12
… To Pique His
Jaded Appetite

For many years, beginning in 1944, M.F.K. Fisher wrote for House Beautiful. The magazine said they hoped she would help “make wine as familiar to American tables as bread and butter, as much a part of our cookery as salt and pepper.” The magazine declared that in Fisher’s language “there’s a food poem in bread, wine and cheese, when you know which bread, wine and cheese to put together.” In this selection from August 1944, Fisher tells readers how to make a mid-summer meal that will “revive his interest in life—and yours, too.”

PAST SURPRISES—THE FIRST FULL BOWL OF PEAS from the garden, the taste of fresh tomato juice on a summer day, the baskets piled with little green beans waiting to be smothered in sweet butter; they can all become bores of the present. What was delight in early June is a bother by late August. No matter how proud we may feel at the prodigality of the Victory garden, the constant stemming of its flood of produce can be more than wearisome.

It is then that newness can revive us—whether we be man or woman. It does not really matter whether we are country-fresh, tanned, and languorous under the apple trees, or pale as ghoulies in the rubbery glare of simmering town streets; we must be surprised again to pull us over the dead-summer hump of boredom. We must turn our backs on full vegetable bins crying to be emptied in the farm house and on sensible salads eaten doggedly at the drugstore nearest the office.

One of the easiest and most magical ways of changing tempo is with food—and drink, of course. If you are not used to serving wine with meals, except perhaps when Great-Aunt Maggie comes or there is a birthday, have one kind to be drunk easily, pleasurably (economically), throughout an ordinary “unparty” supper, and see how everything grows lighter. And if you usually have one good one, break out two, to turn it into a festival. You will feel, even if you are ravaged by the heat of the day, that this night is a cool and rosy one.

What goes with the wine, single or a riotous two, is not second in importance. Rather, they must step out proudly, arm in arm. And to make the meal a really stimulating one, for the planner as well as the partakers, it should be somewhat astonishing. The subtle marriages of all its flavors should be like the horseradish on the last oyster, or the flip of a laughing jackrabbit’s tail as he leaps the fence.

A sardine pie from Portugal, for instance, is a hard thing to match with any wine, especially if you want to carry on the latter to the end of the meal. It can be done, though, and, with the certainty that many will disagree with me, I dare suggest without any doubt either a Louis Martini Sylvaner or an Inglenook Traminer. Both are firm, assertive white wines that will be able to stand up under the fishy flavor of the pie and can, if you want them to, behave with great dignity for everything else you serve in this late summer meal which is to act (you hope) like a kind of spiritual benzedrine to your moping heat-worn enthusiasms.

Meat, to my mind, is not meant for thunderheads. Fowl may be, but by August it grows tiresome: it is a spring thing like the pascal lamb. And you have eaten salads until lettuce in a bowl induces nothing but ennui. Now is the time to ignore all these kindly standbys.

Here is the menu to pique his jaded appetite:

Portuguese Sardine Pie
Louis Martini Sylvaner or Inglenook Traminer
Summer Corn
Sweet Butter
Rolls
Louis Martini Mountain Zinfandel or Inglenook Gamay
Fromage de Crême
Coffee