How to Market Vinegar to Billionaires

With wine prices soaring, how much would you pay for a bottle of vino? Is your usual wine under $15 or is it a bottle of Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s? Either way, if you’re into adventure and wine, read The Billionaire’s Vinegar. Outlining the rise and fall of the super expensive wine market, Benjamin Wallace describes with Sherlock Holmesian detail, every person, place, and thing of, as the subtitle says, The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine stemming from the discovery of a cache of eighteenth century wine in a Paris cellar allegedly belonging to Thomas Jefferson.

The book begins with the history-making 1985 auction of one of the first Jefferson bottles, a 1787 Lafite, inscribed with the initials “Th. J.” Led by Christie’s auctioneer Michael Broadbent, the founding director of its new wine department, the bottle sells for $156,000 to Kip Forbes, son of Malcolm Forbes, founder of Forbes magazine. The bottle was purchased for one purpose: to be displayed in a gallery, alongside many other authentic Jefferson artifacts, in the Forbes building. It never ends up being tasted or even drunk, unlike the fate of the other Jefferson bottles.

All the Jefferson bottles could be traced back to one man, a German wine collector by the name of Hardy Rodenstock. Working in the music business, among other ventures, he was known to embellish the history of his past and his name, Rodenstock threw lavish wine tastings—his first in 1980—for his customers, each one outdoing the previous. In 1985 he discovered the cache of so-called Jefferson bottles, but never revealed the specifics of the location of the discovery or the previous owner. Many wealthy individuals bought bottles directly from him or at auction. But by the early 1990s—a decade where the wine market was awash in fakes—Rodenstock’s customers began to notice that certain specific aspects were off with the bottles of wine that were being presented at the mega-tastings. At first it was assumed that a bottle of many hundred years should taste awful yet faintly of wine, but when bottles began turning up of vintages and sizes that could not possibly exist according to French wine houses, people began to wonder.

This book makes the reader wonder: Is it really that easy to fool people into believing anything about wine? It seems so. If a cask of wine discovered in a Roman cellar allegedly belonging to Caesar turns up for sale, I’m sure someone will bite.

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James Peterson Shares His Cooking Wisdom

Instead of reading from his new cookbook Cooking, with its 600 recipes and 1500 photographs, James Peterson, cookbook writer, cooking instructor, and former chef, told an audience of inquisitive members at the James Beard House yesterday an abridged story of his life. Peterson became interested in food at a very young age despite his mother’s lack of culinary expertise and penchant for cooking frozen meals. He recalls the early 1960s in America as a time that was culturally deprived in terms of food. His two Southern Californian aunts eventually ignited a love for food in young Jim. From them Peterson gained an appreciation for liqueur at the prime age of 10. Jim would visit the two women for a few weeks at a time, and at one such visit he was asked what he wanted for dessert. His reply was Crêpe Suzette only because he had heard his mother say it was the fanciest. It took a long time for the dessert to be prepared, with Jim helping measure the Grand Marnier, but it turned out wonderful. At another visit, Jim’s mother sent along a gift of Irish Mist liqueur. His aunts gave Jim a drink of the liqueur and in the following nights for two weeks they tested all different liqueurs. At an upcoming show and tell at his school, Jim, a fourth grader, gave his presentation on the different liqueurs of the world to an uninterested classroom and a shocked teacher.

At the age of sixteen, Jim became interested in chemistry. Like cooking, he found chemistry intriguing because it was a process of discovering what happened to substances when heated. After going to school for chemistry, Jim found his choice of career disillusioning and decided to take a trip to the Far East in search of a guru. After a fruitless search in India, Peterson fell back, out of necessity, on cooking as a short-order cook. He continued his travels by making his way from east to west, even going as far as Japan and finally ending up in France, a place that became his turning point. In France Peterson truly discovered culture in food. He saw that the French cared enough about food to talk about it on a daily basis, whereas in America eating food was simply a time where conversation recounting the day might be held. A meal of chicken poached in cream with tarragon was Peterson’s moment of discovery. It was at that moment that he decided to make a career in food. He went back to the U.S. and worked again as a cook until inspiration struck in the form of Richard Olney’s book Simple French Food, which led him on a quest to find Olney, who at the time was living in France. Olney was happy to recommend restaurant apprenticeships and Peterson ended up working at two different three-star Michelin restaurants while taking courses at Le Cordon Bleu. At these venerable restaurants Peterson says he learned that cooking, even of the most extravagant kind, is doing a lot of little things right.

Back in New York, Peterson worked at various French restaurants until he became chef at Le Petite Robert, where he worked for four years until its closing. He then went on to teach culinary classes at both the French Culinary Institute, while also writing its curriculum, and the Institute for Culinary Education. Afterward he authored his first book Sauces, which won the James Beard Award for best cookbook of the year and is to this day considered seminal in the field. According to Peterson, the book made for the demystification of complicated recipes for French sauces by providing systematic descriptions for preparation that were missing in most sauce recipes of the time. Many more cookbooks followed.

Peterson finished his talk with advice for new food writers and cooks. For writers, Peterson says, it is very important to find one’s voice. In his own books Peterson says that his style has changed over the years, from an authoritative voice in Sauces to a lighter voice for home cooks in Splendid Soups. It is important for a food writer to develop that style and recognize the audience that he or she is writing for, be it an imaginary one at first. For cooks, Peterson says that first and foremost recipes must work. Good recipes only come about by having good technique and testing, testing, testing. Peterson finds cooking and jazz analogous: in jazz one learns many chords and notes to improvise the music; in cooking one learns technique which is then transferred to the preparation of the meal. Final words of advice from James Peterson: if it tastes good, use it; our senses are reliable, so season until it tastes good; and be generous with salt.

Peterson continues to create cookbooks, for which he shoots his own photography, and is currently working on a meat book that had been on the back burner—the missing link, according to Peterson, in his gamut of cookbooks. Peterson teaches food styling at the Institute for Culinary Education.

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Follow the Muse with Cookbook Editor Judith Jones

Judith Jones, vice-president and senior editor at Knopf, who brought us cookbooks by Julia Child, Madhur Jaffrey, Irene Kuo, and Lidia Bastianich among many others, spoke yesterday about her new book The Tenth Muse as part of the Beard on Books monthly literary series at the James Beard House. Also an adventuresome eater and prolific cook, Jones began her lecture and reading with a quote that sums up her life experiences. When current Poet Laureate Charles Simic was asked in a recent New York Times interview: "What advice would you give to people who are looking to be happy," Simic replied, "For starters, learn how to cook."

Acknowledging Beard's house, Jones recalled the many times when she and Jim, as she calls him, used to work on projects together at his home, and when they would get hungry Jim would sway in front of the refrigerator looking for ingredients to whip up a quick meal. Mr. Beard, as we call him, used to say, 'There's always something in the refrigerator to eat.'

Jones spoke of her journey in food as being never ending even to this day and that food still gives her a sense of pleasure. Growing up in New York City, Jones was raised on bland food because her mother did not allow garlic and many other foods considered foreign at the time. For Jones, her first taste of garlic was a moment of discovery to the world of food. In fact Jones had initially thought to title the book, Do You Really Like Garlic? Jones recounted the time when her 91-year-old mother had asked her that question and Jones answered, as her mother had come to expect of her wayward daughter,'yes.' Jones inevitably decided to go with the title The Tenth Muse from Brillat-Savarin's description of Gasterea, who he considered to be the forgotten tenth muse of classical mythology, in his book The Physiology of Taste.

While working on her memoir, Jones reexamined the letters that she had sent home from her years in Paris in her twenties, which her mother had saved. She admitted that she was surprised to rediscover a very modern, rambunctious, and fearless girl. She went on to recount a moment in Paris when she left her purse on a park bench in the Tuileries Garden, and found it missing when she returned to retrieve it. She took this as a sign to stay in Paris. She ended up staying for three-and-a-half years. Inspired by the French appreciation and love for food, in these years, Jones eagerly learned the basics of cooking from locals while holding down a number of odd jobs. Along with an American friend she opened a makeshift restaurant inside an apartment catering to Americans living in Paris. While working for the newly opened Paris office of Doubleday, she met her soon-to-be husband.

Once back in New York as a married woman, Jones began working at Knopf as a junior editor. She received the manuscript of what was to become Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She recalled this moment as the answer to her prayers, considering that specific time in American cookery as a wasteland of limited, sub-par produce and deficient cookbooks. Her goal was to make the voices of these writers heard.

Jones's journey in food came to a head when in 1980 she and her husband rented a home in Vermont not far from where she had vacationed as a child. They ended up purchasing the homestead to use as a summer vacation home. In this time the Joneses were brought closer to the sources of food by planting vegetable gardens and fruit trees while also learning to reap the benefits of the wild vegetation.

Jones answered a few questions before sitting down to sign books. In response to a question about cooking as a single cook, Jones called it a strategy, that sometimes one must ask the butcher to split a package of meat or be willing to buy a head of broccoli and eat it for a week. When asked about what she thinks of cookbooks today, Jones said that they are too fancy and that too many chefs are creating books with the help of hired writers. She believes that these books are not useful to the home cook, because one never learns the secrets of cooking and many times the ingredients used in the recipes are expensive and inaccessible.

The Tenth Muse is a fantastic book filled with beautiful anecdotes from an author brimming with stories to tell. For Jones, cooking is no longer just for sustenance. As the French say, it is an art. Jones's passion is effervescent and contagious. She shows us her dedication in creating such wonderful cookbooks. Without Judith Jones, Julia Child's cookbook may have never been published. And for this we thank Jones for changing the face of American culinary culture and for starting a revolution.

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Learn How to Chop an Onion and More at Le Cordon Bleu

Do you cry when you chop an onion? Kathleen Flinn no longer does. In her book The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, Flinn develops her tough skin at the world’s most famous cooking school Le Cordon Bleu, well known as the cooking school attended by Julia Child. Interspersed with recipes that highlight the author’s self-discovery, the book illuminates her experience of learning four-star cooking skills at a rigorous culinary boot camp and does not fail to include a bit of romance.

Flinn begins her book with the realization of her worst nightmare, and most everyone’s, of losing her job. Weighing the options, she fears that by not immediately finding a new job she would stall her career indefinitely. From her days of writing newspaper obituaries, Flinn has always dreamed of attending cooking school at Le Cordon Bleu. And by being fired from her corporate job in London, Flinn now has the excuse to follow that dream. With the encouragement of her boyfriend and armed with her high school French, she decides to take the plunge and move to Paris.

Flinn enters Le Cordon Bleu prepared in every which way except emotionally. At her worst she lets herself be put to tears from a strict if not sadistic chef she has nicknamed “the gray chef.” After battling her immediate reaction to pack her bags and go home, she vows to impress the gray chef. Through many trials and tribulations, Flinn gains strength from her friends and fellow students, and becomes resolute in her determination to make it to graduation to receive her diplôme de cuisine. While at the school Flinn takes particular inspiration from a photo of Julia Child she passes by almost every day. We soon discover that many years earlier Flinn had the opportunity to meet Julia Child, to whom she divulged her dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu. By the end of her time at the school, Flinn has impressed her teachers, garnered the respect of the gray chef, and is even offered an internship at the three-star Michelin restaurant Le Doyen, which she promptly turns down. The result of her experiences is not to be a chef, but to simply accomplish her dream.

I picked up this book on a whim while looking for another food writing book that I could not find. At first I wasn’t all too sure that I would like it, because the front cover flourishes a blurb from Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert. I’m averse to Oprah book cult selections and steer clear of them, but I wasn’t going to let Gilbert’s blurb hold me back from exploring the book. I was quickly attracted to the author's mission because I too have secretly dreamed of attending Le Cordon Bleu. At first I thought and hoped that this book would turn me off from the idea. And after reading the first few chapters it even did, but by the middle of the book I became immersed in Flinn’s world. I had become a convert. I devoured Flinn’s book within a few days with my secret dream renewed. Indeed, this book lives up to the clichéd dream of living in Paris. But is that so bad? For anyone who has ever dreamed of accomplishing a goal that seems impossible, this book is for you.

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