Pierre Delize Blanc de blancs vin mousseux, NV

Pure, plain fresh apples
dry
bubbly ("vin mousseux") -- for a $5 closeout tipple, delightful

The fine print is almost as mysterious as that on any Italian label:  "Elaboré par V.cl. à F21200," it says, "423 France -- brut -- bottled by Veuve Ambal F21200 -- Montagny-les-Beaune." We'll try to decipher it.

Once we see the word Beaune we know we are in Burgundy, home of pinot noir and chardonnay. In spotting Veuve Ambal, we at least recognize a company name -- the nice English words "bottled by" are a huge help -- resembling those of other French producers, including for instance that very great Champagne house, Veuve Clicquot (veuve means widow). Our Pierre Delize is a vin mousseux ("frothy") because though it may froth and sparkle, its origins lie outside Champagne; therefore it may not call itself by that magic word. Blanc de blancs, white from white, tells us that it was made entirely from white grapes

Having deciphered a few basics we may go on to gloat that, with this sale-bin treasure, we inadvertently delve into a whole world of French sparkling wines, or perhaps we could say un-Champagnes. There are three styles made all over the country. The bubbliest are mousseux -- Champagne is itself a mousseux -- the next bubbliest are crémant, having about half the pressure in the bottle as mousseux, and the least bubbly, pétillant, frizzante, or "crackling." Since sparkling wines are made everywhere, these category descriptors can be a part of Appellation Controlée designations which we usually associate with a place. For example, crémant is part of the official AC designations Crémant d'Alsace, Crémant de Bourgogne, and Crémant de Loire. Note that our Pierre Delize is not a Crémant de Bourgogne, even though it is from Beaune, because its fizz level classifies it mousseux instead.

Anyway it is most tasty. Do check the sale bins. If you don't finish the bottle before it goes flat, remember your French culinary history, as taught by Madeleine Kamman in The New Making of a Cook: use it up in soup. "It is believed," she says, "that onion soup was created by the French king Louis XV from a bottle of flat Champagne and a few onions on an occasion when he came back famished from a joyous night in eighteenth-century Paris." Delightful.

2008 Joseph Phelps Insignia, after the wait

Everyone got a little pour -- let's see, that makes fourteen people, or was it fifteen? -- and the wine flowed black-purple into our glasses. It was like eating a bottle full of fruit, but fruit strong enough, as my grandmother used to say about some coffee, "to stand up and walk down your throat." Dry-shod, I might add.

And then after the little crackers and the cheeses and the spinach bites and the pickle-and-beef rollups and the pasta Bolognese and the bruschetta and the cookies and the cakes and pies and the wines and the ancillary birthday champagne, we all tottered out into the cold under the twinkling stars (my, Orion is a big constellation) and drove home. Giving thanks.

"It was a pre-Christian force which drove them all into agreement upon the twenty-fifth of December. Just as they wisely took the Christmas tree from the Roman Saturnalia, so they took the date of their festival from the universal pre-Christian festival of the winter solstice, Yule, when mankind celebrated the triumph of the sun over the powers of darkness, when the night begins to decrease and the day to increase, when the year turns, and hope is born again because the worst is over. No more suitably symbolic moment could have been chosen for a festival of faith, goodwill, and joy.

"And the appositeness of the moment is just as perfect in this era of light and central heating, as it was in the era of Virgil, who, by the way, described a Christmas tree. We shall say this year, with exactly the same accents of relief and hope as our pagan ancestors used, and as the woaded savage used: 'The days will begin to lengthen now!' " -- Arnold Bennett, The Feast of St. Friend (1911)

2008 Joseph Phelps Insignia -- or, waiting

Since the wine retails for something like $200, we are waiting to bring it to the Christmas party. Meanwhile, waiting reminds us of stories of Christmas Waits.

It seems that, in nineteenth century England and before, carolers went about in the depths of the night of Christmas Eve and sang songs outside people's windows to celebrate the joy of the approaching day. The word waits makes sense, deriving as it does from old English words meaning to be awake or keep guard. Washington Irving, American tourist in the English countryside circa 1819, thought the custom picturesque and delightful. Jerome K. Jerome, whose story is quoted below, was less impressed.   

The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow by Jerome K. Jerome (1899)

"Christmas Waits annoy me, and I yearn to throw open the window and fling coal at them--as once from the window of a high flat in Chelsea I did. I doubted their being genuine Waits. I was inclined to the opinion they were young men seeking excuse for making a noise. One of them appeared to know a hymn with a chorus, another played the concertina, while a third accompanied with a step dance. Instinctively I felt no respect for them; they disturbed me in my work, and the desire grew upon me to injure them. It occurred to me it would be good sport if I turned out the light, softly opened the window, and threw coal at them. It would be impossible for them to tell from which window in the block the coal came, and thus subsequent unpleasantness would be avoided. They were a compact little group, and with average luck I was bound to hit one of them.

"I adopted the plan. I could not see them very clearly. I aimed rather at the noise; and I had thrown about twenty choice lumps without effect, and was feeling somewhat discouraged, when a yell, followed by language singularly unappropriate to the season, told me that Providence had aided my arm. The music ceased suddenly, and the party dispersed, apparently in high glee - which struck me as curious.

"One man I noticed remained behind. He stood under the lamp-post, and shook his fist at the block generally.

"'Who threw that lump of coal?' he demanded in stentorian tones.

"To my horror, it was the voice of the man at Eighty-eight, an Irish gentleman, a journalist like myself. I saw it all, as the unfortunate hero always exclaims, too late, in the play. He - number Eighty-eight - also disturbed by the noise, had evidently gone out to expostulate with the rioters. Of course my lump of coal had hit him - him the innocent, the peaceful (up till then), the virtuous. That is the justice Fate deals out to us mortals here below. There were ten to fourteen young men in that crowd, each one of whom fully deserved that lump of coal; he, the one guiltless, got it - seemingly, so far as the dim light from the gas lamp enabled me to judge, full in the eye.

"As the block remained silent in answer to his demand, he crossed the road and mounted the stairs. On each landing he stopped and shouted-

"'Who threw that lump of coal? I want the man who threw that lump of coal. Out you come.'

"Now a good man in my place would have waited till number Eighty-eight arrived on his landing, and then, throwing open the door would have said with manly candour-

"'I threw that lump of coal. I was-,' He would not have got further, because at that point, I feel confident, number Eighty-eight would have punched his head. There would have been an unseemly fracas on the staircase, to the annoyance of all the other tenants and later, there would have issued a summons and a cross-summons. Angry passions would have been roused, bitter feeling engendered which might have lasted for years.

"I do not pretend to be a good man. I doubt if the pretence would be of any use were I to try: I am not a sufficiently good actor. I said to myself, as I took off my boots in the study, preparatory to retiring to my bedroom - "Number Eighty-eight is evidently not in a frame of mind to listen to my story. It will be better to let him shout himself cool; after which he will return to his own flat, bathe his eye, and obtain some refreshing sleep. In the morning, when we shall probably meet as usual on our way to Fleet Street, I will refer to the incident casually, and sympathize with him. I will suggest to him the truth - that in all probability some fellow-tenant, irritated also by the noise, had aimed coal at the Waits, hitting him instead by a regrettable but pure accident. With tact I may even be able to make him see the humour of the incident. Later on, in March or April, choosing my moment with judgment, I will, perhaps, confess that I was that fellow-tenant, and over a friendly brandy-and-soda we will laugh the whole trouble away."

"As a matter of fact, that is what happened. Said number Eighty-eight - he was a big man, as good a fellow at heart as ever lived, but impulsive - 'Damned lucky for you, old man, you did not tell me at the time.'

"'I felt,' I replied, 'instinctively that it was a case for delay.'"

*******************

And we will discuss the Insignia later.

From my house to yours on Christmas -- marguerites

These "marguerites," little pecan and brown sugar muffins, are a family recipe that I have never seen elsewhere. At least, not yet. Sometimes it takes a bit of digging before you realize that your old family recipe actually came from an old family Betty Crocker cookbook. Remember the episode of Friends in which Phoebe insists that the Nestle company stole her grandmother's chocolate chip cookie recipe and put it on the back of the chips bag?

I do have an old Encyclopedic Cookbook from Chicago's Culinary Arts Institute which has a recipe for Marguerites, but the confection offered there is a strange one. A sugar syrup is poured over beaten egg whites, then vanilla, nuts, and butter are added, and then this meringue is dropped by spoonfuls onto soda crackers and they are all baked until the meringue browns. Thanks, I'd rather not.

My family's real marguerites are simple to make, since they do not require any fussing with butter, creamed, cold, or otherwise, and they bake quickly. You will need miniature muffin tins -- almost the first thing I bought when I was first married -- and miniature paper muffin cups, unless you don't mind greasing the tins.

Marguerites
Preheat the oven to 350 F. Mix in a bowl:

• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/8 tsp. salt
• 1 cup chopped pecans
• 1/4 tsp. baking powder

Add 2 eggs, and mix the batter thoroughly. Fill each muffin tin with a spoonful of batter. Bake 15 to 17 minutes.

Frost with a basic frosting of 3 Tablespoons hot water (or other flavoring) blended with 2 and 1/2 cups powdered sugar until smooth. Makes 22 to 24 muffins.

A small collection of Christmas reds

Is it only three days away? You might try --

Vini Ciccariello, an ultra-cheap but decent Italian merlot that will serve admirably for a large party full of people who are not there to swirl and sniff. It retails for about $4 to $5. We have met its brother pinot grigio before, and liked it, too.

 
2009 Temptation, whose label packs more punch than the wine. (Certainly a shoo-in for our Gallery.) This Sonoma County zinfandel might strike you as a rather wimpy compared to the lush, high alcohol fruit pies most zinfandels are. But pour it as another nice, anonymous red to wash down the Christmas Eve finger foods, and you will like it fine. Retail, about $15.        .

1999 Château Simard -- at last, a real Bordeaux. Deserving of real tasting note haiku:

complex fragrance  --
smoke, cedar, meat
silky 
mashed berries and apple skins
leaner, denser, drier than ... 

May I shamelessly pilfer from Château Simard's publicity materials? "Château Simard is located near the ancient and beautiful town of Saint-Emilion, home to the Right Bank's most prestigious estates. ... A quintessential Saint-Emilion producer, Château Simard's vineyard is surrounded by the region's first growth vineyards. ... Château Simard produces only one wine. It is classically elegant, with a refined style that results not only from the excellent location,  but also from the traditional winemaking methods employed at the château and the number of years the wine is aged in the cellars." 70% merlot, 30% cabernet franc. Retail, about $20. 

2002 Kenwood Artist Series cabernet sauvignon -- this one may not necessarily be sitting waiting for you on your local liquor store's shelves, but Kenwood makes a good, more modest line of wines, too, retailing for about $12. Our Artist's Series cabernet, if you can find it --

plum skins 
pencil box 
olives 
still a young, purple mulberry color
satiny tannins 
fresh --fruity -- elegant --  full

-- will sell for about $60.

Sugar

What with Christmas only a week away, it seems appropriate to revive this entry into the "Baking 101" catalog that I began to compile during my brief stint as Examiner.com's Chicago Baking Examiner. Here we learn a little about sugar, even consulting children's books for basic information. Consider: what ingredient do we suddenly eat more of, during the holiday baking season, than sugar? Perhaps something outranks it, maybe butter, but we would still be dismayed to learn how much our consumption of the white sweet stuff skyrockets come December. The stock kids at the store haul out pallet after pallet of it, four pound bags stacked high, sometimes tracking a thin sugar trail across the floor if there's been an unnoticed spill. Hard to believe there was a time when our ancestors did not know sugar -- nor chocolate, coffee, or tea, nor very much good wine -- and made their Christmas cakes and cookies festive instead with the subtleties of honey, almonds, saffron, and rose water, and their meals festive with homemade beer of who knows what quality.

So, sugar. Examiner.com liked everyone's posts to be short and "news-y."



White, refined sugar was not known in Europe until after Crusaders brought it back from the middle East around the year 1100. Even then, sugar was used primarily as a medicine. Physicians mixed it with other drugs to disguise their taste. Sugar in cooking and baking was a luxury reserved for the rich until about the 1700s. What finally made sugar more available to all classes was simply the massive production levels achieved, in the sugar islands of the Caribbean and in South America, through the use of slave labor.

All plants contain some natural sugar, which usually is concentrated in the plant's fruit. Even a lemon has 1% sugar. Sugar cane -- technically a grass -- has more sugar in it than any other plant except sugar beets. Its sugars are found in the juices inside the mature cane. To eventually get solid white sugar crystals out of the plant, the canes have to be chopped and pressed, and the sticky juices repeatedly mixed with water, boiled, evaporated, and whirled in a centrifuge. Each time this is done, the liquids whirled away become another batch of molasses, and the solids left become a whiter, more refined sugar.

Raw sugar, pictured here, is sugar that been through a centrifuge and had some molasses whirled away, but has not had all that molasses coating washed off all the crystals. White sugars (granulated, cubes, superfine, or powdered) have been redissolved and reprocessed not only to remove the molasses but to eliminate the impurities within the crystals which also contribute to sugar's naturally brown color. The commercially available "brown" sugars, light or dark, are refined white sugars which have had molasses added back to them.

Fun trivia about sugar:

• Sugar crystals were first extracted from cane in India, about 500 B.C.
• The word candy comes from an Arabic version of the Sanskrit word "khandakah," meaning sugar.
• Sugar used to be processed into conical shaped loaves. This is why the giant granite peak overlooking Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is called Pao de Acucar, Sugar Loaf.
• London's famed Tate Gallery was built by Sir Henry Tate, who made a fortune in the 19th century sugar business. He patented a machine which cut up sugar loaves into small, easily handled cubes.

For more info: See Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking (1984); Sugars by Rhoda Nottridge (1993); Sugar From Farm to Market by Winifred Hammond (1967); Let's Learn about Sugar by Maud and Miska Petersham (1969).

Olive Garden, Obamacare waivers, sodium footprints -- and three months of falling sales

... or, in which I dabble in the news.

Every so often I venture off to a funny if snarky blog called Michelle Obama's Mirror, which gives the world a beguiling peek at life in the White House -- or just as often, life on some exotic "vacay" -- from the point of view of, well, the First Lady's mirror. And a hardworking, observant, sometimes defensive, frequently exhausted piece of furniture it is. It accompanies "the Wons" on every foreign trip and attends all of "Big Guy's" state dinners, it knows what's growing in "Lady M's" organic garden and what fabulously new or virtuously recycled frock she wore to this fundraiser or that. 

And every so often the Mirror, MOTUS as it fondly dubs itself, reports hard news. Since last week's update (December 8th) involves food, I take the liberty of sharing it.

MOTUS tells us that for the last three months, Olive Garden restaurant has posted sales losses. Those for the month of November alone amount to "a whopping 5.7%." Olive Garden's parent company, Darden, reports no similar downturns for its other chains (Red Lobster, Longhorn Steakhouse, etc.), so MOTUS echoes the original questions broached on the CNN report that was its first source. Why should Olive Garden slump from September of 2011 onward?

Image from Michelle Obama's Mirror

The Mirror "reaches into our way-back machine," finds more sources, and tells a story. In September, Michelle Obama announced the restaurant's participation in her "Partnership for a Healthier America initiative." Partner Darden agreed to remove milkshakes and French fries from Olive Garden's children's menu, replacing them with fruit smoothies and grapes, and to cut sodium and fat from the menu in general by 10 percent. This was called "reducing sodium and calorie footprints." This is also called "never mind what the customers want," as MOTUS points out.

MOTUS leaves us to figure out the timeline,* but points out as well that Darden is one of the many businesses that got a waiver from Obamacare. So it gets to ignore, temporarily, the ruinously expensive provisions of the law, and to maintain its employees' health care coverage until all waivers expire and the accounting department there, like accounting departments elsewhere, finds it cheaper to pay Obamacare's fines than to go on absurdly insuring waitresses and cooks and people.

In Illinois we call this general approach to life "Pay to Play," and we marvel as one state governor after another goes to jail for indulging in variations on the theme. What is curious about the Olive Garden story, though, is its last part, what we might call Pay to Eat. It seems Olive Garden's customers are not doing that quite so much. Not since September. Coincidence? Outraged public? Or puzzled customers simply going elsewhere for milkshakes and French fries, and wondering what's with all the grapes? As MOTUS humbly allows, "I report, you deride."

Image from Michelle Obama's Mirror

*Sources:

"Olive Garden rolls out more healthful kids' menu," Restaurant News, July 7, 2011

 "Obama's Lunch Buddy's Company Given Obamacare Waiver," The Weekly Standard, July 12, 2011

"First Lady Michelle Obama Praises Darden Restaurants' Plans to Reduce Calorie, Sodium Footprint," Darden press release, September 15, 2011

CNN transcripts of Erin Burnett's "Outfront," broadcast December 6th, 2011

"Pardon me, waiter, there's a fly in my soup," Michelle Obama's Mirror, December 8th, 2011.

Raimat

Well, of course a major Spanish wine producer is going to be the thing that introduces you to the online, "Sims"-style role playing game Second Life. Interesting marketing gimmick, but truly -- don't waste your time. In fact that little marketing gimmick may already be a thing of the past. I surf the web, and I detect no further connection between Second Life and Raimat. Did I really taste these wines a full year ago? No matter. They are still good.

Raimat belongs to Group Codorniu -- chances are we all know this sparkling cava, retailing for about $9, better than the group's subsidiary products -- and the three that I tasted struck me as follows.

2006 Raimat Vina 43 tempranillo 

Chocolate/leather
acids, but ...
satiny
smoky raisins

2009 Raimat Vina 24 albarino :  

Light wood 
light vanilla spice 
peach candy 
very acidic
buttery finish

"The only albarino authorized outside Rias Baixas" saith the nice salesman.

2006 Raimat Vina 23 cabernet sauvignon, Costers del Segre D.O., Spain

murky brownish-maroon color
fresh mushroom and smoky earth
not a fruit bomb (yet)
leather 
later, heavier fruit and caramel

All of these wines retail for about $10; all nice with whatever interesting things, meat, fish, or fowl, you are cooking for the weekend. In your real, first life.

Fish with wine, grapes, and cream -- and Your Work

Enclosed please find (as one used to say, back in the days when one submitted unsolicited manuscripts and formal cover letters to magazines and agents) something light, quick, and pretty to look at, adapted from Marion Cunningham's Fannie Farmer Cookbook (1986). It must be my reading a mystery novel set in ocean-girt Scotland that has inspired thoughts of fish. Speaking of The Five Red Herrings (aha), I have reached the point in it where the detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, has satisfied himself as to the murderer's identity, but has not told anyone else. This is always a satisfying place to be in a whodunit, no matter whether it's Wimsey or Miss Marple or anyone else doing the soft-focus musing. "Oh, yes, it's quite clear, isn't it," the sleuth always says. "I thought so, it was only the missing button [or pencil, or hat] that confused me. The murderer would scarcely have forgotten that, would he?" And so on. I never have the slightest idea who it is.

Fish with wine, grapes, and cream

Melt 2 Tablespoons butter in a heavy skillet. Toss in 2 cups seedless green grapes and 1 teaspoon salt. Pour on 2/3 cup white wine.

Bring the wine to a simmer.



Lay about 1 pound or so of mild, whitefish fillets on the grapes. Cover the skillet and let the fish steam until done -- 10 to 15 minutes for fresh, half again as long for frozen. Remove with a slotted spoon, pour in 1 cup cream, bring to a boil, and boil to reduce the sauce a little. Pour over the fish or serve the sauce separately in a gravy boat

And, did you know -- by the way you'll want a rice pilaf or some couscous with this, plus a green vegetable and a glass of something crisp and white -- and we've gone off thinking about mystery novels and fish just for the moment, and are back to unsolicited manuscripts -- did you know there is a site called Rejectionwiki devoted to the classification of rejection slip verbiage? You may log in, type the name of the journal or magazine that has most recently turned down the chance to publish Your Work, and investigate whether you have received a standard rejection slip ("Dear Author, no thanks"), a "second-tier" notice ("Dear Mr. Smith, we read your article twice, but still no"), or a very encouraging personal letter ("Dear John, Sorry this won't work, but the story was lovely and please send us more").

Even better than Rejectionwiki is Literary Rejections on Display. This blog is so amusing that, paradoxically enough, it has earned attention from the kind of gatekeepers who reject manuscripts. The gatekeepers' badges, proudly displayed on the blog's sidebar, make up a most esoteric collection. Among them we see Entertainment, Psychology Today, The Village Voice, The Boston Phoenix, Gawker, and Poets & Writers. All have found something of interest at LROD; for my part (do you think I'll get a badge?) my favorite post is this one from August, 2011, in which our author/collector takes a moment to sigh over the rigorous standards maintained even among the small fry of the publishing world, in this case at the editorial offices of Grist. With Grist we are talking about the literary journal of the University of Tennessee, and therefore, about twenty-three-year-olds wielding red pens. "Ah, college students," LROD mourns. "How innocent they are. Founding a journal and learning to reject at an early age." And then he (she?) treats us to the whole of the kids' letter:

Thank you for sending your manuscript to us at Grist via the online submission manager. After careful consideration, we regret that this submission does not meet the editorial needs of the journal at this time. We do hope you will send to us again in the future as we could not publish Grist without the many quality submissions we receive. Although we would like to send an individual response to everyone, the number of manuscripts we receive makes it difficult for editors to respond personally to each submission. Please know that we are devoted to giving each submission to Grist at least three reads and an editor personally reads each submission. We do appreciate your interest in Grist, and the opportunity to consider your work. Thank your for supporting our journal with your writing, reading, and subscribing. Sincerely, __________.

Anxious wordiness here tries but fails to cover a multitude of compositional sins, from missing verbs ("after careful consideration, we regret [to say, to conclude, to inform you, pick an infinitive] that this submission does not meet," etc.) to the long-winded tautology struggling to escape at the end --  "we are devoted to giving each submission at least three reads and an editor personally reads each submission." Emphasis added. Make that two tautologies.

I suppose it really isn't nice to laugh even at the kids, especially when the laughter does seem to come from one's suffering a case of sour grapes. "Hollow, sir," Jeeves would label it. Complaints about the difficulty of getting published are as old as pen, paper, and those small human horrors, ambition, frustration, and jealousy, so why blame the kids? Samuel Johnson and James Boswell lamented the evasiveness of "literary fame" in the 1770s, when there were oh so many competitors for it. A hundred years later, in The Bostonians, Henry James allowed the heroine to question the hero on his failures as a writer. Whoever was manning them, the gates to a six-figure book deal were as impregnable as ever:

"Why don't you write out your ideas?"
"I have written many things, but I can't get them printed."
"Then it would seem that there are not so many people -- so many as you said just now -- who agree with you."
"Well," said Basil Ransom, "editors are a mean, timorous lot, always saying they want something original, but deadly afraid of it when it comes."

By the way, none of this squares with the strange anecdotes one sometimes finds in biographies of writers, anecdotes to the effect that so-and-so had a difficult time making ends meet at this point in his life, and "turned to writing to earn his bread." Benjamin Disraeli is said to have done this when he found himself hugely in debt as a young man. The teenaged Louisa May Alcott was given a set of pens as a birthday gift, so a legend goes, the gift serving as a message from her family to get to work, writing, to help fill the family coffers. How on earth could anyone plan writing as a fallback career when success in writing has always been in the gift of gatekeepers not ready to bankrupt themselves sponsoring just every new talent?

If anyone can explain the puzzle to me, I shall be glad. At any rate it is precisely now, of all eras, when writers would seem to have almost no cause to whine about mean, timorous editors doling out their usual random helpings of injustice and obscurity. Not only did that nice Mr. Gutenberg invent his printing press some centuries ago, but thanks to the genius of his modern day equivalents, Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, and others, one may blog away on any subjects one likes, being all expressive and artistic, and gatekeepers be damned. How strange, then, that we all still seem to clamor for their shelter. Literary Rejections on Display shows off its badges from Psychology Today and Poets & Writers. Food blogs revel in the stamp from Saveur anointing "Sites We Love." One good recipe will do it -- perhaps that's why food blogging attracts writers who have the brains to know they don't want to pine away forever, waiting to be crowned a master of the short story, or hoping against hope to get embalmed in some foreign policy wonk biannual.

Or win a prize. Almost four years ago our dear LROD -- and we remember of course this is not a Chocolate & Zucchini or a Blue Kitchen, able to catch an editor's eye with a "Hello, sailor!" Turmeric-and-Ginger-grilled Pork Chop -- our dear LROD really stormed the gates of its niche, recording and adding to the outrage felt when a prestigious literary prize was not given out at all because the editor in charge of it decided none of the submissions she received was worthy of recognition or cash. Why should she bother? She had standards to uphold, no boss, and no crass food-editor incentive to make a reader click a nearby ad for ketchup or something. The fact of her being good-looking also got people's goat. "She got to the literary top," LROD fumed, "looking glamorous I might add, and didn't reach down to help anyone else a hand [sic]. I guess because by her stnadards [sic] we all just suck." Yes, but dear things, she spends her life it seems, this Miss Smith, running something called the Willesden Herald. Far from being the top of anything, that may be a tiny little hell in itself. Oh wait -- it's 2011. She's been promoted. Now she is a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and the New Books reviewer for Harper's. Bully for her. I must be wrong about the hell part.

Image shamelessly pilfered from Blue Kitchen, who actually earned it.

So we return to our ocean-girt Scottish mystery, and our fish with wine, grapes, and cream. Not exactly "hello, sailor!" material, but thanks to the technical efforts and business sense of people far brighter than me, I get to blog, I get to publish myself, about it. How Disraeli would crow, though he would wonder where the paycheck is. I wonder if I still ought to package it up, somehow, as something literary -- Vivian Grey Cooks -- and submit it to some authority figure in charge of happiness and acceptance. In verse, possibly, à la one Thanhha Lai of National Book Award fame. Or might I even submit to Harper's? Miss Smith works there, and Wikipedia says one of her genres is "hysterical realism."

2006 Conn Creek Anthology

A blend of cabernet, merlot, cabernet franc, malbec, and petite verdot.

clear brick red
smoky -- earth -- leather 
candy apples -- juicy acids 
melts away to a light caramel 
a little barnyard
sleek

Retail, about $35

Conn Creek Winery

New cocktail: the Stubby Collins

This comes from our dog-eared Calvert Party Encyclopedia, circa 1960. It is what the Tom Collins should be, when that wedding reception staple isn't made sickeningly sweet and diluted with too much club soda. Although, to be quite fair, drinkers who like a classic dry martini may find this Stubby Collins a bit sweet, too. A teaspoon of sugar is not inconsiderable in a small drink.

The Stubby Collins

1 ounce lemon juice
2 ounces gin
1 tsp sugar (superfine, so it will dissolve quickly)

Stir all the ingredients with ice in a high ball glass. Strain into a martini glass and garnish with a fresh cherry and/or an orange slice.

Warre's Otima 10 tawny port

Honey, oranges, and cloves ...

...very nice with that slice of pumpkin pie topped with whipped cream. Has it really been a week since Thanksgiving?

And nice to look forward to, on an otherwise dolorous-looking early winter day. Otima goes especially well with a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novel (The Five Red Herrings) on a quiet Saturday afternoon, the novel being all Scottish mists, a half dozen fire-eating Scottish suspects, the occasional prim mysterious woman, and lots of painstakingly collated train schedules. Will the murderer turn out to be Ferguson, or Strachan, or Farren, or Waters, or none of the above? You want to savor it all with your port.

The character I like best is Lord Peter's man, Bunter. He seems to be Wodehouse's Jeeves, before there was Jeeves -- or perhaps that is all wrong, and Jeeves came first. Or perhaps the English gentleman's personal gentleman was, in real life, such a complete human type that there was no way for any novelist to make of him anything different from what Jeeves and Bunter were.

All this savoring and sipping, and busy rustling of train schedules and eyeing of prim women, has caused us, all unthinkingly, to make inroads upon our port (no pun intended). You see how the bottle, admittedly only 500 ml, is approaching empty.

Retail, about $20.