These are actually "Porcupine meat balls," but the other sounds so much more fun.

The recipe comes from an old classic of American cookery, the famed Settlement Cookbook. I had always wanted to have a look at this, and a few months ago I found the 1976 revised edition at a library… Read full post »

Another library book sale treasure, picked up for one dollar about a year ago, was this, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1958:



It is the "companion volume" to Thoughts for Food, which I have not yet been lucky enough to find. Thoughts for Buffets, however, must have been popular, as the librar… Read full post »

One would think the combination of white bread, cheddar cheese, and canned mushrooms would be positively ghastly -- that to a refined mind it would shriek "bourgeois 1950s glop" right there on the plate. It does holler 1950s, but having tried it and gussied it up just a little, I can… Read full post »

Working at a wine shop is not quite like being a bartender, but one does hear stories, and one does get a chance to observe human nature. What I notice more than anything else in my customers across the counter,… Read full post »

(March, 2008)

I have been keeping track of the website "DhimmiWatch" for so long that I forget when or how I first found it. Now I have it bookmarked, just as if I were some sort of computer whiz. Consulting it for the latest news on the incremental spread of supremacist… Read full post »

These boules de picolat, or Roussillon-style meatballs, come from one of the most splendid cookbooks one could hope to find, Clifford Wright's A Mediterranean Feast (William Morrow, 2001). History, recipes, personal anecdote, historical anecdote, maps, illustrations from medieval and Renaissance art… Read full post »

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"The Tholian Web." "The Gamesters of Triskelion." "Amok Time."

Star Trek first aired when I was a toddler, so I missed it then, but I know I grew up with the famed reruns saturating the very air around me, because episode titles like the ones above are as familiar to me as… Read full post »

Romance fiction is a billion-dollar-a-year plus industry; over one-quarter of all books sold in the United States are romance novels. Although the romance publishing market seems to be uniquely open to novice writers -- the one market left whose writers need not have a marketable persona themselves,… Read full post »

Sometimes wine writers will startle you in the opening sentence of a chapter or a book by asking whether, supposing you're tired of chardonnay or merlot, you might like a glass of rkatsiteli, or perhaps a nice sip of airen. What in the world are these? Nothing much -- only two… Read full post »

Yesterday would have been a day on which I had lots of news for my uncle Ray. Would you believe it, I always liked to begin things, I got my one and only check from my blog's former advertising network, in the whopping amount of $27 and change, representing the farewell-and-godspeed… Read full post »

Let's pretend I'm a teacher, and I'm giving you a pop quiz to start the new year off right. One question, multiple choice.

Choose the phrase that best defines "vintage" in wine:
a. "This is really old"
b. "This is really rare"
c. "A panel of experts agreed this is very good"
d. "The weather was… Read full post »

Okay. I saw the movie. It was good. The time travel/double reality plot struck me as a little bit weak (is Spock's mother dead or isn't she?), and the snow planet monsters a little bit gratuitous. But it was a lot of fun, and the young folks playing the classic characters… Read full post »

Madame du Barry by Stanley Loomis

Madame du Barry was the last of a long line of official royal mistresses of the French kings. She followed Madame de Pompadour into the affections and the lit of King Louis XV, and lived splendidly with him at Versailles for the last six… Read full post »

I know it is possible to grow grapes in this area -- south suburban Chicago -- because my neighbor three doors down grows a big grapevine on a trellis every summer. However, I doubt he is growing vitis vinifera, the wine grape.

For some reason, vinifera wants to grow in soil so… Read full post »

When I was growing up -- think the Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan years -- I seem to remember that the Russian newspaper Pravda was understood to be a laughing stock. Of course, it was a mouthpiece of the Soviet state, and so its articles were only quoted in the American press as examples of… Read full post »

Well, it was fun while it lasted. A charming little wine shop with a slightly cumbersome "style" categorization, a small inventory, corporate-driven, one hundred percent and beyond price markups, and no booze or beer sales to pay the rent, has sadly folded. Now I am back in the job hunt, and… Read full post »

The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans is one of those gigantic classics that you fear to approach. Who is this author, and what is he about? His book was the foundation of upper-class education from at least the Renaissance forward, it seems; I have elusive memories of reading that… Read full post »

The most savory preparation for ground beef that I have ever come across includes a combination of chopped fresh lemon zest and grated nutmeg, in surprisingly large quantities. The recipe is called "Cannelon of beef" and it appears in Marion Cunningham's 1986 revision of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook. L… Read full post »

...but that patch of spring sunshine is really nice. What's the looming shadow? Who cares?   Read full post »

The most beautiful little package of potential pleasure the kitchen has to offer: the square of unsweetened Baker's chocolate.

We are lucky enough to have two winter birthdays in our house, one in late November and one in late December. Traditionally, the dessert of choice after birthday dinne… Read full post »