WXRT's cowbell "dog whistle," plus more French wine

Slice of life: I am at work, and the radio station playing all over the store is Chicago's own hoary, too cool for words "classic rock" WXRT. I distinctly remember being confused, as a child of seven, about what "classic rock" meant. (The station went live in 1972.) I thought that " 'XRT" was going to play both classical music and rock, which struck me as a strange but good idea: imagine hearing something of Mozart or Beethoven, followed by the Rolling Stones or Iggy Pop's "Real Wild Child" from the same station. Nobody seemed able to elucidate matters for me, back in the Nixon era. And 'XRT never played any Mozart.

Fast forward to 2015. The same staff are on the payroll. The pushing-seventy-year-old Terri Hemmert was in her glory, two days ago, remembering Doctor Martin Luther King Junior, and how she was in college at the time, and those were dark days, my friends. Then she played John Lennon's "Imagine."

Yesterday, a different host played a brief sound bite of Senator Ted Cruz reacting to the previous night's State of the Union speech. The senator from Texas said that the President's tax-and-spend proposals reminded him of an old skit from Saturday Night Live starring Christopher Walken, "where, if you remember, there is a band playing and his solution to every problem is ‘more cowbell,’ ‘more cowbell.’ Well, for President Obama, ‘more cowbell,’ is ‘more taxes, more government,’ ‘more taxes, more government.'”

After playing this bit, 'XRT seguéd immediately into the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women" (1969), a song which begins with a cowbell. And that, my fatheads, was all the comment our own hoary, too cool for words classic rock station needed to make, to reassure its listeners that Ted Cruz, conservative, is an uncool moron trying to prove his chops by quoting the always-cool Saturday Night Live -- with Christopher Walken, icon of The Deer Hunter Russian roulette scene, thrown in! -- and therefore failing miserably. That Cruz looks like a young Bill Murray playing a dopey senator from Texas only hilariously closes the circle of uncoolness.

Anyone who has pointed out in the last few years that Republicans have a branding problem, at least with the cool people if not with voters, hasn't gone far enough. Republicans and conservatives together have a "branding problem" with the cool people in the way the Jews of 1930s Germany had a branding problem with Nazis. Another political minority, as it happened. At the heart of it, know this. Dear Senator: and others: you are never going to be allowed to define yourself with this aggressive and beatifically smug minority; they will define you. That's brand failure, surely. You'll recall that the brand of the European Jew only recovered, a little, after considerable violence.

Anyway all this is no reason we can't have a glass of wine. You'll recall also that we have decided to drink more French wines in the new year. Such as 2010 Château des Arnauds (the producer), Cuvée des Capucins (the blend in this bottle); from Lalande de Pomerol, the A.O.C. or, is it now the A.O.P. (the region of Bordeaux the wine comes from)? In sum, a four-year-old merlot blend, inexpensive, good. Retail, about $13, possibly half that on sale.

(Pictures of) things forbidden by Islam

Pluot likes to think it has a reason to pay attention to the serious things of this world, even though a wine, food, and cocktail blog maybe shouldn't. It seems frivolous and disrespectful to the dead to do so; but it seems ignorant and disrespectful to the dead not to do so.
  

The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were murdered because they drew unflattering pictures of Mohammed. (Although to say even that is to degrade their memory. They were murdered because their murderers were evil men who "made the personal decision to end their lives." Years ago when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, I remember a rabbi at a memorial service used exactly those words to describe the crime -- the Prime Minister was killed not "because of" his political acts but because one man made the personal decision that Yitzhak Rabin should not go on living. The responsibility is the killers', no one else's.) Molly Norris is still in hiding -- incredibly -- because she drew lots of little pictures of ordinary things , each one cartoonishly announcing "I'm the real Mohammed!" -- a cup and saucer, a spool of thread. No kidding.

Only there are so many things forbidden in Islam. To draw or post pictures of any or all of them is barely to begin to inventory Western civilization. Andrew McCarthy offers a partial list: Islam forbids:

• musical instruments
• "pictures of animate life" -- people, animals, plants; so, oddly enough I suppose you could draw a picture of a harp or a violin, but not have one or play one
• singing, unless unaccompanied by instruments and based on Muslim texts encouraging obedience to Allah. Go here for a taste of the former Cat Stevens expressing his longing for "victory over the kuffar" in one of these "nasheeds."
• drinking alcohol   
• women leaving their homes without male permission and/or uncovered

And so on. Therefore the wine bottle label shown above, Orin Swift's Abstract (retail, about $30), is offensive to Islam on several points. We are looking at pictures of animate life, pictures of uncovered women, we are looking at alcohol. Just think what else, not on this label but in general, is not merely "offensive" to display, but not permitted in life.

A harpsichord, decorated with pictures of animate life.

A harp. Pink! And ...

...if musical instruments are forbidden, then so is Mozart. 

And so is she. Maria Callas. Woman, uncovered, outside the home without male permission. Singer. Triple, or is it quadruple? whammy.

Animate life, woman, uncovered, etc. 

You get the idea, above, as Bacchus offers you a glass of wine, and below, as you admire animate life. And there is a woman in the sun, rather well-covered actually.  But still.

Let's have more wine. Appropriately, almost all those pictured here today are rich, opulent, port-like reds. Good for winter sipping and winter meals, good for symbolizing our rich, opulent civilization. Don't take it for granted.

The Cuttings, from The Prisoner wine company. Retail, about $50.

Fog Head pinot noir. Not as port-like as the previous two wines, but a pinot noir also not, I daresay, made in the spare or earthy Burgundian style. And delicious, too. Retail, about $20.

Quinta do Noval Late Bottled Vintage port, 2005. Retail (if available) about $30. Port-like, because it's, well -- port. Note the tart, clean juiciness that sprawling, lush California jam-bombs tend not to have.

Now I have uploaded quite a few images that are not mine, so it is possible that in a few weeks or months, the interwebs' copyright patrol might find them and take them down, even though I have been careful to link to all their sources. So here are a few others, all my own. I call them Animate Life.

(You can barely tell, but a heron keeps pace with a speedboat here. Or, as Ayatollah Khomeini once said, "there is no fun in Islam.")

2013 Domaine Laroque, from the land of the Cathars

Enclosed please find a tasty French bargain, a southern Rhône-type blend. Looks more daunting than it is. We love the romantic sounding appellation, Cité de Carcassonne. Although, really, Cité de Carcassonne is not an appellation, it is legally a lower-tier Indication Géographique Protégée. This means the wine's sourcing and making has proceeded under less stringent controls than an AOP (Appellation d'Origine Protégée) wine. You may remember that today's AOP wines are the AOCs (Appellation d'Origine Controlée) of yesteryear. Go here for a neat summary of "recent changes to French wine law," and for a sensible assessment of Why They Did It. Declining sales seems to sum it up. We know a little about that. 

We say the IGP of Cité de Carcassonne sounds romantic, but we don't know the half of it. Carcassonne is a medieval walled city in the south of France, "painstakingly restored" as TripAdvisor tells us, not too far from the Mediterranean to the east and the Spanish border to the south. To look at tourist photos of the site, to look at course upon course of jagged gray stone battlements capped by small conical towers (that's the painstakingly restored part, apparently none too authentic), all surrounded by greenery and all gleaming in the summer sun, is to transport oneself back eight hundred years or more. We are peasants tramping this road by the apple trees below the walls. We are tending the grapevines in a July or August heat. We are standing on the narrow high ramparts -- or we are worried about our sons manning those ramparts -- gazing anxiously across the tumbled green rocky landscape towards some fresh army, commanded by some besieging Raymond VI or Roger IV. Romantic, yes maybe, but a ghost from that time might like to come forward and smack us full in the face for saying so, because it is also romantic in the way Iraq ruled by the Islamic State today is romantic. In other words, not at all. 

Eight hundred years ago, it seems Carcassonne and its neighbor towns, Toulouse, Béziers, Albi, were the centers not only of the part of modern France called variously the Midi, Occitania, Aquitaine, or the Languedoc, but of a strange, thriving half-Christian religion, Catharism, which the French monarchy and the Catholic church required almost the whole of the 13th century to put down. This war, done in two phases lasting nine years (1209-1218) and then forty-six years (1225-1271), is called the Albigensian Crusade. Its pretext had been the assassination of a papal legate in the south; for a generation before that, worried church General Councils had failed to cope with the heresy, the Cathars ignoring even the powerhouse preaching of Dominic Guzman, St. Dominic himself. The wars' worst moment came in the year 1244, when the Cathar stronghold of Montségur fell to thousands-strong royal and papal armies, and several hundred defeated men, women, and children were dragged down the mountain and thrown alive into one pyre. Think ISIS.

I am not the one to tease out all the right details of a terrible story. What interests me more, since the poor souls in question have been at rest for eight centuries, is the way modern people tell and re-tell it, even inhabit it, now. Today's Catholic Encyclopedia online shows us a scholarly article from 1907 going into calm detail about the Cathars' doctrinal links to other neo-Manichean sects, but saying little about any violence except to acknowledge that the death penalty was "inflicted on them too readily." In his survey The Divine Order, Henry Bamford Parkes (1969) chronicles ghastly European centuries in which European feudalism itself takes the blame: even though the arrangement of society into small fiefs worked by peasants and ruled by armed men made sense when that was the only answer to the Mad Max-ian chaos of barbarian invasion, that same arrangement fed upon itself when Goths and Vikings were gone. Bad enough that younger sons had no way to get land but to conquer it from their fathers' neighbor over the hill or beyond. Add the Church's assurance that looters could also earn forgiveness of sin and centuries exempt from Purgatory by killing heretics (Parkes claims), and you have a workable recipe for another army at the gates of Carcassonne -- or Béziers or Albi -- decade after decade after decade. "The sacking of a city," he says, "was an orgiastic performance, the most pleasurable available to medieval man, offering a release from all moral inhibitions that was quite as complete as the most savage of primitive fertility rituals and much more bloody and destructive." Think ISIS.

This is where other voices re-telling the story, even inhabiting it, come in. The Cathars had a bizarre and grim faith, but in some ways it was very much after our soft modern hearts. They believed that the universe was subject to two divinities, one good and one evil, and that everything in the visible world had been created by the evil one. Therefore the body, food, animals, sex, procreation -- essentially all life was bad. The soul, created by the good principle, longed only for escape and reunion with heavenly good. Suicide was thus commendable, preferably by starvation (endura), and concubinage outranked marriage because it was less permanent. Homosexuality was better than sex between man and wife, precisely because it did not lead to the evil of more children. They also believed that Jesus, "very perfect" but a mere creature, had not lived on earth as a man -- since as the Redeemer and the epitome of good he could not take on flesh -- but had only appeared to do so. We begin to see why the Cathars caught the attention of the still struggling-to-grow Church.

Where their beliefs most please our soft modern hearts is in their pacifism, egalitarianism, vegetarianism, and their rejection (poignantly enough) of capital punishment. We hear also that they were tolerant, wealthy, cultured -- the troubadour songs, the medical school in Toulouse -- leisured, democratic, but nobly defiant of the medieval Church's blowhard corruption, and so on. Although they had rules of their own, too. "The necessity of absolute fidelity to the sect was strongly inculcated."

We love this. It's easy to get romantic about a sunny land that seems to have been populated with sunny people, especially if we moderns in our reading and research strike gold in that sunny word, tolerance. Surf the net and you will find modern people who want to inhabit this story. They fancy themselves Cathars, guided by spirits from the thirteenth century and signing their PDF reports, deliciously, by the title Parfaite. The Cathars' egalitarian priestly hierarchy -- celibate, mind you -- were called this, men being parfaits and women parfaites. Modern people also can be bewitched, it seems to me, simply by the musical names of the old Occitan language: there are martyred heroes called Belisenne and Caraman, heroines called Esclaramonde and Aude, there are beautiful place names like Pamiers, Fanjeaux, Foix and Pereilha. Go here for a long and impossibly tender tale of the orphaned young female knight/sorceress/animal whisperer, another Esclaramonde, illegitimate daughter of the ravishing and tender fallen abbess Na Ermengarda, who had returned to her lands in Telho to give birth when her position in the convent became impossible. I should say so. We don't hear what sort of convent it was, Catholic or Cathar. 

I love this. I am always interested in modern people who try to bring, not just the spiritual but the supernatural into their lives in at least a somewhat serious way, and I am interested in the effort of imagination it takes to believe you are a part of a past group. I was a convert myself but at least I joined a present group. If you wish to inhabit this particular, dreamy story, there's no risk in being "a Cathar," but also no real comfort. No northern baron, no Sir Boeuf will drag you down from Montségur and throw you into a fire -- although if you are a Christian in Iraq, ISIS will -- nor can any fellow worshiper give you the Consolamentum, or stand tenderly impressed if you choose to die by the endura. Owing to both these facts, the stresses on one's true, religious enthusiasm must be immense and also ridiculous. What then is the appeal? I can only think it's really the enjoyment of a rich fantasy life, combined with a feeling of safe, retroactive superiority to Christianity and maybe the West in general, as deservedly defanged institutions. This is why I take the glowing information about the Cathars with a large grain of salt. It's not that the Catholic church's and the French state's violence against them was not horrific; it's just that when a group of people are so very congenial to the most fashionable modern attitudes that we begin to see them as tender knight/sorceress/animal whisperers, as people possessed of a perfect worldview ("paratge,") lost to human understanding forever, I begin to wonder. Were they not also human beings? With flaws and pettinesses? What did they do to you if you questioned them? "Fidelity to the sect strictly inculcated." Again, we consult the Catholic Encyclopedia. 

Moreover these sects were in the highest degree aggressive, hostile to Christianity itself, to the Mass, the sacraments, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and organization; hostile also to feudal government by their attitude towards oaths, which they declared under no circumstances allowable. Nor were their views less fatal to the continuance of human society, for on the one hand they forbade marriage and the propagation of the human race, and on the other hand they made a duty of suicide through the institution of the Endura (see CATHARI). It has been said that more perished through the Endura (the Catharist suicide code) than through the Inquisition.

Admittedly this is a "hostile" source, but as far as I can see the hostile sources also tell us of the Cathars' sophistication, leisure, vegetarianism, and tolerance. In the middle ages they "poured all over Western Europe," the Encyclopedia says. This is startling. Invaders pour. We have visions not of Joan Sutherland as Esclaramonde in white veils, but of the garbage-strewn rape camps and the well-to-do, chanting, young, malicious ignoramus-protesters of Occupy Wall Street. We forget how much of Europe then was young, young, painfully and stupidly and ferociously young. Thirty Cathars had already reached England in the 1160s. Henry II had them branded on their foreheads with hot irons, whipped, and then turned out ... to starve. (It was forbidden to aid them.) Why? Again it's not that we are looking for ways to "blame the victim," or that we don't acknowledge completely innocent suffering. Have you ever known people who kept a copy of Mein Kampf in their homes, because "they wanted to find out Hitler's side of the story"? Sometimes when it comes to innocent suffering there isn't another side to the story. There is only suffering. The troubadours fleeing Montségur wrote bitter songs on the triumph of evil.

No, anyway it's just to look for the truth about an old, unhappy, far off thing. And to note that today's morning-dew "Cathars" or even their sympathizers would fit perfectly into Mapp and Lucia, or some other mid-1920s English social-comedy novel stuffed with harmless lorgnette-carrying London eccentrics. Perhaps that's very lucky for us, I mean the harmless part. As to the wine, the Cité de Carcassonne IGP which we opened ages ago -- remember? -- the wine which the parfaits would have considered just a part of this evil world; it retails for about $10. Enjoy it.      

Pluot turns seven! (in a way) and --

 -- I was going to say, " -- and fights climate change," sarcastically, because I just had a (let us say) communication from a (let us say, extremely distant) colleague to warn that the taste of wine as we know it may soon vanish as our planet warms, and vineyards of olden time are ruined from the heat.

It's absurd, of course, but polite people are trained not to question another's religion, and this is what this is. (Then again, why are the left-wing religious allowed to trumpet their beliefs at all times and places?) Merely to start with, my colleague either has never heard of, or doesn't care about, the East Anglia emails, about the fraud of the Hockey-Stick graph, about no warming having taken place for going on twenty years, about robustly expanding Arctic ice caps and thriving polar bears. Nor can he or his fellows I think ever have questioned how the Earth could have been a hothouse jungle in the age of the dinosaurs, when there were no evil humans to drive cars or pollute the atmosphere, nor again how it could have endured Ice Age upon Ice Age geologically very recently, recovering in between -- passim climate change, no? -- again without evil humans doing much about it. 

For no, that is not what global warming climate change is about. For all the believers it is about man's depravity, and about the need of a faithful elite to absolve him of his sin and guide him to a clean utopia, sometime in the future. Never mind those clanking chains you hear, and the doors being shut and bolted all around. It is all for everyone's good, and we shall all be happy soon. Meanwhile the struggle gives life-purpose to all kinds of people, especially those who were born to be high priests, or inquisitors or maybe just village bullies.

I am convinced "within myself," as characters in Jane Austen novels used elegantly to put it, of three things: one, that our descendants will one day laugh delightedly at the image of us, worrying about climate change ruining all our wines (incidentally, don't utopian left-wingers scoff wisely at "First World problems"?); two, that some portion of Western humanity still has not come to grips with the Industrial Revolution, and yearns wild-eyed to go back to the days of rural quiet and Jane Austen novels -- before "the fatal knowledge of machinery," as a character mourns in a far different novel, the once-blockbuster Lost Horizon; and three, that we should all thank God Western man has at least made moral progress enough to spare us our frustrated utopians' coming after us with fire and the stake, as their spiritual precursors once did. When a high priest or a simple bully has no argument for his plans except "shut up," violence must be horribly tempting.

So here at Pluot we fight climate change by laughing at it, remembering the proverb [the devil hates to be laughed at]. We believe that no man has the right to make another human being say that what is false is true, and vice versa; no one has the right to insist a whole society agree dementia is sanity, and vice versa. And we raise a nice glass of Champagne to Pluot's seventh anniversary -- well, in a way. My dear fatheads know the tale of the blog At First Glass going along swimmingly for six whole years, from one New Year's Eve to the next, at its own address, atfirstglass.com. Then despite best efforts to renew it, I lost access to the domain name, and in a slight panic rebooted here. Six years of At First Glass and one of Pluot equals seven for Pluot, right? The Champagne is Laurent Perrier's Cuvée Rosé brut. 

I've decided I can't really explain the goodness of champagne or fine sparkling wines adequately. Really knowledgeable people talk about feminine and masculine styles; I was told years ago that the classic signs of great champagne are the aroma of biscuit or toast, plus the smallest and longest-lasting bubbles -- and you start your champagne knowledge from there. In time you may notice cheaply made sparkling wines have a strange taste and mouthfeel in comparison, not at all like biscuit and bubbles, but somehow like sour pickle juice and syrupiness. What good champagnes are, I thought as I sipped last night and tried to analyze delicacy and fruit and so on, are addictive in the way chocolate chip cookie dough is addictive. Chocolate chip cookie dough is marvelously unlike real cookies, as sparkling wine is unlike other wine. Yet you just keep fingering it up from the bowl in fascination.   

  
 Retail, about $60.

New Year, new you: try French wine

It's like this. In the store the aisles of domestic red wines, especially the cabernet aisle, are a mess. It's not that the nice young fellow who takes care of them isn't tidy, although there is that. Rather, so much product is crammed into the space, so much sells through and so many new things arrive so often, that it's a tough job to squeeze it all in and still make it "shoppable," as we say in the trade. Meanwhile, the shoppers agonize over all their choices. Will this wine, or that one, taste right with this meal? Will it please these guests? "We always try one new cabernet a year." Will it be the perfect experience? What if my favorite wine has gone to a new vintage? How do the 2012s compare to the '11s?

It's not that I'm making fun, although there is that. Rather, just five steps away from these hundreds of Domestic Reds lies the French wine aisle -- two of them, both sides -- where few people venture. It's tidy. Everything is shoppable, "double-faced" as we say in the trade (two bottles of each wine face the consumer, prim and at attention). There are choices, not just among two superb grape varieties made in the two best vineyards in Napa Valley in the last two years, but choices ranging from Alsace's rieslings to the Loire's Vouvray and Sancerre to all of Burgundy's options, red and white, to all of Bordeaux's options, red and white, to all the Rhône Valley's options, red and white. Champagne has its own aisle, as does Sauternes. More of everything lies behind lock and key, in "the cellar."

There are also choices in the French aisle because not much sells through. Are you worried about vintages, or about whether a wine is ready to drink now? Go to the French aisle. You will find wines from 2005, '06, '09, look closely and you may even see an '03 or a 2000. Lots of 2010s, 2011s, and '12s of course. You can pick up a "vertical," a selection of wines from one producer made in different years, without too much trouble. As for cost, you can spend as little or as much as you like. I'm told that some of the $10 Bordeaux on the bottom shelf are actually the closely guarded and always-prestigious "futures" of yesteryear.

As for taste, now here I suppose is the nub. Why drink French wine? In a way, everyone agonizing over the exuberant mess in the California cabernet aisle is drinking French wine; cabernet sauvignon is the grape of Bordeaux and if we were to confine ourselves truly to our native grapes, we would be very moderately enjoying things like Muscadine (scuppernong) and catawba. Why not go to the source? When people hesitate, I tell them this: it seems to me that whereas California cabernets and red blends tend to coat the tongue in a delicious, spicy and lush and somewhat flabby way, French wines have a core that you almost eat. I say this with a straight face, and so far no one has laughed.

Why do they hesitate, still and always? Why is there little to do in the French wine aisle except dust the bottles? I suspect it has to do with the novice's fear (yes, yes, aren't we all) of not getting the very best of any product whose reputation, vague but mammoth, precedes it. Of course the language barrier is no help. "I have no idea what I'm looking at with all these 'Chateaus,' I'll just stick with Howell Mountain." 

So I exhort you. Go to the French aisle in your liquor store. An experiment costing $12 there may please you just as much as a sure thing from the Russian River Valley of $20 or above. Remember, RRV -- as we say in the trade -- is essentially trying to imitate the French anyway. As for quality assurances, i.e. the novice's fear of wasting his money on less than the very best, I suppose it's mostly the famed classification of Bordeaux in the 1850s that freaked everybody out for generations and still does. In 1855, some guys running a World's Fair in Paris ranked several dozen French wines as the best to show off to the world. Sixty were red Bordeaux and one was a sweet white dessert wine, also from Bordeaux (Château d'Yquem). All those classed growths are still there. But Bordeaux produces 800 million bottles of wine every year (Herbst, The New Wine Lover's Companion). Don't worry about it all. Just try something new.

2009 Château de Lisennes Bordeaux Supérieur (a notch above "basic" Bordeaux, like Mouton Cadet), retail, about $13.  Curiously, this particular wine is only available, in the U.S., in Illinois. There are many other nice French wines. 

For more information on affordable Bordeaux wines, see Planet Bordeaux. Or in French, cleverly, Planète Bordeaux. 

New cocktail: MAILER-DAEMON failure notice: "Mailbox full"

Why on earth anybody responds to a famous author's writings is beyond me. I guess we all think we're going to give the great man pause in some superb way, or we're going to be discovered, too. All we get is a ding in our inboxes, encouraging us to subscribe to whatever online magazine the famous author writes for; or we get a MAILER DAEMON failure notice. This time it was "mailbox full," which I gather is unusual in these post-floppy-disk days. Oh well. Here's what I wrote him. His groupies, know him as VDH.  

Dear Mr. Victor Davis Hanson,

Every once in a while, I think your editors ask you to write something optimistic, and the "Still Dazzling" article seems to me to be the latest. Right on schedule too, around Christmastime. They always seem to follow a more heartfelt (and depressing) piece chronicling the disintegration of life in rural CA. Anyway thank you for the dose of good cheer.

You're right, it's all about ordinary people carrying on, the trouble is it's also the ordinary people who foot the bills, and I sometimes think authentic crisis will come when ordinary people figure out they have no voice left except tax revolt. Then we may see what the government is willing to do to get their hands on the money.

I also agree with something Dennis Prager said years ago, that liberalism is a religion. Using politics to fight it does not work. Eighteenth century political cycles, i.e. voting every two years, move too slowly to keep up with 21st century, left-wing compassion tyranny. Or royal edicts, for that matter. I sometimes think a true opposition leader, when he comes, will be a religious figure -- not even necessarily a pastor or Bible-thumper, but someone with some kind of inner core that will be impervious to the weapons of the entrenched media/academic elite. I look forward to the first president who does not have a White House press corps, and sends no representatives to "the Sunday morning shows." I think maybe he'll choose to live in Detroit, or Branson, or maybe even (if he has a lot of imagination) Mexico City. Why not? 

You said the ordinary American keeps on working, taking care of his family, ignoring pop culture, and doing what he excels at. Good for you, yes, I think you're right. Years ago when I still read the Chicago Tribune I read an article of yours in which you wrote that what distinguishes today's America from earlier, declining empires was the presence in our midst of an elite which loathed the country and fought hard for its worldwide contempt and collapse. Even the Romans, you said, did not have that. I've always thought that was the best thing you have ever written and the thing historians will remember you for. 

Thanks again for the dose of Christmas cheer. Looking forward to next year's version.

Best



Drown your frustrations with a little something from a very pre-floppy-disk era. We're going to resurrect and re-christen the Calvert Party Encyclopedia's [1961] "Princeton cocktail," a delight not only from 1961 but from the early 1900s. Paul Clarke at Serious Eats records that the Princeton was created by "New York barman George Kappeler, who mixed it [ca. 1900] along with other Ivy League-named drinks at the Holland House bar." It must be true, since our Encyclopedia lists the recipe for the Yale on the very next page. The Princeton is simpler. It requires two of our favorites, gin and port, plus orange bitters.

Specifically it requires Old Tom gin, a style sweeter than today's usual gins. Mr. Clarke says that if you can't find new makers of Old Tom, the flavor can be approximated with a mix of regular gin and a bit of simple syrup. I suggest regular gin and -- why not? -- a bit of apple cider, or possibly even apple cider liqueur. Let's try Journeyman Distillery O.C.G. (Old Country Goodness) apple cider.

Therefore, our new cocktail becomes --

The MAILER-DAEMON

1 jigger (1 and 1/2 ounces) gin
generous dash -- say, 1/4 teaspoon -- apple cider liqueur, such as Journeyman
1/2 ounce -- a little less than half a jigger -- port
2 dashes orange bitters

Stir all ingredients in a mixing glass with 4 ice cubes. Strain into a cocktail glass. The usual garnish is a twist of lemon peel, which seems to me a jarring note. Port and lemon? No. A little cube of apple with peel seems better. Mr. Clarke by the way says the gin and bitters only should be mixed together with ice; after they are strained into the cocktail glass, the port is poured carefully down the side of the glass, so that it  may settle prettily at the bottom. Kind of like voters.  

Food and Wine's Herbed Meatballs with Rich Tomato Sauce and Ricotta, plus a barbera

From the January 2014 "Readers' Choice" issue. I think you may give yourself some leeway with the gigantic list of ingredients. If you happen not to have fresh mint or enough ground cumin on hand, do not fret. The main point is not to skimp on (1) the milk-soaked ground almonds and (2) the fresh basil leaves and garlic; these latter two ingredients have made all the difference in the last three meatball recipes I have prepared. I must write a book about meatballs, after I write one on lemons.

For the rich tomato sauce:

• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 4 large garlic cloves, minced
• 1 cup tightly packed basil leaves, torn
• 2 Tbsp. oregano leaves
• 2 bay leaves
• 1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper
• 2 (28 ounce) cans whole Italian tomatoes with their juices, crushed
• 6 large anchovy fillets, chopped. (You may please yourself about this. I understand that anchovies are a basic, ancient, and respected flavoring, approved of by no less a source than Sylvia Windle Humphrey, whose A Matter of Taste must forever stand as one of our Culinary-Hall-of-Fame, retro favorites. Still, the only can of anchovies I ever opened reminded me, in all their red segmented glory, so vividly of earthworms that I have no desire ever to open another. You might replace them with a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce, the composition of which I believe owes much to anchovies.)  

For the meatballs:

• 1/2 cup raw almonds, finely chopped
• 1/2 cup milk
• 2 and 1/2 pounds ground lamb
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1/4 cup finely chopped fresh basil leaves, plus more for garnish
• 1/4 cup finely chopped flat-leaf parsley -- also called Italian parsley or cilantro, this is the opposite of the curly, decorative, slightly peppery but mostly inconsequential kind we see on restaurant or Passover seder plates. I was just beginning to appreciate the odd tinny flavor of flat-leaf parsley when I read somewhere that, traditionally, Western cuisines have rejected it because its smell is that of bedbugs. 
• 2 Tbsp. chopped mint
• 1 Tbsp. chopped oregano
• 1 and 1/2 tsp. chopped thyme
• 2 large garlic cloves, minced
• 1 Tbsp. dry red wine
• 1 and 1/2 tsps. ground cumin
• 1 and 1/2 tsp. ground coriander
• 1/2 tsp. ground fennel
• 1 and 1/2 Tbsp. kosher salt
• 1/2 tsp. ground black pepper
• 1/4 cup olive oil

Ricotta cheese, for serving

I reiterate that we must feel free to play with this immense and specific list of ingredients. Where, let us say, not only mint or cumin but perhaps fennel and oregano are missing, I see no reason why the cook may not substitute rosemary, curry powder, celery salt, or that wondrous Chilean merquen, smoked chili pepper flakes. The mishmash of spices will taste nice, provided you have provided yourself with the keys, which -- I reiterate --  are fresh garlic, fresh torn basil, almonds and milk. 

Task one: make the sauce. Not difficult. In a large sauce pan, warm the olive oil  Add the garlic, basil, oregano, bay, and red pepper. Warm over moderate heat for 30 seconds. We do not want burned garlic, that horror of horrors, the smell of which you can identify upon walking into any not-so-well-run pizza joint. 

Add the tomatoes and simmer over "moderately low" heat until the tomatoes are "saucy" -- excellent word -- about an hour. [Stir in the anchovies, and] season with salt and pepper. [Maybe.]

Task two. Make the meatballs: Soak the finely chopped almonds in milk for about 10 minutes, until they are thoroughly moistened.  Add the ground meat, the eggs, herbs, and all the spices. Form into small balls and saute briefly in the heated 1/4 cup olive oil, in batches a few at a time, until all are nicely browned.  

Then, either return all the meatballs to the skillet and ladle on the tomato sauce which has already cooked for an hour, bring to a boil, and simmer until the meatballs are cooked through, about another half hour or so; or else simply add the half-cooked meatballs to the simmering sauce, bring to a fresh boil, and simmer another half hour.

While they finish cooking, you may assign yourself task three, which is to cook a potful of pasta. 

To serve all forth, spoon little dollops of ricotta cheese over a helping of pasta and these herbed meatballs in rich tomato sauce. Your accompanying wine should be any red of your choice, but nothing too full of California-style spice or blueberry jam. Why not something more bracing, more cleansing and Italian? A Valpolicella? A barbera, my new go-to wine of choice? I used to have an Italian co-worker named Lorenzo who said, "you really can't find a much better wine than a barbera," -- I think he meant, "in the ordinary course of life, assuming you are not buying Chateau Lynch-Bages as a regular thing" -- and I think he was just about right.

Stefano Farina Barbera d'Alba, retail, about $10.

Retail rant: among the top 5 worst Christmas songs (plus a cocktail)

They used to play over the radio at a former workplace, you see, and so one became slowly irate. I am sure I could make a new list for the new workplace. And why yes, these are in order. 

1.) Etta Jones, "It's Christmas time." A maundering voice screeches and drones on, rather like a vaguely lecturing teacher, about "peekin' out the window," ting-a-ling-ling. Maundering trumpets try to make some sort of desultory melody to fill in the blank spaces. Very, very bad.

2.) Lena Horne, "Jingle Bells" -- Lena of the fierce smile, fierce eyes, hard face, harder voice. When she sings about not knowing where she is going on her sleigh ride -- "with my baby by my side, I don't really cay-uh" -- one is reminded of wintry Russian stories about the bride being thrown off the sledge to the pacing wolves. In this scenario, Lena is the fierce-eyed chucker-out, not the bride.

3.) James Brown, "Santa Claus (go straight to the ghetto"). Tough call. What he does isn't music, yet one can't ignore the screams.

4.) Brad Paisley, "Santa-looksa lot like Daddeh." Santa-wasa much too thin. And he didn't come down the chimney, so momma must have let him in. As Miss Mapp would say, such a new idea.

5.) Brenda Lee, "I'm gonna pop-pop Santa Claus (with a water pistol gun)." Squirt, squirt! Storied career or no, in my house we call this performer "the swamp child in a bottle," because that's what the voice sounds like.

I feel better. Enjoy a new cocktail, the Honeysuckle. The honey does give the drink an unusual flowery character.

• 1 jigger (1and 1/2 ounces) light rum
• the juice of a small lime (or half a large lime)
• 1 tsp. honey

Shake all ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker, and strain into a cocktail glass. Have two, depending on your schedule. 

Brown and gray, or -- another essay (a try) at fashion blogging

We tried this once before, and now we're going to try it again. In a small camera, combine:

• One day off
• One gray silk dress, worn as a tunic
• One pair last year's boots, -- full disclosure: not leather, and so alas already showing signs of, um, wear and tear; note to self, next time invest in real leather
• One faux fur vest, from when Daisy Fuentes was still making things for Kohl's or maybe it was Target, and maybe she still is
• One slightly garish Victorian-style necklace from (if memory serves) the Lia Sophia direct sales company, which coincidentally just announced it is closing down as of this December
• One pair earrings
• One hat

My favorite fashion bloggers are beautiful young things who never tire of snapping and posting photographs of themselves in their latest "street style" or vintage mixes. Since I recently unearthed from the back of the hall closet a small tripod for my camera, and also found instructions online for the camera's self-timer capability, I can more or less mimic their technique. They seem to do lots of the downcast-eyes thing. Also some artful, sort-of-caught-off-guard "candids."

In the next photo, below, my point was to show (sort of) the boots. I'm always amazed when, in professional spreads in Bazaar or Vogue, even though I don't take in Vogue anymore because it's too fawningly leftist, things you can't even see are credited. A manicure; a barely glimpsed ring; a watch, "Kate's own," or "Gwyneth's own." My watch is my own, my favorite Anne Klein pink porcelain with the 52 tiny crystals all around the face. "I love it to pieces," as the fashion bloggers say.
 

The day was one of those utterly dolorous, brown and gray early winter ones which some people find hateful, but which I think you can make the best of, "if you approach it in the right spirit" as Georgie says of planchette in Mapp & Lucia. Think not of hopelessly vanished summer weather but of cozy fires, smart hats, of steaming pots of tea and English novels read by lamplight. Interior voyages to stormy moors and mysterious gray castles and things. Anticipate the warming glass of port before bedtime. If you are like me, you will have spent last evening listening to a live-streaming re-broadcast of Maria Callas singing Norma at La Scala in 1955, strangely mesmerizing and soothing, plus reading -- on another open "tab" -- about the Cathars (because Joan Sutherland once sang Esclaramonde, and who on earth was that? We must know). So you see even on a day of brown fallen leaves and gray skies, you will have plenty to think about. One thing you might think about is that the beautiful young fashion bloggers tend to live in Portland or Seattle, where they can go out and set up their tripods on Puget Sound or in front of some temperate-climate rain forest bursting with ferns and redwoods. I live elsewhere. 

Now we come to the hat. Victorian Trading. I used to be convinced I could not wear hats, my face being too absurdly small to support them as it were. However this one, called "Winter Sky," proved delightful beyond resisting. I am sorry you cannot really see the little green bird who is the centerpiece of the decoration. Only if you look very closely will you spot his small beady black eye. 

Incidentally, I wonder if at my age it is about time to start wearing makeup. Remember I'm a child of the 1970s, when everybody was natural and wore "Earth shoes" and burlap blouses. Quite an emotional handicap. It's just that I have spared you a few of today's downcast-eyes photos, in some of which the horridly liverish colors of les paupières made me look as if I were ready for the coffin. The beautiful young fashion bloggers never look like that. A bit of eyeshadow might help, only we don't want shadows, we want brightness. Incidentally also -- scarf, "Florentine paisley wrap" from the Acorn catalog, coat, Vince Camuto by way of Macy's.  

For more of my favorite young fashion bloggers, go here --

Delightfully Tacky
Vixen Vintage (who on earth gets skin like that plus gets to be named Solanah? She could at least be Pam or Debbie like everyone else)
Keiko Lynn (ditto -- and she seems to be a big deal in the fashion blog world, #84 of Signature 9's top 99 most influential, for those who are keeping track)
The Soubrette Brunette
Finding Femme (a bit wacky in a pink flamingo sort of way -- you'll see what I mean when you visit)
ChiCityFashion (Chi stands for Chicago. Hey! the same gray skies as me! The same dead native grasses in the concrete planters downtown! And I've walked on that wooden footbridge over Lake Shore Drive!)

And, some heavy lifters:

The Cherry Blossom Girl -- in Tahiti this week. Black sand beaches. Black scallop bikini. Endless pictures of me, me, me, and me. But beautiful. As Nigel purrs over Andrea's lofty puzzlement in The Devil Wears Prada, "Yes, that's what this billion dollar industry is about -- inner beauty."
Le Blog de Betty.  Paris.
Cupcakes and Cashmere
The Sartorialist. Ranked at Signature 9 the #1 most influential fashion blog there is. Puzzling choice. Deeply joyless, distinctly un-wacky. You're better off with Cupcakes, or with me, even.  

Pillsbury's "Simply From Scratch" Apple Cream Cheese coffeecake (1981)

My notes were very brief. 

quite a project
baking pamphlet, picked up in a thrift store
cardamom $14 a jar

Let me give you the recipe first, so that you may begin to judge what a project it was. You are going to make three things, a cake, a filling, and a topping, so you will need three good sized bowls just for a start. (What luck that we happen to be reading Bee Wilson's Consider the Fork (2012), whose first chapter, "Pots and Pans," delves into the history of why we have so much duplicate stuff in our kitchens). You will also need two cups of peeled and chopped apples, plus two sticks of butter and an 8 ounce package of cream cheese set out beforehand, to come to room temperature.

Pillsbury's "Simply From Scratch" [that's the baking pamphlet,1981] Apple Cream Cheese coffeecake  

First, grease and lightly flour a 13 x 9 inch baking pan. Then, for the cake, combine:

3 cups flour
1 cup sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 and 1/3 cups milk
2/3 cup butter, softened  (yes, you will work softened butter into an already thick and milk-moistened dough)
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 eggs

Spoon the batter into the prepared pan.

Next, make the filling. 

one 8 ounce package cream cheese, softened
2 cups chopped apples
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon cardamom (this is the delicacy that costs $13.99 a jar)
1 Tablespoon flour
2 Tablespoons butter, softened 

Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl, and spoon the mix over the cake batter. Use a rubber spatula to gently swirl the apples partly into the batter.

Now is a good time to preheat the oven to 375 F.

Finally, make the topping. Mix together:

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 Tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup chopped nuts

Sprinkle over the cake. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, until golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. "If desired, top with whipped cream."    

It is most scrumptious, but I must ask whether one teaspoonful out of the $14 purchase of cardamom made that much difference in the end. I am inclined to think not. The gunmetal gray powder once had a distinct lemon fragrance in the jar, a fragrance which seemed to lose itself amid the cream cheese, the apples, and the butter. Nutmeg might have been more to the point.

Besides, some time has passed since I made this cake. When I opened the jar again to smell whatever was left -- almost all of it -- the first words that came to my mind were model airplane paint. My brother used to make very nice model airplanes, painting and gluing with utmost care. I have not smelled that paint since I was maybe twelve years old. Not for nothing do we hear assurances that the sense of smell is the most evocative of all. I threw out the jar of cardamom.

Still, I'd like briefly to discuss its marvels, for apparently it has them. There is no better way to enjoy them vicariously than to quote the strong lovely prose of Sylvia Windle Humphrey, whose A Matter of Taste (1965) is our spice-and-herb bible. She says: 

Cardamom (Elettaria cardamom maton) ... a jewel of a spice, it is the second most expensive spice in the world (saffron comes first), so dear because every delicate little seed pod has to be snipped off the plant by hand with scissors. The yield is low, too, only about 250 pounds per acre. It is native to India, but most of our supply now comes from Guatemala. [Mrs. Humphrey seems to be still right about this last, even fifty years later.]

Cardamom, a clean flowery-spicy breath sweetener, is put up by nature in handy little-fingernail-sized, bleached-white capsules, each containing ten to twelve pungent black seeds, easy to fit into pocket or purse. As a member of the ginger family it has some of the properties, but not the taste, of that invaluable plant. It is sweeter than ginger, with less edge, yet has authority. Like ginger, it awakens the whole tongue, making it, in moderation, a good ingredient in a spice blend which is to be used to bring out the flavor of main dishes. Like ginger it belongs with fresh melon. Like ginger, it is good for the stomach.

Cardamom is most familiar in sweets. Fine Danish pastries and coffee cakes are frequently seasoned with cardamom, both in the dough and in the filling. In all the Scandinavian countries it has been both a favorite seasoning and flavor ever since Viking sailors first carried it home from the markets in Constantinople more than 1,500 years ago. In Norway, the Christmas season reeks of cardamom, and the Swedes consume fifty times more cardamom per capita than does the United States. 

She goes on to rhapsodize about its "clean warmth," "floral perfume," etc. I begin to think that perhaps there never was very much authentically going on in my jar of cardamom, even perhaps that I can't source the real thing because I don't know any Vikings. We will have to let our Apple Cream Cheese Coffeecake do the work of reeking-of-Christmas on its own.

A little bit of perfection -- new cocktail -- the New Job

Cocktails, like other good things, must surely have their recipes tweaked and perfected very slowly over the course of time. They must surely change, grow, and come to fulfillment depending on who liked what foundational thing, capital T, and who had what ingredients on hand to improve the Thing. Remember Mrs. Wakefield at the Toll House, who had only to cut up some chocolate bars into a plain butter cookie dough to create the immortal chocolate chip cookie; remember also King Louis XV, who is said to have invented French onion soup from only onions and a bottle of flat champagne "after a joyous night in eighteenth-century Paris" (Madeleine Kamman, The New Making of a Cook). 

When it comes to cocktails I like a sour, like my master Charles Schumann (American Bar). A sour is a large category of drinks, fundamentally lemon juice, sugar, and a spirit. We here at Pluot, by way of At First Glass, have mixed and enjoyed whisky sours, gin sours, Boston sours -- in which we learn that an egg is many things, but it is not refreshing -- and of course our longtime favorite, rum sours. When recently we availed ourselves of a stash of good Calvados, we tried and very much liked the "Arc de Triomphe," or Calvados sour. Once upon a time we even invented -- didn't we? -- something new, the Sour Blossom martini.

Today we tweak again, based on ingredients to hand, and devise a delectable cocktail very much in need of a name and a wider audience. It goes like this.

The __________ 

In a shaker, combine:

the juice of half a lemon
a dash of sugar or simple syrup (perhaps a quarter teaspoon at most -- or equal parts to the juice, if you like your drinks less tart)
half a jigger Calvados
half a jigger good bourbon, plus a tiny extra splash of  it (I used Bulleit)

Squeeze a splash of fresh orange juice into your cocktail glass -- perhaps half a teaspoon or so. Stir all the other ingredients in the shaker with a few ice cubes. (We prefer our drinks stirred, not shaken, because stirring keeps the ingredients a tad warmer and more flavorful. To shake is to anaesthetize.) Strain the lemon-and-bourbon/Calvados mix into the glass with its waiting orange juice. Garnish any way you like, provided it is simple, say a grape or a cherry, or don't garnish at all. The prettiest choice is a blushing yellow Rainier cherry, but they are only in season for a short time, and we must enjoy our new creation, The ____________,  in other months besides May.

Now what shall we call this little tweaking and approximation of perfection? It's tart, it's sweet, it has bourbon's rich fruitiness and Calvados' whiff of the apples of Normandy. For all its homey-ness, the orange juice adds a plump touch of the exotic. Though calling the drink the New Job seems downright prosaic, still we think we'll leave it at that. After all we are about six weeks into this life milestone, and are gratified to have pretty thoroughly learned the fundamentals.

Speaking of which, it's a curious thing -- and I must ask, is your workplace like mine? -- at the New Job, everyone does the same four or five tasks all day. Each task has about four or five components all of which are subject to a specific clerical error. Committing one of these errors, in other words getting one-fifth of any task wrong, nullifies the whole thing and creates cascading problems for everyone else "down the line," which is exactly the right, mass-production metaphor to use. A manager who has done the work for ten years can spot an approaching clerical error long in advance, whether I make them at my six weeks' experience, or whether a colleague makes them at his three or four years' experience. And of course the corrective is to "pay attention" to all things. Only, sometimes, that exhortation seems to backfire. It reminds me of a scene in 30 Rock when boss Jack asks earnest page Kenneth whether he can walk and talk at the same time. "I always could, but now I'm not sure," Kenneth blinks, and then carries on doing both, awkwardly. In order for any workplace ritual to become second nature, you almost have to stop paying attention, don't you? Being New, however, I think I will keep that little bit of perfect wisdom to myself.