“A smooth sea never a skilled mariner made.”
- English proverb

In the summer of 1997, two friends and I decided it would be a hoot to spend six weeks visiting a variety of countries that had recently emerged from behind the Iron Curtain. It turned out to be rather more of a hoot than even a trio of 19 year olds hell-bent on sampling every brand of cheap local vodka could have possibly imagined. In fact, during one particularly ill-starred episode, we were ordered off a train at gunpoint by a quartet of grim-faced Belarusian border guards. Oh, the mirth.

Boarding the train in Vilnius, Lithuania, we were glad to be leaving town after what can only be described as a bizarre couple of days in the company of Martin, a distinctly odd English cruise ship entertainment coordinator who we had met at our hostel and who had vanished at the culmination of a tour of the city’s less-popular watering-holes and not reappeared. Easing ourselves onto the grubby, unpadded upholstery of the otherwise empty carriage, we worked our way through a package of greasy chicken rissoles and a bottle of warm grain alcohol before being overcome by the rhythm of the train. Several hours later, we were shaken out of our sweaty slumbers and the shiny barrels of Soviet-made carbines thrust in our faces. Had we been sober, temporary incontinence may have resulted, but barely batting an eyelid, we meekly obeyed strongly gesticulated orders to disembark, and could only gaze dumbly as the lights of the train clacked off into the gloom.

Sitting on the platform in the pitch black beneath a sign that dawn would reveal was marked “Lithuania” on one side and “Belarus” in Cyrillic lettering on the other, we were utterly confused. The vodka-haze clearing, we checked our tickets and figured out that we had boarded the train for Minsk instead of the one to Warsaw. Without visas for Belarus, we had been refused entry and would wait nine lonely hours on an unlit platform haunted by the hoots and growls of a deep Slavic forest until a train returning to Vilnius arrived. Backs together, facing outwards, the summer night suddenly chill, the full gravity of our situation became apparent. Blubbing and tears, heated arguments, angry accusations and, eventually, weary acceptance of our collective stupidity, ensued. A warm August sunrise was followed by a wicked thirsty, tired and hungover grumpiness that lasted until midday when we were able to obtain from the awful dining car on Belarus state railroads a gallon drum of tepid mineral water and a pair of sandwiches so old and so revolting that the mayonnaise had turned grey and the lettuce disintegrated to the touch.

The two almost completely sober weeks that followed this escapade, spent in Poland, the country that produces more vodka per head of population than anywhere else on earth, speak to the virtue of this experience. A harrowing visit to the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau certainly assisted that sobriety, as did the decision to spend an entire day in the cold dark of Europe’s largest salt mine. In continual use since the 13th century, Wieliczka’s main attraction is an entire cathedral carved out of the rock salt. Retreating to the dim, briny recesses, we presented our personal thanks to the Almighty for his recent benedictions.

Our good fortune that the outcome of our foolishness had been nothing worse than a panicky night under the stars was further emphasized while blowing the froth off a couple of pilseners on our first full day in Prague. Planning our onward itinerary to Budapest, Hungary, we couldn’t help but notice a man slumped at the bar who, lifting his head, revealed a blood-stained bandage, a nose bent like a shepherd’s crook, and a pair of almost cartoonishly gruesome black eyes. About to remark on this, we all suddenly realized it was none other than Martin, the Englishman who had gone missing that night in Vilnius. Amazed at the coincidence, and temporarily forgetting how awkward and weird he had been – (the reader may care to learn that in our efforts to track him down, we had gone through his belongings looking for contacts to inform of his disappearance. All we found was an unfeasible collection of the most dismal Eastern European pornography concealed in his backpack.) – we called him over to our table, haling him as a long-lost friend.

Through cracked, swollen lips he began to describe his terrifying ordeal after wandering off into the rabbit warren of Vilnius’ old town, full to the eyes with booze. No sooner had he turned a corner than he was set upon by a gang of thugs who promptly beat him senseless. Waking up to the end of a truncheon jammed in his ribs, he was arrested by the local boys in blue naked as the day he was born, having been robbed of everything: money, passport, and clothes. That his incarceration had coincided with a British public holiday that kept the consulate closed for three days meant that, in all, he had spent five of his vacation days unclothed in a cockroach-infested Lithuanian jail pleading with his unsympathetic gaolers for help. It was only after one of them had recognized his cries as English that the situation finally got resolved. Through the kind graces of a Czech colleague from the cruise line, he had managed to obtain some clothes and find his way to Prague where he was recuperating before rejoining his ship.

Doubting that a man whose fearsome visage resembled a heroin-addicted clown would have much success enthusing geriatric holiday-makers in the on-board entertainment schedule, we watched Martin refresh himself with four or five liters of strong Czech lager during his baleful account. Knowing from experience that this boded ill, we waited for him to take the inevitable bathroom break and did a runner, legging it onto the first available train for Bratislava, Slovakia, hoping like hell that we had seen the last of Martin.

Peeling shutters, rusting tram-tracks and, outside our hotel, a tabby so tranquilized the noon-day heat that it refused to toy with the wounded pigeon that struggled and fidgeted barely three feet away. Bratislava felt decades more than a two hour train ride from the touristed throng of Prague. Lacking the brooding gothic towers and castles of the Czech capital, but replete with heavily-mustachioed men in threadbare Homburg hats, hobnail boots and dusty jackets, the city felt more like the antediluvian Central Europe of Patrick Leigh Fermor, than the crucible of Cold War surveillance activity it had recently been.

A day-trip to Austria, across the Danube over which Communist east and capitalist west had spied on each other for more than 40 years, we didn’t even get our passports stamped. Although, this change in sentiment hadn’t extended to the signs pointing east at Vienna Hauptbahnhof which were still painted red. The thickly gilded palace of Schonbrunn and the unrestrained baroque of the Hapsburg capital, accentuated with sparkling silver Mercedes, provided stark contrast to the creaking medieval and ruinous prefabricated concrete just the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Returning to the Slovak capital that evening, we split up for the night: my friends to a nightclub called “The Special Eksperiment” where, among other notable events, they encountered twin sisters, who, as the evening progressed, both turned out to be bald; I, to an unlikely-looking restaurant with bare trestle tables and full ashtrays where I sweated through an enormous serving of stewed duck legs with heavy Slovak dumplings, and a side of sauerkraut so vinegary it made your butt pucker.

Five weeks in, the trip was far from over. A highly disturbing episode in Budapest’s Turkish baths and a youth hostel that doubled as a strip-joint lay only a few days ahead, but enough water had passed under the bridge by this point in our journey that a calm evening gorging on Slovak comforts represented a welcome break from the hijinks of the prior month.

The world of social media seems to have been created for the sole purpose of allowing the general public to share its idiocy as widely as possible. Along with this opportunity also arrived the penchant for inventing ridiculous new expressions and forming them into one of the most odious aspects of modern life, the hash tag. It is for this reason, among several others, that we are rarely to be found on Twitter. However, the recent decision by Facebook to adopt these irritating little phrases to align themselves with the rest of the social media world seems to suggest that the hash tag is here to stay, at least until something twice as grating comes along.

If our non-use of hash tags may lead us down the road of interweb marginalization, our lack of posting contributes at least as much. We’ve actually been cooking rather a lot in 2013, so much so that we recently went so far as to re-arrange all our cookbooks into a color-coded scheme on the shelves (!), but our output on these here webpages has been risible, making this our second post in the calendar year. Happily, it’s not only worth the wait as, I’m sure, our reader (singular) would agree, but perfectly seasonal too. Whether this is yet another unsuccessful attempt to get back into the swing of blogging at least a couple of times a month remains to be seen, but like the hash tag, just because we don’t use it, doesn’t mean this blog is going away any time soon.

Like the ghost of Christmas past, leftovers from rich holiday meals have a habit of malingering in the fridge awaiting an inspiration that is progressively less likely to arrive as the holiday season fades into memory, especially in the broadening context of one’s waistline, try as one might to conceal it beneath this year’s hideous knitwear gift from Aunt Hilda. In our household, it is usually around the second week of January that we finally face up to the fact that no one is going anywhere near what’s left of the nut loaf.

We’ve noted before that there are some cases in which an abundance of aging leftovers is a blessing, but on the whole, time is of the essence if you’re to take advantage of remnant holiday provisions before they become too superannuated or resolutions to eat sparingly actually kick-in. Even so, the conventional answer is to try to fashion something that is as unlike the original as possible to distract the weary palate from recognizing the recycled goods. In prior years, this has manifested itself in a revolting “Cajun-spiced” turkey as well as a doomed attempt at “Mexican” mole using ham, gravy and green beans that succeeded only in convincing the diner to retch. However, if you have a fridge full of leftovers, fear not, as enticing confections can be raised from the ashes of Christmas dinner, especially from the dessert course.

In many Italian and Italian-American households, the sweet egg and fruit bread, panettone, is a common sight on the holiday table. And, it is just as commonly left, largely untouched, come the New Year as stomachs bloated on lasagna, seven fishes or roasted meats repeatedly balk at dessert. This year we were fortunate enough to have been sent a pair of panettone – one traditional, one featuring chocolate chips – from Bauducco, that we tried but failed to find room for during our Christmas dinner. Happily, inspiration struck almost immediately, and with a bottle of marsala, some mixed berries, a packet of rasperry jello and some English custard powder to hand, we fashioned a confection so cunning that nary a private detective with the nose of a bloodhound could have perceived the recycling it concealed.

In the UK, there is no dessert so traditional, perhaps save the Christmas cake with its rock-hard icing or the figgy pudding speckled with filling-threatening “lucky” coins, especially on Boxing Day, as the Christmas trifle. Served chilled and conventionally made with lady finger cakes soaked in sherry and topped in layers with jello(y), custard and whipped cream, it is considered an almost ethereal cousin to its dense, fruit n’nut dessert counterparts. Light, though not in calorific value, it offers an unusual pairing of flavors, which along with wobbly mouth-feel provides a pleasant contrast to the heavier dishes of the season, providing one doesn’t make the mental leap to those involuntarily trembling anatomical sections you’ve been augmenting this past fortnight.

Hailing originally from Milan, panettone is today the quintessential Italian Christmas bread and is taken with coffee and a variety of liqueurs throughout the holiday period. However, its origins are by no means ancient, having only really gained popularity since the turn of the 20th century, but its advent coincided with both Italy’s unification and the period of mass Italian emigration to the New World in such a way that panettone’s presence is almost ubiquitous on South American Christmas tables especially Argentina, Brazil and Chile. A Brazilian company based in Sao Paulo and still owned by descendants of its Italian-immigrant founder, Bauducco has been making panettone and almost nothing else for more than 60 years, recently launching its products in the US from a factory near Miami.

Light, eggy and sweet, Bauducco’s panettone is slightly more saccharine than Italian panettone and lacks some of the dried fruit and holiday spice flavors that is common with more traditional purveyors. For this reason, it made the perfect base for a trifle, but may fail to please the purists. Nonetheless, because of these characteristics and its brioche-like consistency, it is a perfect weekend breakfast food at any time of the year when paired with a bracing jolt of espresso. And, if the tastes of a two year old are any indication of gastronomic value or interest to our readers, you may wish to know that our son thoroughly enjoyed it and currently prefers panettone to cookies.

It’s also worth knowing that panettone is meant to last a while, and if kept in an airtight container, it will be good for several months, so you shouldn’t worry too much if you either have plenty leftover or you find it on the discount shelf at your local market. Indeed, the English Christmas trifle isn’t wildly dissimilar to the English summer trifle, the principal difference being the type of fruit included, so if you don’t get around to it until the weather is edging towards mild again, this recipe will still be good.

A typical Sunday morning (or afternoon depending on what time they crawl out of bed) for a New Yorker involves brunch. And what, perhaps, characterizes brunch in New York more than anything else is bagels, cream cheese and lox. However, few, if any, New Yorkers, I would guess, think about lox very much, probably because of its ubiquity, and are unaware of the age-old food tradition they have inherited.

Popularized in the city by its large Ashkenazi Jewish population in combination with cream cheese and capers, lox or belly lox (from the Yiddish laks/lachs meaning salmon), is brine-cured salmon that is almost always served in wide, thinly-sliced strips. Crispy toasted bagels, soft, buttery cream cheese, tangy capers, and smooth, salty lox is a fabulous combination and is one of the few fish dishes I can stomach as my first meal of the day, especially after a few holiday beverages the night before.

Growing up in England in the days before salmon farming, smoked salmon (as we called it) was so wildly expensive that we only ever had it at Christmas when my mother was feeling flush. It was only available in these posh-looking presentation packets emblazoned with a bold tartan that announced its esteemed Highland origins and you could rarely find it on the shelves at the delicatessen before early December. I remember my mother instructing me that I wasn’t to scoff it down like some ordinary fish, and under the watchful gaze of my grandfather, I’d sit and chew one small piece appreciatively around my mouth until it became an oily mush, before slyly coughing it into my napkin. To me, the whole thing wasn’t that it was to be enjoyed, but that it was expensive and I had to pretend to recognize its luxuriousness while being stared at by beady old eyes.

Through the intervening years I’ve learned to chew it less and enjoy it more, but I still get that frisson of excitement whenever I order it, thinking myself a real grown-up now I can eat it whenever I like. I learned recently though that I hadn’t been eating lox as a young man at all, nor, for that matter, have I been eating smoked salmon since moving to America. And, I doubt it’s just me that is confused by the range of apparently similar salmon on sale in the store.

I reckon that most New Yorkers, in spite of being connoisseurs of cured salmon, are largely ignorant of the differences between lox, Nova Lox, smoked salmon, and gravlax. It might have been Eastern European Jews that helped make it a weekend tradition in America, but curing salmon and serving it with bread, pickles and condiments is a practice found throughout Northern Europe where preparations and names vary from place to place.

Generally-speaking, German and Czech techniques for lachs and losos respectively tend to mirror the brining commonly used in lox in the United States; Scottish recipes for smoked salmon eschew the brine in favor of a dry salt and sugar cure followed by a cold smoking; Nova Lox — from Nova Scotia — favors a combination of the Jewish and the Scottish, with a less salty brine and cold smoking; and the Scandinavian gravlax, gravad lax (Sweden), gravad laks (Danish), gravlaks (Norwegian), graflax (Icelandic), graavilohi (Finnish) is typically made using a dry cure sometimes augmented with akvavit (aquavit), vodka or brennevin (Icelandic caraway seed-flavored schnapps) and assisted with a heavy brick.

The derivation of the word gravlax (and its other Nordic cognates) actually describes the technique originally used to make it. “Lax” means salmon and “grav” means buried, and in the Middle Ages Scandinavian fisherman would salt freshly caught salmon and bury them in the sand just above the high tide mark. This would perform the dual function of keeping it moist and squeezing out excess moisture with the weight of the sand. In fact, the whole point behind making gravlax, or indeed any type of cured salmon, was originally to preserve it and allow you to eat it later. In the same way pork is salted to make salami or cured hams that last a long time, the salt in a gravlax cure removes the water in the fish via osmosis denying bacteria an environment in which to grow.

No one technique is better—lox, gravlax, etc.—they all produce very delicious cured fish, that is, in its own way, unlike the others, but we decided to focus on the Scandinavian method because we liked the sound of the varied and traditional herbs and spices (white pepper, caraway, juniper and dill) it uses, not to mention the high strength booze. In truth, all are very simple to make at home, even if you don’t have a stretch of shoreline to bury your fish in. And, in spite of the amount of salt used the result is very nuanced in flavor without being salty.

Gravlax is highly versatile too—use it to make your own Yuletide Smörgåsbord (have a party with it!), add it to your next bagel and cream cheese, make cute appetizers by adding a slice of cucumber to a cracker and topping it with a thin slice of gravlax, toss it in some cold pasta salad, or top your own arugula salad with a few slices. As long as you have room in your fridge and some patience, gravlax is worth a try.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all our readers! Yes, we mean you, mom.

[A version of this post first appeared on ReadyMade, March 2010.]

We have a confession to make. After eight enjoyable but increasingly long years in Brooklyn we jumped ship over the summer to the suburbs. We didn’t deliberately hide it, we just didn’t make a big deal of it on our blog. Okay, so there is definitely some weird foodie cachet to living in a big city known for its culinary diversity that we may have been slightly concerned about losing by moving to the “food desert” of the suburbs, if for nothing else than invites to foodie parties we never attended and offerings of freebie samples we rarely covered. And, given that a good proportion of our content focuses on some of the incredible diversity of the New York dining scene, it’s only reasonable for us to have been a little apprehensive about finding that elsewhere.

The saying goes that “there is no zealot like the former addict”, and while we can freely admit that we once subscribed to the belief that Brooklyn is one of the greatest places for food in the country and that, by comparison, there was very little of gastronomic interest in that strange netherworld of highways and sub-divisions between the farm and the city, we now believe this to have been the result of Stockholm syndrome. A peculiar phenomenon of prisoners in long term captivity under which they not only begin to sympathize with their captors but often seek to convince themselves that they deserve nothing better than their current lot, for us, the mantra of “this place is awesome!”, became inverted into the question “if this place is so awesome, why aren’t we happier here?”

It took us a couple of years of drudgery, but since resolving that city life wasn’t feasible in the long term, we found ourselves accidentally stumbling across enough great Mexican grocers and terrific Indian supermarkets in the most unlikely of strip-malls to know that the terrifying tales of sneering urban hipsters, aghast at the prospect of people being forced to shop in supermarkets and suffer the ignominy of having to, gasp!, drive there and back, neither phased us anymore nor accurately portrayed suburban reality.

It’s tempting to say that for all our snobbery about unfettered access to the newest and hippest restaurants and the freshest and most diverse markets, like most city folk, even those who consider themselves into food, in the latter two years we, principally due to the rigors of carting an unwilling child around, rarely left our neighborhood in search of new victuals. Prior to that, perhaps because we always knew that we weren’t going to be staying in New York forever, we did our very best to absorb as much of it as we could – enjoying some wonderful and fascinating meals over the years – but when the advantages of Brooklyn life became inaccessible, the disadvantages of it became impossible to ignore.

Interestingly, and to throw out another old chestnut, a change really is as good as a rest, because while there is certainly rather less diversity on one’s doorstep in suburbia, recent trips to a local Persian restaurant, Carl Venezia’s pork store and a pub serving real cask conditioned, hand-pulled ales have renewed our ardor for seeking out the good stuff. And while we still have only limited time to explore our new area’s gastronomic offerings, in all honesty, outings of that variety are far more enjoyable in the company of a toddler than schlepping out to Jackson Heights, Queens, on the subway for Colombian or Egyptian food, even if they don’t have quite the same exotic ring.

Above all, we can say that we are deliriously happy with our new status as home owners. We would never have imagined we could buy anything half as beautiful or historic, and given the absurd real estate prices, it’s a stone-cold certainty that we never would have afforded even half as much in Brooklyn. Now that we’re settling in to our new home and new environment, and our son has got used to fresh air, and is becoming less agoraphobic at the sight of open spaces featuring tall trees, we’re starting to get back to some sort of cooking schedule in our new kitchen.

We haven’t yet managed to find the time to pass an entire weekend making sausage or even make any mince pies for Christmas, and perhaps compared to some of our earlier exploits, this recipe may seem tame, but some handmade butternut squash gnocchi made mid-week offered a reassuring return to the old groove that we’re excited to be back in. Beyond that, the fascinating challenge of planning, redeveloping and paying for the kitchen we have yearned for the majority of our adult lives looms on the horizon. It’ll take us a while, but the enormous advantage of owning rather then renting is that any investment we make will be solely for our benefit, constituting a paradigm shift from a combined forty years of feathering the nests of neglectful and rapacious landlords since we last inhabited a place we called home.

In his rather witty book, French Lessons, Peter Mayle attends the annual Fete de Grenouilles (Festival of Frogs-Legs) in Vittel, France, and describes an episode at the festival banquet in which an attendee, elbow deep in amphibian thighs, tells him that if he thinks eating frogs is unusual, she had heard of an even more peculiar repast enjoyed throughout Britain, the toad.

Now, of course, it’s not true. The British do not, as far as I know, eat toads, though, if frogs are edible, and taste a bit like chicken, then I might be prepared to try toads, if sauteed with a little garlic and parsley. However, the British do eat toad in the hole – a delicious, simple and filling dish that is one of my father’s perennial favorites. I, like my father, love this dish too and had been threatening to make it for my wife for months until recently, when the weather got cold enough to warrant a meal with sausages, eggs, flour, milk and gravy, I finally got around to it.

It went down very well, I’m glad to report, and it’s an easy, inexpensive and relatively quick meal to make on a weekday night. You should try it whether you like amphibians or not.

Many among us, ourselves included, can be forgiven for spending a few wistful moments during the more tedious passages in our lives wondering what it might be like to wander exotic locales, rubbing shoulders with cultured types all while sipping fine wines over plates artfully decorated with exquisite regional specialties. When we come out of such reveries, we often try to convince ourselves that in reality this kind of life would be too much of a good thing, that after the novelty wore off it would be tiresome and, in all likelihood, downright unpleasant. Sadly, if the new book from Mike Desimone and Jeff Jenssen, aka The World Wine Guys, is anything to go on, it really is as wonderful as you’d imagine.

In fact, while there is much to be envious of in the global boozy peregrinations of the authors, it is only fair to say that a book of such encyclopedic detail represents years of yeoman work and a serious commitment to research. One may joke about how challenging it would be to have to drag oneself to yet another private tasting of select vintages, but to have written a comprehensive guide to the enormous selection of wines from these diverse regions across three continents, is tantamount to a life’s work, and deserves to be acknowledged as such. Inclusion on your holiday gift list would be fine way of doing so, as might searching the interwebs for whichever of the book’s wines you can lay your hands on to enliven your Yuletide festivities.

As we noted in a recent post, wine has lately become a truly global beverage. From the tropical Brazilian Highlands to New Zealand’s snowy Southern Alps, and from the dusty Patagonian steppe to the foot of Table Mountain, grapes are being grown and turned into a staggering variety of remarkable wines. In fact, this is hardly a recent development, since the root stock of some of South Africa’s most noble vineyards predates anything in Europe or anywhere else, and Argentina and Chile have been making wine since the 16th century. However, for much of this time, neither production level nor the quality of these wines made them suitable for export, so it is only comparatively recently that they have become available to us in the rest of the world. A phenomenon this book is the first of its kind to celebrate.

Along with brief histories of the wineries and tasting notes to accompany their more recent vintages, the authors also feature charming vignettes from a selection of the winemakers, as well as some occasionally dodgy-sounding recipes you’re advised to pair with said wines. If this last inclusion is perhaps a step too far in a book already over-packed with information, we really commend the authors for making room for these first person narratives from the winemakers themselves.

Any regular readers of our blog would know that our preference is to wrap the food we write about in florid tales of our personal travels and anecdotes of the fascinating variety of folks we encounter. Many times there is only the haziest connection between the trip and the dish, but while Desimone and Jenssen do an excellent job of highlighting Uruguayan vineyards, we feel that, in this area, we have something legitimate to add. So, allow us, if you will, a moment to recount our visit to the Bouza winery, a boutique, family-owned vineyard sitting very contentedly in the lush pastureland surrounding the Uruguayan capital a couple of years ago.

Like the owners of many South American wineries, the Bouza family are but a pair of generations removed from their Galician immigrant founders who brought their know-how and passion for the grape across the Atlantic. Hidden among palmeras, the entrance to the Bouza property is easy to overlook, which would be a pity since you’d miss a charming bucolic vale replete with herds of woolly sheep, acre upon acre of orderly vines and the mock-French chateau stylings of the winery’s main facility surrounded, rather ostentatiously, by a large collection of highly-polished vintage motors. Visits to the vineyard must be arranged in advance and, though our eager guide’s English was vastly superior to our pidgin Spanish and especially after the tasting there was much goodwill and enthusiasm from both sides, communication was still rather hard going at times.

A tour of the vines, the barrel-room, and an extensive tasting of Bouza’s wares, was concluded with a typically meaty, but considerably refined, lunch in the winery restaurant where our only fellow-diners were a pack of purple-nosed French businessmen and their Uruguayan counterparts getting stuck in to what appeared, from the empties littering their table, to be an entire case of the house tipple. Returning to Montevideo that evening, full of wine and enthusiasm for this country, we strolled the malecon accompanied by hobbyist fishermen and professional dog-walkers festooned with leashes like spiders-legs, and watched the setting sun gild the city’s waterfront as it slid into the muddy ripples of the Rio de la Plata.

Even prior to this excursion, we were (and still remain) enchanted by Uruguay. Our trip offered a brief and envious window into the working lives of Desimone and Jenssen who seem to share our admiration for this part of the world. Like them, we highly recommend Uruguay, its food and its wines, especially the 2007 Bouza Tannat Tempranillo blend, a pair of which have been snoozing in our very own micro-cellar since we returned, awaiting just the proper occasion.

For centuries, mankind and cuttlefish have had something of a difficult relationship, certainly from the latter’s perspective. Even prior to the development of the photographic tint known as sepia – a brownish hue that makes the late 19th century appear to have been an unusually dusty period – the ink of the cuttlefish was prized for its color-giving properties. In fact, this cephalopod’s dye is known as ink because that is exactly what much of recorded history was written in.

In an ironic twist, the plight of the cuttlefish worsened when enterprising fisherman saw that the inedible, but highly buoyant, internal structure, known as cuttlebone, could be used to manufacture floats which, when attached to fishing lines, resulted in an even more effective means of catching them. The concurrent discovery that the rest of the poor creature is exceedingly delicious, like a meatier version of squid, only increased humanity’s murderous desire, making its existence almost untenable in some parts of the Mediterranean until synthetic dyes and plastic floats allowed populations to recover in recent times.

In the same general spirit of fishermen making the best use of what they had to hand, it is thought that fideua, a noodle dish cooked in a similar fashion to paella, was the fortuitous outcome of an absent-minded fishing boat’s cook having left his bag of rice ashore sometime in the 1920s. This dish is now popular throughout Mediterranean Spain, but the beach resort of Gandia claims it as its own, styling itself as the “Home of the Fideua” (pronounced roughly “fih-day-wah”). [For more on Gandia, as well as some interesting podcasts on life in Spain, click here.]

And it is little wonder that neither this fisherman nor his countrymen have looked back since discovering the dish. It is as perfect for a quick weeknight meal as it is enjoyed lazily on a summer weekend. Unfortunately, and it’s not clear why, since squid is very popular in the US, cuttlefish doesn’t seem to have caught on this side of the Atlantic and is consequently rather tricky to source. That is, of course, one knows about the wonderful web store, La Tienda, who were kind enough to send us a couple of pounds of delicious Peregrino Canarian sepia recently.

La Tienda PR and marketing manager, Laurie Hager, reached out to us after she’d read our (admittedly pretty fabulous) pork belly pincho moruno post over on the Christian Science Monitor and leafed through a couple of our other posts on Spain – including this one featuring a terrible picture of some very fine cuttlefish a la plancha we ate in Madrid, deciding very correctly that we were worthy recipients of gratis merchandise. Let it be known that we would have posted about this sooner had we not moved house six weeks ago and only just started eating homemade food again after several unhappy weeks eating out of cans as we slowly unpacked our cooking gear.

Let it also be known that La Tienda is seriously committed to sourcing authentic Spanish products for us Americans. Such is their devotion, that La Tienda founder, Don Harris, was recently awarded Spain’s cross of the order of civil merit for his services in promoting the people, culture and foods of Spain in America. Here’s hoping that this post and the body of our work on this site dedicated to Spanish gastronomy helps, even in a small way, La Tienda go from strength to strength.

My guidebook assured me that 3 out of 5 Icelanders believe that faeries, mischievous sprites and trolls are real. Many, it continues, actively take precautions against them, refusing to set foot in the spots they are thought to inhabit. My first introduction to the country, the drive from the airport into Reykjavik, past a giant aluminum smelting factory set in a jet black lava field against gun-metal clouds, felt more like Bladerunner than the redoubt of spirits.

The snow-capped black mountains that ring it to the north and west, and the city’s jewel-box houses of green and red and white provided a rather Yuletide feel, even when illuminated by the midnight sun. A friend had told me that midsummer in Iceland was like an extended daytime drinking session punctuated by brief episodes of fatigue lasting all of about twenty minutes when the sun took its brief dip towards the horizon before rising again. His story went that during a week-long stay he had slept for less than six hours start to finish. A few weeks of this and perhaps I wouldn’t entirely rule out the existence of will-o the wisps either.

The homogeneity of the Icelandic population is such that, I, a tall, fair-haired white man, was always addressed in English. This was possibly for the best since Icelandic sounds like an even more inscrutable version of the Elvish tongues lisped so cloyingly in the Lord of the Rings. Happily, though, for students of this, the original Norse, there are no regional accents, slang or dialects of Icelandic to contend with. That there are less than 250,000 native speakers helps keep the number of foreign students limited to either the truly committed or the mildly eccentric.

However, spending my week there with an Icelandic family meant that my exposure to the language was greater than the average tourist, and so it was that by its end, I could both write and pronounce “Hej, hvað segir Þu?” (Hi, how are you?) and “Fint, takk fyrir!” (Fine, thanks very much!”) well enough that everyone still responded in English.

Þingvellir, the site of two seismic events – the separation of the European and North American tectonic plates that gave birth to this geologically-active nation, and the creation of Europe’s first parliament, here in the 8th century – had been a fascinating day trip out of the capital, as had the midnight motorcycle rallies in the northern city of Akureyri, and the appropriately itchy excursion to Myvattn (Mosquito Lake). And, if it hadn’t been exactly a highlight, then the three excruciating hours spent drinking tea laced with brennivín as a guest of my hosts relatives in the beautifully desolate fish-processing town of Isafjorður was certainly a testament to the legendary Icelandic capacity for self-punishment. A quality that has seen them achieve fame in strong-man competitions and notoriety in gastronomic spheres.

Not only have Icelanders traditionally had to make do with boiled sheep face and gasp-inducing, ammonial, buried basking shark as festive dishes during the endless, pitch black winters, but that they had to manage it, until the early 1990s, without beer. Even when blind-drunk, the tiniest bite of the shark, tasted under peer pressure at Þorrablot, the traditional midwinter festival, had nearly brought me to tears some months earlier.

On my final, gorgeously sunny evening, with the light dancing off the twinkling wake, I took a boat across Reykjavik harbor to dinner on the island of Viðey with a consequent degree of pessimism about my prospects for a decent meal. The summer though, is an inversion of everything that is awful about Icelandic winters, from the weather to the cuisine, and I was delighted by everything on offer, that is, until the arrival of the almost preposterously enormous bill.

On my plate that night was a gloriously simple pan-fried arctic char of the most luminous orange over a cauliflower mousse that the chef had sculpted to resemble a ski-jump, surrounded by some tiny, inky-hued Siberian tomatoes, greenhoused locally. The combination of fish, snow and black boulders felt like a distillate of the country itself, in microcosm. Perhaps only a sprinkling of pixie dust was missing.

Recreating that dish some years later, I opted for salmon over char, cauliflower mash over mousse, and a purple basil pesto in place of the dusky tomatoes. As we edge into fall, all these vegetables are at their peak, and the contrasts they offer are as interesting texturally and aromatically as much as they are visually.

Back in the days before blogs were afforded any of the current grudging acknowledgement they get from “proper” writers, one of the sticks used to beat them with was that their content was all too personal and scatological, lacking reliability, depth and, above all, readability. That they have been one of the principal conduits for this here today, gone in half an hour news cycle only serves to convince critics of this format that they were right all along. By contrast, the popularity of blogs among the public would seem to undercut these naysayers, and paint them, along with, serious TV actors descrying the popularity of reality TV shows, as dinosaurs who failed to adapt to a major change in climate. It is noticeable that traditional media sources, in an attempt to brand their content as premium and superior to that of hordes of pajama-clad scriveners, have recently begun hiding it behind pay-per-subscription pages.

If an echo of this formal-to-casual paradigm shift can be found in the wine industry, it might be in the seemingly unstoppable rise of inexpensive and highly drinkable New World wines at the expense of well-bred, distinguished Old World bottles. What used to be pilloried by aficionados for their lack of refinement and the brashness of their marketing approach, has progressively taken market share away from wines steeped in tradition and terroir, pushing vintages with a decade of more of cellaring even further beyond the reach of the public. If this comparison sounds tenuous, then it should. After pensively rinsing our teeth in two heavy tomes on the world of wine, in which preposterous aroma-based analogies seemed more numerous than snobs at a Bordeaux tasting, we were in the mood to propose something controversial and highly suspect.

A cursory leaf through The New York Times Book of Wine, an anthology of the last thirty years of writings about the grape from that esteemed publication (yours for $24.95, no subscription necessary), will provide more information about the world of wine than you may have thought existed. Unlike the Windows on the World Complete Wine Course, it is not aimed at beginners, nor at those still wondering how to differentiate Burgundy from Beaujolais, chardonnay from Chablis, instead it features stories as various as the latest trends in South African wine production, why you should take interest in Hungarian sweet wines, what happened to all the white Bordeaux, and, inevitably, tales of smug global wine cognescenti tasting excruciatingly expensive, pre-phylloxera vintages in candle-lit cellars. In fact, so comprehensive and readable are the columns from such devotees of the grape as Eric Asimov, Howard Goldberg, Frank Prial and Florence Fabricant, that the only gripe that may be made of this handsomely bound edition is that the entries resemble blog posts in their brevity. Surely, book format not just allows, but requires, greater length? It is unfortunate that these columns have been repackaged without reversing some of the sub-editor’s prunings.

Former sommelier at Windows on the World, Kevin Zraly, is a man who could be credited with having elevated the wine cellar more than anyone else. Both actually, given the former location of his restaurant, and metaphorically in the minds of the general public. In fact, it has been his life’s work to de-mystify wine and make it as accessible as possible. In the 25th anniversary edition of his guide, he is at it again, explaining the meaning behind the high Gothic script of German Riesling bottles, why the position of the vineyard determines the quality and price of certain Burgundies, and what you’re really getting in a bottle of Californian red marked with a merlot label. His punchy, school book format – complete with pictures, chapter-closing quizzes, and his candid advice on the offerings of commonly-found producers – is as useful to the novice drinker in their local wine merchant’s as it is to the uncertain diner being circled vulturously by an unscrupulous wine-waiter.

When Zraly’s first edition was written it was dominated by French and Californian wines with a smattering of northern Italians and the odd bottle of Rioja thrown in. Today, it has a more global approach, providing helpful detail on many of the lesser-known regions including Austria, Hungary, South Africa, New York’s Finger Lakes, and Argentina, with updated information on the vintages of traditional growing areas. Perhaps it’s too much to ask for a single volume to be completely encyclopedic of a subject that is not just global but highly regional, but I still find Zraly’s book too heavy on traditional French wines and too light on these newer regions.

That so many of these parvenus are producing affordable, approachable wines which have helped induce millions to take wine as their beverage of choice seems to me to require him to cover them in more detail if this book is really going to be a “complete wine course”. For example, Portugal, source of most of the $7-12 red and white wine we’ve been quaffing lately, barely registers a page, in spite of its native grape varieties offering one of the most original winemaking styles around. Indeed, even Southern Italy and Greece don’t get much of a look-in, let alone the more remote and exotic, though still burgeoning, wine industries of Brazil and Uruguay, or those closer to home in Long Island, New Mexico, Colorado and, dare I say it, New Jersey.

Overall though, it is both an informative and useful guide, that few among us will not learn a great deal from. Tasted together with Kingsley Amis’ extremely witty vintage classic “Everyday Drinking” for some light relief, these two could form as much of a wine reference section to your culinary book shelf as you’ll ever need.