Happy Valentine's Day



Ah, Valentine’s Day, seller of chocolates, herald of cards, day of little heart-shaped candies bearing awkward come-ons. This is the day when florists, card shops, and chocolatiers across the country strive to make it into the black. One story of the holiday’s origin harkens back to a priest in third century Rome. Emperor Claudius II held a belief attachments to home and hearth impeded the performance of his soldiers, therefore he forbid marriage. St. Valentine, disobeying his emperor, continued wedding young lovers, earning himself sainthood and martyrdom in one fell swoop. The problem is there are two additional St. Valentines recognized by the Catholic church and each is attributed in some way with the origins of the holiday we call St. Valentine’s Day. In fact, the only commonality between these stories is the emphasis on their main character being a sympathetic, heroic, and romantic figure.

As with many Christian holidays, St. Valentine’s day most likely was placed in mid-February as an attempt to Christianize a pagan holiday. Traditionally, February 15th was reserved for Lupercailia, a fertility festival associated with Faunus, a Roman agricultural god and the Roman founders, Romulus and Remus. The History Channel describes the ceremonies associated with Lupercailia as follows:

"To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at a sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. They would then strip the goat's hide into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood and take to the streets, gently slapping both women and crop fields with the goat hide. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed the touch of the hides because it was believed to make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would each choose a name and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage."

By the end of the 5th century Lupercailia had been declared un-Christian and banned. It was around this time that Pope Gelasius established February 14th as St. Valentine’s Day, but as with all new ideas, it took some time for the association between the holiday and romantic love to take hold.
 The oldest surviving written Valentine is a poem written in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans. He penned it while imprisoned in the Tower of London after being captured during the Battle of Agincourt.

Go forth, my hert, with my lady;

Loke that we spare no business

To serve her with such lowliness,

That ye get her grace and mercy.

 

Pray her of times prively

That she keep trewly her promise

Go forth.

 

I must as a hertless body

Abide alone in hevyness,

And ye shal do wel with your maistress

In plesans glad and mery.

Go forth

The popularity of Valentine’s Day grew as the centuries passed and the holiday spread around the world. In the 18th Century, the typical Englishman considered February 14th a day for trifling in love and testing the temperature of the waters of romance. A sample of this attitude can be seen in the following excerpt from Poor Richard’s Almanac (1757):

This month bright Phoebus enters Pisces,
The maids will have good store of kisses,
For always when the fun comes there,
Valentine's Day is drawing near,
And both the men and maids incline
To chuse them each a Valentine;
And if a man gets one he loves,
He gives her first a pair of gloves;
And, by the way, remember this,
To seal the favour with a kiss.


This kiss begets more love, and then
That love begets a kiss again,
Until this trade the man doth catch,
And then he doth propose the match,
The woman's willing, tho' she's shy,
She gives the man this soft reply,
"I'll not resolve one thing or other,
Until I first consult my mother."
When she says so, 'tis half a grant,
And may be taken for consent.

By the middle of the 1700s, Valentine’s Day was being celebrated in the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia. By the mid 18th Century the tradition of exchanging small tokens of affection or hand written notes became established and by 1900 printed Valentine cards became widely available.

Thus, the modern Valentine's Day came to be. We've added roses and candy hearts to the mix and modern lovers are likely to exchange Valentine's texts, IMs, and update their Facebook status with cooing, but the traditions have essentially stayed the same. So, crack open the bubbly, warm up the fondue pot, unwrap that Whitman Sampler, and dim the lights - love has come to town!

Wine

 

“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...but with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”

~ Charles Baudelaire

 “I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.”

~ W.C. Fields

 “As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

~ Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

 One would expect Gourmet to have a lot to say on the subject of wine.  You could be forgiven for thinking that since the authors decided to go positively biblical from the onset. They pulled a a quote from St. Paul as encouragement to the embiber.

“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake...”

1 Timothy 5:23

Of course, the author cites this as an endorsement of enjoying wine while it appears from the biblical text that St. Paul meant it to be used as a remedy for polluted water. After bungling the quote, though, the Gourmet struck very modern stance in terms of wine pairings. They stated that the right wine for a meal is the one the drinker enjoys. Of course the next 17 pages are devoted to instructions on how you should choose the right wine for any particular meal!

Seventeen pages seems skimpy though. Twenty eight pages were devoted to mixed drinks and nearly fifty to Hors d'Ovres. Baffling that they'd spend so little time with wine when you think about it, but maybe that owes to the fact most people don't make wine. Then again they included recipes for smoked woodcock, potted bison, and woodchuck pie, I'd think a nice chardonnay wouldn't be too much to ask! Heck, if you're serving me woodchuck pie I'm going to need as much wine as I can get my hands on.

Quote for February

February is merely as long as is needed to pass the time until March.

~ Dr. J. R. Stockton

The Wolf Moon

I remember January’s full moon from my childhood. My parents owned a cabin in southern Indiana back in the days when it was actually common to have an inch or more of snow on the ground through that cold month. This cabin had no heat and no indoor plumbing, which meant the inevitable trip to the outhouse before turning in for the night. I can remember the moon rising over the ridgeline, shining coldly through the bare trees. She wore a crown, a bluish-white moonbow that marked her standing as the cold and mysterious queen of the night, and her hard light cowed the billions of stars that populated the heavens.

January is the time of the Wolf Moon and if you’re in the right place, and you go out to look at the moon tonight, you might just hear a wolf howling up to the queen of the night sky. Here’s a little info about the Wolf Moon from Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Cocktail Time

According to Merriam-Webster a cocktail is defined as "an iced drink of wine or distilled liquor mixed with flavoring ingredients." This seems pretty accurate, it describes our modern sense of the cocktail as any combination of alcohol and a number of juices, flavorings, or other mixers, but a cocktail hasn’t always had such a broad definition.


The first published definition of the cocktail showed up in an editorial in The Balance and Columbian Repository in 1806. This defined the cocktail as "…a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters."

In 1957 Gourmet Magazine put out the second volume of its beefy, hardbound cookbook. The book was an update to its existing tenth anniversary edition, meant to stand on its own as well as to update the previous edition.

Gourmet doesn’t bother defining cocktails, instead offering it’s officious instructions on the “proper purpose and presentation” of “drinks”, a category into which it piles cocktails, long drinks, punches, and coffee drinks into one chapter. They’re more concerned with the fact that “only foods of the nature of dry biscuits, cheese crackers, or olives should accompany the aperitif…” than giving the cocktail it’s due.

Still, I don’t mean to give Gourmet’s book. It hasn’t stood the test of time. It’s stiff, stuffy, concerted, and full of itself and that was what was expected of a 50’s era gourmet cookbook. It wasn’t about bringing culture to the people; it was about separating the upper crust from the ravel.

As an example I offer three champagne cocktail recipes, albeit not the common man’s drink.

Champagne Cocktail Recipes

A champagne coupe is a champagne glass. Not that the recipe says so. If the reader doesn’t understand what a coupe is, well why are they even trying? They probably ought to go back to eating beans from a can and drinking their cocktails from a paper bag! Contrast the Gourmet recipe with this modern recipe:

2 dashes bitters
1 tsp sugar
Chilled champagne
1 twist lemon peel

Place one lump of sugar with bitters in a chilled champagne flute. Fill with chilled champagne. Add the twist of lemon peel and serve.

The coupe has been replaced with a flute and therein is the answer to the strange choice of word in Gourmet, coupe is French for “cup”. French has long been the language of condescension, the verbal equivalent of a glove slap and turned up nose. In fact, in the Victorian era a gentleman was expected to speak French as well as their native language. French was a mark of culture and breeding, and a way of setting oneself apart from the commoners. It’s possible that the choice of a French term was equivalent to paying homage to a time perceived as more refined. A backward looking definition of refinement, therefore refining oneself would mean learning the underpinnings (French) of a cultured life.

I don’t know if there’s any validity to my assertions, I just know that I can look forward to a lot of common terms expressed in a foreign language.

Quote for January Quote

January is here, with eyes that keenly glow,

A frost-mailed warrior

striding a shadowy steed of snow.

~ Edgar Fawcett

Quote for December

It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.

~ Anne Frank