Tuesday, December 29, 2009

how to drink


A new year is on its way, and what better way to ring out the old, and invite in the new? Last year, my in-laws gave me an incredible holiday gift wrapped in newsprint and tied with string: the old family edition of The Flowing Bowl: What and When to Drink by The Only William. My 1891 First Edition is separating at the seams, held together by a hand-made vellum cover and sheer will, but has been re-issued in the paperback by CreateSpace for those who have a guilty weakness for Old Fashioneds, Fizzes, Ratafias, and Punches that pull nothing back. Here’s a list of a few of our favorites, adapted…..

Happy New Year!

The Hot Benefactor

A hot punch glass with 2-3 lumps or tsp sugar

½ glass of hot water for dissolving

2/3 Chianti or other dry red wine

1/3 Jamaica or other good rum

1 slice lemon

Grate a little nutmeg on top

Winter Sangaree

A mixing glass of fine ice,

3 dashes simple syrup

1 small glass of Port

Stir this very well, strain into a tall glass, cut a few slice of lemon, drop them into drink, grate a little nutmeg on top, and present


Doctor’s Orders (Caleb's own)


Rocks glass, if served on rocks, otherwise cocktail or martini glass

1 part Campari

1 part Fernet Branca

½ part Gin

½ sweet Vermouth

½ dry Vermouth

Slice of orange

Bitters of your choice

Shake with ice. Strain into martini glass or over ice in rocks glass


The Thin Vigil or The Priest’s Necklace

In a mixing glass:

2/3 Vermouth

1/3 Amaro

1 dash of Absinthe

2 dashes simple syrup

A little ice in the glass, stir well, strain and serve


The Bonne Fête


Half a glassful of ice,

2 dashes of simple syrup

2/3 Gin

1/3 Vermouth

2 dashes of orange bitters

1 dash of green Chartreuse

Stir well, strain, serve.

Jack Frost

Into a mixing glass squeeze the juice of half a lemon

1 barspoonful of sugar

1 fresh egg

1 pony fresh cream

1 drink of apple whiskey

Fill your glass with cracked ice and shake thoroughly; strain into a high glass, and fill the balance with seltzer, or club soda


The Snowball


A large glass with an egg, beat up well with a little powdered sugar, add a bottle of cold ginger ale or ginger beer (8 oz.) and a pony of brandy, stir thoroughly and serve.

Sunday, December 27, 2009

ho, ho, ho...and a bottle of


For the past several years we have walked down our dirt road about one hundred yards in the dark of Christmas Eve for a traditional feast. Sometimes it is snowing, other times it has rained, and often it is very, very cold. This Christmas Eve, a fog rolled in, making the air damp and rather bone chilling chasing up the sleeves of our coats and underneath our Christmas finery. We came with a basket of gifts and a large bowl of freshly cut greens from the green house—jewel-toned radicchio, frisee, and escarole.

To start there was pink champage and a smoked salmon from New Foundland brought by our host Edie’s father. It was hearty and smokey while being delicate and silky at the same time. A half wheel of a runny French cheese went well with the clean scrub of the champagne. Our other host, Edie’s husband Robert, went all out on a buffet of traditional dishes: a roast local turkey, brussel sprouts, fat beets roasted with ginger, stuffing made with sausage produced right down the road, a gratin of potatoes, creamed spinach, and the salad with the slightly bitter greens to finish.

We drank a jewel-toned wine with the meal, a Barbera d’Alba made by a small producer in the Piemonte with the last name of Correggio. It glimmered true claret in the decanter and was cozy and slightly inky to drink. At the restaurant, I serve another of the same gentleman’s wines, a rarity of still Bracchetto which smells more like a handful of roses and violets. Dessert was peppermint ice cream dressed in warm chocolate sauce.

In the tradition of a holiday, and the tradition of bringing our two families together, and the tradition of a classic meal we sat around the lace-covered table set with Edie’s family china and glassware (the old Venetian goblets painted lightly with gold that I covet so!) talking of family histories, exams at school, plans for anniversaries, exchanging books we’d recently read, and bringing out the wine Atlas to follow a route on the Massif Centrale in France. Somehow, lengthy celebratory meals always end up needing a map.

Then, Edie with a deft sleight of hand, produced a bottle of rum to finish our meal. And not just any rum. This was a family rum. A famous rum belonging to Edie’s father and dated 1875. Medford Rum, which had belonged to the family all those years ago when Gen. George L. Batchelder inherited it. A stash of which had just been found while clearing out someone’s old cellar. The bottle was clear and portly, we suspected the original, but the label had been replaced at some point along the line as you could see the remnants of glue dried on the surface. This did nothing to detract from the deep caramel hue of the liqueur. Caleb did the honors of opening the bottle with the cork breaking along the way, and a little sigh escaped went the last bit of plug was removed as if the spirit in “spirit” has released out into the evening.

Edie poured a dram into one of the Venetian goblets and starting with Edgar, we passed around the glass to taste this particular history until the glass was finished. I have never tasted anything so venerable and so old. Who knew a rum well over a hundred years old would taste and smell so powerfully and elegantly of molasses, orange peel, smoked hickory, vanilla, and clove? When you held up a fresh orange studded with cloves plucked from the table decorations, then smelled the rum, the orange and the clove bloomed into the clarity of olfactory vision. Edgar’s lady friend suggested we bottled the rest into little vials of perfume, and she was right, in smelling and tasting such a liquid gem, one can experience how hair-line the boundary is between perfume and drink.

Medford Rum has a long and famous history dating back to Paul Revere and his fatefull visit to his favorite tavern The Green Dragon, and was the product of a seafaring family that delighted in the treasures of the West Indies and the China Seas. The talk winds down to the magic of tasting something made by people who knew people during our country’s own revolution, of thinking about all the hands that went into producing something so sublime, and while we can’t imagine those particular faces or names or personal histories, one feels compelled to thank and honor them anyway.

We walk home wrapped back up into our coats and already reminiscing about the rum, the meal, and the good company. The fog blankets our meadows, and mists over a quarter moon looking like the view from the prow of pirate’s ship.

--Deirdre

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

This is not just about breakfast. These are my options. What are my choices?


Options and choices play a very big role in all our lives. Perhaps this is more true today, when we have so many options available to us (at the mall or the supermarket, for instance, or on TV). For me the delicate part of the challenge has been to assemble as many good options as possible, and then choose, rather than settling for one good option among many bad or mediocre ones. Or, even worse, settling for the best of only bad options. This issue could easily result in many avenues of investigation, discussion and argument, covering topics ranging from one's career to what we contribute to the waste stream each day. But for this moment, I am going to examine my immediate choices, the ones looking me in the face right now, this morning.


It is my Saturday morning and I am composing my breakfast. Deirdre is still fast asleep, and I am going to leave her to it, as it is the most productive activity she can engage in at the moment, given the intensity of her last 2 weeks. They were my 2 weeks, too, but I am up, and I am antsy and a little hungry. So I take a moment to assess my supplies for breakfast.


I fry some bacon, enough for Deirdre to have some too, once she’s up. I perform one of my favorite activities: carefully preparing half a grapefruit, cutting around each section and then the perimeter. I fry one egg in the bacon fat, with salt and pepper. I put a small slice of apple cake—a happy discovery in the fridge—on the edge of the plate. And I have brewed another espresso, and sugared it a little. Everything is ready and perfect…


Oh, no, I have done wrong by the egg! As soon as it hits the pan, I know the fat is too hot, because it’s spitting badly. I turn off the heat immediately, and then scoop out the egg, somewhat crispy and blistered, after barely a minute. At least the yolk is still runny. But I stand there at the counter, looking at it on the plate, bright white with it’s golden brown edges, and I know that most of the white is simply too overcooked. It takes at least 30 seconds for me to accept this conclusion. An ‘overcooked’ fried egg I can take, as long as it still falls within what I have slowly come to recognize as the spectrum of acceptability in fried egg aesthetics. I used to think a perfectly fried egg never had any crustiness whatsoever, but was tender throughout with a very runny yolk, whether sunny-side up or over-easy. This is not one of those eggs; this really is overdone, and there’s no escaping this demoralizing truth. But that yolk is still so runny, and it’s leaking across the plate. There must be a way. I must salvage this breakfast! Too much has been invested to walk away now!


(Here, in this composition, is that cinematic moment when we see a closeup of the battered warrior, or the boxer, or the bully’s victim, face down on the dirt, or the mat, or the floor, already beaten, crumbling at the threshhold of defeat, and we see the bitter, self-loathing acceptance of the overwhelming power of their enemy in the exhausted and foggy eyes. We see them stop cold in the face of fate. And we see something change inside them. (You can use any and as many analogies as you want, and mix them as you wish.) In this moment of surrender we are witness to a subtle shift of the continents within the heart; the stirring of a slumbering beast; the birth of a revolution. We see, inside those eyes, the turning over of the final, relentless, flush-filling card; the re-loading of the empty gun; the last tumbler clicking softly, slowly, gently into alignment. An alignment of the planets. Impossibility reveals the merest mote of the possible, a flower of the only hope, a flicker of the flame among the smouldering coals. And we see them push themselves up again…Can you see it?! Where’s the phone? Get me the coast! No, wait, get me Rio, I want to talk to Jonathan Nossiter! (the never-say-die director of Mondovino, and author of newly released Liquid Memory, what I might call a dissertation on choices).)


Given my options, these are the choices I make: I taste a small bit of the white, then cut off most of it—the worst of it—and put it in the compost. I look at the plate some more, and I notice that the egg is now the same size as my slice of apple cake. I put the egg on top of the apple cake, and slide the cake into the puddle of yolk. I add the bacon to the plate, and the half of brilliantly red grapefruit. Ruby-red, snowy-white, golden-yellow and meaty-pink. These are the colors of my pennant of salvation, of redemption, of irresistible destiny.

I eat it standing at the counter, while the egg still has some heat in it, down the coffee, and put everything in the washer. Deal done. And good options salvaged out of a small maw of momentary crisis. My choice was not to give up.


And now that Deirdre is up, we can discuss our options for lunch.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

re-opening night






You would think opening a restaurant again after a month of being closed might be a herculean effort—like opening a summer house after a long winter. Remove the white sheets from the furniture. Throw out the camphor moth balls. Open all the windows. A month in a restaurant’s life is very long, kind of like dog years. A month can make or break a place. But we have been lucky in where we set up shop. Our village of Woodstock is somewhat seasonal in nature. While we are a real town with real people who live, work, eat, and sleep full time there is a natural cycle to our year with the months of November and April being extremely quiet. Not only do visitors tend to skip these more homely months, but our locals tend to hunker down in November, staying at home to nest for winter, and depart for sunnier climes during school breaks or long weekends in April just to stop from going crazy from the long, Persephone months.

From the get-go, we have taken two breaks a year during these two still months. Owning and working a restaurant is tough and constant business, and while we love what we do, we need to break the hard rhythm of being on our feet a good portion of our days, provisioning, cooking, pouring, serving, washing, sweeping, talking, and smiling. When we are in full swing, there are no sick or personal days, there are no long weekends. For thirteen years now we have broken twice a year to rest and rejuvenate. For thirteen years, we have re-opened our restaurant twice a year.

In those early years, re-opening took almost a week. There was spring cleaning, even in winter: dining room, refrigerators and freezers, wine inventory, washing walls, waxing floors, purging. Then there would be several days of cooking to prepare the menu for opening night. In the early years, we also had a much larger space. Now, since we’ve moved upstairs into a tiny room in the building, a space that looks like it couldn’t physically exist when you look at the façade from the street, re-opening takes about three days. We are also older, and I hope at least a little wiser and efficient.

Since we were home a good portion of this past November, and we didn’t fully shut down the restaurant, re-opening took about two days—a record set. Two days to wax the floor, two days to inventory wine, two days to mix and age dough for bread, two days to make a soup, two days to sort the mail, two days to organize reservations, two days to decorate for the holidays (including a late night hike to cut pine boughs for the entrance to the restaurant, buffeted by a cold north wind and several falls in the snow as we haven’t gotten out our snow shoes yet). On the night before we re-open, we bring home the makings for gelato because we’ve forgotten the ingredients in our own refrigerator. It’s midnight, and we are lighting the fire and the house is redolent of warm dark chocolate and heavy cream simmering on the stove.

Two hours before opening, we are finishing arranging the fragrant white roses ordered for the occasion, stringing the white holiday lights around the door, inventorying the four cases of new wines arrived at mid-day—a bright, fizzy Reisling from Lombardia that I set to chill; an obscure Lacrima di Morro, heavy with the red scents of roses, bitter orange and peach; finalizing and printing menus. The soup is made from cabbage culled from our garden and our orchard’s apples, elegant and brothy. The little hand-rolled polpettine, or meatballs, are made from local ground pork, lamb, and venison. We have forgotten the stash of dried currants in our home kitchen, so Caleb improvises with a sauce of wine and raisins. We rejuvenate the cured white matsutake mushrooms brought to us by the wild-gatherers Les and Nova for a special pizza. Sometimes we cannot help but be seduced by the exotic or childhood memories, and we have gotten a bowl full of persimmons to slice like tomato and serve on a soft local chevre and season with salt and pepper and a pungent and green olive oil. I used to eat persimmons as a child: we had a tree over our driveway and they would fall mercilessly in the late autumn. There is the chocolate gelato, and a puree made from our apples served with fresh yogurt and honey.

At six o’clock, the candles on the tables and bar are lighted, the soup is simmering, and the door opens…..

--Deirdre

Friday, December 4, 2009

thanksgiving memory redux







Twice a year, we would have two very formal meals at my house: Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. My grandparents always came for Thanksgiving-- my father’s mother, and my mother’s parents. We would add all the leaves to the dining table because that would make us nine for dinner. We ate in our dining room every night as a family, and my mother loved the trappings of a good table, so we always ate off of good china. But at Thanksgiving, the table would be set with a long, heavy white linen table cloth with embroidered linen napkins cleaned and pressed every year by a service provided at the local sanitarium which gave those less fortunate than us a way to earn a little spending money. I always wondered what they hoped to spend their hard-earned pennies on.

The table would be set with my parents’ wedding china, a beautiful and simple center pattern of brown wheat-like sheaves with a spray of turquoise and terra cotta dots for flowers. The pattern was English and called “Autumn” as my parents were married at the beginning of September. The wedding silver was substantial and ornate with monograms engraved at the bases. I have no idea where it came from, whether it was registered for at the local jewelers in Cincinnatti where my parents grew up, or if the set had belonged to someone in the family and been bequeathed. It would take days to polish after the close of the holiday season. Heavy, cut crystal water goblets and wine glasses made in Ireland marched down the length of the table. Then, there were all the silver serving dishes: platters and bowls and shell-shaped extravaganzas. On the side-board, the silver coffee service -- to be taken in the living room after dinner -- would be set up with small bone-white and gold demitasses, minute silver spoons, a claw-footed dish filled with sugar cubes, and a claw-footed pitcher filled with cream.

The meal itself was achingly simple and traditional. My mother, who is actually a good, solid cook, doesn’t like cooking as much as she likes setting the scene: preparing the table, putting fresh flowers in every room, ironing bleach-white hand towels that were bought as souvenirs from faraway travels, and orchestrating a grand meal. In the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s, the town I grew up in didn’t have caterers, but there were women who cooked. They would hire themselves out to cook and present for engagement or holiday parties, ladies’ luncheons, or large family gatherings. My mother knew two women who were considered queens of the local kitchen: Fanny and Charlie-Belle. Sometimes they would work together, sometimes they would work separately, and they were classic soul food cooks. My mother would book them for the following year’s holiday meals at the finish of the present year’s holiday to be sure she had their expertise. To have Fanny and Charlie-Belle cook for you at any time, let alone a family holiday, I’m sure was quite an accomplishment in the small-town social strata of Southern Indiana.

Cocktails would be served in the living room with shrimp cocktail and cheese and crackers which my sisters and I would pass around, my mother making every effort to teach us to be young ladies. We were expected to dress for dinner, and I always got presents on Thanksgiving which proved to be a bit confusing as I got older: a new coloring book, or set of Pilgrim paper dolls. In hindsight, I’m sure this was my mother’s way to try and keep me occupied for the afternoon, and out of her hair. The menu was always the same: crudité of carrots and celery served with a tangy sauce a lá Russe (made with cottage cheese, mayonnaise and Heinz 57, I’m almost positive), black and pimento-stuffed green olives, then whole-roast turkey with savory stuffing, mashed potatoes, thick turkey gravy (the one thing my mother would make for the dinner), peas, and creamed onions. Both apple and pumpkin pie were always served, to be followed by the dark, strong coffee in the living room.

But the crowning glory of that meal was not the crispy skin on the turkey, or the perfect velvety smoothness of the potatoes, or any of the other sleights of hand performed by the those kitchen magicians Fanny and Charlie-Belle. It was in the unquantifiable goodness of Charlie-Belle’s Parker House Rolls. The Parker House was an elegant hotel in Chicago known in mid-century culinary circles for these rolls served at table. Charlie-Belle was famous for these rolls all the way into the next county. I don’t know where she got the recipe or learned to make them—I wish I could go back in time and ask her now. Oh, how many things I would ask her! The recipe was a carefully guarded secret and added to Charlie-Belle’s mystique. Charlie-Belle knocked it out of the ball-park every year. The memory of the taste of those warm, soft, slightly buttery and yeasty flavors mingling with the cold fresh butter we would watch melt into the fine web of the crumb, still lingers.

-Deirdre