• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

2 cups watercress leaves

1 cup finely diced raw potato

4 cups chicken broth or chicken bouillon

4 sprigs parsley

1 teaspoon salt (but not if using bouillon)

½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper

¼ teaspoon dry mustard

2 cups heavy cream

Chopped chives, cucumber, and radishes for garnish

Melt the butter in a saucepan and cook onions or leeks until translucent. Add the remaining ingredients, except the cream and the vegetables for garnish, and bring to a boil. Simmer for fifteen minutes or until the potatoes are tender. Purée the mixture in a blender or food processor. Season as necessary. Chill. (At this point, it can be frozen.) Before serving, stir in the cream and add the garnish. Serves eight.

PANETTONE

Panettone, the light, delicious cake emblematic of Christmas throughout Italy, originated in and is a specialty of Milan. The admirable authority on Italian food, Waverly Root, considered it the world’s best accompaniment for breakfast coffee. Made in a high, domed shape that is sometimes thought to honor the domes of Lombard churches, it contains butter, milk, sugar, eggs, raisins, and bits of candied fruit.

It is traditional in Italian households for the head of the family to cut three large slices and for family members to eat a bit of each slice as a guarantee of good fortune. The Duke of Milan himself used to perform the ceremony annually.

The name “panettone” is probably derived from pane, meaning “bread,” and tone, the suffix for “big,” although there are competing versions. Panettone should be warmed just slightly before serving to diffuse the buttery! flavor, and it is also excellent toasted.

You may be lucky enough to be near a good bakery where panettones are made; otherwise, the big food companies produce respectable versions in quantity. If you happen to be in Milan around Christmastime, there is the Pasticceria Cova, where panettone allegedly began, or the Pasticceria Amrosiana, one of the best in the city.

CANDY CANES

It is said that candy canes were created in 1670 by the choirmaster at the Cologne Cathedral in Germany who gave them to the children in the choir to pacify them during the long Christmas services. He modeled them after the shape of the crooks carried by the shepherds who, according to the story in Luke, were the first to hear the good tidings of Jesus’ birth. It was well over two hundred years later before peppermint was added to the sugar canes, and they took on their distinctive look.

The red-and-white striped pole that signifies a barber’s shop didn’t mimic candy canes but came much earlier. Until the mid-18th century in England, the Barbers’-Surgeons’ Guild performed bloodletting and operations, and their symbolic pole represented bloody rags blowing dry in the wind. When the Surgeons Guild split off in 1745, it abandoned the pole to the barbers, who continued to use keen blades for their own purposes.

CHAMPAGNE

Champagne was the drink of Russian nobility and the English racetrack, and with the rise of the middle class, the drink of nearly everybody. Stimulating ab initio, and stupefying afterward, in its early days it was much sweeter than now and was a dessert wine. It was a favorite of Mme Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, who felt “full of beauty” after drinking it.

Originating in the area around Reims, where a still white wine had been produced for more than a thousand years, it achieved its sparkling quality when in the 17th century, a monk, Dom Perignon, supposedly allowed wine to ferment in a corked bottle.

Champagne has always been costly to produce and hence expensive. The process involves a first fermentation that comes to a stop in the cold winters northeast of Paris. The wine is bottled and some sugar added, and in the spring, although it has been stored underground at a constant low temperature, a magical event occurs—a second fermentation begins in sympathy with the sap rising in the trees outside. This second, sealed fermentation is the defining one. Sediment is later painstakingly removed, a bit more sugar