Time traveler winemakers and disturbing readings 🍾

SB153

October 03, 2023

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / An exclusive newsletter, the best place to start your day with too many cake recipes, time traveler winemakers, and both beautiful and disturbing readings

Demi-sec (aka Sweet) Veuve Cliquot versed in a cool carafe.

Hi there!

Last week I had the privilege of visiting the chalk caves, or crayères, where the finest Veuve Clicquot Champagne bottles are kept (a glimpse).

I was in Verzy, near Reims, a couple of hours from Paris, France. A few days before the grape harvest ended, the fields were just ready for another vintage.

I thought the left grapes were untouchable, but people there offered them to you to taste: «It’s too sweet for making wine», they said. Pinot Noir grapes are red, and it’s from them - and from Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier - that you have the finest Champagne.

In that corner of France, they make hundreds of wines, then every maison mixes them to find the perfect formula for the best bottle. They go through the past vintages, traveling in time just to find the taste of a wine that people will drink years later. It’s a Champagne battle every season for future generations.

I forgot how fascinating is the relationship between Earth, and time, and people, and wine.

Then I thought: could be wine the subject of the next Secret Breakfast End of the Year project?

Piero

PS: write me what you think about it. Suggest names and stories. And bottles as well. We’ll make something of it.

Courtesy Veuve Clicquot - Pic by me

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THE BEST QUOTE

✦ Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality.

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THE MISSING INGREDIENT

THE STRUGGLE OF SEEKING PLEASURE IN A DYING WORLD

I still have to read it, but probably this is the book of the year.

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang is a dystopian novel set in a near-future world where climate change has caused widespread famine and mass extinction. The protagonist, an ambitious chef desperate to cook, accepts a job at a mysterious compound in California where the global elite have built a lush new life for themselves.

Its enigmatic employer, a man known as the Chef, and his daughter, Miriam, are experimenting with new forms of food and cuisine, using ingredients that are both exotic and dangerous.

As it is presented: “Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world”. And “Zhang's writing is lush and lyrical, and she creates a world that is both beautiful and disturbing”.

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I knew, then, why the storerooms were guarded as if they held gold, or nuclear armaments. They hid something rarer still: a passage back through time.

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

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THE BOOK

Food, sex and morality in the end times
★★★★☆

Read above. Or listen here for 7 minutes.

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
→ Shortplot: 🌎 🐗 🐓 🧈

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RANDOM ACTS OF HUNGER

This is the space where I share some food (un)related stuff of my week

🧑🏻‍🍳Chef Karyn Tomlinson on pirate restaurants 🥮Plum Upsidedown Cake (★recipe) 🇬🇧English Muffins (★recipe) 🍪Fasting? Dieting? Banana oatmeal peanut butter cookies (★recipe) 🥧What’s better than a Basque Cheesecake? A Chocolate Basque Cheesecake (★recipe) 🥧Cardamom Cake From Niloufer Ichaporia King (★recipe) 🇮🇹Bonus for Italian readers: There is so much "food" that there is nothing left to eat by Tommaso Melilli

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FOOD FOR LATER

“We may still be in the office. We may even be at our desks. Yet in the moments we are eating or drinking, we are liminal creatures, somewhere between work and home. We are neither entirely employees nor entirely ourselves”.

A Baker’s Secrets 
Dave Denison / The Baffler

The mysterious disappearance of the Guerrilla Cookie from the shelves of Midwestern food co-ops. A confection with a cult following, it rose to popularity in Madison, Wisconsin, in the 1970s.

➤ Last week's most clicked link was the one about the Top 4 Foods a Nutritionist To Eat Every Day. And that's all for today.