When Yeast and Cheese Aim to Please

You know an event has to be a jim-dandy if at some point you think, "If I was a cheese, would you wash me in beer?" and that's exactly what happened this evening at the Beer & Cheese Tasting at C'est Cheese, co-sponsored by Hollister Brewing Company. (Digression, as if every one of my sentences doesn't suffer from at least one, as this poor sentence even has: it might just seem like all I do is eat, drink, cook, make drinks, and write about eating and drinking. That's just how this blog rolls of late, if rolls might be an unfortunate term. The sell-out on health care "reform," say, by the people who are most supposed to be like me politically is just too painful to discuss...without another drink.)

Turns out, as you might know, the good monks and the lay people they hire who are rumored to be even better than the holy folk (no comment from the agnostic gallery, promise) at Chimay in Belgium not only make terrific ales--as Hollister brewer Eric Rose said "the reason you see it everywhere is because it's perfect"--but also cheeses. The most common one to be imported into the U.S. has a washed rind, bathed in Chimay Blue. Hence my opening query, which, alas, didn't get as enthusiastic a response from Amy as I had hoped. I think she'd prefer the tasty cheese to a cheesy husband.

Or one that takes copious notes through an utterly delicious tasting. Part of that is that Kathryn from C'est Cheese and Eric from Hollister are so excited about what they do (and they darn well better be--they sell beer and cheese!) that they impart factoids without pain, so you learn stuff as all the good food and drink go down. But they also simply nail pairings, like the Morbius Double IPA (Rose's latest creation) matched with Shropshire Blue, for as Rose says, "salty foods need hoppy beers." TNT needs a detonator cap, too, but couldn't match this pair for explosive flavor. And then there was my favorite match of the evening (if neither was my favorite cheese or beer--now that shows the complexity of this synergy thing)--Midnight Moon with Allagash Dubbel. Kathryn said she felt the sweet saltiness from the goat's milk cheese brought out the chocolate notes in the beer, but I felt it was more a deep caramel, and for me caramel is a sort of taste safety blanket, so you can't top that (and don't take it away from me or I'll cry).

Obviously, this time around the 5 pairings didn't just feature Hollister Brewing beer, but also beers Rose helped C'est Cheese choose to sell itself. So along with that Allagash Dubbel and Chimay Blue (from the 5 liter bottle, too! they spoiled us so) we had Ommegang Hennepin, which got us so close to the valley girls and gals saying "O-my-gang!" but that's probably not as much a joke near where the beer comes from, Cooperstown, NY. And then I learned there's a Belgium Comes to Cooperstown Beer Festival, which means amazing beer and the Baseball Hall of Fame in the same little town. If I ever do get to go, I might just tremor, fall over, and die of too much joy at one time, the non-sexual version of that me, Neko Case, Julie Delpy threesome. But, like, possible.

Sorry, now that you're all too grossed out to keep reading.... That Ommegang, a wonderful saison style ale, lit up with champagne-like notes for the creamy goodness that is La Tur, the cheese so nice, they had to milk animals thrice--it's made with cow, sheep, and goat cheese. (Kathryn calls it "the scrubby effect of carbonation.") Then there was one more Hollister beer, Rose's new Belgian Country Ale that he says, "Shows the difference between a farmhouse and a saison...bascially I ripped it off from my friends at Russian River." Given as much as I like Perdition in Santa Rosa, it's a 6 hour plus drive, so being able to get an excellent facsimile in Goleta is a big plus. That beer matched well with Cabot Clothbound Cheddar, a new cheese to the store from Vermont, pleasingly pungently cheddar-like, but trading in some of those more ammonia-y after-tones some English cheddars can have for some lovely nuttiness (which the Belgian yeasties--I believe that's the technical term--helped accentuate).

Afterward, we still felt a bit peckish, so picked up some sushi to take home from the ever-reliable Ahi and washed that down sharing a bottle from dear Michigan beer friend Smitty--a New Holland Brewing Golden Cap Saison. It fit the rest of the Belgian-dominated night like a beer named cap caps a fine evening. And it was.

When the Body Is as Numinous as Words

I've got several pat answers for why I stopped writing poetry. One of them is this--you can only write the "langauge is a tool that fails us" poem so many times before you have to take your own word for it. That said, it's the only tool we've got, if at times it's like using a bulldozer to study orchids or a flea comb to search a supernova.

Language has been in bad way these past eight years. It's not just because Bush has so little facility for it, it's that he cares for it the way he cares for the poor--he hopes some meaning trickles down. We've seen how that works, and now more of us are poor. It's got so bad we've had to argue about what torture is, and asses like Rush Limbaugh can suggest Abu Ghraib was no worse than frat boy shennanigans.

So let's hope that electing a president who can write, who can say about the work of Marilynne Robinson, "The language just shimmers," might be a start to getting language back. I hate to be all old-fashioned and the artiste, but a president who values beauty can get me almost misty eyed. I mean, a president who nails his diction with a glorious word like "shimmers"? To paraphrase another ascendant African-American politican Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, it's time to "luxuriate in America's deliciousness." How sneaky, mixing wordplay with food, but then again the best writing is the most sensuous, and we need to feel it in our mouths, need to chew before we swallow.

And on this most miraculous of MLK Days, I want to quote some King, from "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," one of the best passages in American English, with that sentence that begins with "But" a lesson in the periodic sentence:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

Here's hoping his joyous literacy is a legacy we can all share in, hoping the ominous clouds of inferiority no longer form in any child's little mental sky, that our country can put ideas into metaphor, metaphor into meaning, our words, then, made flesh.

Foodie Can't Fail

You'd think that someone who can turn a phrase as wondrously as James Wolcott would be able to avoid moments like this, but I guess not. In a recent post about a meal at Mario Batali's Babbo he wrote:

How was dinner eating-wise? I'm not a foodie, finding comparison eating a grossly materialistic and presumptuous exercise (why should I care what went down your gullet that halcyon night in Provence?--nor am I interested in knowing from which sun-kissed vineyard derived your wine in all its Tintoretto splendor), but for the record I ordered rabbit as an entree, and it was fab.

Part of me wants to point out "comparison eating" gets summarily dismissed in a piece that is largely about his dinner companions that include birthday celebrant Elvis Mitchell, Roberto Benabib, one of the executive producers of Weeds, cinematographer Harris Savides, Lola Ogunnaike from CNN, and a novelist some of you may have heard of, Toni Morrison. So, sure, namedrop your Nobel Prize-winning companions, but god forbid you mention the AOC of your wine.

But there's more to it than that. First, perhaps in the rarefied, Vanity Fair air foodie can only equal snob. That leaves out one of the greatest of foodie joys, the cheap find. A true foodie delights in diners and dives as much as what's haute. A foodie wants nothing more than surprise, and to stumble upon that perfect sopes, say, ranks as a greater thrill than finding out Alain Ducasse is as talented as everyone says (or that one of his numerous sub-chefs is, but that's a different issue, perhaps--a true foodie is intrigued by the chef celebrity game yet realizes there's often a mighty marketing department behind the great Oz's kitchen).

Second, dismissing rapturous food writing is like dismissing an edgy evening in a punk club watching the roar that is the Ramones or an evening at Lincoln Center when the ballerina nails it so she seems heaven-glimpsed, to pick two events Wolcott has exalted in his own writing past. One of the great glories of food and wine, and the desire to write about those glories, is they're so flash and gone. The mulberry bursts the essence of redness, and unless you have your mouth open and now that white shirt won't launder, all you're left with is the magical memory. Unless you write about it. Which is never the same, and therefore poignant and a different pleasure. But that's memory for you.

Third, many of us read food writing for the same reason we read any criticism--to delight in aboutness. What a wonderful thing, thought. Criticism of food follows such a lovely through line, from description to argument, having to build from particulars, getting to revel in all the senses in a way denied most other criticism. Pauline Kael couldn't discuss how the film smelled (ignore Odorama for a second); Lester Bangs, thank god, never tasted Lou Reed (surely we would have heard about it). Turn to a Jonathan Gold or a L.E. Leone, to name just two fine food writers, and we could be worded into anywhere land.

Or everywhere. For that's what Wolcott seems to want to deny. Food isn't just fuel. It's taste, of course, but culture and kindness. It's kin and country. It can be come-on or apology, lavishment or last lusciousness before a lethal injection.

What it can't be is dismissed so easily. Heck, I bet even Toni Morrison would tell you that.