For the Love of Food: November 2020 Book + Bottle Pairing
Food. You could say it all began with food for me, my love of wine. I loved to cook, and to eat, and the only thing that could make that any better was wine, so I got into wine.
Now here I find myself in the middle of Covid, watching enviously as others use their quarantine time to cook for their families. There’s fresh sourdough and cakes and homemade soups and meatballs and tarts and soufflés. And I’m grabbing takeout from around the corner again while pouring wine for others.
As November approached, I noticed myself paying more attention to the cookbooks in the shop, coveting the newly released Per Se by the Thomas Keller from the French Laundry, and, more realistically, eyeing Ina’s new recipes in her new Modern Comfort Food. November is all about food for me - the weather changes (in theory) and new ingredients are in season; we start feeling nesty and craving savory soups and chunky sweaters; and we start thinking about Thanksgiving and what new side dish we’re going to slip into the repertoire this year. Do I stick to the green bean casserole of old or try out Szechuan green beans with almonds this year? Will mom even eat those? Maybe I’ll make both. Food means family.
Owning a bookstore | wine bar means I might not get a lot of time to cook at home, but I sure as heck still have to read, so I picked a book that could indulge all my foodie fantasies while helping you get in the mood to cook your own Thanksgiving feast in a couple weeks.
THE BOOK
As much as I love to read and as much as I love to cook, I didn’t know Ruth Reichl until the shop opened and my new friend and colleague Susan Hall pressed Save Me The Plums into my hands and said, order more of these. It turns out, this woman Ruth IS food, and reading her is nutrition for the soul. She is a genuine food lover and spent her career as a restaurant critic, a cook, a food journalist, a restaurant server, an author of food memoirs and cookbooks, and finally as the editor in chief of Gourmet magazine. For her, food writing is what made her fall in love with food - she frequently recounts reading a story in early Gourmet about a midnight lobstering adventure that changed the course of her own life. And now, reading Ruth Reichl’s own food writing, I understand the sentiment completely. She weaves nostalgia and adventure with sensory lyricism to create a feast for the mind. And now I love her.
Save Me the Plums follows the part of Ruth’s life where she ceases to be a restaurant critic for the New York Times when she’s offered a job to become the editor in chief for Conde Nast’s Gourmet magazine. She’s tasked with a mission she’s aligned with - make the magazine less pretentious and bring the recipes back to the people. One of the things I love about Ruth is her rogue independence. She shows up to job negotiations with the owner of Conde Nast and his family wearing a thrift store suit and squeaky leather boots. She fills her team with free thinkers. She says what she feels. And, she put a picture of a dead fish on the cover of her November issue of Gourmet.
“You can’t put a dead fish on the cover!”
“Si and I have been talking; we think you should forget about turkey this year Just put a fish on your November cover.”
Ruth is also just a good person. In her chapter, “Why We Cook,” Ruth recounts watching 9/11 unfold on TV in her office while her husband scrambled to pick their son up from school, while making plans to meet upstate to wait out the chaos. A few days later, Ruth hightailed it back to Manhattan, opening up Gourmet’s kitchens to cook for the first responders. Her team makes chili and cornbread and serves it to exhausted but appreciative firefighters.
“I thought about my own Thanksgiving, wondering what it would be like this year. I heard the firefighter’s voice once again [“Thank you for this taste of home”] and realized that in the rubble of the World Trade Center I’d suddenly understood the true meaning of food. I knew, without any doubt, that as long as I lived, chili would be one fo the ways in which I offer thanks.”
The fear and uncertainty and anxiety of 9/11 is being mirrored now in 2020. Our covid numbers are going up, an historic election is imminent, and Europe is going back into lock down one country at a time. What does our future hold? Will we eat with our families and friends this Thanksgiving? Should we eat with them?
In honor of the 9/11 first responders and the whole world that is dealing with all that is 2020, I’m centering the pairing on Ruth’s Thanksgiving Turkey Chili recipe on page 140 of Save Me the Plums. I’ll be making this recipe this month and encourage you to do the same, and share it with someone. While we might not be able to eat together we are able to share our love through sharing our food.
THE WINE
Ruth’s Thanksgiving Turkey Chili has the spice and richness of a Thanksgiving meal, but with some added heat that is quintessentially chili. Since Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday (obviously, because it’s the food holiday), I’m going to pair this book with my favorite wine of 2020 - J. Brix “Rougarou” Carignan 2019 from San Diego, California. Carignan is the perfect pairing for this chili because it’s bursting with fresh fruit flavors which will quench some of the heat from the jalapeños. It’s full bodied and rich which sets it up perfectly for the chipotles in adobo and the deep spice of toasted cumin. And there’s a hint of baking spice or cinnamon in carignan which screams fall. You won’t find any bitter tannins in this carignan which would compete with the heat of the dish, just a smooth richness that’s perfect for Thanksgiving.
Carignan has only recently begun to get the attention I believe it deserves. For a long time, carignan was used as a simple blending grape, usually along the Mediterranean in France, Spain, and Italy, because it is a vigorous grower and produced large quantities of fruit. Sounds great, but when vines produce a ton, the flavor of the individual grapes is diluted. However, as a vine gets older it starts producing less fruit, and winemakers soon realized that these restrained old-vine carignans were truly delicious!
Somehow, the husband and wife team behind J.Brix wines discovered the McCormick Ranch in San Diego County, home of 40 year old carignan vines. These vines are tough - they’ve survived two fires in addition to just surviving the climate of San Diego in general. The Brix family only made 75 cases of the 2019 Rougarou Carignan and we’ve got a decent amount stashed here at Book + Bottle to share with you.
“ONLY LOVE”