praising Italian heroes. Presidents Kennedy and (Franklin) Roosevelt, for example, both acknowledged his influence on his friend Jefferson, and thus on America. In 1980 the U.S. Post Office issued an airmail stamp marking the 250th anniversary of Mazzei's birth, on Christmas Day, in Poggio-a-Caiano, Tuscany. In 1984 "the Hon. Mario Biaggi of New York had inserted into the Congressional Record" Sister Margherita's essay, nearly twenty years after its composition. Philip Mazzei also shows up in biographies of Jefferson that carry no hint of ethnic cheerleading -- the men really were good friends, and Mazzei seems to have led an extraordinary and peripatetic life -- Fawn Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974) being a once-popular example.

For my part I have the tiniest suspicion that Mazzei's words, "tutti gli uomini sono per natura egualmente liberi e indipendenti," which Jefferson -- we are told -- translated and published in the Virginia Gazette as signed by "Furioso," may have set forth ideas which were percolating in many sharp minds at that exciting time. Besides, take a look at the Italian grammatical structure of the phrase. "Egualmente" is an adverb, isn't it? The words read, "all men by their nature are equally free and independent," not "all men are created equal." Anyway the boosterist hint that, a few years later and all grammar aside, the Declaration of Independence would never have said "all men are created equal" were it not for Filippo strikes me as a bit of a stretch. Un' " 'po' " esagerazione, as Lucia might say.

But to return to Tuscany, and the present day, and the wine of Filippo's and Ser Lapo's remote descendants.

My notes say --

barbecued tomato soup --
thick, smoky, inky-purple -- 75% sangiovese, 25% merlot.

Good, but in need of a hearty meal alongside it. Of which, more later. First, this. On that simple but already surprisingly informative label, the words Toscana I.G.T., Indicazione Geografica Tipica, tell us that Badiola was made in Tuscany but that it may not call itself a Chianti, which is of course a subregion of Tuscany. A Toscana I.G.T. wine may not do this either because it has been made of an unapproved combination of "Chianti" grapes including not enough sangiovese, or because it was made chianti-like (plenty of sangiovese), but outside Chianti's legal borders. Or both.

A Wine 101 digression: we remember that any Italian wine proclaiming "Blankety-blank I.G.T." is saying something similar about itself: that it is from a general area whose wines legally meet certain rough criteria, but do not meet more specific ones laid down for a Denominazione di Origine Controllata or an even more specific Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita. The same legal pattern applies to Spanish wines, with their status as simple "Vino de la tierra" progressing on to Denominacion de Origen and Denominacion de Origen Calificada, and to French wines progressing from "vin de pays" to the many specificities of A.O.C. -- Appellation d'Origine Controllee -- status. We recall as well that this European Union legal scaffolding regarding wine changed slightly two years ago. French wines, for example, may now carry the term Appellation d'Origine Protegee [Protected], or A.O.P., bestowing roughly the equivalent of A.O.C. status, and what used to be more ordinary "vins de pays" or country wines may now be labelled, confusingly, I.G.P. -- of "Indication Geographique Protegee." A more noticeable change will be that any European wine may now display a grape variety and a vintage year on the label. This naming of a variety is very much a la the New World mode. We comparative newbies like to know what grape we are drinking, whereas the European way has always been to categorize in terms of where the wine was made. But if I were the European Union in the aggregate, and I saw that the New World's share of global wine sales -- repeat, global wine sales -- had shot from 3% to 30% in eighteen years, 1990 to 2008, I too might think of doing business and marking wines the New World way.

We end our digression, and return to sip some more Badiola. About the barbecued tomato soup effect: please don't drink this either on its own or with some vapid little snack. It will leave you thinking of Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans, or wishing you had a spoon, or both. Offer it a meal worthy of its flavors. We had it with another serving of Gourmet's "island" pork tenderloin, all coated in cinnamon, salt, merquen, brown sugar, and Tabasco,

... and with that it seemed to remember its manners and become a wine again, rather than something you want in a thermos on a cold day. Perhaps you could open up a bottle to pair with a rich Tuscan meal this Christmas. If you do, do also raise a glass to Filippo and his birthday, and to tutti gli uomini being by their nature egualmente liberi e indipendenti.

Again with the new things

Sometimes people give me the inside dope.

Our friends at WineSur are sponsoring a Blogger of the Month competition, in which wine bloggers writing in English in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Colombia, are invited to post about Argentinian wine. December's theme is "Tell us about your experience with Argentinian wine in your country," and the prize for the blogger who writes the most creative, original article is a trip to Argentina (no kidding). Details may be found at WineSur, here.

Luckily, though I like Argentinian wine, I loathe travel, so that lets me right out. I gladly pass the information on to more adventurous types.

And our friends at the new site YouDon'tKnowOz are also sponsoring a competition to help promote knowledge of and debunk stereotypes about Australian wines, foods, and culture in general. With the backing of what we might call the big kangaroos dogs of the Australian wine industry (Penfolds, Rosemount, Greg Norman Estates, Lindeman's, Wolf Blass), plus the help of Australian TV host Jamie Durie, YouDon'tKnowOz encourages wine lovers to visit the site, use it as a resource to plan an Australia Day party for January 26, and then enter a photo contest. Take a picture of your Australia Day celebration -- note this competition is not confined to bloggers only -- add a clever caption, and send it in during the week of January 22 to January 31. The prize is a five-day trip (o god) for four to Australia.  

Again with the adventurous types ... I happily encourage them all.

2007 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars' Karia chardonnay

Karia. Pronounced KAH-ree-ah, from the Greek meaning grace. I might almost say "this gives me a new appreciation for chardonnay" except I fear the alert reader will answer with a sharp, three-word exclamation ending in " -- Sherlock." Which he will know how to pronounce.

Anyway, the wine: light. Elegant. Lots of acidity, juiciness. Only at the end of your mouthful, after you have happily swallowed, will you savor that bright and unique taste a chardonnay can give. It seems to be part flowers -- is this what wine writers mean when they talk "honeysuckle"? -- and part fresh melon dipped in caramel. With fine chardonnays like this one I often get a mental image of some sort of expensive and very delicate gourmet candy. Ordinary chardonnays remind me of a piece of Bit-o-Honey or banana taffy picked up off the basement floor.

Karia is of course not ordinary. The wine and the winery belong to the legend of Warren Winiarski, of Stag's Leap cabernet sauvignon and "Judgment of Paris" fame. (The white wine which was ranked in first place at that Paris tasting in 1976 was neither Stag's Leap nor Karia, but a different Napa chardonnay, Chateau Montelena, whose owners, the Barrett family, still make fine wines there. If you have seen Bottle Shock, you know the outlines of the story.)

Somewhere in my wine-related reading I remember coming across the opinion that of all wines, it is white Burgundies which true gourmands most often want to drink with their meals. If Karia is anything like a traditional Burgundy -- and I think it is -- then I can see why. The lightness, acidity, and little scoop of caramel-dipped fruit at the end whet the appetite for more food and more wine, too. The wine is actually mentally interesting, if you will excuse the tautology, in a way that tasty but more commonplace glassfuls are not. You begin to see what aficionados (aficionadi?) mean when they say a wine "sings." It means there is no need to furrow the brow and concentrate hard on whether you taste apples or pears, vanilla or butterscotch. A song just is, and you want to hear more of it.

As to developing new appreciations, these may be necessary because your early reading on wine may have persuaded you chardonnay is overrated. All writers carefully explain the phenomenon. This queen of grapes was planted all over the world in the last forty years or so because, bland in itself, it carried Burgundy's reputation with it, took well to the vaguely sweet flavors imparted by time spent in an oak barrel or simply steeping in a stainless steel tank along with a bag of oak chips, and so made "reliable" or "serviceable" wines practically anywhere. The newbie palate loved them. The newbie winery cashed in.

Which led to the aficionadi reaction, the attempted flogging of riesling in wine books as the white wine world's true peeress (it never works), and to the creation and marketing of unoaked chardonnays, called variously "Tree-free," "nu," "naked" or "virgin." All for a good cause, I suppose -- let's learn more, and drink with more enjoyment. However you carry on your exploration of chardonnay, my advice is this: no, it's not overrated, but when you go shopping for it, do be prepared to grit your teeth and spend some money. It seems to me that of all wines, chardonnays respond startlingly best to the even slightly opened wallet. A ten dollar red and a thirty dollar red are usually somewhat different, but a ten dollar chardonnay and a thirty-five dollar chardonnay are alarmingly so. Alarming, in the sense that amid your enjoyment you begin to pull your chin and quote Mr. Broadbent -- "life is short, we do not waste our time on bland indifferent wines" -- and to draw up a budget.

Retail, about $35.

Before there were wine blogs, there was Hugh Johnson and a sword

Until he decides to start his own wine blog, which is something I suppose he need never do, this twenty-six-year-old film of Hugh Johnson slicing the top off a wine bottle with a sword -- and then going on from there -- will have to do. So much fun, from Decanter magazine (go here in case the video doesn't work).

Or, investigate the magazine The World of Fine Wine, edited by and featuring contributions from the fifteen or twenty people in oenophilia -- Jancis Robinson, Oz Clarke, Michael Broadbent, Serena Sutcliffe, and Mr. Johnson of course -- who really matter. Incidentally he is also an authority on trees.

Simple braised pork from the James Beard Celebration Cookbook

The recipe's official title is Roti de Porc Braise aux Oignons, and it's contributed to the 1990 James Beard Celebration Cookbook by Lydie Marshall. Twenty years ago, her cooking school, La Bonne Cocotte, was located in Greenwich Village "not far from Jim's house." Today, it is in Nyons, France, one hour northeast of Avignon. She offers five-day cooking classes, limited to four people, during which students come and stay in town, and market, learn, and live with her in and around the restored medieval fortress which is her home and school.

To be sure, her website and class schedule have not been updated since 2009, so all of this information may be moot now. In any case, here is her braised pork, delectably simple.

Roti de Porc Braise aux Oignons

3 Tbsp olive oil
4 pounds pork roast (picnic cut)
4 large onions, peeled and chopped
1 tsp salt
fresh black pepper
1 cup water

Heat the olive oil in a Dutch oven (Lydie Marshall's schools have both been named for this, her favorite cooking pot -- a casserole or cocotte in French). Add the roast and brown well on all sides.

Put the onions around the roast along with the salt, pepper, and water. I browned the onions separately ...

... and then laid the pork on top of them, for fear of the meat becoming too tough by actually sitting in boiling water to cook.

Cover with lid and braise for 2 to 2 and 1/2 hours, turning the meat occasionally and adding more liquid if necessary.

Transfer the roast to a cutting board and cover with tin foil to keep warm. Let rest for 15 minutes while you reheat the sauce and degrease it as well as possible. Sprinkling a little rice flour into it, and stirring, will give you a thicker but gluten-free gravy.

Mashed potatoes and buttered Brussels sprouts will be your perfect accompaniments, as will a glass of perfectly pale golden, refined and elegant and bracingly refreshing, but barely melon-and-caramel-like chardonnay. Something perhaps like Stag's Leap Cellars' Karia.
My, my.

Is the glass falling?

In old-fashioned novels, old-fashioned characters will look at the barometer when a storm approaches, and they will say the "glass" is falling. (If you would like to hack your way through the counter-intuitive yet fourth-grade-science-level complexities of air pressure, storms, and what barometers measure, do go to the site You Ask Andy, where the answers are both elegantly written and designed for ten-year-olds.) My question for the day is: when it comes to the California wine industry, specifically the Napa industry, is the glass falling?

You might remember the bad news as announced on Vinography back in April, in a post that author Alder Yarrow called "The Coming Carnage in the California Wine Industry." I took up the issue myself, having learned what Mr. Yarrow had to say. The storm was coming. The great recession had hit people's pocketbooks, and too much high-end wine was sitting even then in warehouses in Napa, worthless to the consumer and worthless even as collateral to the banks which had loaned the money to the wineries to stay in business in the first place. As vintage after vintage came in, got made, and went into storage, there was no way the wine was going to become more valuable, except in taste, which doesn't matter to the banks. We know what happens to businesses whose products aren't wanted.

And how did Mr. Yarrow know all this? He had sources, as well he should, being a respected wine writer and the most prominent wine blogger in the English language. Deep Tank, he called one of them. The sources said the "carnage," the "shitstorm," the foreclosures were coming in the next eighteen months. Bad enough, Deep Tank said, for the wineries which actually sat on real estate valuable enough to be foreclosed upon. Many custom-crush wine companies, which make wine in large facilities but own no land, were simply going to "vaporize."

It's been six months. And now meet our own brand X, a fine Napa cabernet "reserve," the best and most expensive wine in the store. We try to sell it for $150, and we put it "on sale" for $99. Suddenly our most recent shipment came in at $67 per bottle, cost. This means we could drop its regular price to about $88 or $89, while still making, in theory, a decent profit margin. 

Theoretical profits. I'll bet banks don't like those, either. Is the glass falling?

James Beard's rice, lamb, and lentil soup (improved!)

I remember copying this recipe from a James Beard cookbook more than twenty years ago. It's simple to make and delicious to eat, but was not so good to look at. I felt compelled to improve it.

Begin by browning one pound of lamb in "its own or additional fat," as the original recipe directs. I buy a couple of inexpensive shank pieces and brown them in olive oil.



Next, remove the lamb to a plate and, in a little more oil if necessary, add about a cup each of chopped carrots and chopped celery (this is what Mr. Beard did not think of. Lacking the color from these vegetables, his lamb soup ended up awfully gray). Soften these in the oil for five minutes.



Return the lamb to the pot and add 3 cups of water, a teaspoon of salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Bring to a boil and simmer gently for two and a half hours.

Wash 1 cup of lentils, add to the pot, and continue cooking.

Brown 1 large onion in more olive oil in a different pan. Add this to the soup. Add two more cups of water, then bring it back to a boil and add 1 cup raw rice. Cover and continue cooking until the rice is soft and everything is tender. You can add more water to make this soup just the right consistency you like, but it will be thick. Taste it frequently to check the saltiness, too.



It's a three-hour plus endeavor, but like so many dishes that take time, it doesn't take a lot of work: you've got plenty of free time in those three hours. And it's so good for a cold, slushy winter day.

And the wine? Pour yourself almost anything robust, but perhaps a lamb-friendly shiraz, or a malbec, would be best.