somewhere btw swamp soup & potage creme

 I have a craving in the springtime / early summer to make watercress soup. I first learned about it in Ireland. When I started researching this post, I knew instinctively to look in Ruffage, a cookbook by the chef, author, fellow Midwesterner and alum of Ireland’s Ballymaloe Cookery School, Abra Behrens. I found a suggestion there not for watercress soup but lettuce soup. Behrens writes, “cooked lettuce makes everyone wrinkle their nose at first, myself included. I first saw braised lettuce on a Jacques Pepin cooking show in a hotel room before I knew who Jacques Pepin was. Every single step along the way I scrunched my face even more - lettuce, butter, chicken stock, wine. I was wrong. The heat of the base converts the lettuce into silky little handkerchiefs.” I really love her writing, esp this idea of lettuce as a fabric material, her honesty and her humor. 

The texture of a cold soup from greens is tricky. I have an idea that I don’t want to include potato, as in the Ballymaloe recipe, as well as a recipe from the Canal House, because I want to preserve the intensity of the greens in flavor, but in the past anytime I left out potato the soup is slimy, coating your lips with the glycerol texture of the broken down cress. I opted to try to meet the French-influenced lux texture of a shiny chicken stock, cream and plenty of butter with some slick greens. Behrens braised lettuce soup recipe incorporates peas, an interesting innovation. 

There’s a great recipe for Lettuce-Watercress soup from Amanda Hesser in her book the Cook and the Gardener. Hesser writes “Watercress soup was once very popular in France. Considered a spring tonic, it was referred to as a potage de santé or health soup. Lettuce soup has also enjoyed its popularity. It’s been around for ages, reaching a height of sophistication in Careme’s day, during the nineteenth century.” Hesser’s green soup practice makes use of what tastes good in that moment, rather than adhering to the fanciful, almost antique recipes of yore from the likes of Antonin Careme, the king’s cook. 

In the same spirit I recommend you hunt around for what greens are tasting good to you now. This recipe tasks you with imagining a blend of brightness and spiciness from different sources - kind of like how a winemaker has to make a cuvée or blend - I found it fun, hope you do too. 

Green Soup 

3 tablespoons salted butter

3 shallots, chopped

1 lb tender-leaved greens, like young kale, swiss chard, spinach, arugula or amaranth*

Spring of mint, picked for its leaves 

Bunch of parsley, picked for its leaves 

Couple of chives, chopped 

¼ c water 

2 cups good-tasting stock, vegetable, chicken or veal 

¼ c cream 

1 tablespoon Salt 

Pinch of White pepper 

Melt butter in a large pan. Add shallots and cook on medium-low heat until melted, about 8 minutes. Add greens (but not the herbs) and water to pan. Season the greens with salt. Cook on low heat, stirring occasionally, until cooked through, about 20 minutes. Don’t rush it. If the leaves get dry, add a bit more water as needed. 

Transfer onions and greens to a blender, and add raw herbs. Add a little stock and blitz it up on low at first, add speed and stock as you go. Blend until all the flecks of green are incorporated. Should look like a green smoothie. Add the cream. Taste and add seasoning if needed. It should seem pretty thin but will thicken a bit when it gets cold. Chill in fridge until ready to serve. Garnish with chopped chives. 

*Amaranth is a neutral-tasting leaf, so you can layer on flavor with herbs and most pungent and peppery greens. If you can find the herb Savory this does it really well. Amaranth also grows wild around Chicago like a weed. We do have led in most parts of Cook county in the top layer of our soil from industrial run off. In my case, amaranth just starting growing in a raised bed we have, I was only able to identify it with the app called Plant Finder. The markets are starting to have more greens and herbs, and this is a good time for the softer greens, while later in the summer we get more hearty and fibrous textures. 

fish mayo

Mayonnaise was on the short list of foods reviled in my family home. It was taken so seriously I used to order McChickens without sauce (dry). My dad still refuses to touch it. We once went to lunch together at the restaurant I had just started working at, I ordered the whole menu I think aside from the two dishes they always had on. One, a highlight for me, was a goat dish with tonnato. Knowing the principles of the restaurant at the time it must have been made with bonito instead of the moist canned fish. It also had what must have been a mountain of black pepper in the sauce, giving it spice and texture that, to my mayo-sensitive taste at the time, offered balance to that tonnato, to that dish.

Starting so far from the source, the Northern Italian sauce commonly served with veal, opened up my curiosity and six years later I find myself in my kitchen closer to emulating the classic.

In Benedetta Vitali's cookbook Soffritto: Tradition and Innovation in Tuscan Cooking she includes vitello tonnato in a chapter called "Layering Flavors" intended to "offer a series of recipes based on the search for tastes to assemble and mix, with the aim of finding unusual and interesting combinations". Obviously not relegated to only food, this is also how one thinks about putting wine and food together on the table. You could bluntly call pairing a flavor layer and as fair weather pairing fans it proves re-invigorating and inspiring to tear things down to the scaffolding and think about the construction. I think a lot about the scene from It's Always Sunny where Danny Devito's character Frank says he likes to make the sandwich in his mouth because it tastes better.

Because I'm curious about the potential of the flavor layer, freeing the tuna from the veal, I don't use Vitali's recipe which classically calls for using some jus in the sauce itself further marrying the sauce and meat together. As common in my kitchen I turn to Rachel Roddy. Her method is good for this because while some recipes ask you to add mayonnaise to a fish puree, she has you add your olive oil into your eggs and fish mimicking mayonnaise making itself. Marcella Hazan insists that you use 100% olive oil mayonnaise for tonnato and I agree. The flavor is usually too strong but with the multiple fishes and other seasonings the grassiness is balanced and essential to the dish. So doing it yourself you know what you're getting into. The process of making mayonnaise itself has a leisurely magic to it, asking one fat to absorb another close to infinitely without breaking. Bearing witness to that kitchen magic is always a treat. Lastly, building the sauce in one blender is more economical to clean, hopefully allowing you to relax an take your time with your oil addition.

Roddy serves her sauce with tomatoes, as does Helen Rosner in her recent article for the New Yorker. Local tomatoes aren't in season yet but are close enough that it feels sensible to hold off on a dish that celebrates them. I picked potatoes, partially because potato rhymes with potato so you aren't robbed of the joy of saying "potato tonnato" which nicely mimics "potayto potahto". But also in the spirit of Vitali's suggestion. This ultimately ends up combining two fridge salad classics, the tuna salad & the potato salad into one. And I think it's a good place to start. The recipe makes for more sauce than you probably need for potatoes so you can play around with it for a few meals. We used this sauce the other day to dress pork sandwiches.

Tonnato (adapted from Rachel Roddy's column A kitchen in Rome)

Some people put capers in their sauce but I follow RR’s lead and use parsley, leaving capers as garnish. Also while I affectionately call this fish mayo it’s only sort of true. You are looking for a silky texture, expecting something stiffer that mimics Hellman’s will only lead to an undeserved disappointment in yourself.

2 anchovy fillets

160g can tuna (120g drained) this should be written on the can

1 clove garlic

1 whole egg plus one yolk

1 tsp dijon mustard

small handful parsley (optional)

150ml olive oil

pepper and maybe salt depending on your anchovies

1. Add the anchovies, drained tuna, garlic, eggs, mustard, and parlsey into your blender and pulse until smooth.
2. Once smooth, continue to pulse and add your olive oil in bit by bit as you would with mayonnaise. After the oil’s been incorporated, taste and add pepper and salt if you think it needs it.

Add a glass of wine on the side to keep layering flavors.

potatoes & caper leaves in a sea of sauce

break it up

 Sometimes you get to thinking a certain way about things and get stuck. Then if you’re lucky, someone or something gets you unstuck. For me, oftentimes wine does that. It can turn the way you think about something on its ear. I've written about wine and cooking disrupting my depression. A wine can show me a way of being - from combining flavors you'd never think of putting together - to carrying dark depth with grace - that help break out of my lulls, particularly with regard to feeding myself. So this is a post about herbs of all things to the tune of Patti Smith. I'm starting to understand my rage gets channeled into through and around food in some weird ways!

I’ve been very curmudgeonly and a little dogmatic about not having too many herbs in my kitchen. Sometimes it's fun to be a curmudgeon, lately I don't enjoy it as much. During the year I avoid buying herbs to the point that I avoid any recipe that depends on them. They are expensive, and I never use the whole clamshell container and they go bad, with the exception of thyme maybe. Bon Appetit magazine is the source of this wonderful, slightly tedious and helpful guide on how to store herbs properly. For a long stretch in the late mid-aughts BA was also responsible for lots of recipes that required many different fresh herbs. This annoyed me, in that it seemed to always require a pricey trip to the store and was not pantry-cooking-friendly. In summer, I keep a few herb pots that mitigate this issue, although we still need to buy herbs from the store sometimes.

I tend to think of a wine as having either a tender or soft stemmed herbal quality or a woody herb quality. Soft-stemmed herbs are: parsley, mint, cilantro, dill, basil, tarragon ~ while hardy-stemmed herbs are: thyme, oregano/marjoram, rosemary, bay. But then this false binary is broken up by some wines like syrah which classically hold aromatics of both fresh mint and thyme. And thus, in wine I find things go together that I would never reach for in my cooking. 

The person I share my kitchen with loves to cook with blends of herbs and spices, and I always enjoy his use of them. His favorite is herbs de Provence. This blend of thyme, rosemary and a differing combination of chervil, bay, marjoram and sometimes also lavender,  is reflected in the concept of garrigue. Garrigue is the French term for the wild vegetation along the Mediterranean coast but broadly in the south of France. Rather than a single plant or scent, garrigue refers to a variety of aromatic, resinous herbs like rosemary, sage, bay leaves and thyme. It also includes shrubs like juniper and artemisia as well as lavender and mint.   Em, who visited the Languedoc this spring, confirms that when you stand in the vineyard at a winery like Le Petit Domaine de Gimios, it smells like this. 

I made this lasagna in that same spirit of crossing my artificial boundary of soft and hard herbs - using thyme, fennel seed, and a basil garnish that seems minor but is very important for fragrance and texture. 

In addition to crispy noodles and cheese on the surface, I wanted to include the crispy leaf of the kale in this lasagna. This is kind of like a lasagna version of Em’s pasta, sausage, broccoli (PSB). For a vegetarian version, I recommend switching the pork for chopped fennel. It takes a little work to collect the perfect bite for the eater, but this is only because I wanted to keep it as simple and gestural for the cook (me) as possible. Lavering on a bed of fresh green curly leaves, for instance, feels really good even if it takes an extra second to cut it on the plate later on. 

*** and to drink ***

The Rainbow store now offers packs that highlight certain themes or producers, as well as a custom option. We have more wines in stock than are reflected in the packs detailed online. With the custom option, there's a space to give us some info about what you'd like. We encourage you to share what you're looking for - whether you would just like something new, or seasonal, or to go with what you're cooking this week. For instance, if you wanted an herbal pack including a syrah, we have wines for that, and it's just about our favorite type of thing to put together.

Lasagna 

Makes 1 tray / casserole dish about 9” x 13” 

Par-boiled Noodles*

Cream Sauce (see below)

Pork & Onion (see below) 

1/2 lb cleaned and destemmed Russian red kale leaves, kept whole 

1/4 c grated parmesan 

Small handful basil leaves, chopped 

Splash olive oil 

*Buy lasagna noodles and par cook them according to the package instructions, or make pasta according to the egg dough recipe from the blog. Roll out into ¼” thick sheets, then cut into strips. Don’t worry too much about making them evenly sized, it’s nice to make a little patchwork when you assemble it. In boiling, salted, water, cook the noodles for a minute, you just par boil them before baking them in the casserole. 

Cream sauce 

This started as a failed attempt to make Ricotta and turned into something nice between a fresh cheese and a bechamel

2 c heavy whipping cream 

½ c greek yogurt 

1 tablespoon distilled white vinegar 

Combine the yogurt and cream in a saucepan, and whisk until smooth. Bring to a low boil, then add vinegar. Keep cooking at a low simmer for 20 minutes, whisking occasionally to keep the sauce from burning on the bottom of the pan or on the sides of the pan. It should be reduced by about a half. 

Pork & onion 

1 lb ground pork 

10 or so spring onion bulbs or shallots, peeled and quartered

¼ c dry white wine

1 tablespoon fennel seeds, toasted and ground 

 3 or so thyme branches, leaves removed and chopped roughly

In a skillet, heat a glug of cooking oil. When hot, add the ground pork. Season with salt, chili flake and black pepper. Let pork brown by letting it sit in the pan and not stirring it around too much. Cook it til it’s no longer pink then remove to a plate. Deglaze the pan with ¼ c dry white wine. Add the onions and cook on medium-low heat until tender, about 15 minutes. Combine the onions and the pork and ground fennel and thyme. 

~~

Assemble the lasagna by placing cream sauce on the base of the casserole dish, followed by the noodles, then the pork, then the kale, and repeat. Finish the top with kale leaves, a drizzle of cream sauce, the grated parmesan and a few splashes of olive oil. 

Bake at 350 for 30 minutes. Let rest 10 minutes out of oven before serving. Serve with basil sprinkled on top. 

fridge salad

 Maybe you work at a restaurant and it is busier. Maybe your friends are asking you to hang out more. Maybe both are happening at the same time.

Coming out of a long nap you should go into the kitchen and cook something that you can pull from the fridge and eat when you have a little time to yourself. I would suggest to marinate some beets. My old acupuncturist said beets are good for your blood, something that tends leaves your face when you overexert yourself. Maybe kind of funny to be suggesting beets but honestly love and appreciate them for being a workhorse of whatever our Midwestern cuisine is. Plus it’s easier to appreciate cold things when you are hot. I cook them like Alice Waters in a baking dish with a splash of water covered in tin foil at 375 until a knife goes through in the way I feel like eating them. Sometimes that’s more firm and sometimes that’s beet jelly. I find it really hard to cook beets *just right*. Then you wait til they’re cool enough to peel the skins and cut them and dump vinegar on to taste. You can find yourself using a lot of vinegar but my favorite for this dish is very precious to me and I only spare a small glug, it serves more to highlight the sweet-earth rather than to mask it as can be common with this preparation.

The beets are good because of this earthiness, reminding us of what we stand on (even if it’s underneath concrete) and offer a “grounding” feeling for the eater. If you want to sink your feet in even deeper I might suggest to have some blue cheese with the beets. Nicolaus Balla published a recipe for beet and blue cheese salad in the influential Bar Tartine cookbook, including an image where the beets and cheese are separate. Which is how I like it in order to get the full visual impact of both beautiful foods. The beets and cheese tend to bleed on each other which is fine but feels less inspired pulling it out of the fridge on day 2 or 3.

On the way back from the cheese shop I texted Cub that I wanted to the Cab Franc of foods. The kind I like, deep earth with a lick of acidity. Something that reminds me of opening a fresh bag of clay, damp and heavy sure, but full of possibility. Going to take you somewhere. 

Unless you’re really in the clouds I would suggest white wine, a friend of Cabernet Franc, Chenin Blanc for this. We have a duo in the shop from Le Temps d’Aimer that I’ve been dreaming about since the last time the wines were in Chicago. If you hate blue cheese, you can eat beets and drink Cabernet Franc maybe? I suggest this pair from Bobinet. Pop the Hanami whenever you’d like and save the Echalier for an occasion.

Other fridge salads to consider: beans, tuna, mussels like from our apéro bar, a grain salad like farro

New Pack! Movie & Wine Kit

 This week we debuted two new packs available for delivery. One comes from the vignerons Marie and Vincent Tricot in the Auvergne in France, including their rosé of Pinot Noir and their fleshy but fresh white wine called Désiré. The other is my movie pack, two wines I recommend drinking while watching two particular films. They are generally wonderful wines, one white and one red, that don’t require any media to make sense, it’s just for fun. There’s a white wine, Le Temp Faits Tout blanc from Remi Poujol, and O Trancado from La Perdida. 

I sort of thought everyone who likes wine also drinks wine while watching movies and am starting to realize it’s not the case. It has become a ritual in my house for a few reasons. If you have the right wine with the right movie it enhances everything -  it makes action seem more swift, jokes funnier, monologues more profound. I think it’s the same reason a lot of people drink socially, at least according to a set of novelty cocktail napkins someone gave me once, which, rather grimly, read I drink to make the people I’m with more interesting. Yikes. You can take it too far with wine and media, if you wind up just getting too intoxicated and crying at the monologues in Pirates of the Caribbean 3, say, for instance. While I still find those moments cathartic, I feel hollow when I remember the touching line the next day, and it doesn’t have the same resonance. I recommend you always drink water, too, if drinking wine. 

For me, making a movie and wine match is about energy,which is similar to pairing food and wine. You can go for contrast or complement. If the movie is playful and light, a fresh and direct wine might be good. If it’s a dark movie, like literally dark or dark in tone, you can have something deeper, dusty. You don’t want to double down too much on matching the character of the movie and the wine, however, or it can feel over the top, and you wind up falling asleep watching Underworld with a glass of old vine Sangiovese still in your hand. In that instance, I was reaching for a smell-o-vision style pairing of a sanguine wine with a vampire flick. Much like 4DX, this came up short. 

I asked my husband what he considers when it’s his turn to select a wine for a movie we are watching. His concerns were a little more practical than mine. He goes for something that will last and be interesting to drink for at least the duration of the film, but also something that you can drink two glasses of and not become very drunk. For him, the wine must always be refreshing. “It’s dry work watching a movie,” he said. 

 

I can’t summarize Top Gun better or more concisely than A.O. Scott and Manohla Darghis in their viewing club piece for the New York Times, and I won’t try. 

A story of boys, toys and sunglasses, “Top Gun” was a shiny, noisy, dumb hit. When it landed in 1986, it launched Tom Cruise into the superstar stratosphere and his decades-long action-flick flight plan. Depending on your point of view, the Tony Scott-directed “Top Gun” was harmless (mindless) fun, a gung-ho commercial for the military-industrial complex, a perfect distillation of the Reagan era or — with its sweaty, bare-chested high jinks — the most delectably homoerotic movie to come out of Hollywood, maybe ever.

I was skeptical that I would enjoy Top Gun. To those of you who are also skeptical, I understand. But in March 2020 my husband and I sank into the couch with our two cats, who seemed to also be watching the movie - I had a theory they thought the planes were flies on the monitor. Or maybe like me, the cats just loved the spectacle of stunning aerial photography and non-stop synthesizer-heavy tracks. We re-watched Top Gun this week in preparation for the release of the long-awaited sequel. I went to the fridge for a pulpy, cold wine with verve, and found it in Le Temp Fait Tout. 

It’s hard to talk about Remi Poujol’s wines without addressing the man himself. I’ve never met Remi but have heard many stories about what a generous and wonderful champion he is for natural winemaking. He is an advocate and a teacher, who has evolved his farming and winemaking practices alongside a community of like-minded vignerons in the neighboring area like Joe Jeffries, Julien Peyras and Bernard Bellahsen. He’s a member of Association des Vins Naturels and one of the initial five principal vignerons of the BRUTAL!!! movement. I’ve written about the star text of the vigneron previously - I think in reaching for a wine from Remi I was thinking of the powerhouse he is, in comparison to Tom Cruise, a reliable performer who has come to embody the tentpole of Hollywood action stardom. 

Thinking about movie wine as refreshment, there’s nothing better to drink while watching the iconic sweaty sunset volleyball scene than Le Temp Fait Tout. It’s a leesy and uplifting white wine made mostly from the grape variety Ugni Blanc. Rainbow received this wine last year and have kept a few bottles to see how it grows and changes. We wanted it to settle a little bit, when it first arrived it seemed really quiet. It’s now a little more expressive, but, just like when it arrived, it changes quickly. I like drinking this wine that has its own sense of locomotion along with a film that is essentially about speed. Together they make for a pleasant rollercoaster ride.  The brightness of the wine quenches movie thirst while the steely, stoney minerality matches the sleak machinery on display. 

Ok so the second recommendation is also for something of an action movie, albeit a science fiction one - Escape from L.A. the 1996 film co-written, co-scored and directed by John Carpenter. It is the sequel to Carpenter’s Escape from New York, which he made in 1981. Both take place in a post-apocalyptic America The year is 2013, and after just one of many ongoing earthquakes, L.A has been turned into an island-prison for the entire country. You go in but you can’t get out. Kurt Russell reprises his role as Snake Plissken, a former soldier who nearly got away with robbing the Federal Reserve. If Snake is to survive his death sentence, he needs to rescue the president’s daughter from L.A. Along the way he evades many dangerous face offs with various gangs and crews, including vampiric plastic surgeons in what used to be Beverly Hills, where he has to save his own flesh from being cut up and used in their underground skin shops. 

I really enjoyed drinking the remarkable wine O Trancado from winemaker Nacho Gonzalez while watching this wild film. Nacho Gonzalez is one of the most progressive natural winemakers in Galicia, Spain. He actively seeks out vineyards that are isolated and remote. O Trancado comes from an old vineyard which Nacho inherited from his grandmother, named after the area it’s planted within, and the Garnacha Tintorera & Mencía vines yield less than 1kg of fruit per plant. 

As Carpenter tours us around his dystopian L.A. worlds, there are vibrant colors, lots of reds, blues and purples. It kind of feels like a carnival. I found the flavors of this wine also so vivid and rich - gleaming, juicy cherry fruit, crunchy violet and tart red currant. It’s a wild and rustic adventure of a wine, opaque and deep, a little dirty tobacco savory thing like the ash from the pyre that is this future California coast. Like Carpenter’s film, there’s a lot going on without anything seeming too distorted or too circusy, it all just comes together, even if at times they are viewed and drunken through a fun house mirror - one moment the texture seems too heavy to have without food. My suggestion is in fact to first start drinking the wine with dinner, a little piece of meat is very nice, then finishing it with the movie afterwards. 

You can check out the pack in our store. Please don’t hesitate to email me with your own thoughts about movie and wine pairings, I’d love to know! Our address is Rainbowwinechi@gmail.com. 

natural wine folk science pt ii

 This week’s blog is about dinner table tripping, natural wine theory of relativity:

On Monday I was walking to Le Bouchon to meet some old friends for dinner. It’s funny timing, I’m already feeling nostalgic, which I’ve attributed to seasonal change.

Now I’m at the restaurant and we’re having some Chardonnay from Julien Labet and catching up. The conversation feels very familiar and comfortable, enacting the past in which we all know each other more intimately. This isn’t reminiscing, we’re not talking about the past we’re talking as if it were 2014 or something.

But we’re also drinking some natural wine and in my body is the natural wine feeling. Something we’ve sort of shared in together, but not often and not in a nice restaurant. So while I’m saying something old out loud at the table, something I might not bring up with more present company, my bodily feeling is very much defined by my present. And being acknowledged only privately by me. Still working on getting that sensation out of the iykyk category. But have been listening to the song Cowboy Take Me Away a lot and think it’s the best way to describe it, the natural wine feeling. Both lyrically and the sensation of the sounds in your ears. 

Already I am feeling physically stretched across time, between past with these friends and the present cowboy in my life but I think wine can show you the future too. In flavors saved my life pt 1, over a year ago I referred to one of the German words for experience, Erfahrung. Which we account for in a definition of experience, but for them it is distinct enough for its own word, Erfahrung serves as your understanding of your past and the perception which shapes your present. Though in your moment of experience you are grazing the future, creating the opportunity to change your perception. I don’t think I always understand wines that are refined, like nice Jura white wine, but in appreciating them without a full grasp I feel closer to that change.

How nice and how hard and how special to sit still, so temporally fucked.

I wouldn’t argue that it’s exclusive to natural wine, but I want to submit it to the folk science archives because I think it is special about the wine. I’m reminded of this poster we made at Cellar Door for our last wine school (February 13, 2020). Everyone went around and said something that defines natural wine and I wrote a simplified version on butcher paper, it hung in the restaurant for a couple weeks after that. Someone on staff (sorry if you know it was you please text me!!!) suggested that there is a tension, natural wine is “how wine used to be/connection to history” and “ALSO helps us look forward”. The past and the future colliding in glass, for us to drink now, fresh & feel. 

apéro

We are hosting an apéro afternoon - evening this Sunday at Tusk, at 3205 W Armitage, from 2 - 6:30pm. We will have glasses of wine and snacks available for sale. Hope you can join us! 

 I first learned about apéritif in Chicago, which is very much not a city known for this European ritual of gathering for a drink and bite in the pre-dinner hours. Happy hour might be the closest we get culturally to apéro, and Happy Hour was outlawed here until just a few years ago. 

When I worked at Red & White I met my friend Nadim Audi, who grew up in Paris and is now a partner at the importer Selection Massale. I think it was because of Nadim that this concept became part of my social life. And also because of Mac Parsons, who is also an importer now, at El Rancho. Em says she didn't know what apero was until hanging out with the likes of Mac and me, when we’d invite her over and she’d ask what time to come by and we’d say something like ‘apero is at 7’ which indicates a loose time frame, and means dinner will be ready when it’s ready. Em actually added something more like, “because you people don’t know how to serve dinner on time,” in a very loving way. 

I recently asked Nadim about apéritif, and if it needs to take place out at a bar, or if it must be a specific type of spirit or drink. He said that apéro is apéro as long as you’re drinking before dinner. The place doesn’t matter, so stopping somewhere for a drink on your way to a dinner reservation is apéro, but drinking a bottle of wine in the kitchen while the host cooks before sitting down for dinner is also apéro. Sometimes you get invited to ‘apéro donatoire,’ which, he told me,  just means whoever is inviting you over doesn’t really wanna cook and you’re about to get drunk and nibble on cheese. He added that after apéro donatoire you might wind up at the McDonald’s in Paris on St. Lazaire. 

Apéro is also something you can enjoy on your own, or with just the people you live with. My friends from outside Montreal, Sophie and Isabel, told me that their grandparents always, always had a little apéritif and a digestif, it was fundamental to their dinner meal. Apéritif whets your appetite for food, and the digestif helps - well - digest the meal. Over in Spain, alcohol is commonly used to prepare for eating a meal, including at lunch. La Hora del Vermut, meaning “the Vermouth hour,” is a specific time to drink vermouth. Drinking vermouth is a treasured tradition, particularly in the city of Madrid. Traditionally, la hora del vermut was just before lunch. The idea was to drink a vermouth before eating to wake up your appetite. The vermouth, paired with a good tapa, would prepare your stomach for lunch.

I use apéro to mark the end of my work day. Once I’m having a little glass of vermouth, some olives, a carrot stick, maybe a slice of pecorino, I’m signaling to my mind and body to relax, and slow down. This is where apéritif doesn’t feel very American to me. Shutting down the work day, decisively turning towards quiet time or social time. There’s no rule that apéro be consumed standing up, but it’s most common, whether out at a busy bar, with friends standing around the kitchen, or solo, hovered over a little plate of snacks. The fact that you still feel like standing, still have energy, but are winding down the work day, as opposed to working yourself to the point of collapse and falling into a seat as dinner is on the table, feels like a statement of values to me. 

In her cookbook Old World Italian, Mimi Thorisson, who lives in Italy but was raised in France, describes aperitivo, the Italian word for the same concept. “Torino is the city of aperitivo. It seems like every evening at around 6 o’clock, the whole town gathers for a drink and something to eat, whether salty or crunchy or cheesy. I love to do it, too, but I can’t do it every day, so shakerato is my salvation. You meet friends in a cafe or bar and they’ll have a Negroni or spritz and sometimes I’ll join in, but other days, I'll order my trusted shakerato, which is shaked black coffee with ice. It’s served with the same ceremony as a Bellini, in a high glass, delightfully foamy, topped with three coffee beans.” The three coffee beans symbolize the holy trinity from Catholicism. This seems a little more American, and a nice option without alcohol, a delicious shakerato. 

Cocktail hour is distinct from apéro. Both involve making a beautiful display, but canapés are more work. Apéro snacks are also fairly calorie dense but involve little or not preparation. The apéro beverage is typically not a cocktail. In France the old tradition is to have a liqueur like Pastis, Picon, Pineau des Charentes. Something you can just pull from the fridge or pour over ice. You might have a Champagne cocktail or kir, but generally the only thing you need is a bottle of one thing. For our friends, this is just opening a bottle of wine. Rosé and dry white wines are a broad category but always work. I think of Lulu’s Provencal Table, by Richard Olney, a cookbook that covers the kitchen of Lulu Peyraud, part of the family at the iconic southern French Domaine Tempier. The Tempier vin rosé remains one of the most coveted pink wines, and a solid apéritif. For every menu Olney lists, Lulu starts with apéritif. In summer it’s bagna cauda, octopus confit, grilled mussels, fried eggplant, and artichoke fritters. Year-round there are olives from the Peyraud farm, anchovy puffs, tapenade, salt cod purée, dry cured sausages. Olney writes, “When there are few guests, and the weather discourages an out-of-doors apéritif, Lulu and Lucien love to serve vin rose at the kitchen table, accompanied by sea urchin and violets.” 

I keep food in my pantry and fridge for company. Food for company that you can break into yourself if needed out of hunger or spirit - opening the box of crackers, jar of olives, unwrapping a nice salami. Although I do try to resist opening these things, like Sebastian Maniscalco’s mother who always had a store-bought cake on hand but insisted “the cake is for company only.” My go-tos are a saucisson sec, a hard cheese, generally sheep’s milk, kept very well wrapped, a jar of olives in the pantry, with a package of crackers and - importantly - a bag of chips. 

In preparing this post, I thought it might be fun to make some fresh chips myself. While apero is all about ease, and it doesn’t get easier than popping a bag of Great Lakes, making chips turned out to be fun and feel special. I also really like that you can season them yourself with some spice that really works with some wine and welcomes the dinner to follow. 

Spiced Potato Chips 

Makes about 2 quarts 

Adapted from Toni-Tipton Martin in Jubilee

Tipton-Martin tells us of the history of this snack in Black foodways. “According to legend, George Crum was head chef at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1853. One evening, a guest complained that Crum’s French-fried potatoes were cut too thick, so Crum very thinly sliced another batch, fried them very crisp, and seasoned them with salt…After that, he served the crunchy snack as an hors d’oeuvre in baskets in his own restaurant for thirty years.” 

Chips 

2 pounds russet potatoes 

2 teaspoon salts, or to taste 

Quart of Peanut Oil 

Seasoning

Any 2 teaspoons of your favorite spice blend (I like Old Bay, Baharat, Shichimi Togarashi) 

2 teaspoons lemon juice 

Method 

Using a mandoline, or a vegetable peeler, or a sharp knife, slice the potatoes into ⅛ inch rounds. Place in a large bowl. Rinse with cold water until the water runs clear. Cover the potatoes with ice water and refrigerate 1 hour. 

In another small bowl, prepare your spice blend. Set aside. 

Pour oil, enough to rise about 2 inches in a cast iron skillet, dutch oven or frying pan. Heat to 350 degrees, over medium-high heat. (Without a thermometer you can flick a few bread crumbs, if they sizzle immediately but don’t burn instantly the oil is ready). Adjust the heat to maintain this temperature. 

Drain the Russet potatoes and thoroughly pat dry with towels. Working in batches so as not to crowd the pan, fry the chips until golden, 3 - 4 minutes per batch. Use a slotted spoon to remove to a wire rack or paper towel-lined plate. Season them immediately, while still very hot. Let stand for 10 minutes to allow the chips to firm up. Serve with your apéritif and enjoy.