Food

Being a citizen of the world is difficult when you’re not allowed to enter the rest of it, much less travel across state lines without excessive burden. The ‘bad thing’ has made eating adventurously a tad harder. Some of us are meat-and-potato people. Others of us will unflinchingly and unknowingly order gizzard served in the basement of a Nepali restaurant in Queens because, as they say, when in Rome.Although I’ve been unable to travel or eat at restaurants, my enduring love affair with my stomach has not taken a hiatus. With Christmas fast approaching, neither should yours, or that of the citizen-of-the-world you love.These are items I’ve used or eaten, or that are also on my wish list, most of which are under $50. Bon appétit (and joyeux Noël).

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed his esteem for a lifetime. There are few miracles greater than what rod and reel will conjure from the deep. So it has been for me as I cast away my cares in this uncertain year. In early spring, I delighted for the first time in the freshwater lake fish of New England. In the cooler months, bluegill, pumpkinseed, yellow perch and largemouth bass all swim close to the Connecticut lakeshore. Fishing from the shore in one such lake in Litchfield County, I found that a simple spinning jig or, better yet, a nightcrawler on a hook and bobber are all that is necessary for a strike. These frisky creatures can be as colorful as their names.

‘Put the hen in a Dutch oven, brown him in butter for 12 minutes. If you have a piano in the kitchen, play the “Minute Waltz” 12 times. Add a little water. Put the lid on and let simmer. When you have finished playing half “The Dance of the Hours”, dragging it slightly, you’re ready to eat like an epicure.’ The Danish-born pianist and comedian Victor Borge is best known for his virtuosity on the keyboard, his wit and his timing. Most Borge fans don’t know that he was also a shrewd gentleman farmer. Julia Ransom Doty, my father’s first cousin, was a food and fashion editor for the Ideal Publishing Corporation, which produced popular, glossy ladies’ magazines back in the Fifties.

Ah, autumn, season of mists and mellow soupfulness, as the poet Keats didn’t quite say. In southern England, where Keats was inspired to write his famous ode to summer’s red-and-golden aftermath, fall mists may stick around all day; but in New England, they burn off with the morning sun, giving way late in the day to heady breezes that blow clean through the soul. It was Geoffrey Chaucer who brought the word autumn into the English language. As sure as ‘Aprill with his shoures soote’ leads ‘folk to goon on pilgrimages’, so October cries out for vigorous outdoor activity followed by autumnal soup.

I walked into a party with a friend a few years ago and told her I felt uncharacteristically uncomfortable. ‘That’s because you’re not carrying a pie,’ she said. It’s true; I usually have a pie as my calling card. The offering of a homemade pie makes no one unhappy. It’s a nice presentation, sure, but the handoff is magical, a conjuring the baker does when deciding whether the recipient is a pumpkin or cherry pie kind of guy. People think you’re being generous when you show up with pie, but really it’s quite selfish. First, baking carries me away. Second, I love to see people’s faces when handing them pie.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Donald Trump serves the best food in Washington. The residents of DC won’t say so, but it’s true. America’s capital has a lively food scene, with many excellent restaurants. None is better than the two that are in the soon-to-be-sold Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue: Sushi Nakazawa and BLT Prime by David Burke. Burke’s joint is absolutely my kind of place. It’s in the hotel lobby. The building used to be a post office before the Trump family converted it. The enormous glass-roofed lobby area is a marvel: put politics to one side and admit that it is an extraordinary achievement.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Paris ‘And please meet Alice, who has brought industrial cheese,’ said our Parisian host as she introduced me to the other dinner guests. Imagine my despair! I had failed her, not to mention her guests, on the sacrosanct fromage. A fate worse than death. Food is a national obsession for the French. The couple throwing the party presented us with a three-course meal, all made from scratch using seasonal produce from the local market. To think that I almost brought a six-pack of beer.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Going into Spoken English, you feel a little like Henry Hill taking the back entrance to the Copa in Goodfellas. Wander into the Line Hotel, past the check-in, take a right past the elevators and enter the kitchen. It works best if you’re with someone you need to impress. Unfortunately, this time I’m with a Spectator editor. The Line is one of DC’s newest and hippest boutique hotels. That’s another way of saying it’s slightly less boring than the Hilton about five blocks away.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. In Greenwich Village, one block south of Washington Square Park, stands the flagship store of DŌ, ‘New York City’s first ever cookie dough scoop shop’. Opened in 2017 by an American designer with fond childhood memories of baking with her mother, DŌ is now so popular that it requires a special line policy, as in: ‘SINGLE FILE so that pedestrians can still use the sidewalk.’ Often, a line of hundreds of customers can be seen snaking around the block, eagerly awaiting tubs and cones of its buttery, sugary (and uncooked) batter.

Olive Garden’s ‘Never Ending Pasta’ promotion, I’ve come to believe, is an accelerationist ploy. For about $11, you can engorge yourself with your pasta of choice, paired with your selection of a sauce, many of which catch the American eye with the adjective ‘creamy’ or ‘five cheese.’ Authenticity is an afterthought in the fever dream that is ersatz ethnic dining in endless proportions. And with $100 and a bit of luck, you could have purchased a ‘Never Ending Pasta’ pass — the 24,000 winners of this pass can indulge in the creamiest pasta with the crispiest toppings for nine weeks, unlimited. They can eat their weight in pasta without ever having to see the bottom of their ceramic dish staring back at them.