The Kitchen Whisperers by Dorothy Kalins

Author:Dorothy Kalins [Kalins, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The Stomach Club

Many years ago, Michael Anderson, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, confessed to our San Francisco–based writer friend Tom McNamee that he was an obsessive wine collector—but that he never drank the wine he collected. Indeed, he had bottles stashed under the bed and in the coat closets of his Upper West Side apartment. And there they stayed. Immediately, Tom saw it as his responsibility to relieve Michael of such an embarrassment. He suggested that a small group of us—passionate cooks all—could make a splendid dinner to accompany such wines as Michael saw fit to contribute. This simple premise would become a tradition: decades of dinners known as the Stomach Club—our very own version of Dickens’s Society of the Pickwick Club—where we could cook together, experiment with recipes, and drink very good wine. And learn one another’s cooking moves firsthand.

For years, Michael overdelivered; one dinner featured a roast pork shoulder with a flight of 1982 Pomerols; another centered around rare Saint-Émilions—Château Cheval Blanc, to be precise. We served cucumber soup with Puligny-Montrachet Les Combettes, 1992. Tournedos, sautés au madère (no one promised unpretentiousness), were paired, for the purposes of comparison, with four different 1985 Bordeaux—including those show-offs, Lynch Bages and Lafite Rothschild. And because we were all writers, or actors, or filmmakers, or editors, the Stomach Club planning process itself—emails frantically pinging from coast to coast—took on a dizzying life of its own.

Here’s an example of the deliberately pretentious exchange between Tom, the Stomach Club’s gifted chronicler, and Miles Chapin, our actor/real estate friend:

Tom: So, Miles. I was planning on a chocolate dessert—somewhere I have a recipe for the three-flavor mousse from New York’s old Café Chauveron, the greatest chocolate mousse in history—but Michael wants to bring Sauternes and he says chocolate with Sauternes is an abomination. On the other hand, he’s also bringing a flight of 1986 Pauillacs. What do you say?

Miles: Part of me wants to say, “Michael, you’ll have your d’Yquem with chocolate and you will like it.” But of course, since he’s being so generous sharing his cellar with us, we can’t do that. So. Maybe we could have a Sauternes with an earlier course, like foie gras, or a blue-type cheese? It matches well with both and is kind of unexpected for most people. Or, I guess, I suppose, we could change the dessert. How about some junket?

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