The Hemingway Cookbook (28 page)

We’ll come home and eat here and have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the cooperative you can see right out the window there with the price of the Beaune on the window. And afterwards we’ll read and then go to bed and make love.
⁹

As the story goes, an English wine merchant introduced his apprentices to Burgundies by telling them “there are two kinds of Burgundy: Beaune and the rest. We sell the rest.” Beaune, the major city of the Côte de Beaune in central France, is considered the “Capital of Burgundian Wines.” The region produces red and white wines, which are light and quick to mature. Most will hold for less than five years. We can assume that they purchased a red beaune, as Ernest later recommends this wine, along with Corton, Pommard, and Chambertin, as accompaniment to the Woodcock Flambé in Armagnac (see page
20
).
¹⁰

Cahors

An extremely dark, heavy, and ignoble red wine from southwest France, Cahors was often used, as was Algerian wine, to add color and flavor to lighter wines. Cahors was described as “black” and, like several other wines in the Hemingway cellar, was once very high in alcohol. Ernest and Hadley drank this wine, diluted by one-third, at the Nègre de Toulouse in Paris. By contrast, they brought home a bottle of Corsican wine, another cheap and rough wine, and could dilute that by one-half “and still receive its message.”
¹¹
Ernest always had a talent for finding pleasure in cheap wines, particularly in the early days when he had no choice. Much later, when money was hardly an issue, he wrote to the art critic Bernard Berenson, “I do not know why the wines you love should be so expensive. If I had all the money in the world I would drink Cahors and water.”
¹²
Cahors is rather slow to mature, and should be aerated longer than most red wines for drinking.

Capri

Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the window open and the swallows flying over the roofs of the houses and when it was dark afterward and you went to the window very small bats hunting over the houses and close down over the trees and we would drink the capri and the door locked and it hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan.
¹³

This is how Frederic Henry imagined it would be with the women he had fallen for. Ernest, too, must have imagined such scenes with himself and Agnes during the war. He was able to give Frederic his evening of romance later in the
novel. At first, when Frederic was on his crutches, they went into Milan and, after trying several sweet white wines (including Freisa: “… imagine a country that makes a wine because it tastes like strawberries”
¹⁴
). They drank Capri and made it “their” wine. When they finally had their night of love in Milan, a bottle of Capri (as well as a bottle of St. Estephe) accompanied the woodcock, soufflé potatoes, purée de marron, salad, and zabaglione.

Capri was a dry, white wine from southwest Italy. It was made in very small quantities and was hardly ever found outside Capri itself. Often similar wines were imported and bottled under Capri labels. This was likely the case with Frederic and Catherine in Milan, adding an air of deceit and betrayal to their love, a vestige from Ernest’s relationship with Agnes.

In the early 1920s, when Ernest returned with Hadley to his old front, they visited Biffi’s in the Galleria in Milan and enjoyed a fruit cup with Capri. In
A Moveable Feast
, Hemingway remembered Biffi’s and the fruit cup with wild strawberries and peaches, served in a glass pitcher.
¹⁵

Biffi’s Fruit Cup

4
SERVINGS

3 peaches, pitted and cut into bite-size slices

2 cups wild strawberries, hulled, or very small regular strawberries, halved

1 tablespoon sugar (optional)

2 cups Capri, or other dry white wine

Combine the peaches and strawberries in a bowl. Sprinkle with sugar, then pour the wine over the fruit. Mix the ingredients together gently. Chill in the refrigerator for 1 hour. Pour the fruit and wine into a tall glass pitcher and serve in a large bowl surrounded with crushed ice.

Chablis

Chablis is the well-known green-tinted yellow-gold wine from central France. It is known for its dryness and austere flavor.

In
The Sun Also Rises
, Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton order Chablis and sandwiches as an alternative to lunch as they find themselves stuck behind an endless procession of Catholic pilgrims aboard a train from Paris to Spain:

We ate the sandwiches and drank the Chablis and watched the country out of the window. The grain was just beginning to ripen and the fields were full of poppies. The pastureland was green, and there were fine trees, and sometimes big rivers and chateaux off in the trees.
¹⁶

The wine seems a lovely complement to the serene vista passing by the train window. Before the madness of Pamplona and San Fermín, replete with twirling dancers, drums pounding, and shirts stained with deep, rich Spanish red wine, a glass of Chablis and a rolling pastoral landscape may deceive our travelers as to what exactly awaits them.

Chateau Mouton-Rothschild

In 1937, Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil War for the North American News Alliance. As he watched his beloved Spain torn apart, he cultivated an affair with fellow journalist Martha Gell-horn, who he had met at Sloppy Joe’s in Key West late the previous year. In Madrid, a city devastated by war, Ernest and Martha stayed in adjoining rooms at the Hotel Florida, venturing into the war torn streets to eat and drink at Chicote’s on the Gran Via. Food and supplies were running very short. Hemingway remembered those times in the short story “Night Before Battle”:

“Comrade,” I called the waiter…. “Bring another bottle of wine, please.”

“What kind?”

“Any that is not too old so that the red is faded.”

“It’s all the same.”

I said the equivalent of like hell it is in Spanish, and the waiter brought over a bottle of Château Mouton-Rothschild 1906 that was just as good as the last claret we had was rotten.

“Boy that’s wine,” Al said. “What did you tell him to get that?”

“Nothing. He just made a lucky draw out of the bin.”
¹⁷

Château Mouton-Rothchild is afforded eminent status among the Bordeaux due to its excellent quality and prestige, imparted by Philippe de Rothschild, who took over administration of the vineyard in 1926. Mouton-Rothchild was once known for its unique, faintly metallic flavor. That special quality is gone, but what remains is a wonderfully heavy, full-bodied wine. Coming from the Hotel Florida, whose top two floors had been destroyed by shelling, a 30-year-old bottle of this very fashionable wine must have been quite a pleasant surprise.

Châteauneuf du Pape

Ernest had great difficulty getting his early fiction published in the United States. Literary magazine editors were simply not prepared to accept his style, subjects, or choice of words. Many editors agreed with Gertrude Stein that his work was “inaccroachable,” like a painting whose creator cannot hang it for view because it will no doubt offend. One magazine toward which Hemingway remained bitter for those early rejections was the
Dial
. Ernest Walsh, an editor at the
Dial
, once asked Ernest to lunch shortly after rumors spread that the magazine was going to award a sizeable sum to their most outstanding contributor. Walsh took Hemingway to a very expensive restaurant in the Boulevard St. Michel, and they dined on all the things that Ernest could not afford.

“What about red wine?” he asked. The sommelier came and I ordered a Châteauneuf du Pape. I would walk it off afterwards along the quais. He could sleep it off, or do what he wanted to do.
¹⁸

Ernest knew that Châteauneuf du Pape was “not a luncheon wine.” In fact, it has the highest minimum alcohol content of any French wine (between 12% and 14%). Perhaps he was out to prove, as he had often done and would continue to do, that he could drink anyone under the table, especially some con-man editor from the
Dial
.

After they were almost through with the wine, Walsh told Ernest that he was to receive the award, not Ezra Pound or James Joyce. Years later, Hemingway found out that Joyce, too, was told he would win the award.

Fleurie

Hemingway finishes a carafe of this Beaujolais wine he and Fitzgerald shared on their layover en route from Lyon to Paris. They order the wine as an accompaniment to
Escargots à la Bourguignonne
(see page
64
). Fleurie is known as the queen of Beaujolais wines (Moulin-à-Vent is the king), exhibiting the quintessential characteristics of the region: heavy, yet exceedingly fruity. This wine should be drunk, not sipped, which Ernest no doubt does as he awaits Scott’s return.

Mâcon

Mâcon is a dry white wine of southern Burgundy, “moderately full-bodied but with a low alcoholic content.”
¹⁹
On their epic journey from Lyon to Paris, Hemingway sees to it that he and Scott have plenty of Mâcon with their picnic lunch of Truffle-Roasted Chicken (see page
63
). He is surprised that “a few bottles of fairly light, dry white Mâcon could cause chemical changes in Scott that would turn him into a fool.”
²⁰
No doubt the drinks before breakfast, the whiskey and Perrier after, and the double whiskies before lunch contributed to Scott’s eventual episode of hypochondria.

Marsala

Marsala, a dark wine sometimes served as an aperitif, is the principal dessert wine of Sicily. Made from a blend of aromatic white wine, a mash of dried grapes fortified with brandy, and grape-juice syrup, marsala has a mild taste of burnt sugar. While Ernest was recovering at the Red Cross Hospital in Milan, a man “with beautiful manners and a great name,”
²¹
came bearing marsala and Campari and made homosexual advances toward him.

Montagny

According to Lichine, “pleasant is the word most frequently used to describe”
²²
this white wine of the Côte Chalonnais. In fact, as Hemingway and Fitzgerald sat down for a meal of Poularde de Bresse, it was accompanied by this wine which Ernest called “a light, pleasant white wine of the neighborhood.”
²³
After one sip, with no theatrics and apparently being careful not to spill anything, Scott proceeded to pass out at the table.

Muscadet

This pale, slightly musky white wine from vineyards on the River Loire south of Nantes, goes perfectly with fresh fish. In
A Moveable Feast
, Ernest recalled walking along the Seine to clear his head, watching the fisherman catch goujon with long cane poles. When he had money he would dine at La Pêche Miraculeuse and eat goujon fried whole, accompanied perfectly with Muscadet. Other times, he would dine al fresco:

I knew several of the men who fished the fruitful parts of the Seine between the Îie St.-Louis and the Place du Verte Galente and sometimes, if the day was bright, I would buy a liter of wine and a piece of bread and some sausage and sit in the sun and read one of the books I had bought and watch the fishing.
²⁴

Pouilly-Fuisse

Hemingway and Ernest Walsh drank this very fine dry white wine from southern Burgundy as an accompaniment to their oysters. The wine goes superbly with oysters.

Rioja

We lunched up-stairs at Botín’s. It is one of the best restaurants in the world. We had roast suckling pig and drank rioja alta. Brett did not eat much. She never ate much. I ate a very big meal and drank three bottles of rioja alta.
²⁵

Hemingway’s recognition as early as 1925 of the superior quality of Rioja Alta is less impressive today, now that Rioja is widely considered one of the world’s finest wine-producing regions. Rioja, in north-central Spain, produces wines that rival a fine Bordeaux or Burgundy. Interestingly, Rioja Alta, the northernmost and highest part of Rioja, is tantalizingly close to the Basque coast and San Sebastián, from where Jake was summoned to Madrid and Brett Ashley and Casa Botín. As when he was served Izzarra, a Basque liqueur, while in France, it seems that Jake has a hard time chasing the Basque presence from his memory.

Sancerre

After a good day at the track, Ernest and Hadley stop at Pruniers and spend their winnings on the “clearly priced”
²⁶
oysters,
Crabe Mexicaine
(see page
55
) and glasses of this crisp, very dry white wine from the Loire Valley.