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beef with a fork. Heat the milk, mashing the bread into it until creamy and add it to the meat, along with the onion, salt, pepper, prosciutto, cheese, and garlic. Mix thoroughly by hand. Mix in the lightly beaten egg yolk. Shape meat into a firm, round ball; then roll this into a salami-like loaf about two and a half inches thick. Tap with your palm to drive out any air bubbles. Roll the loaf in the bread crumbs until evenly coated. Drain the mushrooms (save the water they soaked in) and rinse them several times in clean, cold water. Chop them roughly and set aside. Strain the soaking water through a fine sieve lined with paper towels and set aside. Heat the butter and vegetable oil in a heavy oval casserole just big enough for the meat. Brown the meat on all sides in the casserole over medium heat after the butter foam subsides, handling carefully. Add the wine. Increase heat to medium high. Boil wine briskly until reduced to one half turning meat carefully once or twice. Turn heat to medium low and add chopped mushrooms. Stir the tomato paste into the strained and warmed mushroom water. When smooth, add to the meat and mushrooms. Cover and cook at a simmer for thirty minutes, turning the meat once or twice. Remove meat to a cutting board. Allow it to cool slightly and settle. Cut into slanted slices about three-eighths of an inch thick. If the sauce seems thin, concentrate it by boiling rapidly for a few minutes. Pour a little sauce on a warm serving platter, arrange the meat slices, then cover with the remainder of the sauce. Serves about four.

ROALD DAHL

Among all that has been written about wine—roomfuls—a short story by Roald Dahl stands out. It is called “Taste” and is about an unforgettable wager one night on whether or not a guest at dinner can taste an unknown wine and identify it as to region, year, and even vineyard. The story is dazzling in its detail, and the end of it completely unexpected.

Joe Fox, who was then an editor at Knopf, said that Alfred Knopf, the famed founder, had read the story in The New Yorker and had wired Dahl, saying that he would like to publish anything he wrote. It is the equivalent of having someone whisper “I adore you.”

COMMANDARIA

Tradition says that Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love, was born out of the seas off Cyprus. The wine poured there on great feast days in her honor is a sweet, red dessert wine, originally called Nama, and as early as 700 B.C., Hesiod, a farmer as well as a poet, described how to make it by first drying both red and white grapes in the sun for a couple of weeks, and later aging the wine in great earthen jars. Shakespeare wrote a scene in which Antony gives the wine to Cleopatra, saying, “… your sweetness, my love, is equal to Cyprus Nama.”

When Richard the Lionhearted landed on Cyprus in 1191, he praised Nama and said he hoped to return, “if only to taste this wine again.” Nevertheless, he sold the island to a military and religious order called the Knights Templar, founded in 1118 to protect pilgrims during the Crusades. The Knights already controlled an area on the island called Commandaria. It became the wine’s new name and now, more than eight hundred years later, it is the oldest existing name for an individual wine. Edward III served it at a banquet in England in 1352 when he entertained the kings of France, Scotland, Denmark, and Cyprus. Two hundred years later, Elizabeth I also liked it and gave Sir Walter Raleigh the exclusive privilege of importing it.

There is no way to know for certain, of course, but it is likely that the present wine is quite similar to that of the past, though the blending of the grapes is more exact and almost all the aging is now done in oak casks instead of clay jars. Unfortunately, it is no longer credited with its miraculous healing properties.

KELLOGG

On this day in 1860, Will Keith Kellogg was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, the town he was to put on the map. He had only a sixth-grade education, but with his older brother, John Harvey Kellogg, a pioneer in nutrition, he developed an