Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [100]
In many cases, bottles will have no vintage year. The long tradition in California has been to make a wine of consistent, reliable quality, often by blending older and newer wine. If there is a vintage, it means that all of the wine must be from that year, and it should be remembered that vintage years in California have no relationship to those in Europe.
People who love wine love life, and in the finest wine areas—Napa and Sonoma, for example—as in comparable places in Europe, there are exceptional restaurants and small places to stay.
I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.
—MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
ALICE WATERS ENTERTAINS
Too often when giving a dinner, you are so busy during the evening that you end up feeling you’ve missed your own party. Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, understands the temptation of trying to do too much. “At the restaurant, I always cook with a whole group of cooks around me, so even though I trim down the menu for dinner at home, I’m overly ambitious. I always think, the first course will be pasta, and then there will be lamb, and it never works.”
She has settled on these rules:
• I have guests come into the kitchen for stand-up hors d’ouvres. I just keep putting things out, almost in the form of tapas.
• The first course is always cold.
• There’s only one hot dish that has to be prepared just before the meal. When we go to the table, I bring the hot dish with me. If it is meat or poultry, I always want it to rest for ten minutes between cooking and serving. And since your sense of taste is diminished by really hot food, it is sometimes an advantage for it to cool even longer.
• I love salad, so I often have one afterward that I dress just at the end, served with some cheese.
• I choose fruit or something cold for dessert, like sherbet, but nothing that has to be cooked during the meal.
SOMMELIER
A sommelier, or restaurant wine steward, is often the one who displays the chosen bottle at the table to verify the name and the vintage, opens it, and pours a sample. Frequently, he has created the wine list, choosing wines for variety in type and price range. He’s also usually qualified to recommend wines to complement the food.
The name comes from the old French běte de somme, or “beast of burden,” with a sommelier as its caretaker. The connection with transporting things evolved, until by the early 14th century it had come to mean the person in charge of the royal baggage during the king’s travel. Over the next three hundred years, the sommelier graduated to carrying the wine to royal meals, one of seven officials responsible for the king’s table, including the pannetere, who served the bread, and the echansonniere, who poured both water and wine from silver ewers.
THREE PLACES FOR LUNCH
There are days, perhaps many, when you long to be somewhere else, and days when you are. It is only a kind of daydreaming, but if you could choose three places in the world where you would like to be for lunch today, where would they be?
First of all, Paris. The Grand Colbert, a brasserie just north of the Palais-Royal on rue Vivienne. Talk, intelligent faces, decent food, a tone of sophistication, and the unmistakable aroma of French cigarettes. You feel you are almost part of it.
Second, a restaurant in a hard-to-reach village, Erice, high above the sea in northwest Sicily. Erice was once the most famous of Mediterranean shrines to the goddess of love, in both a religious and carnal sense, though all that is gone now. From the Via Chiaramonte down a narrow alley, through a private garden, up some steps to a small patio with an awning and a number of tables—this is Ulisse. Level with the treetops, you look out over the tiled roofs of the town. Tomato and onion salad, spaghetti al funghi,