Marshall Field's sour cream cranberry coffee cake

Anything that begins with two sticks of melted butter and then moves on to sour cream, pecans, cranberries, and cinnamon is going to be good.

The recipe comes from The Marshall Field's Cookbook, which is a fairly new (2006) publication  filled with Field's restaurant standbys plus more trendy ideas from still-hip food people like Andrea Immer Robinson, Marcus Samuelsson, Tyler Florence, and Charlie Trotter. But the book has already been rendered retro by the absorption of Chicago's stately old Marshall Field's department store into plain vanilla, one-size-fits-all New York Macy's. Are the Walnut Room, the giant Christmas tree, and Frango mints still the same? In our memories, perhaps. For myself I have a very early foodie memory associated with Marshall Field's. It's the vaguest possible recollection of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a bowl of chicken soup, eaten at the Walnut Room when I was at most five, while mother and grandmother enjoyed more adult fare.

This coffee cake postdates my kindergarten lunch by a few decades. Elizabeth Brown, director of Field's menu development at the time of the cookbook's publication, was its source. Let's begin.
 


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Sour cream cranberry coffeecake

For the cake: 

• 1 cup butter (2 sticks), melted and slightly cooled
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 and 1/2 cups flour
• 1/4 cup wheat germ (I didn't bother)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 cups fresh or dried cranberries, chopped (I didn't bother chopping them, either)

For the filling:

• 1/2 cup chopped pecans
• 1 Tbsp dark brown sugar
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Butter a 10 cup, fluted Bundt pan and set aside. (The instructions specify using a "non stick cooking spray" rather than butter to grease the pan, but, as with the wheat germ and the chopping of small berries -- why bother?)

Combine the melted butter, sugar, eggs, sour cream, and vanilla in a large bowl and mix well. Stir in the flour, (wheat germ), salt, and baking powder and mix until just combined. Do not overmix.

Fold in the cranberries.

In a separate bowl, combine the pecans, brown sugar, and cinnamon and toss to mix well.

Pour half the batter into the Bundt pan. Sprinkle on the nut mixture ...

... and then layer on the remaining batter. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes, until firm and golden brown on top. Let cool for 10 minutes before inverting onto a plate.

Completely wonderful. I can promise you won't even miss the wheat germ.

A VIP tasting of rubrum lilies

May I record impressions of a trade tasting attended a whole year ago? You see, I had feared I really hadn't a clue what I was about, so when I came home, I tucked my notes away and slowly forgot the experience. What business had I, anyway, to muck about with wines actually approaching the $400 price point? Especially when five of the twelve on offer tasted, to me, like rubrum lilies? All this took place last March. Yet I open a notebook now, and out falls the brochure with my scribbles. "Lilies. Lilies. Rubrum lilies."

That part of the afternoon was perfectly ridiculous. Everyone agrees wine tasting is subjective, everyone agrees that what you think you taste can be influenced by all sorts of things -- what you ate half an hour ago, what you know about the cost of the wine, what the person next to you says about it. But really. The fact of a single bloom of rubrum lily in a vase on the wall, nodding over my lunch table and smelling narcotically delicious while I ate, should not have affected the taste of the wines I then tried an hour later in a room on another floor of the building. Unless rubrums shoot out some sort of pollen or other property that clings for hours to anything in the vicinity, particularly the interior of any nearby average human nose and its attached, average human olfactory bulb.

For the lovely fragrance wafted around me, sweet, inescapable, tropical, wafting up from much too many goblets of tremblingly expensive red liquids. The event was a "Winemakers on Tour" tasting of Beringer Private Reserve, Chateau St. Jean, and Penfolds Grange, and it was held in the fine old Union Club in downtown Chicago. All the trembling red liquids were heavy duty, serious-to-legendary cabernets and shirazes and blends thereof. The very attractive, tanned and toothy, nattily be-suited California blonde who hosted the affair invited us all, in her welcoming remarks, to close our eyes and jointly, lovingly remember "the very first time we ever spent a hundred dollars on a bottle of wine." That didn't take me long.

My notes follow, in all their (pick one) unadorned honesty, charm, stunning neophyte perspicacity, or ghastliness, depending on what you know.

Beringer Private Reserve Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon

• 1989  banana peel -- rubrum lily -- brownish ruby -- high acid, high tannin -- cool -- silky then ... caramel, port, elegance, dates
• 1992  similar -- paler florals -- green pepper -- heavier -- more tannin (no fruit in either)
• 2001  deeper purple garnet color -- rubrum lily -- high tannin 
• 2005  vanilla flowers -- tannin -- caramel -- fruit still there 
• 2006  scentless -- cola -- vanilla -- tannin -- chewy

(From the files: Beringer's history goes back to the 1870s, when Jacob Beringer first worked for Charles Krug; today its winemaker is Laurie Hook, its winemaster emeritus, Ed Sbragia.)

Chateau St. Jean Sonoma Cinq Cépages Cabernet Sauvignon 

• 1996 green pepper -- flowers -- syrupy look -- black -- fleshy -- tannin
• 2001 medicine -- lilies -- fruit! -- chewy -- less acid 
• 2003 earth -- lilies -- acid -- (tight)
• 2006 vanilla -- fruit -- acid -- tannin

Sometimes these guided tastings move along so fast that you scarcely have time to try to savor what's in the glasses. Your hasty notes seem increasingly to fall from the pen of a blinking but earnest Captain Obvious ("fruit, acid, tannin").

(For Chateau St. Jean, think more contemporary history: 1970s, Sonoma. The winemaker is Margo Van Staaveren.)

Last came the big dog.

Penfolds Grange (Shiraz)

• 1994 rubrum -- thick, sauce-like -- maple, honey -- spice -- chewy -- then, softer 
• 1998 scentless -- a little medicine -- starch -- intense texture -- thick -- a little harsh in throat -- chewy -- hot 
• 2004 tannin -- tight -- big -- funky -- pool-like -- cola -- chewy -- retail $400 -- "partial fermentation in oak = quick balance, approachability"  -- cola

(Penfolds Grange, predominantly shiraz, was first made in 1951 by Max Schubert of Penfolds. Up until the 1990 vintage, the wine was called Penfolds Grange Hermitage, Hermitage being an Australian synonym for shiraz, which in turn is the grape of France's famed Hermitage AC in the northern Rhône.)
 
Anyone with any years in the trade will be horrified at a Penfolds Grange being described as funky and pool-like. What was I trying to express? Mustiness, soapiness, chemical-ness, mildew? Was something wrong with my wineglass perhaps, or was I simply off my nut? We may as well note that Penfolds' website advises that a Grange is not to be drunk until it has aged fifteen to twenty years. Perhaps that was it. As to general perceptions, only a little earlier in the hour my worries there had been somewhat assuaged when I heard a man behind me question the winemakers about the distinct impression of green pepper in the 1996 Chateau St. Jean, above. Glancing at my notes as he talked, I saw that I had scribbled down that very same impression myself. Huzzah! Vindication, and lilies be damned.

And as to the scent and taste of cola, present in more than one of these samples: that was a first for me. Cola is such a nice rich taste, but I wonder if the winemakers would be cheered to know they had achieved that flavor profile through their work. Incidentally, the woman who answered the green pepper question said that certainly she didn't strive for green pepper in her wines, but if there is a little of it, it's not a flaw.

In the end, after lapping our way through twelve monster reds -- surely we can agree, they were that -- we must ask, what foods do we then eat with the monsters? I believe it was our beloved curmudgeon Willie Gluckstern who once snarkily suggested only "a plate of bear meat" could do battle with the volcanic, pie syrup reds that are top-notch New World winemakers' pride and joy. Perhaps we would eat nothing. A recent survey reported in the Napa Valley Register tells us that most enthusiastic wine buffs don't drink wine with meals, and the younger the drinker, the more likely she is -- in this survey, 54% of wine consumers are women -- to treat wine as a sweet, high alcohol cocktail rather than as a thrilling accompaniment to food. In any case before doing any menu planning around these, you may want to consider your budget. I forgot to come clean about all the prices.

Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, retail, from $115 to $300 a bottle depending on vintage. 

Chateau St. Jean Cinq Cépages Cabernet Sauvignon, retail, about $75. 

Penfolds Grange, retail, $245 (the 1999 vintage, at my local big wine warehouse); other vintages, online, from $400 to $600.

 Technically, not a rubrum but a stargazer lily -- but we understand each other.

Our long-lost Sunday meme: vintage liquor ads

This is the drink that was outlawed for ages because something in it was bad for you. It's making a comeback.

Image from Absinthe Posters.

2009 Elements by Artesa chardonnay

Absolutely delicious -- but
pure buttered caramel -- a tart apple slice may be trying to get through, not succeeding too well
almost colorless gold

If "absolutely delicious," then why the "but"? Only to emphasize that if you have memories of a certain puzzling Puligny, all acidity and acid, then this California chardonnay will remind you -- well, I suppose it will remind you what California chardonnays can be. Not very French, but absolutely delicious. Can a wine drinker accustomed to the one ever really prefer the other? Must do more research.

Grilled sweet Italian sausages in "Aurora sauce"

Some meals just come together in a way that makes you swoon. It helps if, at dinnertime, you happen to have a pan sitting on your stove which still holds a film of bacon fat from the morning's breakfast bacon. Postponing doing the dishes has its advantages.

First, grill about 2 pounds of prepared sweet Italian turkey sausages (10 sausages) in the pan with the bacon fat. When they are done, you will cut them in half and add them to this fabulous sauce, called for some reason "Aurora Sauce" in the quaint and not-so-old cookbook, Of Tide & Thyme, which has gone through nine printings, as of 2003, since its release in 1995 by the Junior League of Annapolis, Maryland.  

Aurora Sauce

3 Tbsp butter
3 Tbsp flour (use rice flour and the dish will be gluten-free)
1/2 cup white wine
3 cups milk
a few sprigs parsely and a few leaves basil, snipped
a few sprigs fresh thyme
1 can diced tomatoes (or fresh, if in season)
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese (I omitted this -- it seemed unnecessary)
1 large clove diced garlic
salt and pepper to taste

Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed saucepan, and then add the flour and mix to form a bubbling roux. Add the wine and milk and stir and cook until thickened. Then add the herbs, the tomatoes, the cheese if you are using it, and the garlic, salt, and pepper. Simmer everything together for about 20 minutes.

Plop in the halved, cooked sausages, make it all piping hot again if need be, and serve with pasta. Swoon.

HR 1161: Congress mulls your right to buy wine, again

They're at it again. Last year, a bill called the "CARE" act, HR 5034, was floated around the halls of the U.S. Congress but happily died before coming to a vote. Written largely by the National Beer Wholesalers Association, the bill would have made it impossible for anyone to sue any state over liquor distribution laws. If, for instance, you found you could not buy wine online because your state's laws forbade it, and you decided to go to court about it, the CARE act would have insisted that you prove your state's distribution laws were ineffectual in general -- that they didn't help in collecting tax revenue or making distribution orderly. Naturally, that's hard to prove and entirely beside the point to a consumer who has a far different and specific complaint. It would be like suing one doctor for malpractice, but having to prove that your state's malpractice laws in general do nothing. 

The purpose of the proposed legislation, of course, was to cut out the courts from the arena where wholesalers, retailers, and consumers battle for access to wine. The nice wholesalers would very much prefer that you buy all your liquor from your local retail stores, where it's their business to supply it; when you go behind their backs and shop elsewhere, online especially, they earn none of your dollars. The way to stop this is to turn to the state governments, and manipulate little-known and multifarious state laws via the sponsorship of state representatives who like campaign contributions and who don't have terribly thirsty constituents to pester them about access to craft beers or internet wine clubs. In order to clear the field, however, and leave beer wholesalers and state representatives alone to coo, the courts and the U.S. Congress have to be got out of the way. (We don't want Washington D.C. telling Podunk, Iowa, "you've got to let Iowans buy unusual booze if they like it.") This is why HR 5034 -- floated in the U.S. Congress, mind you -- not only would have made lawsuits impossible, but also decreed that the U.S. Congress itself would never again permit itself to interfere in state liquor distribution issues.

Very tidy. Very brilliant. It got nowhere in the last U.S. Congress, but it's been resurrected with a new number and a new name. Now it's called HR 1161, the Community Alcohol Regulatory Effectiveness act -- CARE, again -- and its sponsor is Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican. From (wait for it) nice, dry Utah. Brilliant.

Facebook: Stop HR 1161  
Congressman Jason Chaffetz
Fermentation (Tom Wark is the go-to source for this)
Vinography: Why every wine lover needs to call their representative ...
Congress mulls your right to buy wine (2010)

Conundrum ...

Trying to Guess the Varietal is a game that always lands me in the soup. Savoring the blend that makes up Conundrum, I thought, "gewurztraminer, surely -- there's that ginger ale taste. Most of the rest, chardonnay?"

Mostly wrong. According to Conundrum's website, if they are not being adorably cagey with their information ("enters round with a Chardonnay weight to it" is not the same thing as saying "we use chardonnay"), the grapes used are muscat, chardonnay, sauvignon blanc and viognier.

Flowers -- ginger -- 
marshmallow -- thick, heavy body -- dry
banana candy

I'm sure it's very beautifully done -- probably very difficult to do, and would it be easier to blend red grapes to begin with? -- and there are people who love it. But Conundrum is not to my taste. Each of the four grapes used has its own characteristics which I like to appreciate separately. These characteristics don't necessarily complement all others, and the whole -- flowery and spicy, thick and sweet, raw-doughy but weakly acidic and faintly dry -- seemed to me a bit of a mess. Still. Best regards, and all that.

Retail, about $20.

Aftershave champagne; and a delicious little movie

When one is treated to a delicious birthday lunch in a huge old refurbished Queen Anne house in Crown Point, Indiana, just across the street from the ancient jail Dillinger once broke out of, one should take care that a nice young couple do not walk in, evidently on their first date, and sit beside one. If they do walk in and sit down -- she very blond and cute, he not blond but also cute -- one should take care that he does not happen to be wearing too much aftershave. Because if he is, then one's little glass of champagne will struggle to smell and taste like apples and a hint of taffy, and will instead give up and taste like a pleasantly bubbly, musk and spice "oh, so you have two brothers?" "Yeah, and a younger sister ...."

However, the lunch was wonderful. Grilled Alaskan salmon, really grilled over charcoal, with simple grilled potato and mixed fresh vegetable accompaniment. Triple chocolate mousse cake surrounded by caramel cream sauce. And who were those men outside, near the gas station, well dressed and carrying guitars and things, taking professional photographs of one another in the spring sunshine? A peek through the curtains, and then back to the food -- and to the dark wooden floors, the fireplaces, the stained glass windows and the sweeping staircase; and to wondering what fine meals and grand occasions must once have been celebrated in this small-town, Industrial/Victorian midwest mansion. It's called Lucrezia's now, and has adopted a Renaissance Italian motif.

Meanwhile, and just because, here is a delightful little movie from a blog called The Cook in Heels. Watch carefully, as the editing and the superimposed script is rather jumpy. The lighting is also a bit murky. Still, has one ever before seen the preparation of zucchini flowers stuffed with black olive tapenade and goat cheese? No? One Me neither. It was filmed in Antibes, France, not far from Cannes.


Antibes from the Cook in Heels on Vimeo.

2009 Truchard Roussanne

liquid gold 
the scent of fresh cut wood -- maybe honey
lilies, caramel
rich, fatty texture -- a hidden acidity comes through at the end

What a very, very good wine, albeit perhaps not to everyone's taste at first. The opulent scent of altar flowers combined with a round, rich, almost syrupy mouthfeel and a finishing dryness make an unusual package. The roussanne is one of only a few white grapes used in the northern Rhône, particularly in three appellations contrôlées called St.-Joseph, Hermitage, and Crozes-Hermitage. In all these cases the word "Blanc" should follow, to distinguish the appellations' white wines from their more famed reds, which are all syrah-based. The other white grapes of the northern Rhône are viognier and marsanne; for quick reference as to their generally accepted ranking, think of viognier, roussanne, and marsanne as King, Queen, and Jack respectively. 

What meal do we pair with a roussanne? The cooking of the northern Rhone, exemplified in its nonpareil culinary capital, Lyon, seems to celebrate hearty country food like sausages or tripe -- see Madeleine Kamman's recipe for deep-fried tripe called "Fireman's Apron," "one of the glories of Lyon's cuisine" (The New Making of a Cook, pp. 909-910) -- and is altogether heavy on the onions, potatoes, and black pepper. Does imagining all that make us thirst for an unctuous, globulous wine of springtime lilies and caramel? Or do we think we might prefer a beer?

In any case we should recall that with this delicious Truchard roussanne we are in California, in the Carneros region of Napa. So perhaps for our meal we should be contemplating something Californian -- some sort of "fusion" or other.

2007 Stags' Leap merlot

Remember, it's Stags' Leap, not Stag's Leap. And it's not the same as Stags Leap, although both are located there.

Bright berry-red
velvety plums
faint, faint compote of prune and vanilla
and cocoa
elegant, rich, and lovely 

Why do fine merlots seem so queenly and serene? They just do, somehow. One searches for the right image to do them justice.

Image from Olivia de Havilland -- Lady of the Classic Cinema

The millenium arrives -- and takes its hat off and stays awhile (I like another beer)

How does it compare to my favorite, the great Duchesse de Bourgogne? A little bitter for my neophyte taste, not as sweetly round, not as tinglingly sour or freshly toast-and-cola-like as la Duchesse -- beer lovers use a vocabulary all their own, heavy on nuts, toast, and caramel -- but still very good.

Samuel Smith's nut brown ale

"Rather extravagant" Shaker cake

In The Best of Shaker Cooking (1970) this treat is officially titled "An old recipe from an old sister for an excellent and rather extravagant cake." Yes, I'd say four sticks of butter, nine eggs, and two cups of dried fruit goes a long way toward extravagance, wouldn't you? The "old sister" was a member of a Shaker community in Mt. Lebanon, New York.

To make it you will need:

• 2 cups (4 sticks) butter
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 cups flour
• 2 cups mixed fruit -- raisins, candied fruit, currants, etc.
• 9 eggs
• ground cinnamon and ginger

Cream the butter and sugar together, and then mix in the flour and fruits gradually. Beat the eggs lightly, and add to the mix. Season to taste with cinnamon and ginger. (This is an odd instruction. You might start with perhaps 1/2 tsp cinnamon and 1/4 tsp ginger, but won't spices taste different in a raw batter than they will in a finished cake? Perhaps the old sister reasoned that it won't matter much anyway, since the prime taste of the cake is butter and sweetness.)

Beat well. Bake in a greased, 9 inch square baking dish, in a moderately slow (325 F) oven for 1 hour.

An hour was not quite sufficient to completely cook this very thick batter, so prepare to add ten minutes or so to the baking time, and keep on checking until you are reasonably sure the thing looks the way the old sister would have wanted. If the center is still gooey no matter how dry and clean the toothpick emerges with which you test for doneness, why -- why then, enjoy the rest of it.

Idly looking over the baking section of this cookbook, it seemed curious to me that this cake should not also serve as "Mother Ann's birthday cake," the recipe for which is printed just above it on the same page. Mother Ann was Ann Lee, the "beloved founder" of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. Why shouldn't her birthday be celebrated with as much extravagance, as much butter, eggs, and dried fruits, as possible? Especially since she had the luck to be born on Leap Day. I've always thought that would be such fun.

A closer look at the two recipes may explain the curiosity. Where Extravagant Cake is a huge galumphing bowlful of rich sweetness and expense, the birthday cake is a light, refined, and graceful affair, three small layers leavened by both baking powder and egg whites -- twelve of these -- the layers enriched with peach jam in between, and all topped by "any delicate icing." It requires more work and loving skill than mere galumphing extravagance. Even before beginning, the baker is instructed to go out and cut peach twigs, "which are filled with sap at this season of the year," bruise their ends, and use them to beat the batter. "This will impart a delicate peach flavor to the cake." Anything for Mother Ann, and with good reason. She not only founded the Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, she was thought to exemplify the Second Appearing in herself, and taught that all Believers spiritually held Christ in themselves too. It was a wildly revolutionary idea, going far beyond any simpering claims that all people can be good.

Since the Shakers are down to their last three members at one last, venerable place called Sabbathday Lake in Maine, it seems right to offer them a paragraph. They were a most unusual American denomination. The ferment of an industrializing eighteenth-century urban England partly gave them birth, along with Protestant religious revivals flaring both in the mother country and in the American colonies. The rest of their identity they owed to young English factory girl Ann Lee's strong personality. Her youthful spiritual torments about sin and correct service to God, combined with a deep revulsion to sex, helped create -- once she was through with a near-forced marriage and the tragic deaths of all her four young children, and had left Manchester -- a new religion. In rural New England the she and her followers separated themselves from the world, lived quietly on large communal farms, and devoted themselves to work, prayer, total sinlessness, handicrafts, and business in imitation of the earliest and purest Christians. They were celibate. (I had trouble once explaining this idea to a class full of fourteen-year-olds. "But they would just sneak around," one young man leered meaningfully. "No," I said. And I had to explain the desire not to sneak around.) How their dancing and physical convulsing -- hence, Shakers -- was in imitation of the primitve church is a mystery to me. Historian Paul Johnson judged that this ecstatic worship may have had long-forgotten European roots in Crusader exposure to the Muslim world's "whirling Dervishes." Anyway so famed was it, in sleepy backwoods New York or Maine, that the Shakers built small bleachers into their meeting rooms to allow outsiders, the "worldly people," to come and watch and be out of the way. Their famed song "Simple Gifts" is about dancing (" 'tis the gift to come down where we ought to be ... to bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd").

I am not sure when the dancing stopped. Two and a quarter centuries after their founding, what these humble people will be remembered for, apart from living incredibly sweet and tidy lives, will likely be their perfect furniture and their robust farm food. I have not yet tried the "Birthday" cake, but if you care to attempt it in honor of beloved Mother Ann, here is the recipe. The Believers used to celebrate her unusual Leap Day birthday on March 1.

Mother Ann's birthday cake

• 1 cup best butter (sweet, fresh if possible)
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 cups flour, sifted
• 1/2 cup cornstarch
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1 cup milk
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 12 egg whites, beaten
• 1 tsp salt

Beat the butter and sugar into a smooth cream. Sift the flour with the cornstarch and the baking powder, and add alternately with the milk to the butter mixture. Beat well after each addition (ideally using the peach twigs at some point). Add the vanilla and then lightly fold in the egg whites which you have whipped with the salt.

Bake the batter in three greased 8-inch cake pans in a moderate (350 F) oven for 25 minutes. When cool, fill between the layers with peach jam and cover the cake with any delicate icing.

More:

A History of the American People, by Paul Johnson (1987)

Work and Worship: The Economic Order of the Shakers, by Edward Deming Andrews and Faith Andrews (1974)

The Story of the Shakers by Flo Morse (1986)

The Four Seasons of Shaker Life: an Intimate Portrait of the Community at Sabbathday Lake, Maine by Gerard C. Wertkin (1986) -- in the photos you can spot the three remaining members still pictured at the community's official website today.

YouTube has the Ken Burns' film on the Shakers, Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984), uploaded in 15-minute segments. Here you can see the woman who fears being "remembered as a chair or a table"' (at 7:20).

More about the community at Sabbathday Lake, Maine
Mother Ann Lee, at wikipedia
The Shaker Museum and Library
The National Park Service's Shaker Historic Trail site