In the inimitable manner of The Manolo, Mr. Henry feels obliged, almost compelled to share the following with all his gentle readers:
Mr. Henry is reading
Mr. Henry is listening to
Mr. Henry is watching
Mr. Henry is eating
The Christos’ charm was contagious, their energy preternatural, and their enthusiasm for good sushi apparent (and it was very, very good, as was the black cod in miso and the sirloin steak). Having visited Japan 71 times, they knew very well what they were eating.
Mid-meal, when Jeanne-Claude drew a long cigarette from out of her pack, our host, Dr. Alvin, came rushing over to inform her most graciously that here in New York smoking is not permitted indoors. Feigning shock (she has lived here for 40 years) and heaving a very Gallic sigh, she unseated herself and headed upstairs out the door.
Indeed, they are a unit. Even though he does not smoke, Christo dutifully, loyally, adoringly followed behind. Holding her bag while she efficiently disposed of not one but three quick cigarettes, he wryly admitted that although her smoking was not something he enjoyed, after 45 years together he was not about to try to change her.
How do they get that sprite-like energy, anyway? All night they bounced around like sylvan creatures who, were the sushi to run out, might survive equally well on mushrooms or nettles.
The next day they sent Mr. Henry a book which documents every moment of The Gates from its inception 26 years ago to its installation last year, a tome solid enough to have served as a column base for a Gate. Mr. Henry has not tired of turning the pages and reliving this divine folly, an event that rendered all of New York participants in a “happening.” Taxi drivers opined about aesthetics. Street vendors held forth on subjects of art criticism not normally included in their customer palaver. The whole city was chewing, digesting, and expelling their “take” on The Gates.
It was like a huge dinner party on the lawn organized by a couple of eccentric, expatriot New Yorkers, the kind who make this city great. Merci.
Unlike Mr. D’Arcy whose good opinion once lost is forever lost, Mr. Henry retains the privilege of changing his mind. Although a man of his word, he never stands by his mistakes.
A Mr. Henry Dictum: What may be true in the aggregate may be false in the particular.
[Such is the starch a money manager might employ to explain why although the market as a whole is up, your investments are down.]
With regard to champagne, our present topic, the dictum against drinking rosé hinges largely on price. Mr. Henry does not want his friends to become dependent on budget-busting effervescences.
Rosé champagne can be quite wonderful, and indeed, as Courtney says, to call it “pink” is rather disparaging. Yes, the best ones are prepared by leaving the pinot noir skins in contact with the juice – the saignée (bleeding) method – although others are made by simply blending a bit of red wine with white before bottling. (In each case, the subsequent addition of a spoonful of yeasty sugar syrup enables a second fermentation in the bottle.)
Mr. Henry’s experience with rosé champagne harks back to an embarrassing dinner ten years ago. My Phuong, a graduate of the Ecole du Cordon Bleu, had spent all day preparing an exquisite bouillabaisse in New York, a difficult accomplishment because the requisite Mediterranean little salty fishes are tricky to substitute, and Mr. Henry at the insistence of a stripling youth behind the counter of Nancy’s Wines for Food had been persuaded to buy a rosé champagne. It was a disastrous match. We seemed to be drinking our dessert as an accompaniment to our soup.
Since that fateful evening, he has not gone near the stuff.
Recently, however, small champagne houses such as Billecart-Salmon and Gosset have been making excellent dry rosé champagnes offered at high prices. Mr. Henry is not a skinflint but he balks at paying giant sums for curiosities. He is more than willing, however, to accept the generosity of his many friends who take a more carefree approach to disposable income.
nota bene: Since Mrs. Henry does not drink, which is her principal failing in marital relations, an invitation to us both won’t cost very much.
Mr. Henry’s favorite fruits are the pulpy, pitted, tree fruits such as plums, apricots, nectarines, and peaches. The Chilean ones in the markets lately, however, although ravishing beautiful, have been rudely tasteless. While the weather this year has been divine, springtime as a rule produces very few fresh fruits or vegetables. California artichokes came and went in a couple of weeks. Like California strawberries, excessive rain ruined their usually intense flavor.
In despair Mr. Henry does what he has done so often in the past: he complains to his friends. A suggestion from Nadia (who is never really wrong) solved the problem in an inspired, old-fashioned way.
Compote: When you have purchased five luscious, black plums and discover they have the internal texture of turnips and a flavor redolent of caterpillars, you feel rather less than hopeful for the future. To save the moment as well as the fruit, pit them and throw them into a casserole with half a cup of fresh orange juice and a tablespoon or two of Demarara cane sugar crystals.
Add a splash of slivovitz or kirsch for a rounded aroma and more smoothly textured liquid. Brandy will intrude a bit on the plum flavor but works nicely if you intend to create a dessert.
Nadia likes to add a stick of cinnamon, but Mr. Henry generally avoids it. Like for cranberries, once the pot has boiled, it is done. After it cools, add a bit of fresh lemon juice to bump up the tartness and preserve the color.
The Czechs eat this as an accompaniment to schnitzel and other fried foods. As both a taste treat and a visual treat, the dark red, aromatic concoction is equally appropriate alongside meat or fish. 
On top of yogurt it makes a perfect breakfast, too. There is something tantalizingly attractive about that color, something positively medieval.
Spooning it
into his bowl, Mr. Henry is transported and translated to a picnic in Poitiers reclining on the unicorn tapestries.
As a dinner guest at the Metropolitan Opera’s Grand Tier restaurant on Friday night, Mr. Henry found himself confronted with a common dilemma: should he order a glass of champagne for himself when his hosts André and Susie were drinking still wine?
The other question, no less vexing, was what to order from the menu. The opera was to begin at 7:30. The divine Renée Fleming would be singing the title role. What if Mr. Henry were to order the duck breast maroccaine and suffer stomach growls during her too, too soft renditions of Handel’s da capo arias? [As it was, Renée had a hard enough time carrying that huge hall without intestinal interferences from the audience.] What if the duck’s garlic were to invade the space of Mr. Henry’s near neighbor in Susie’s high-priced front row seats?
Sitting in the opera restaurant at 5:45 p.m., Mr. Henry quickly weighed each of these strategic decisions. At both of the 25-minute intermissions yet to come, Mr. Henry would amuse himself by watching women’s fancy shoes pad past and thinking how pleased The Manolo would be if were here. [And is he here?? How can one be sure he is not?] During these intermissions, to help refresh the spirits Mr. Henry normally buys a glass of champagne at the bar.
Too much alcohol early in the evening, however, renders the third act an abyss of gloom, or in the words of the eloquent Joan, “ a cosmic time sink.” Too little leaves the Henry intelligence over-stimulated by thoughts of the week’s mundane annoyances. No, it is best to take some alcoholic libation for its relaxant and slightly anesthetic effects, but how much, and which choice of drink?
At the bar the best pour by far is the champagne. Nothing else offers its combination of aperitif, dessert, and post-prandial digestive. Champagne is at once a beginning and an ending. Moreover, it should be taken alone. Once a cork has popped, the drinker should stick with champagne for the remainder of the evening.
Having settled on the halibut with morels in cream sauce, a preparation difficult to screw up, he noted with pleasure that the house Brut (Piper-Heidsieck) was no more expensive than a glass of anything else. That settled it! The evening would be one devoted faithfully to champagne.
The very best of pairings for champagne is a salty, strongly-flavored fish dish. Even the strongest Chinese or Indian spices cannot defeat Dom Pérignon’s eternal recipe. But in deference to Mr. Henry’s gastro-intestinal tract, which after all would be accompanying him to the performance, he wisely avoided such courageous culinary voyages and stuck to the mild white halibut.
In lieu of dessert, he opted for a second glass.
A Mr. Henry Dictum: Never drink champagne with sweets.
This may seem counter-intuitive but it is a dietary dictum Mr. Henry has tested empirically in the field, so to speak. The subsequent hangover, and there will always be a champagne hangover, is made far worse by the addition of extra sugars to an already super-sugared evening. If you run short of champagne, and Mr. Henry shudders to imagine such a situation, then a sweet course will bring champagne sugars bubbling back into the bloodstream for a half hour or so, after which you are on your own, beset with cotton-mouth, headache, and nausea. [Please note: this is not a strictly scientific explanation of the phenomenon. Mr. Henry is not a physiologist, after all. Please do not expect his learning to extend into every domain.]
One more piece of advice: Mr. Henry decries the champagne cocktail as yet another example of “fusion” confusion. If you are in the south of France seated on a terrace in the dying light of a summer day and you are offered genuine wild forest raspberries in your champagne, well, what is the harm in that? Still, mixed drinks are a fundamental mistake.
[Here the keen reader may take note of a Henry proclivity towards things in their unadulterated version. Nadia calls him the “ascetic gourmand,” and Nadia is never really wrong.]
Furlagirl writes:
Mr (ha!) Henry, does not, though, quite address my question. His advice, if one wishes to maintain a svelte figure, is to make breakfast the largest meal of the day, but the breakfasts he outlines don’t seem that big to me, not compared with his lunches.
Eating a big breakfast is an ideal, a goal, a mental construct, a “road map” to a better tomorrow. As an evidentiary matter, the size of Mr. Henry’s breakfast does not necessarily conform to his published proscriptions and, consequently, is rarely his largest meal of the day. That is, like the mother crab telling her baby, “Don’t walk sideways, dear!” Mr. Henry does not always follow his own advice. Limiting dinnertime drinking to two glasses of wine, for example, is another noble ideal not always achieved. But without ideals, even failed ones, who are we?
Through this confession has he disappointed his devoted readers? Do they feel their trust misplaced, their loyalties betrayed?
Furlagirl quickly picked up on this contradiction, almost as though she were an investigative reporter who specializes in Middle Eastern and other insurmountable problems. Breakfast issues are not nearly as ticklish as those of the Arab-Israeli conflict, thankfully, yet they vex us nonetheless.
A “big” breakfast, therefore, can justly be described as “big” if it exceeds the breakfast an early-morning Henry might eat if left to his raw, unreflective self. First thing in the morning cooking in any normative sense is not an option, nor are surgical activities such as chopping, slicing, or shaving. The notion of cooking Blackstone Eggs, as delicious as Joan makes them sound, is quite unthinkable in the morning. Even breaking an egg with aplomb, much less poaching one, is beyond Mr. Henry’s capabilities.
Upon rising he stumbles into the kitchen and, following a well-rehearsed rote sequence, places the kettle on the fire, walks downstairs to retrieve the N.Y. Times, and sits in his favorite chair. At this moment Mr. Henry considers himself to have achieved a moral victory merely by maintaining his body in a sitting position. When the kettle begins to whistle, he rouses his leaden frame and proceeds to perform the one essential morning task: he makes the coffee.
A Mr. Henry dictum: Dinner is the vehicle for wine, breakfast the vehicle for coffee.
Coffee is not easy to prepare. Do not leave the preparation of coffee to minors, tea drinkers, aged relatives, or health nuts.
Coffee is among the world’s most potent aromatics. In the 13th century when the Arabs of south Arabia first introduced it to the Muslim world’s holy cities, coffee was declared to be an intoxicant and men were hanged for imbibing it. Its salutary effects on mood, however, make it a holy substance in Mr. Henry’s cupboard, the frankincense of his life. Without it, he descends immediately into despair – one of the seven deadlies – and gets a wicked headache, to boot. Once when he forswore the black potion for five days straight, a misguided attempt to boost fertility [don’t ask], his staff rose up and threatened to resign en masse unless he took a cup immediately. Acceding to the strikers’ demand was an enormous personal relief.
Although breakfast may not be the day’s largest meal, it remains a very important moment, the chance either to begin the day profitably or begin it insalubriously. Its importance, therefore, may loom larger than its physical scale.
We are each creatures of routine, and no routines are as invariable as morning ones. Mr. Henry begins his day slowly and rises to a crescendo sometime in the late evening. He once broke up with a perfectly nice woman after the first overnight date because she was so peppy and cheerful in the morning. Although he feels pangs of guilt about it and wishes her nothing but happiness, in the end he knows it was all for the best.
Since Mr. Henry’s confessional impulses seem to have taken hold, he should by rights declare that lately he has been breakfasting on the little Henry’s leftover birthday cake, a soggy-bottomed Chilean dulce de leche affair covered in whipped cream (lovingly crafted by Tia Mirta), an altogether inspired accompaniment to a thick cup of Sumatra.
Another Mr. Henry Dictum: True Latin countries are defined by a fondness for desserts with soggy bottoms, the zuppa inglese being a prime example.
France only pretends to be Latin so they can steal Italian style and Spanish wit. In truth the French are Romanized Germanic tribes, which explains why their trains run on time. But is there a people who know better how to live? Is it any wonder that so few French emigrated to the New World?
Dear Mr Henry
Here in England the hearty breakfast is the traditional English fry up of bacon, eggs, sausages, black pudding, baked beans, tomatoes, toast. I can’t help feeling that this isn’t a good way to start the day. My own breakfast is likely to be oatmeal or muesli with milk, fruit, yogurt. But if you count up the calories that’s not such a big breakfast. So what is it you have in mind when you talk about the big breakfast. Could you post some examples?
Linda Grant
Mr. Henry knows this letter comes from a genuinely British person because here in the States we employ a period after “Mr.”, a dead give-away. (In addition to being foodies, Mr. Henry’s readers are punctuation fussbudgets and style sticklers.) Mention of muesli, as well, what we here call granola is a clear clue of her European origin. Of course both names by origin are trademarks for oatmeal mixed with nuts, raisins, brown sugar, and the like. Once we all began eating our morning porridge cold, however, the old name became inappropriate. ‘Cold gruel’ is an apt coinage, perhaps, but surely one unacceptable to the marketing department.
The traditional English breakfast fry-up where even the toast is fried! The morning cholesterol stun! Yes, that is the way towards empire, my son, the appropriate beginning for a traditional English day out hiking through the Hindu Kush or dog-sledding across the Antarctic, excursions which require sensible breakfasts and sensible shoes. Once in a while the hearty fry-up does hit the spot, Mr. Henry admits, but perhaps so many calories with such a high proportion of fat in one sitting is a jolt best endured at midday, the equivalent of a heart resuscitation by electric shock. [Place metal discs on either side of the chest, shout “CLEAR!” and hit the button.]
I quite agree with your choices of morning repast, Ms. Grant, and you serve as a paragon of English practicality. Mr. Henry himself always takes fruit in the morning, a banana at first, the gentlest of fruit, and then at the end of the meal something pulpy like melon, berries, or the pitted fruits – most delicious of all foods.
Rolled oats, and in this Mr. Henry parts with tradition rather dramatically, he eats raw, sometimes with plain yogurt and sometimes without. The crunch is very satisfying, the oats provide fodder for intestinal rumination, and the fiber encourages digestion while protecting against shocks delivered by the New York Times.
In the late 18th century, the rise of wage labor meant the English working man took his lunch at the job site, a lunch that normally consisted of a slice of cheese and bread with a cup of tea. The hot sugared drink took the place of a proper home-cooked meal and became one of the great adaptations of the modern world, a necessary element in the rise of industrialization. The traditional English fry-up is, Mr. Henry believes, a hold-over from a gentleman’s breakfast, not a working man’s breakfast, and reflects an abundance of expensive victuals. In our world when the cost of basic foodstuffs has become an expenditure smaller than the entertainment budget, eating bacon and eggs and black pudding, etc., at a single sitting is distinctly unwise.
Mr. Henry treats his alimentary canal with care. In his youth he had an iron stomach. Raised on TV-dinners, bologna & cheese sandwiches, and hamburgers, he could digest nearly anything. His favorite mid-morning snack from the school canteen (a holdover name from its military school days) was a Coke, Reese’s peanut butter cups, and a bag of Cheetos. He shudders to recall it, but since his adolescent stomach would not accept any breakfast whatsoever, the snack became young Henry’s breakfast long overdue. That triple-cocktail was the highest caloric mix available at the canteen.
But in 1975 a banana milkshake at the Hippie Café in Marrakech sent him crawling to his bed for two weeks, after which he could never again blithely graze the groaning board.
The intestines may have suffered but Mr. Henry’s character only strengthened. He began to establish routines, the signature of adulthood. And in life there are no more firmly rooted routines than those of breakfast.
The Japanese, for example, cannot begin the day without pickled vegetables, a curious habit Mr. Henry quickly picked up during his sojourns in Kyoto. Sashimi first thing in the morning was a habit more difficult to establish, however, but miso soup with rice (and fishy sprinkles), pickles, and a bit of egg went down nicely. Most unfortunately for western travelers, however, fruit in Japan is prohibitively expensive. Mr. Henry does not understand how the Japanese, an admirably practical island people like the British, permit themselves to remain victims of their greedy, protectionist farmers. He ruminates about this.
June of Lyman writes:
Dear Mr. Henry,
I’m sure that there’s more to that paragon of abdominal architecture than you let on, but your secret is safe with me. I wish you luck reconciling your appetite for cheese, chocolate and scotch with the long-term maintenance of that unobstructed view of your little piggies. What I find hard to believe is that Pepper will permit a fine cheese to rest untasted on your countertop. How do you do it?
Ah! Ha! Does Mr. Henry detect a whiff of suspicion about the existence of his vaunted waistline? Is not the earth flat now, too, all of a sudden? Yes, yes, everyone must be suspicious of what they read on the web. (On the internet no one knows you’re a dog.) Now at last to make his argument persuasive Mr. Henry will be forced to reveal the deepest secrets of his dietary regime. Here goes:
Mr. Henry’s Dietary Dicta [with Exceptions]
1) Never drink soda.
Exception: When on a summer day against all sound advice and good judgment you take a taste of the kifta at the bus stop in Larache, Morocco, drink a large bottle of Coke right away as an anti-bacterial agent. Then get home soon.
2) Don’t eat anything after dinner.
No exceptions.
3) Don’t drink alcohol after dinner.
Exception: one short Scotch neat in a brandy glass, or perhaps a beer before bed uniquely for digestive purposes, i.e., in lieu of an Alka-Seltzer.
4) Skip dessert after dinner.
Save it for breakfast when your natural disinclination to binge on sucrose has not been impaired by last night’s wine, laughter, or her eyes.
Exception: fresh fruit
5) Eat crunchy things.
They satisfy.
6) Avoid anything icky-sticky.
Exceptions: carrot cake, banana bread, and once in a while some mousse au chocolat or good French pastry. (Pace Joan who wrote to critize Mr. Henry’s condemnation of cream cheese. Since truth is now to be told, he loves cream cheese icing on carrot cake. But is this an appropriate venue for authentic cheese?)
7) Fill up on the salad and the vegetables.
Eat the meat as a taste treat, not as the primary focus of the meal.
Exceptions: steak tartare, sashimi
Make dinner a small meal.
Make lunch a bigger one. And since you want to be able to move around in the afternoon, you won’t stuff yourself at lunch.
9) Never eat fried foods for dinner.
They are difficult to digest by bedtime and are too fatty anyway. Of course, everyone agrees that french fries are the most delicious creation, the food of the gods. When you eat them — and you WILL eat them — do it at lunchtime.
10) Drink weak tea as a substitute for a caloric snack.
Drink hot water all through the winter months to combat dehydration. Just keep putting hot water on that peppermint tea bag. It’s a Chinese scholars thing.
11) Walk everywhere you can.
Walk briskly, especially when you are feeling tired or hungry. Often that craving for a snack is just a need for increased circulation.
12) Break a sweat.
Work out hard every day, especially when you feel tired.
13) Don’t eat candy.
Exception: good dark chocolate
14) Go easy on the carbs.
In particular eschew the wicked white foods.
Exceptions: an occasional fresh baguette or properly prepared sushi rice.
15) If you must snack, pick a food with value like the noble pistachio.
Consider them to be the next meal’s entrée and adjust your plate accordingly.
16) Go to bed hungry.
This last rule is the most important and the hardest one to incorporate into your routine. To sleep empty is to sleep better. You avoid dyspepsia, esophageal reflux, and nightmares. Moreover, you awake hungry and ready to eat a solid breakfast – the very best of all dietary habits.
Each night Mr. Henry pushes his organism to the brink of hypoglycemic coma until it falls like a stone, the roiling Henry brain starved of all creative or destructive juices. It’s a battle won by strict adherence to routine, the nightly victory of regular habits over adolescent urges to (shudder) watch TV, a habit every bit as pernicious as a drug.
As for Pepper’s fondness for cheese, she knows very well that Mr. Henry’s plate is out of bounds.
Once, however, when she was quite young, Mr. Henry got up to answer the phone and left a large piece of cave-aged Gruyere (nuked for seven seconds to an aromatic room temperature) out on the plate. When he returned he saw a very guilty-looking dog skulking along the side of the room and an empty plate on the table. On that occasion Mr. Henry growled most convincingly.
Now, however, when no one is looking, she gets a little taste. Is this wrong? Can cheese really be bad for a dog? The Henry household is in a major uproar over this question.
Because from among Mr. Henry’s myriad talents a grasp of computer application software is conspicuously absent, he only just now received the many kind messages sent by his reading public. One of the first e-mails came from a Japanese site called Sweets which judging by its pink background looks as though it may be devoted to matching up lonely Japanese girls with suitable salary-men. Since it is written in Japanese, however, its nuances have escaped even Mr. Henry’s subtle capacities for apprehension.
The e-mail below suggests that in a single week Mr. Henry has already become a voice of authority and experience, a veritable Rip Van Winkle of the information highway. Consequently he feels not merely a desire to help, therefore, but a positive obligation.
Mr. Henry,
Let me first take a moment to cheer your new food blog under the auspices of the ever-benevolent Manolo. I come to you with a question that given your love of Scotch, should be easy to answer. My father’s birthday is next month, and he is a Scotch drinker. Since (unlike with wine) I do not like Scotch, I am forced to rely on the advice of others in procuring new and different Scotches as gifts for him. If you would let me know what you think are some good choices for his birthday. I’ve previously gotten him a Bowmore Port Casked scotch and Talisker. I’m intrigued by your mention of Oban.
Looking forward to your response,
Megaera
Dear Megaera,
With such a lilting Celtic name you must surely take the choice of Scotch with seriousness of purpose. Mr. Henry, therefore, will do no less.
Oban is indeed the right choice, or at least cannot be the wrong choice, but it is a choice ripely made only after a sail round all the others.
For Mr. Henry to assess this request he needs to conjure a profile of your Dad’s regular habits. Does he take his Scotch as an aperitif for its restorative qualities to both energy and appetite? Or does he retire for a post-prandial glass with feet up surrounded by his all-adoring family (or at least one daughter who does not disapprove of his drinking)? Does he excuse himself to the smoking room at the back of the house (or completely outside the house)? Or is he a reformed smoker who longs for a smokiness in the glass that recalls those freer days? Does he drink it neat, with a splash, or on the rocks?
To Mr. Henry’s ever-evolving palette, the salient question here is the choice of before-dinner or after-dinner. The Macallan, an excellent Speyside that became enormously popular in the 1980’s, is in his opinion exclusively an after-dinner drink. The lingering oak, honey, and brandy aromas imparted by long aging in sherry casks render The Macallan an ideal substitute for cognac, indeed an improvement on it or on any other after-dinner drink, but the same notes of sweetness feel more like an end to the evening repast than like a beginning.
Your previous two choices were quite different in character: Bowmore is an Islay — the region known for smoky, peaty, altogether salty tastes. Lagavulin is the fiercest of these; it hits you like a North Sea wave over the foredeck. Laphroaig is a paler and smoother distillation but with equal smoke and peat.
If your Dad liked Bowmore, Mr. Henry suggests Caol Ila which, like Bowmore, is a milder Islay but one with slightly fewer floral qualities. But Caol Ila is hard to find in stores.
Talisker is an Island malt, and yet in color, tone and balance it closely resembles Oban, a Highland malt. Mr. Henry prefers Talisker to the other Island stills. It is equally satisfying before or after dinner. Curiously enough Mr. Henry discovered Talisker in (of all places) Paris where he got stuck staying in (of all places) a British hotel in the 16th arrondisement, the very last available hotel room in the whole Frog City. Forced by the upstairs presence of small, sleeping Henry offspring to stick close to the hotel at night, with a jaundiced eye he accepted the advice of a too, too young French sommelier who suggested Talisker from among a list of some 50 Scotches.
And Talisker became Mr. Henry’s preference for some years.
Through the advice of a wizened old downtown reprobate, a lowly writer by trade, some years later he sampled Oban and found his new Big Love, his first wife, his default choice for any occasion.
Similar in character to Talisker, Oban balances its amber, raisiny nose with hints of “sea breezes” that recall the salty Islay brands. Thus, if your father liked both Bowmore and Talisker, try a bottle of Oban because it combines the best elements of both.
In the ideal Henry liquor cabinet, a bottle of each would stand side by side. This is Mr. Henry’s vision of Big Love – a plural marriage characterized by sharing and harmony. However, Mrs. Henry does not seek such domestic arrangements. Moreover, lately Mrs. Henry has been watching the grocery money more carefully than usual and thus no $50 bottles of Scotch have gained recent admittance to the secret recesses of Mr. Henry’s cabinet.
Sea breezes remain in the air, not in the glass. Instead of sipping, Mr. Henry writes.
To be more accurate, he pierces it with a sharp-pointed dagger and picks up the pieces with his fingers.
Chocoholics please take note: The foil-wrapped bar of chocolate is a thing of the past. Now chocolate arrives en bloc.
Mr. Henry has eaten chocolate in many ways and many places but employing a dagger is a notable first. In doing so, he has changed his life to a small but not unimportant degree.
Would not Richard Lionheart after a romp with the dauphin have unsheathed his [other] dagger to carve himself a slice of mutton or cheese? (At “room temperature” in a northern European castle, cheese must have been desirably firm, and Scotch whisky’s ancestral concoction must have been at its perfect temperature, as well.)
Did not the great Alexander himself, peckish on a hill in Ctesiphon, eat his pickled eels with a dagger? (To have conquered the known world and still not have either Scotch or chocolate at your table seems to have been more a strategic than a tactical error, wouldn’t you agree?)
This connection with antiquity comes courtesy of the elves at Scharffen Berger whose block of bittersweet 70% cacao now sits out on a dedicated cutting board next to Mr. Henry’s cheeses.
Place the dagger point just behind the edge and push firmly. The chocolate yields very slowly at first. Then, like an iceberg calving, a geological morsel falls away.
When Neolithic man pushed his thumb against a reindeer antler on the face of his flint matrix, with only modest pressure he was able to pop off a flake as sharp as glass. Like those pressure flakes, each piece of daggered chocolate has edges and points, broad smooth parabolic planes and knobbly rough patches.
However, the temptation to snarf chocolate all day long must be long resisted, else Mr. Henry seek chocoholic counseling which he cannot afford. Lying on the counter, the dagger presents a primal attraction not unlike a putter, a pool cue, a Frisbee or a yo-yo. Before the mind is engaged, the hand reaches out.
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Seizing the trend towards artisanal chocolate, last year the Hershey’s empire purchased Scharffen Berger, a Berkeley outfit started by a couple of Napa Valley oenophiles eager to explore the New World’s most pleasurably addictive food. Consequently their chocolate can be found now at their own boutique on Amsterdam Avenue brightly appointed in yellow and brown like a shop from 18th-century Turin (where chocolate was first drunk together with coffee — the divine biccerin).
Mr. Henry finds it curious that nowhere on the Scharffen Berger site can you find any mention of Hershey’s ownership. No matter. Mr. Henry does not divulge all the secrets of his past, either. He supposes that when John Scharffenberger sold his eponymous champenoise company, he sold the rights to his name, too — hence the new space between Scharffen and Berger.
For the record, Mr. Henry’s name is not currently for sale.
