Because it's delicious, as Flemish sours are. (I am always so pleased to find a flavorful beer without bitterness that I can't understand beer geek-reviewers only giving a Flemish sour like this a score of "3.15" out of 5 at Beer Advocate, for example. What's not to like?) The Ichtegem's people might just consider stepping up their marketing a little, however -- the label art is not all it could be. See "Best beer packaging, ever."


Retail, about $4 for an 11 ounce bottle.

Naturally, the packaging is for a selection of delicious Flemish sour ales. Leave it to the kids to wrap their thick, sweet, quadruple-hopped and high-alcohol monsters around with coarse references to dogs or tragic shipwrecks or prostitution. Adults brewing fine old things restrict themselves to bright colors and cheery images of old movie stars. That is, I think they do -- I recognize David Niven here, but not the woman or the other man. A co-worker suggests Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra, but somehow I don't see the resemblance.





In this six pack we find two bottles each of Monk's Cafe, Petrus Oud Bruin, and Petrus Aged Pale. "The key to heaven," the label on Oud Bruin says, and if in fact the key to heaven would be a beer, I entirely concur it would be a sour. The deep clear brown-maple color, the gigantic spun-brown-sugar head -- the rich sweet-sour flavors of caramel, nuts, and cola -- bitterness almost non-existent -- and even the Oud Bruin is a tad bitter for me. (Drink it with food, to avoid a long-lasting bitter aftertaste.)



And I don't see why it must always be dogs associated with beer marketing. (We are back to complaining about the kids again.) Why not cats? Herewith, I offer these two images to any micro-brewer in need of ideas for his newest label. Bright colors, grace, repose, regality -- shouldn't some beer say that about itself? Note how the two cats share the same corner of the couch, at different times of the day of course. And Nicholas must have his blue pillow.


There. Half a dozen ideas already. "Blue Pillow" ale, "Shared Couch," "Sleepy Nicholas," and so on. "Martha's Glare." Please make that one a sour.

Golden
Toasty
Nutty
Dry



Delicious. Crémant means sparkling; Alsace is the region of eastern France which produces this sparkling wine, in the style of Champagne, that may not be called "Champagne" because it is not actually made in, etc., etc. You know the drill. The grapes permitted for the Crémant d'Alsace AC -- it is an appellation, a place guaranteed to make a wine a certain way -- may include chardonnay, pinot blanc, pinot gris, pinot noir, riesling, and the little known Auxerrois blanc.

So one night we ate polenta and garlic, mushrooms and tomatoes, green peppers and spicy Italian sausages. This Klipfel happened to be in my refrigerator. I asked the daughter's boyfriend whether he would like a glass of wine with dinner, and he in turn asked, "I don't know -- what wine goes with this?" And I said, "Whatever is in my refrigerator." He laughed. So we drank Klipfel Crémant d'Alsace. Why not?

And might it also pair well with Thanksgiving? Why not?

Retail, about $16.

How many times, dear things, have we bought and eaten a fruit pie that was only a glum approximation of a pie? You'll recognize the symptoms: a flat, thick, greasy brown top crust, a filling of sweet sludge in which possibly five or six pieces of underripe, undercooked peach or apple, or a few cherries, glumly float. A bottom crust of which the less said the better. And we know pie can be better than this, if only because we have seen gorgeous photographs of flaky light pastry the color of spun gold trembling to contain an orchard's worth of delicately spiced and juicy fruits, in the pages of gourmet books and magazines. And only there. Too often, even professional bakeries cannot do what they should.

If you love pie you might think of attempting the miracle at home. More power to you, but be warned. Cookbook and magazine authors who reassure you that pie-making is not difficult are being kind. It is tricky, and you will only get a "knack" through practice and, in my case, through the consulting, at long last and by sheer chance, of an authority which finally laid down some new and sensible rules. It was an "Aha!" pie making moment. And don't we all want those?

It's kind of like, you must know, an "Aha" political moment. If the briefest of digressions is permissible, I'll ask -- do you think the recent election was such a moment? Is it true, as some people maintain, that the victor of two weeks ago, liberalism, is a religion more than anything else? If so then that is bad news for the Republican party, and for people who wish their conservatism somehow to enjoy political representation in the public square. For of course, a campaigning religion will paradoxically not respond to political argument. Try it. For example: "What is Solyndra?"

I had a professor who startled me when I was nineteen by saying that a society can have either freedom or equality, but not both. "If people are free, they are free to be unequal. Equality has to be enforced," he said. Freedom is a focused status -- either I can do what I want, or I can't -- which may be seen and grasped and lost and fought for and argued about through politics. Equality is a kaleidoscopic abstraction -- "life isn't fair, and that's wrong" -- to be yearned for, mourned over, imposed, believed in, defined and redefined with every passing day. Political voters go to the polls thinking of tangibles like unemployment and entitlement spending. The liberal faithful, devoted to equality and above argument, go to the same polls uninterested in anything except the chance to assert right thinking and to poke the infidel beast in the eye.

This time, he was "Mitt the Shit." (Check your blithe young relatives' Facebook pages if you doubt me.) In four years, his shape will have changed but the faithful, gnostics to a man and to a woman, will know him and hate him. And if they are the country's majority, then their religion may be ever unbeatable in the mere political arena. Piling up the votes for a heavenly abstraction would tend to weed out non-believers from the ballot, and to chloroform quaint old fashioned things like "political wrangling." Imagine! "Wrangling!" -- when folks are suffering.

Yet we all still need to eat. (If I were an acerbic dowager à la Maggie Smith's Lady Grantham, I would at this point say, we need to find a way to live a meaningful life even though our leaders and our fellow citizens wreak havoc on us through their heavenly foolishness. Though that seems harsh.) Because we must eat I begin to understand, just perhaps, why old civilizations make such a to-do about food. In illustration I remember the story, in the strange classic cookbook The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, of the young French girl, one of the Auberge's later owners -- Mademoiselle Ray I think -- despondent because the Nazi occupation of her country looked to be making it impossible for her to collect the necessaries for her family's traditional Christmas terrine. March had already come, and where on earth was she to get I don't know what, the calves' feet for the decorative aspic, the brandy to soak the raisins, and so on.

Her father saves the day. He comes home one lowering afternoon, that very March, leading a cow. "She was a pregnant cow." A pregnant cow meant a calf near Christmas, therefore calves' feet, therefore calves' foot jelly. "My terrine was saved." The stout patriot safely removed from the fray might ask, why on earth weren't you out in the woods with the partisans circa 1942, instead of worrying about holiday treats? But who knows? Whatever that family's tale of imposed havoc, they had to eat. Denizens of an old civilization, perhaps they were wise and human, humane, to think especially about that terrine. Or, perhaps it's merely mathematically true that old civilizations, suffering much and responsible for much, also happen to have accumulated a lot of recipes.

Regardless. We were talking about needing to eat and about pie, wasn't it? Allow me to shade in a few details.



For years I trusted, tried, and raged against a basic recipe for a 2-crust pie from my most-used kitchen bible, Marion Cunningham's Fannie Farmer Cookbook. Are you ready? It goes like this. Combine:

• 2 cups flour
• 1/2 tsp. salt

Cut in with a pastry blender or two knives:

• 2/3 cup shortening

When the mixture resembles coarse meal or tiny peas, sprinkle over it:

• 1/3 cup ice water, 1 Tablespoon at a time.

Mix lightly only until the dough holds together when pressed gently into a ball. After this, you are ready to roll it out and fill and bake the pie.

Blessings on Marion Cunningham, and may she rest in peace. She died in July 2012, at the age of ninety. But my response to this is "Um, not likely." I have never been able to conjure these ingredients in such a way that a scant 1/3 cup of water moistens 2 cups of flour. And, sprinkling in the water 1 Tablespoon at a time, mixing after each addition, would seem to directly contradict the other important instruction she and all authorities give, namely not to overhandle pie dough lest it grow tough. "Treat it firmly, not timidly, but don't fuss with it."

Oh, I stopped fussing with it. I almost stopped trying to make pies at all, and the few times I did, I kept extremely calm and simply picked up the dry pieces of dough as they shredded there on the table, or fell off the rolling pin. I layered them into my pie plate and carried on with the fruit and the baking. The results were glum.

Then came my Aha! pastry moment. By sheer luck I discovered Dorie Greenspan's Baking with Julia [Child, of course]. And there I found my new pie crust recipe. "If you could have only one pie dough in your repertoire, it would have to be this one," she writes. A lot of cookbook authors say that about a lot of things, but here the lady happens to be right.

Baking with Julia's perfect pie dough

• 5 and 1/4 cups pastry or all-purpose flour
• 1 Tbs. salt
• 1 and 1/2 sticks cold butter, cut in small pieces
• 1 and 1/4 cups chilled vegetable shortening
• 1 cup ice water

Note: the recipe makes enough for two double-crust pies or four single-crust tarts. Combine the flour and salt in a large bowl. Cut in the butter either with a pastry blender or your fingertips, and then cut in the shortening in the same way. When the dough looks like crumbs or "small curds," use a wooden spoon to stir in the ice water all at once. Turn the dough out onto a work surface, knead it only slightly, then wrap it in plastic wrap and and put it in the refrigerator to chill for at least two hours. Then it will be ready to roll out and use as desired.What you don't immediately need will keep well-wrapped in the freezer for about a month.

Here are our "Aha" pie making moments: the use of butter (for flavor) as well as shortening (for flakiness), and proportionally a lot of both; the stirring in of what seems a properly copious amount of ice water -- no dribbles and drops, no delicate tossing after each addition of a scant Tablespoon; finally, the long chilling of the dough. During that time of course you will prepare your filling, which is nothing but fruit and sugar, and you will have time to marvel at how simple the concept of fruit pie is after all. It requires fewer ingredients than cake- or cookie-baking, and there is no fuss over nut-chopping, preparing pans, adding liquid ingredients by thirds, the whipping of egg whites or the boiling of frostings. Small wonder that biographies of pioneer women tell us Mrs. Wyoming or whoever routinely had time to "bake a dozen pies before breakfast."

One more thing. Absent a pastry cutter or a fork, professionals seem obsessed with only permitting us to handle pie dough with the tips of our fingers. (I defy you.) The reason seems to be to avoid warming the dough with our whole hand, melting the chilled butter and ruining the chance for a delicate result (since it is the little crumbs and pieces of butter and flour that bake up to flakiness). I say, use your whole hand, just as you do when making shortcrust doughs you don't "fuss with." Think lemon bars. Getting in there and tussling with the dough enables you to feel it start to turn moist and crumbly as it should. I find the speed obtained from this handling avoids the toughness that comes from too much fiddling with a fork. Professionals will smile, but I give you permission to sacrifice a little spun-gold perfection thereby.

And now you know all. Get out there, dear things, and make a pie, and live that meaningful life. Regardless.

It's pizza in a glass --

heat
spice
green pepper
olives
thick sauce

and yes, even sausage ...



Delicious. Enjoy it with, oh I don't know, pizza?
Carmen wines here; Retail, about $16.

Among my collection of retro and downright antique cookbooks, I am glad to possess a monster called the Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook, edited by Ruth Berolzheimer and published in 1950. The Culinary Arts Institute, not to be confused with today's Culinary Institute of America set on its gorgeous New York campus, seems to have been at one time the pride of Chicago, and Miss Berolzheimer its alpha lioness. Many of the enticing little retro cooking pamphlets to be picked up, just as I did the monster, at antique malls and castoff library book sales -- Cooling Dishes for Hot Weather, Entertaining Six or Eight -- also bear this editress' name, and the name of her institution. Who knows what mid-twentieth century avalanche of long-forgotten hostess, bridal, and housewarming gifts these little remainders represent?



If you want to learn more about Miss Berolzheimer and the Culinary Arts Institute, and how it all began in the 1880s with the Butterick sewing pattern company's PR-and-dress patterns magazine, The Delineator (and how Miss Berolzheimer's surviving nephew in Evanston remembered her as a good organizer -- founded the first Jewish day school in Chicago Heights at the age of seventeen, was only the second woman to graduate from the University of Illinois with a chemical engineering degree -- but not a very good cook -- plus she was "tall, intimidating, crusty, and critical"), if you want to learn more, I say, you can do no better than to consult Mike Sula's article in the Chicago Reader ("The Cookbook Queen," Sept. 11, 2008)..

But perhaps she was not as crusty and intimidating as all that. Every chapter of our monster Encylcopedic Cookbook is titled, endearingly, "Your [topic]." Your 2,000 Facts about Food, Your Egg Dishes, Your Sauces, Gravies, and Dressings, Your Quick Dinners for the Woman in a Hurry. And on and on. We get the impression in glancing over all these titles that Miss Berolzheimer was anxious to soothe and encourage inexperienced young things in the kitchen. Don't fret, her posture seems to say. All this is already "yours."


All right. Let's take her at her word. Let's say we are a Woman in a Hurry. We just worked a ten-hour day. Our "prove up" court date is set for late December. We're worried about what both divorce and Obamacare are going to do to our finances. Leave it to fool men to take away perhaps a third of our income on a kingly whim. Our harassed ancestress circa 1950 lived in a freer time, and would not have had to worry about that. To top it off, our dear gentleman friend faces jury duty and a kidney stone.

Hurry? Yes, please -- but we are only allotted six pages out of an encyclopedic 974 for our rush. We can choose our menus on these six pages from "For the woman who lives alone" and "For the family of 3." That's all. Instructions are even spelled out to the very day: Ms. Berolzheimer, crusty as she may be, seems to think that because we're pressed for time, we may forget things, and will need the week entirely planned out for us. All right. It's Wednesday. On Wednesday she allows us to eat:


I like the fact that she thinks we have taken the trouble to make Fudge Squares preparatory to this evening, precisely as she thinks we are going to cook apricots tonight, for tomorrow's permitted Thursday dessert (Apricot Whip). Here is everything we need to know for Wednesday's dinner, or, "How to go about it (requires 30 minutes)."

Scrub 2 potatoes and cook, covered, in small amount of water. Pare grapefruit, cut out sections and arrange on lettuce. Add French dressing. Chill

Set table. (For the woman who live alone! This is most civilized -- we must all do it.)

Sauté liver and onions.

Peel potato and reheat in butter.

Keep other potato for Friday (You will gash its top and cover it with shredded cheese, then pop it under the broiler to reheat -- it will accompany your pan fried perch.)

Only -- when have we made the radish roses?

Preparation for Thursday.

And the liver itself? Here is "how to go about it:"

Sautéed liver with onions

1/4 pound beef liver, sliced
2 Tablespoons cracker crumbs
1/4 teaspoon salt
dash pepper
3 Tablespoons bacon fat
2 small onions, sliced

Wash liver and drain. Dip into crumbs; season. Fry liver slowly in bacon fat in preheated frying pan until browned on both sides. Add sliced onions and fry slowly until onions are tender.

At just this moment, I want the detective from Laura to stroll in to the shadowy and lace-bedizened apartment, shotgun in the crook of his arm. I want him to smirk about our Career, and about how Dames look when they Get Killed. And I -- the Heroine -- want to drag on my cigarette coolly and say, "I never have been and I never will be bound by anything I don't do of my own free will."

Take that, O kingly men.

When the weather cools down for good, after a burst of very windy late summeriness you might have enjoyed a week ago -- a day ago -- you might in turn be very ready for Apple and Root Vegetable Soup. This comes courtesy of the "Cooking with Bon Appétit" series volume French Country Favorites (The Knapp Press, Los Angeles, 1987). The soup is simply leeks, potatoes, carrots, and apples -- and an onion and celery, if you feel adventurous --

At First Glass will mark its fifth anniversary this coming New Year's Eve, so it plans to celebrate by launching a new theme for the new year. What better than to do a sort of practice run now, and feature a simple recipe on the theme?

At First Glass, you must know, likes -- I like -- lemons. Consider: they are pretty to look at, they go with practically every other basic eatable and drinkable (butter! garlic! sugar! olive oil! cream! gin! and so on!). Stuck with cloves they smell heavenly in a linen closet. Once upon a time they lent their antiseptic and freshening properties to our great-grandmothers' skin and hair care routines. Once upon a time, Mrs. Beeton made them into Lemon Wine (recipe no.1823 of The Book of Household Management -- if you want to make it you will have to lay in fifty lemons and sixteen pounds of sugar, plus have four gallons of water and a "cask" ready). On wallpaper they make a cheerful motif in kitchen decor. They will serve as a battery in sixth-grade science fair projects, though I must admit I am not quite sure why that works.

In any case, let us take our practice run, and stock our virtual pantry today with an abundance of Citrus limon. Because, you know, the things can also be pickled. (Mrs. Beeton did that, too.) Let's make Moroccan Preserved Lemons.

This recipe hails from what is fast becoming my new kitchen Bible, The Gourmet Cookbook edited by Ruth Reichl of Gourmet magazine (Condé Nast, 2004). She in turn credits "Mediterranean food authority Paula Wolfert" for what she has adapted.

Moroccan preserved lemons

You will need:

10 to 12 lemons, 6 to preserve, and the rest for their juice
2/3 cup kosher salt
1/4 cup olive oil

You will also need a 6 cup glass jar with a lid (although I got by with a 32 ounce ex-pickle jar).

First, bring a large pot of water to a boil and blanch the 6 lemons to be preserved, whole, for five minutes. Drain. When they are cool enough to handle, cut each into 8 wedges, discarding the seeds. Toss with the salt in a large bowl, and pack them into the jar along with the salt.

Squeeze the juice from the remaining lemons to measure one cup. Pour enough juice into the jar to cover the wedges, and screw on the lid. Shake gently to mix everything. Let stand at room temperature for five days, shaking gently once a day.

Finally, add the olive oil to the jar and refrigerate. The lemons will keep up to a year.

What Gourmet didn't very forthrightly explain was how we use this pickle in cooking. All you want is the rind. When ready to try your new creation you will fork out a wedge or two from your jar, hold the wedge steady on a cutting board with the fork, and with a spoon scrape away the pulp clinging to the wedge. Then you will thinly slice the rind and add that to whatever stew or soup you are making. (I put the slivered rind of two wedges into a quickly made pork meatballs-and-sauce dish, and found that they lent a certain depth of flavor that was hard to identify, but seemed somehow -- professional.) This should help clarify Ruth Reichl's confusing assurance, at the very beginning of her recipe, that we may "save the pulp for bloody Marys or anything else enlivened by a little juice and salt."

The recipe seems to be a sort of training-wheel version of preserved lemons. From David Lebowitz and Nourished Kitchen, to name just two, we learn a different, slow-food way, in which we skip the blanching, only partly quarter the lemons, pack their interiors with salt and reshape them into wholes again, and then press them tightly down into a jar. Over days and weeks of repeated pressing and weighting, they soften, give off their own juice, and so preserve themselves. They are ready for use in a month, and should be refrigerated then.

Isn't that just like a fine pinot noir: gamy, smoky, fruity, and almost cola-like. Delicious, even a week after opening, with my simple evening snack of crackers and what I call my "boring cheese" (fresh mozzarella).


And now, dear things, I must ask you -- were you elated by the election news, or numbed by it? Here is the best quote I have found, from the best article I read about it. The article is titled "Our Terrifying Message," and the author is David French. He is here talking about the statist, government-will-take-care-of-me outlook which triumphed Tuesday night, "relentlessly reinforced in a news and pop-culture bubble that conservatives simply aren’t penetrating."

Within this liberal bubble, it is simply conventional wisdom that conservatives not only don’t care about those less fortunate but that we will even promote human suffering if it means higher profit margins and more cash in our pockets.

True. You'll hear this wisdom tossed off happily, without thinking, by any number of people in any number of situations. I think they like to think of it as speaking truth to power.

Well. Dear things, I can assure you. I have no wish to promote human suffering.

Now enjoy your crackers and your boring cheese, and your lovely pinot noir.

It's a delightful book, filled with amusing, easily digestible snippets of information arranged in easily digestible double column print. So many wine-themed books these days seem to be such wordy epics nevertheless done on a very small, very personal scale: how I felt when the famed winemaker first showed me the soil composition at Screaming Eagle, while the sun rose behind the trees and flooded the valley, etc. This book is much more relaxed and much more fun. And it is the perfect place to look up quickly the anecdotes or names you have heard of, but don't quite remember where -- the wine called Lacryma Christi, the California wine pioneer named Haraszthy.


Dr. Vine's (how perfect a name) English usage is occasionally shaky, but perhaps that is only because he writes too fast about too much, and mostly mellifluously, to stop and proofread. As for instance, "At the tender age of fifteen, Richard Plantagenet became the duke of Aquitaine, granting him [sic] a vast region ...." " ... a retribution that continues their scorn" was another. "Well-healed" for well-heeled may only be a typo.

(Wasn't it Lin Yutang who said the discovery of small errors in printed matter was one of the joys of life, and that sensible editors would put errors in for the sake of their readers' pleasure?)

Anyway. Highly recommended.

$20.00

Morrison Wood used to be a food writer for the Chicago Tribune in the 1940s and '50s, writing a column, syndicated elsewhere, called "For Men Only." If you turn to a handy link from google newspapers you can see exactly the way his column looked, buried on page 19 of the Toledo Blade (and I don't doubt it looked the same in a good many other papers on a good many other days) -- say on March 2, 1948. Letting your eye roam the rest of that page you'll notice -- my, but the news two generations ago was very closely printed. And it was so full of interesting side information. Household help writers still knew what fuller's earth was. They suggested mixing it with sour milk to make a paste to remove ink stains from clothes. Right beside that you will find one Elsie Robinson, à propos of nothing, remembering the San Francisco earthquake and saying it wasn't all bad. "Earthquakes aren't always a bad force -- they level ground but have similar effect on society," her piece's headline announced. And as luck would have it for us foodies, on this very day in the Blade's "Talk of This 'n' That" feature, Kay Quealy reported that "a milling company" was going to introduce to the world the first "completely new-type cake in 100 years, combining the best qualities of butter and angel food cakes." It was to be called "chiffon" cake. Miss or Mrs. Quealy was quite right. A California insurance salesman named (incredibly) Harry Baker had just sold his cake recipe to General Mills, after keeping it a profound secret at smart Los Angeles dinner parties since the 1920s.

What with Mr. Baker and his cake, and Morrison Wood and his "For Men Only" recipes, and my own notes on Lime Pie and Swiss Almond-Carrot Cake from Glenn Quilty's Food for Men (1954) -- we must ask, was this perhaps an era when the cookery-publishing industry particularly liked the theme of cooking for men? Perhaps so. A little exploration of Google Books will turn up a neat summary from Jessamyn Neuhaus' Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking (2003), subtitled -- oh dear -- Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America. She says:

From 1946 to 1960 at least thirteen cookbooks intended for men appeared in the United States, including Brick Gordon's 1947 The Groom Boils and Stews, Fletcher Pratt and Robeson Bailey's A Man and His Meals also published in 1947, Glenn Quilty's 1954 Food for Men, and Robert Loeb's Wolf in Chef's Clothing, first published in 1950 .... Morrison Wood collected recipes from his travels in a 1949 cookbook entitled With a Jug of Wine.

Thirteen frankly masculine cookbooks in fourteen years of American publishing does not seem an oppressive number. Anyway, our Mr. Wood went on to write two more books, More Recipes with a Jug of Wine (1961) and Through Europe with a Jug of Wine (1962). This is the source we will use today.

Through Europe with a Jug of Wine dates not only from the era of manly cookbooks, but from the era when people, stylish people or wealthy people or old-fashioned people or maybe just people who had saved their money and felt like doing it, traveled to Europe on ocean liners and stayed there for a year and a half. The Woods lived a chunk of life straight out of the novel Dodsworth, except I don't think Mrs. Wood -- and she is always Mrs Wood, "Mrs. Wood enjoyed the cheese platter," "Mrs. Wood stayed at the hotel that rainy morning" -- ran off with impoverished young German barons, nor did Mr. Wood get fed up and move in with the beautiful and quiet expatriate widow Edith in her airy stone house in Naples. Dodsworth is also a great movie, by the way, and one of the few in which you will get to see Mary Astor play someone besides the twitchy villainness of The Maltese Falcon.

My favorite lines in the whole cookbook come right away, on the first page of the Introduction, and they reflect just this era of the very long European vacation. It must have been quite a holiday:

After some time in Paris we motored through France down to the Riviera. The weather in France (and all over the northern hemisphere, according to the newspapers) was cold and stormy, so we rented a lovely apartment in St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, right on the Mediterranean. We remained there three months, making many trips to the interior of Mediterranean Provence. Next we set out for Italy, and quite thoroughly covered that wonderful country ....

We're glad they did. And we don't mean to sound faintly derisive. The handful of readers who take the trouble nowadays to get an account at Amazon so that they can write unheralded cookbook reviews all rave about Morrison Wood. "Best cookbook I own, and I own 400," etc. This is significant because Woods' recipes are, -- not especially fussy, nor especially unfussy -- not especially quick or especially time-consuming -- not especially unusual or especially plain. What they are is somehow grown-up: they seem to breathe an experience of good food of all sorts and of many places. Naturally. The book is the result of travel. Whether you make the almost-street-food Mozzarella in Carrozza (fried cheese sandwiches) as Romans do, or Pan Am airlines' Tournedos Heloise (steak with foie gras, mushrooms, truffle, and artichoke bottoms -- "a masterpiece"), you will be making some very fine things that professionals placed before paying diners a half century ago, and that a sophisticate like Mr. Woods appreciated. That says a lot.

So at last we come to the recipe for today, from the German months of the good couple's long-ago trip. (Not to be derisive, but how did they tear themselves away from St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat?) "We had a most savory pork chop dish in a little wayside inn on the 'Romantic Road' from Wurzburg to Augsburg," Morrison Wood remembers. "I failed to put down the German name, but it consisted of pork chops, apples, and beer."

When I made it I changed it to pork shoulder (or "Boston butt," if your supermarket calls it that), a fatty, tough cut requiring long stewing, because modern day pork chops are so lean and dry in whatever manner they are cooked. I added cider and garlic, which are perhaps un-German, but which showed up in Gourmet's "Cider-braised pork shoulder with caramelized onions" when I used that for a cross reference. So they seem right.



Braised pork shoulder à la Morrison Wood

one 3 to 4 pound pork shoulder, bone in (in my suupermarket, now called a Boston butt)
2 Tablespoons butter or bacon drippings
1 medium onion, diced
2 Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored, and "rather thickly" sliced
1 and 1/2 cups beer
3/4 cup cider
2 cloves garlic, left whole
3 whole cloves
1 bay leaf
1 strip lemon rind (please don't omit this. It's the sort of small, sophisticated detail that Wood revels in, and I thought it made a difference.)

Preheat the oven to 300 F. Heat the butter or bacon drippings in a heavy skillet, and when the fat is hot, put in and brown the pork on all sides. Remove it to a platter, and add and sauté the onion, diced, until it is soft and fragrant. Add the apples, and fry briefly until they begin to soften a little.

Return the pork to the pot, and pour on the beer and cider. Add garlic, cloves, bay leaf, and lemon rind. Bring to a boil, cover, and place in oven. Bake for 3 to 4 hours, until the meat is fork tender.

"Serve from the casserole, and of course the perfect accompaniment is tall glasses of chilled beer."

Or a delectable German riesling?



.

Green pepper, smoke and -- could it be -- very rich, dark roasted apples?

We wax poetic. Anyway, it is delicious. Another fine sample from last week's Wines of Chile Live blogger tasting. We are almost beginning to think carmenere is our new favorite grape.




Koyle Vineyards here; retail, about $27

My daughter gave me the idea. She is a great reader of mystery and suspense novels, and she says men consistently write better books in the field than women.

I believe it and I'll go further than that. Here is my thumbnail guide (or is it nutshell?) to all of world literature.

Male author:

"Then Sir Ralph and the Duke chose weapons, and the Duke died of being run through the belly."

Female author:

"Corisande -- called Ree by an eccentric aunt since childhood -- felt strangely upset and sad that morning."

Am I being snappish? Perhaps. The week was rather long and hectic. But just think -- if you know all world lit. in a nutshell, you have all that extra time to go and mix a cocktail. Here are two of my newest:

Havana #2, from the Calvert Party Encyclopedia (1960). A bit sweet, but good.

1 and 1/2 ounces (a jigger) light rum
1 ounce (2 Tablespoons) pineapple juice
1/2 ounce (1 Tablespoon) lemon juice

Shake with ice in a cocktail shaker, and strain into a cocktail glass.

Pink Creole, from Schumann's American Bar. Cream-based drinks do not seem to me to be fortuitous creations. Remember the disappointment of the porto flip. But perhaps you'll have a better experience with this one.

dashes lemon juice
dash grenadine
1/4 ounce (1 and 1/2 teaspoons) cream
2 ounces (a jigger plus a Tablespoon) white rum

Shake well with ice in a cocktail shaker, strain into a cocktail glass.

The rest of the day is yours.


Free image from Tack-o-Rama. Is this the actress who played the cold, bitchy sister in Katharine Hepburn's Holiday (1939)?

If no one minds, I will start with the random thoughts. Dear things, I have seen two or three episodes, and I regret to say I am not impressed with the famous Downton Abbey. Apart from the beautiful clothes on beautiful people, and the tart amusing short speeches given Maggie Smith, I see nothing much going on. The four leading women characters seem barely to interact, even though they are meant to be mother and grown daughters. (The actresses' ages seem all wrong, too.) There is no real feeling between the earl and his countess. And what actually happens as the stories play out? The eldest daughter, Mary, ought to marry Matthew but doesn't, and cries when he leaves. Then he comes back and leaves again, and she cries. The nice valet, Mr. Bates, mysteriously and nobly leaves his lordship's service. Then he comes back, and then he nobly leaves again. His fiancée cries. The aforementioned countess and mother of the three grown daughters slips on a bar of soap while miraculously pregnant again, and miscarries. (Why not a banana peel?) Just when some major plot is brewing, servants overhear all the right things and go to the earl with revelations that still the brewing. Chauffeurs confess undying love to the daughters of the house, because "times are changing." Then they leave. The daughters look stunned, and cry. World War I breaks out, and the men go to fight -- well, drink tea -- in incredibly clean and tidy trenches.

And so on. One hates to cavil. But it is small wonder that when Maggie Smith sweeps in with her furs and her hat, and glares that they must all buck up because "Great-Aunt Roberta loaded the guns at Lucknow," -- the show comes alive, and we start to enjoy ourselves.

Speaking of enjoying ourselves, and thoroughly, it seems that one of the sources for Downton Abbey is the fascinating book To Marry an English Lord, first published -- mercy, how time flies -- twenty-three years ago by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace (Workman Publishing, New York, 1989). I can be smug about it, since I bought it then and so actually own what is now an out of print copy, complete with beautiful cover art all done in a motif of pink and gray marble edged in bright green. But you must go out and get your own copy too. It is wonderfully entertaining. Buried in the sidebar of page 147 -- and the picture- and anecdote-crammed book does look as though it were designed on-line even in those pre-internet days -- is a menu for a Spring Luncheon on "the Vanderbilts' first yacht, the Alva." On a certain April 2 (in what year? sometime before 1895, by which time the Vanderbilts divorced and the Alva sank off Martha's Vineyard), someone wrote in a quick, loose, but nicely legible hand that lunch would be eggs à la Aurore, lobster, tournedos [very thin-cut tenderloin steak] and marrow, potatoes, spinach, asparagus and "Sce. Hollandaise," chicken and watercress, salad, "crèpes aux confitures [a confection or sweetmeat, Webster says]," cheese, dessert, and café.


It sounds lovely. Only, what -- no wines? Speaking further of enjoying ourselves, thoroughly, do take a look at the book review blog maintained now by Carol Wallace, one of To Marry an English Lord's authors. She calls it Book Group of One ("too cranky for the real thing") and she is at present pounding her way beautifully through all twenty-odd novels of the great Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. I must read more than just the first one.

It so happens that on my Kindle I also have a cookbook hailing from about the Downton Abbey/Marry an English Lord era. It's called The Cook's Decameron, and was written by a Mrs.W. G. Waters in 1901. Our authoress here frames her two hundred-plus Italian recipes in a story, by which we understand that ten English friends of an Italian lady, the widowed Marchesa di Sant'Andrea, have all lost the services of their respective cooks at once; and so, commiserating with one another in the Marchesa's London apartments, where they have forgathered to cancel invitations and make new dinner plans, they agree to her idea to bring them to a country retreat for a few weeks and give them cooking lessons. Ten friends cooking for ten days will end up producing at least a hundred recipes. Hence, the nice little tribute to Boccacio's fourteenth-century Decameron.

I wonder whether Mrs. W. G. Waters simply liked this quaint frame for her recipes, or whether in proper Downton Abbey days, an Italian cookbook for English readers was considered outré enough to require some sort of slightly strained literary pedigree. Regardless, she puts two other, practical reasons for her book. She says, first, that Italian cooking should be a welcome change since most English people never eat non-English food unless they travel, in which case they stick to Europe, big hotels, and big cities, and therefore eat only poor imitation French fare. And second, she says the recipes she will present are valuable especially for the use they make of inexpensive but good ingredients, such as variety meats and vegetables. Certainly from The Cook's Decameron you will quickly learn the Italian for sweetbreads (animelle), and calves' brains (cervello), should you wish either to try them or avoid them.

Shall we think about making something fairly easy and familiar, like one of her desserts? This is "No. 212, Crema rappresa (Coffee Cream)." No mollycoddling of her readers for her -- no measured ingredients or to-the-minute instructions. It's 1901, and you and your Cook (Mrs. Waters thanks her own devoted Mrs. Mitchell in the preface) are understood to be already fairly competent. Hop to:

Ingredients: Coffee, cream, eggs, sugar, butter. Bruise five ounces of freshly roasted Mocha coffee, and add it to three-quarters of a pint of boiling cream; cover the saucepan, let it simmer for twenty minutes, then pass through a bit of fine muslin. In the meantime mix the yolks of ten eggs and two whole eggs with eight ounces of castor [superfine] sugar and a glass of cream; add the coffee cream to this and pass the whole through a fine sieve into a buttered mould. Steam in a bain-marie [double boiler] for rather more than an hour, but do not let the water boil; then put the cream on ice for about an hour, and before serving turn it out on a dish and pour some cream flavoured with stick vanilla round it.

Way back, when we titled this post " 'What a goofy niche!' -- and other random thoughts," we said we would start with random thoughts. Now for the goofy niche. Would you believe I had to smile in glassy-eyed perplexity when a customer said just that to me, as he marveled at a new line of wines? They are called the Pairings Collection, and come from the ancient ("depuis 1725") French company Barton & Guestier. The charming labels tell you, I think, all you need to know about what foods might pair nicely with these five new wines. You might, for instance, try this below, to accompany lobster and shrimp.


There is also a "Chops & Burgers" red Bordeaux, a "Salmon & Trout" white Bordeaux, a "Chicken & Turkey" Côtes du Rhône and a "Crackers & Cheese" Beaujolais. "Food pairing just got easier," as the website says. The marketing idea is as clever as can be and the wines are pleasant for the $9.99 price tag. Nevertheless my customer looked twice at the stack of wines in the aisle, seemed to stagger, and then walked toward me, chuckling and shaking his head. "Who would think of that?" he asked, gesturing backwards. He seemed not at all sarcastic but truly at a loss. "What a goofy niche! I mean, in my opinion."

I kept on with the smile and the glassy-eyed stare. He went away. If I were a character played by Maggie Smith I might have thought of something about the guns at Lucknow.