in good taste, vol. 55: it’s meg ryan fall
french menus, table season, and poires au vin rouge
Hopefully you caught this week’s Lunch Hour Links featuring yours truly; there’s a bunch of new folks here as a result and I’m dealing with the pressure to perform!!!
What else has been up? Last weekend, we held a beautiful little autumnal dinner party with friends, complete with 4 courses, silly place cards, and a ~*tablescape*~ of drippy candles and jewel-toned velour pumpkins from the Target dollar bin.
I cooked from Richard Olney’s French Menu Cookbook, a moderately difficult and pretentiously written guide for elaborate, seasonal dinners. Our “informal, elegant autumn dinner” menu featured a fresh cucumber salad with cream, lamb & artichoke heart stew, a cheese course, and (recipe below) pears poached in red wine for dessert. Fall food. Fall weather. Fall looks. It’s here, it’s now; get out your sweaters.
THE TACKY AND THE TASTEFUL
Why we love the Cheesecake Factory, and that ubiquitous Applebee’s TikTok song (I can all but guarantee “the kind of intense ecstasy felt by the suits in the Applebee’s marketing department” is exactly how it went down)
the R&D of ‘new car smell’
on checking out of big-tech algorithms and ‘rewilding’ your attention
It’s about to be table season:
“I would never Instagram my space, but I would like to know I could. Being able to Instagram something and not doing it is, after all, the starkest representation of class there is.”
Niche content, perhaps, for an audience of 1 (my husband), but here’s a fascinating free online archive of digitized rare and collectible bartender books, 1820s-1940s
RED WINE POACHED PEARS AND CHUNKY KNITS FOR MEG RYAN FALL
This recipe is a little silly but highly appropriate for those heavier cool weather dinners, if you’re the dessert kind. It is absolutely beautiful and will impress everyone, just like Meg Ryan’s wardrobe in the years of 1989-1998. It also takes minimal time to prep (minus the actual baking time).
INGREDIENTS
4 pears, not quite ripe, peeled and halved -- I use Bartlett
¾ cup (yes) of granulated sugar
1 bottle of wine (I use a Pinot Noir)
The peel of 1 orange
¼ tsp cinnamon
WHAT TO DO
Preheat oven to 300. Core each pear half using a spoon, being careful to scoop out the tougher core bits. Keep the stem on for aesthetics. Lay the pears cored-side down in a casserole dish (I used a lasagna dish that’s about 13.8”x10”, and about 4 quarts). Pour the wine, sugar, and cinnamon over all of them -- the wine should nearly cover the pears, but it’s ok if it doesn’t.
Bring to a boil over a burner for a couple of minutes, cooking off a bit of the alcohol, then baste your pears with a spoon and place in the oven. Cook for about 2.5 hours. When they’re done, they’ll be a little bouncy but have some give when poked with a fork. Serve with some of the poaching liquid poured over the top, and maybe a little homemade whipped cream on the side.
Richard Olney says these should be served cold, but I think there’s nothing nicer than a warm pear in Meg Ryan Fall, at least for those of us who observe.