Bringing Out The House

    It was Anthony Bourdain who first exposed the handful of questionable and off-putting practices of the modern restaurant that had diners, critics and restauranteurs worked into a lather sometime in the early 2000s.   While in university I worked at a few less-than-magnificent restaurants myself, and while I don’t have the shocking tales of kitchen underhandedness (nor the acerbic delivery) Bourdain does, there was one dishonorable practice that I won’t soon forget.  The “house wine” at one vaguely Italian place was really just the combined by-the-glass wines that were in danger of going off.  The funny thing is, people ordered it all the time.  Maybe they appreciated the randomness of my boss’ meritages, or the four dollar price tag.  But I’ve always suspected some of its popularity was due to the designation; something house always appeals.  

    The term has fallen from favor lately, perhaps because of the abuses outlined above, but outside of the restaurant the concept of house comestibles is charming.  This is especially true when applied to something edible.  Guests to my home have learned to expect two ramekins, one filled with brined Picholine olives, the other with Marcona almonds.  I realize olives and nuts served with drinks or as a buffer between a lagging roast and a hungry room of dinner guests is hardly revolutionary.  But the success is in the specifics.  The unpitted Picholines I serve are perfectly balanced—no small feat considering most are bitter or sour salt bombs.  The Marconas I prefer are unblanched, and their papery brown skin adds a noticeable tannic note that offsets the richness ideally.  

    I love a good cheese course, either served the British way following dessert or in the continental fashion before dessert.  Several cheeses have become favorites—Manchego, Robbiola, Lincolnshire Poacher—but one cheese in particular makes a frequent appearance: SarVeccio from Antigo, Wisconsin.  This is a hard, dry parmesan-style cheese (not to be confused with Pamigiano Reggiano, which is inimitable).  It has a latent sweetness and a softly granular texture that is ideal for hovering around dessert.  I admit, though, at least part of the reason this has become a house favorite is the shock most guests register when discovering it is from Wisconsin—home of countless anonymous and largely uninspired cheeses.  

    My house drink is not a specialty cocktail (which is far too fussy a signature to be fiddling with as guests arrive) but a potent spirit for after dinner—namely, Armagnac.  Again, the charm is in the specific.  Several years ago I was introduced to the Bas-Armagnac house of Delord.  Their offerings range from young VS Armagnacs to highly collectible vintages (1946, I’m told, is in demand).  But it is Delord’s more humble Napoleon, a blended spirit aged a scant 10 years, that quickly became a familiar site after meals.  It is rich and raisiny but somehow still fresh—a combination that satisfies both habitual brandy drinkers and novices.  

    Accessibility is really the point of a house comestible.  I appreciate rare and sharply flavored foods and drinks, but there seems little purpose in forcing challenging things on an unwilling audience.  In a dining landscape where innovation and exoticism have become the rule, I am far more satisfied when a guest reveals they know exactly what to expect when they sit at my table.  Familiarity can be its own sort of luxury.  

Heart Felt

    How strange it is that American Labor Day should have become the symbolic end of summer.  More than any other over the past two months, it is this weekend that my straw hats and linen clothes are needed.  And yet I am supposed to be thinking of wrapping these things up for the long, cold haul to Memorial Day?  It is true that only the strictest traditionalists follow to the letter summer and its gear.  But one can hardly deny, either, the melancholic top note that seems to waft in on even the muggiest breeze.  Summer is ending, it cries, and with it, the need for those appurtenances that only now seem relevant.

    One way of lessoning the ache is to spend some time in anticipation of coming seasonal changes.  If heavier clothing of tweed, flannel, cashmere or heavy worsted needs attention now is a good time to begin giving it.   These mends are easily done, though, and need perhaps a week at the most.  Shoes take longer; a local cobbler may need a month, but if your shoes are heading back to the original maker (often overseas), they better make the voyage chop chop—two or three months is normal.

    The most satisfying item to return to its maker, though, is a felt hat.  There is a simple reason for this: no matter how well you wield a brush or manage the steam from a kettle, your skills fall short of the hatter and his laboratory.  My hats return to Optimo around this time each year and when, in a few weeks, I am called to collect them, they appear as if newly made.  It is often not until I try each on do I believe they are mine; a good hatter will remove dust, marks and loose threads, but not, somehow, the molded memory of your head.

Labor Day Clothes

Frayed, badly marked and bagged--in other words, perfect for work.  

    Work clothes, by which I mean clothes for physical though not recreational activities, require a surprising degree of thought.  Perhaps not as much as might go into something like a suit for a wedding, but evaluations and decisions no less.  The difference is the thought required when seeking something new manifests as a list a desires, like peaked lapels, or a lightweight cloth of navy pindot.  When deciding upon work clothes, the thought is one of allocation of existing qualities.  Which old clothes best serve a particular task requires consideration of the rigor of the task versus the diminishing life of the cloth and the sentimental attachment to the garment.  It can be melancholy work assigning one’s clothes their final roles.

    My grandfather on my mother’s side was an avid gardener.  He died before I was born, but his passion for soil and the things that grow in it was passed on to my mother, and, in some diluted measure, to me.  Since adolescence, I have developed an image—even a jagged narrative—of him cycling his modest plot of land through the seasons.  He is wearing a weathered gray suit, an off-white shirt and dark tie. In summer he leaves the jacket hanging and allows himself the pleasure of rolled sleeves.  The tie is tucked through the shirt’s placket.  Remarkably, my mother recently confirmed these long-held images, adding the delicious detail of an economical  three-suit wardrobe.  The newest was his best suit, reserved for holidays and special occasions.  The second, a suit for ordinary wear, and the last his gardening suit.  Of course none were static; a best suit would, in a dozen years, have trundled down through the scale until indistinguishable from the soil it had, in its final stage, expertly worked.  Gardeners understand the beauty of compost; even prize-winning roses eventually become soil for the lowly shrub.

    My own gardening clothes are less suffused with the metaphorical.  They did, however, all start life as clothes that I wore on the street—an important distinction from the purpose-built costumes many hobbies infer are required.  The selection consists of two pairs of chinos—one made exceptionally gauzy and lightweight from laundering that I reserve for the heat, the other a sort of canvass duck cloth in some indeterminable putty color.  I expect the summer ones will disintegrate sometime next summer; the ducks are impenetrable, but don’t breathe, which is what consigned them to cool-weather gardening.  For shirts: the oxford cloth button-down collar, the traditional choice of those interested in American Ivy-League inspired style.  They are durable, absorbent, breathable and launder well.  Oxford cloth is thoroughly active wear cloth; I will never understand how it leapt into popularity as dress shirting.  

    Below gardening is a task with far more permanent reminders of station: painting.  It is difficult to assign old clothes to the task of painting.  In one respect, the clothes will be ruined, and often after a single session.  But sometimes a favorite pair of chinos gains an unquantifiable element of style with its permeant reminders of lavender rooms and buttercup hallways.  For the wearer, it’s the memories of past projects, however misguided.  For the audience—for it is inevitable that paint-splattered clothes will be worn for beer runs as a project reaches completion—they engender curiosity: is the wearer a painter or a painter?  Jean Michele Basquiat was said to regularly paint in the droopy Armani suits of the late eighties.  This seems excessive, even for an eccentric, but a watered-down effect occurs with all genuinely splattered clothing.  It should go without saying that any pre-splattered clothing is disingenuous, no matter how artfully executed.  The randomness of real labor simply cannot be reproduced.  

    Finally, accessories.  If it is sunny or cold wear your third-best hat.  Many menswear aficionados will be shocked to learn that roughly finished, buff-colored hog-skin gloves can be purchased for a tenner a pair from the glass aisle of most hardware stores.  A neckerchief is helpful in managing perspiration or drafts.  My grandfather wore a tie while gardening.  I almost didn’t believe my mother until she showed me a treasured gardening book of his.  It is a resinous and dusty volume full of pressed roses and herbs from his garden, many still faintly fragrant.  And then there he is, neatly spading a trench, precisely as I have always pictured him.

Continental Drift

The crescent shaped savior of many a hungry traveler.

    To appreciate the continental breakfast is to first understand its opposite—The Full English, a hearty plate of eggs, back bacon, blood sausage, beans, mushrooms, broiled tomatoes, and, as my mother likes to put it, lashings of toast.  Given the unhappy choice, it would probably be my last meal.  In fact, it is so lavish a spread, I imagine the Full English has inadvertently been a last meal.  And that’s really the problem; we no longer need a belly bursting with the rich fruits of the homeland to go forth and create empire.  A roll, a small pot of yoghurt and some fruit, it turns out, is a very civilized way to start the day too.  

    The name itself is the essence of mild English derision.  Was the Englishman abroad too preoccupied with his missing breakfast to bother using the formal names of the countries he visited? Or did The Continent just have a sort of carefree mystique, similarly attained by the term out west when used by Americans headed to California?  Maybe both, perhaps neither;  importantly, continental came to be mean anything in distinction to that which is British.  Applied to something as sacred as breakfast, one can practically hear the raised eyebrow.  

    I think an anecdote at this junction would best color the surprisingly dramatic effect the appearance of a Continental Breakfast can have.  I was a boy of, say, fifteen, traveling with my parents, first from relatives in Wales, then on to London, and then (here it comes) to The Continent.  My father’s side of the family is spread out over Germany, France and Switzerland, and we struck upon the idea that it would be fun to rent a car and do a sort of miniature grand tour through these and other places—the Italian Alps, Austria, Liechtenstein.  The British leg of the trip went well, filled with long walks in an old forest, castles, and, even once removed from the rolling countryside and in London, several mornings that began with the sort of earnest, multi-component meals as described above.  And then, rather suddenly, we were in Switzerland.  I should have anticipated the change in morning menu—it wasn’t my first time on The Continent, but somehow that initial meal of bread, jam, a few slivers of gruyere and muesli almost knocked me off my stool.  Part of me felt cheated; the rest, light and satisfied.  Whatever eyebrow arching had taken place that first Alpine morning quickly transformed into a wrinkled and upturned nose at the thought of anything more substantial before the PM hours.  By the end of the tour, I could hardly fathom the Full English.

In theory, penance for pastries.  In practice, rich, tangy, full-fat yoghurt with fresh berries and tasted oats.  

    Of course, to the inhabitants of the places we visited, I was just experiencing breakfast, or, it should be said, a sort of romanticized version available at small hotels and cafes when moving through much of Europe.  (The sad reality is that from Mitteleuropa to the American Midwest, food is often packaged and canned and generally abysmal outside of places that preserve tradition for the sake of commerce).  But there is unity in the principle behind the continental breakfast, namely, a desire to begin the day with the appearance of austerity.  At the heart of the meal is the promise of some small pastry anointed with impossibly delicious jam alongside a milk-enriched cup of coffee.  One is almost unthinkable without the other, but even together, something else is needed.  The ideal foil has at least the veneer of health: yoghurt with granola, muesli, bran flakes or fruit.  A few shavings of ham or semi-hard cheese are quaint additions, hinting to the groggy tourist of the pleasures available at lunch.  Juice is also part of the deal; it should be served in something only slightly larger than a jigger so as to give the impression of being a health tonic.  A second cup of coffee, preferably this time black, is the final stroke and brings the diner to modesty’s precipice before shunting him out the door to see the ruins or the masterpieces or whatever.

    Happily, this civilized start to the day can be recreated anywhere, and several times each week I start the day with some combination of baked good, yoghurt, fruit, grain, coffee and juice.  A mix-and-match matrix featuring several columns of possible components was a tempting, if pithy way in which to end, but I came down on the side of that other European quality: the appearance of modesty.

The Problem with Consistency

    Of the well-thumbed photographs that appeal to those interested in men’s clothing, there is one floating around the internet that has always confounded me.  It is a wide-angled shot of what I assume was only a fraction of the Duke of Windsor’s wardrobe.  From left to right sweeps perhaps two dozen tweed, corduroy and tartan jackets.  The scale of patterns, the variety of buttons, the unusual cuff treatments—a veritable encyclopedia of menswear esoterica is fully on display.  I wish I could enjoy the details too, but I just can’t get my mind around the other glaring aspect of the photo: no two garments seem the same size.  

    I say seem because these things can be awfully difficult to determine with any certainty.  There are coat hangers to consider; some stems are visibly longer and others rather stubby.  The angle of the shot might exaggerate things.  Then again, some sleeves differ as much as six inches, and the skirt lengths vary as well, but not proportionally, and some jackets are just  short generally while others could be said to be longish.  The Duke’s closet reminds me of a clearance rack of multi-sized jackets at a thrift store.  A very stylish thrift store, mind you.  

    I often mull consistency.  Today’s computer-aided design (CAD) machines precisely cut carefully established patterns for the assembly of ready-to-wear men’s suits.  The tolerances for error are minute, and any pieces with variance greater than some pre-determined and low threshold are marked for the scrap heap.  Good ready-to-wear suits all in the same size should, by every metric, be identical.  That’s just not my experience though.  I was quite happy in a well respected ready-to-wear brand for several years.  And while most of it fit as well as it could, one in four pieces had some weird inconsistency—a fuller sleeve, some slightly narrower lapel.  Like any self-respecting clothing enthusiast, I took a tape-measure to the garments to confirm my anxieties.  Laugh all you will; it was later admitted in strict confidence to me by one of the senior sales associates that the plant manufacturing their garments was having serious consistency problems.

    The other aspect of the issue is that I wasn’t precision cut by a CAD machine.  Realizing this, I sought out clothes that weren’t either.  The words are difficult to find, but the first suit Despos made for me didn’t just fit well; it was a handsome, dynamic extension of me.  It was, quite suddenly, the first and only real garment in a closet full of imitations.  I have slowly replaced the latter with the former, learning as I go.  Recently, gazing upon an armoire that steadily grows, I realized something: bespoke has its own type of charming inconsistency as well.  However, whereas inconsistency in ready-to-wear can be a frustrating disappointment, the type of mild variance in my wardrobe is purpose-built to reflect the character of the cloth and intended use.  A casual flannel suit, therefore, might have slightly more expressive lapels to accentuate the softness of the cloth.  A favorite tweed might be modestly roomier to accommodate a sweater.  Trousers sometimes narrow or widen to reflect the character of cloth.  This only makes sense considering the dramatically different properties of mohair and flannel, linen and worsted.  

    Finally, there is the very real fact that we (humans—all of us, even the clothing obsessed) have an unhealthy preoccupation with consistency—something that doesn’t really exist anyway.  Oh sure, a stack of polo shirts can seem identical, or two bowls of lobster spaghetti can both be seasoned perfectly. But at some level well below most people’s threshold of negligibility, inconsistency thrives.  Why must it be noticeable to bother us?  Isn’t the thought alone that true consistency has never actually been experienced enough to explode any desire for its pursuit?

   This is the point in the essay where that quotation from Oscar Wilde's "The Relation of Dress To Art" about consistency being the refuge of the silly, or whatever it is, would fit in nicely.  I prefer Aldous Huxley’s though: “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”  Indeed, not a good look.

Making The List

    Although I’m almost guaranteed to object, I can barely resist lists of things with the word best in the title.  I could happily spend a Sunday morning knitting my brow over some frothy Best Kitchen Gadgets list.  And at the top of the heap of subjects that provide this cynical pleasure are lists that try and corral something abstract, like style, into a rough spreadsheet.  For those I clear an entire weekend.

    If we (I assume I have not solely instigated their proliferation) try to identify why lists like these are attractive, the brutal conclusion is this: it is self-edifying to quietly and confidently disagree with an authority.  To look at a picture of a semi-famous person in questionable clothing, and know, at a fundamental level, that things could be so much better, makes us, the reader, feel good about what hangs in our own armoires.  And when that authority is a long-time arbiter of style and society, like Vanity Fair, the stakes for the reader are much greater.  September’s Style issue is out, and I imagine chops have already been well-licked and ink spilled in dissecting the best dressed lists, the men’s in particular.  

    If we can disentangle ourselves from notions of fashion and style for a moment, and focus instead on the words best dressed, we might begin to understand how an influential publication goes about navigating so abstract a project.  The word best seems specific, but is actually vague and thin.  It assumes inferiority in relation, but doesn’t suggest a metric, like volume or number, or even any suggestion of character, like richness or softness.  The omission of detail is purposeful: best is sincere shorthand.  But without substance, most usage is unavoidably ironic.  Dressed, by contrast, means something.  If we ignore all the secondary meanings (salads, windows, wounds) we are left with: clothed or furnished with clothing.  But clothed for what?  Dinner?  Larceny?  Abseiling?  Indeed the usage is general, which is why dressed is usually followed by something more specific, like for the part or to kill.  Without a qualifier, though, dressed is unmoored, even theoretical.   Best dressed, then, seems to mean an unspecified state of having clothes on—an idea broad enough to encompass more or less anything.  

    Vanity Fair’s list seems to support this definition.  Ten men are listed, all with varying levels of celebrity, but perhaps only two or three with even remotely similar approaches to personal style.  Musician Pharrell Williams has long been on my radar for how well he puts together articles of sports and street wear.  His layered outfits of cardigans, necklaces, punched-out fedoras and unlaced athletic shoes are, if anything, well conceived.  Retired bullfighter Miguel Baez appears on the same page in fairly classic bespoke garments.  The intended message might be that Vanity Fair appreciates diversity in style; the effect, however is that they’ve lost their bearings—that an editorial voice is being stifled by a swelling pressure to appear contemporary.  Genuinely appreciating two drastically different expressions is fine, but self-consciously juxtaposing them beneath a banner labeled best is thinly disguised noncomittalism.  

    Where direct comparisons are available, the effect intensifies.  Both actor Benedict Cumberbatch and professional football player Victor Cruz appear in white tie and tails.  The former is wearing what appears to be a perfect rig—a difficult feat considering the challenging proportions and details of this most formal side of the masculine spectrum.  Cruz wears a dreadful interpretation of the same that barely contains his muscular form; it pulls and creases, reveals waistcoat where it shouldn’t, and rides above his ankles.  The problem isn’t fashion; its physics.  How could Vanity Fair possibly celebrate both?  On something as prescribed as white tie and tails, you simply must come down somewhere.  

    What puzzles me is Vanity Fair has positioned itself over time as a guardian of a certain timeless ideal.  An issue does not pass without a story—and accompanying spread of mouth-watering photographs—pulled from our collective notion of where and how and by whom elegance was best practiced.  All the usual suspects have splashed the pages: The Duke and Wallis bumming around France, the Kennedys afloat in a yacht, Grace Kelley darting about Monaco.  Even in this very Style issue, tucked well behind the haphazard declarations of who is best dressed, are a few images of Gianni Agnelli looking elegant in morning clothes.  And then there is Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s Editor, who himself is stylish in a decidedly classic Anglo-American way.  The sum is an editorial voice romantically preoccupied with a time when the day’s fashions and what is now deemed elegant aligned more perfectly, but one that struggles as the two develop a more complex relationship.  That voice truly falters when called upon to name a handful of best dressed men.  In an attempt to appear contemporary, a list like this is instead timid—a safe declaration of awareness, and a tentative fishing for reception.  

    Vanity Fair is not alone, of course.  I’m often floored by the brazen reference to some classically dressed man from a more elegant time by designers, writers or celebrities who wouldn’t be caught dead in the fuller, more masculine clothes of their supposed style icon.  Cary Grant, Gene Kelley, Frank Sinatra—these and more are name-dropped by men on this year’s best dressed list.  Those three in particular would burst into laughter if confronted by the skin-tight off-the-rack fashion suits worn by those who throw around their names.  What is the disconnect?  I think today’s fashionable man is simply taking an easier route—a narrow preference for the obvious and widely available or the self-consciously abstract rather than pursuing subtler expressions of contemporary elegance.  The latter is available but is less sensational and far more difficult to attain.  In the end, being best dressed is about the possession of fashionable clothing.  Living with elegance, having style—these things deal with the person inside all those clothes.

Some of the icons mentioned by members of Vanity Fair's best dressed men list.    Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Steve McQueen, Charles, Prince of Wales.  (All images are in the public domain).

The Multiples Advantage

    In addition to a general aversion to kitchen gadgetry, I despise sets of things.  Why would I ever need a very small, a medium and a gigantic frying pan?  My advice to those who need to fill a new kitchen with pans is to buy multiples of the medium size—the standard twelve inch pan.  Like a line cook at a busy restaurant, I have a stack of these loyally waiting just next to the range.  This is a basic efficiency; there is no application for a miniature frying pan that the standard one can’t accomplish, and if cooking in volume is really necessary, I switch to a large brazier.  In other words, small and large frying pans are irrelevant, but a medium one is just right.  Is this really so exotic a concept?  For professionals, not, but the humble home cook usually finds the idea (or me) peculiar.

    And yet I have never been in an amateur kitchen that doesn’t possess some favorite pan, or knife, or spoon, or apron…  I had a friend who made a good soufflé, but he could only do it using his favorite soufflé ramekin.  It shattered one day, and he quit soufflés for good.  Despite a number of others, my mother uses an old sauce whisk that has long lost its handle.  She grips at the little metal stub feverishly each evening so as not to lose it in the dressing.  This is insane!  I don’t begrudge the desire for the consistent performance of a favorite; I just don’t understand why dinner must screech to a halt if some piece of equipment is in the wash.  Instead I’m preaching perpetually available consistency.  

    To return for a moment to size: it is not universally ill-advised that it should vary.  Stainless steel bowls are the unsung heroes of the efficient kitchen, marinating meats, storing leftovers, serving as impromptu Champagne buckets.  But six bottles of bubbly and a ten pound bag of ice won’t fit in a two quart bowl, and a sixteen quart one is far too large for storing a few cups of concasse.  So one resorts to sizes in, say, four quart increments from two to sixteen.  This works well, but, once again, only if there are multiples in each size.  If one very large bowl is needed, the chances are good that another will for the same meal.  Incidentally, the twelve quart stainless bowl is the most useful—I have at least four of them in constant rotation.

    A confounding and mercurial force is at work preventing all of this kitchen prudence: the packaged deal and its silver-tongued appearance of value.  When my wife and I registered for our wedding, a very slippery salesperson escorted us about the kitchen department recommending sets of all the, as she put it, essssentials.  When challenged on what was so essential about a three inch braising pot, her response was the full pitch: you never know…and the set is such good value.  I do know, and no it isn’t.  Packaging things is always a tactic to get the consumer to spend more, not less.  And throwing in a few specialty pots for which there is little need is an inexpensive way to create an impression of value.   She was not amused when I confiscated the little gun from her and zapped three identical pans.

Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes

Highly technical muscle group legend.

    Why the youthful resistance to stretching?  I can clearly recall recoiling at a barked instruction to cross one leg over the other and touch my toes.  My first tendency is to roll my eyes when I imagine some crew-cutted coach twirling a lanyard, extolling the merits of proper stretching.  And yet as recent as last winter when I coached a high school wrestling team, with the minor exception of the crewcut, that was me!  Get a good stretch in, boys—believe me—you don’t want to pull a hammy!  What happened to all of our vim—our arrogance in the face of pulled muscles—that, with the exception of a tender groin here and there, proved itself one of the few victories over those officious authority figures of our teenage athletic lives?  

    I don’t know, and I don’t care: this creaking frame now needs stretching.  Several minutes of leaning, bending and tugging before anything more vigorous than pruning the hedges is compulsory.  I was ribbed for taking that long by my wrestlers until I instituted a similar daily requirement for them.  Out went the lethargic partner stretches that had ineffectively occupied fifteen minutes each day.  The replacement regimen took twelve minutes (kept on-pace by that obnoxious mainstay of the coaching trade—the stopwatch) and could be executed without holding hands with a teammate.  It’s a neck-down treatment that focuses on the vulnerable bits but flows efficiently.  The key is to avoid thinking in strict terms of named stretches, instead focusing on muscle groups.  Specifically, these twelve:

Neck: Roll head in controlled circles, both directions.  Gently tug head from side to side, front to back.

Shoulders: Rotate arms in controlled windmills, forward then back.  Pull each arm across chest using opposite forearm. 

Arms:  Grasping an elbow, gently pull bent arm behind head and down back, left then right.  Next grasp fingers of opposite hand; straighten both arms and pull fingers down, then back.  Repeat with other arm.  

Chest:  Facing a wall, plant one hand at head level, arm extended.  Rotate body away from wall.   Repeat with other side.  

Torso:  With legs shoulder width apart, bend torso to side, reaching one arm down a leg and the other over head.  Repeat other side.  Next roll torso in wide, controlled circles.  

Hamstrings: With legs more than shoulder width apart, bend at the waist and touch floor.  When comfortable, alternate reaching for left then right ankle.  

Quads:  Standing on one foot, grasp ankle and bring it up to rear.  Repeat with other leg.  

Calfs:  In a slightly bent-at-the-waist pushup stance, push one heel to the floor, using the other foot to brace or increase stretch.  Repeat with other leg.  

Groin: Squat with heels touching, balancing on toes.  Place hands on floor in front of feet and use elbows and body weight to gently push out knees.  

Glutes (arse):  Sit with legs straight in front.  Cross one leg over the other and bring knee and thigh to chest using arms.  Repeat with other leg.  

Back:  In the same position as above, rotate torso to the side of the bent leg.  Thread opposite arm between front of thigh and torso, gently increasing stretch.  

Ankles:  In a standing position, roll one ankle at a time over toes in controlled circles.  Repeat with other foot.  

    For the over thirty (and older) set, stretching is a sort of chicken-or-or-the-egg scenario.  I can’t stretch cold, and yet I need to stretch before warming up.  The solution, I’ve found, is to do both, a sort of jumping and bending and shaking of limbs one sees runners do before a race.  Once suitably unkinked, and marginally limber, stretch in earnest.  I have to emphasize the time limit, though.  This is not a yoga session, and stretching for much more than the one-minute-per-muscle-group regimen leaves me (literally) cold.  For those who prefer metaphorical images: whether the light brightens or dims on a tire-mounted dynamo is a question of momentum.

Capping Things Off

Standard flat cap in handsome glen check.  

    Like any hat-wearing man, I cycle through preferred shapes and configurations, favoring some, suddenly rejecting others.  Proper, full-sized fedoras appeal to me, but the reflected image is always slightly too near costume to have one made (even though I am confident Chicago's Optimo would nail the proportions).  In the same breath, I must admit I own the ultimate costume piece: a bowler, which strikes at the very core of masculine affections for headgear as a dashing, semi-formal stiffened helmet.  Sadly, bowlers are impossible to sincerely wear.  Trilbies are flattering and rakish, though and I’ve long wanted a soft Tyrolean, decorative rope and all.  

Linen cap folded and ready for a patch pocket.  

    But it's the humble flat cap that I reach for most often.  Like a bowler, the appeal has a duality born of action and style.  Unlike the bowler, though, the cap is a laborer’s hat—an inexpensive, straightforward design that can be deployed in an instant or folded and jammed in a jacket pocket as need arises.  The cap was borrowed by well-dressed gentlemen at the turn of the previous century as a casual, sporting alternative to the (often quite literally) stiff formal hats of felt expected of the upper classes.  I say borrowed because to this day the best versions are hardly made of scrap cloth; the shape might remain true to its modest origins, but the materials have moved up in the world.  

    Caps can be made of virtually any cloth.  One of my favorites is very fine linen lined with etherial mesh made by London’s Lock & Co.  As much as I depend upon my trusty straws, this is the head covering of choice when traveling.  I have held cashmere caps that caused me severe internal conflict; this simple shape so beautifully rendered had the same paradoxical charm of a dinner jacket made of some rugged tartan.  But tweed is really the correct cloth for a cap.  If a technical fabric-swathed disbeliever ever needed proof of the original performance cloth’s ability, I would encourage the wearing of a proper tweed cap for a week.  If his head doesn’t remain dry, warm and comfortable for the duration of the trial, I’ll eat my hat.

The Question Remains

The standard menswear selfie.  Oh for shame!  

    A casual search around the internet reveals most genuine questions regarding menswear pertain to the more rigid aspects of the interest.  Questions of propriety are at the top, particularly as concerns weddings.  These are the can I wear x with y if the event is at four pm in a non-denominational church sort of queries, to which, more often than not, a good answer won’t help matters anyway.  One notch below these are questions of pattern scale or color—a sort of tie, shirt and jacket derby where the obscure is clobbered by the banal.  Occasionally one sees an interesting question; I recently ran into: “how does one negotiate boutonnieres and topcoats?”  This last one might just as well be the meanderings of an eccentric rather than a genuine concern.  (From a practical perspective, I imagine I would transfer the flower from lapel to lapel as needed).  

    The dearth of consistently good questions in these matters surely stems from the nature of the medium: the internet Q&A forum.  On the surface, these outlets encourage rushed answers over thoughtful discourse.  It’s unknowable, but I wonder what percentage of how-to-tie-a-bow-tie questions are frantically posted by groomsmen while late for the appointed church time.  I was fortunate enough to have an uncle, a retired Royal Navy man, in amongst my groomsmen both admonishing and assisting those few stumped by their bow-ties.  But what if no avuncular figure is waiting in the wings, prowling the pews?

    Those men who have the experience--that know well the rules and how to flout them--do participate in question-asking of a sort.  Digging just a little deeper online, one uncovers member-only forums dedicated to every echelon of dressing, from street-wear to the loftiest bespoke ambitions.  The most prolific of these is Styleforum, which is really an evolving and immense library of opinion regarding male dress.  I’m not a member, but have read quite a bit of the publicly available content.  It can be interesting, self-conscious, combative and revelatory all in a single sitting.  Some humble questions are asked, but mostly there is the nervous hedging of uncertainty with blunt, semi-hostile statements of generally agreed-upon principles.  The bravest members submit selfies for scrutiny.  This strikes me as a very modern way of asking a question.  

Image searches can answer those vague questions, like what's the correct facial expression for a gray tweed?  Courtesy of the Harris Tweed Authority Digital Archive

    Of course no one becomes better at anything without asking questions.  The right questions, I’ve found, are often silent, and phrased as internal statements or ideas, rather than anything punctuated by a question mark.  Contemplating a gray tweed jacket, I wanted to see something similar in action—actually, I just wanted to see recent precedent.  An image search is all that was necessary; within a few fractions of a second I had hundreds of examples of the good (at left) and the bad.  Very good answers can manifest over time from explicating images.  In a similarly broad approach, Adolph loos, architect, essayist, and generally opinionated fellow of the turn of the previous century began many of his short critical pieces with that old standby, the rhetorical question.  “Ah, to be well dressed, who does not desire to be well dressed?” (Men’s Fashion, 1898).  Better still: “How is Fashion Created?” ((Gentle)Men’s Hats, 1898).  But Loos does get rather specific with his answers: “an article of clothing is modern when it is possible to wear it in one’s native cultural environment at a certain occasion in the best society and it does not attract any unwarranted attention.” (Men’s Fashion, 1898).  Oh how I wish Loos could see how complicated modernity in dress has become.  I imagine he would have many more questions.  

    Ultimately, the very best resources are those experienced people with whom an hour’s face-to-face conversation is not unusual.  I have learned more in an afternoon spent with tailor Chris Despos than a week reading essays or the online debates of the anonymous (but well-attired).  My father is another good source, but his wisdom usually comes as a question of his own.  At a recent backyard gathering he asked me where he might, these days, find some decent polo shirts.  I pointed at my own, asking innocently enough if he wanted something similar.  “No” was his flat response.  “Shows too much chest.”  Point taken, pops.  

The Common Bird

    In Melanie Dunea’s efficient, if morbid, My Last Supper, 50 of the world’s more accomplished chefs reveal what they would choose to eat during their last, earthly meal.  Some of the responses are appropriately extravagant—grand menus of luxury ingredients and rare vintages.  Others are self-consciously restrained, although, as Eric Ripert demonstrates, not necessarily humble: “It would be a simple dish, a slice of toasted country bread, some olive oil, shaved black truffle, rock salt, and black pepper.”  The common theme found in the bulk of fictitious last meals, though, is hit upon in the forward, written by author and food personality Anthony Bourdain: if cooking is a demonstration of control, eating requires submission.  I think Bourdain is on to something; my last meal would be a roasted chicken, a dish that begins with control but, somewhere near the halfway point, resolves to submission.  

    The temptation is to write romantically about the experience that comes with roasting hundreds of chickens—the way the thighs plump and the skin tightens, the correct hue of running juices, the telltale smell, even the slight alteration in sound that signals a chicken is approaching doneness.  But the novice wants temperatures and times, and many modern ovens are digitalized to the point of requiring, at the very least, an estimate of either before they will operate.  I will say this: Chickens tolerate high heat but universally begin drying out with cooking times in excess of 90 minutes.  My ideal scenario is a chicken that has been in the oven for one hour at around 465 degrees.  Of course that means almost nothing considering oven performance varies as much as that other shifting variable: chicken weight.  

    Chickens are categorized by their fate: fryers and roasters.  The former refers to retail weights between 2 1/2 pounds and 3 1/2 pounds, the latter from 3 1/2 pounds to five pounds or so.  There is no discernible difference in flavor, so the choice is one of volume, or, as I’ve discovered, number of a particular part.  I now prefer two small fryers to one large roaster because four legs are better than two.  They also cook more quickly and at slightly higher heat.  Capons (castrated males) and roosters (mature birds that have had their way with countless hens) can also be delicious but require special preparations.  Namely, the fat that renders from a plump capon will need managing during the roast, and roosters are too tough to do anything to but stew.  

    The canard about something mild tasting just like chicken is a sure sign that something is going dramatically wrong with most chickens.  A compound butter is a good corrective.  An average roaster needs a quarter pound of softened butter with a fresh herb mixture of rosemary, thyme, tarragon and parsley.  The idea is to make butter and chicken intimate: inside, outside, under skin, beneath wings and between thigh and breast—spare no crevice.  As for elaborate trussing, I find tucking the wingtips and a simple square knot around the legs is sufficient.  Season with salt and pepper and let sit at room temperature for half an hour.  Roast.

   But don't just roast.  Roast!  Timid hovering will make for an uncertain chicken.  Peering through the oven window will lead to opening the door, which in turn will encourage the use of a thermometer, a device that takes just long enough for the roast to lose its momentum, all but guaranteeing pallid skin and less succulent flesh.  Whatever control exists at the outset—variables of weight, seasoning and temperature—must be traded for submission to the fact of a chicken in a hot oven once the door is shut.  Do this enough and any fear of under or overcooking will dissipate.  As for fear of last meals?  A good chicken might just cure that, too.

Above All, Discretion

    As gerunds go, grooming is a particularly evocative one.  It begins with a growl, a masculine posture that, once uttered, smooths to a purr before finding a satisfied, feminine ending.  The effect is that of taming the wild—from encounter with tangled, impenetrable brush to the neatly bordered beds of submission, all within a single word.  Of course guides on the subject are usually decoration, mere advertorial for luxe emollients and unnecessary tools.  I refuse to list must-have products or descriptions of obvious technique.  Instead here are three areas of particular personal attention.  

    When my wife was pregnant with our first, my fingernails grew at an alarming rate.  Perhaps it was the excessive mango-eating, her only craving—and one in which I happily participated.  I pruned my nails daily for those nine months, after which whatever mysterious keratin accelerant had been in play vanished.  I learned two lessons.  The first is that well-kept fingernails require three pieces of equipment: a nail brush for cleaning, clippers for removing sizable matter and a high-quality emery board for shaping and honing.  Secondly, a man may be laden with choices in his daily routine, but his nails offer a single correct answer: clean, short and gently rounded.

    Anyone who has regularly met with a dentist in the past ten years has almost certainly noticed that electronic toothbrushes have become the preferred tooth cleaning technology.  My dentist doesn’t employ the hard sell with me, partly, I imagine, because he is pleased with the results of my analogue routine.  I brush with good toothpaste and a gentle, natural bristle brush several times each day, careful not to erode my gums.  The finishing touch is an intense minute of gargling with an alcohol-based mouthwash.  I realize alcohol-free products are said to be superior, but I just don’t get the same long-lasting fresh breath and, let’s call it what it is, invigorating burn.  As if to underscore the outmoded nature of the product, I store my mouthwash in an empty Scotch bottle on the bathroom counter, where it raises the eyebrows of houseguests and cleaning ladies alike.

    Errant hairs begin losing their charming randomness for most men around thirty.  Before that age,  some small humor might have been had in discovering a singular and long hair sprouting from an otherwise bare ear or neck.  But the fun evaporates when these anomalies no longer seem anomalous; when hair starts appearing in tufts some action is required.  All sorts of devices exist, from manual safety clippers to electric trimmers.  I haven’t experimented, but partly because I prefer the simple, somewhat punitive experience of tweezing.  I must also admit that I go about this activity with gusto; eyebrows, nostrils, ears, brows, necks—no patch of public space is spared my terrible scrutiny.

    See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?  No gruesome account of the personal routine, no embarrassing defense of waxing.  Not even a single reference to that most loathsome portmanteau: manscaping.  And while I haven’t covered the entirety of my daily and weekly maintenance (to everyone's benefit), well-kept fingernails, fresh breath and some minor removal of unwanted hair seems a good start.  But that's where I will leave it; as vital as grooming is, one aspect often goes overlooked: discretion.

Gray Area

Three lengths of cloth: two versatile and one downright irresponsible.  

    As far as I know, no one has seriously tried to document the various sub-species of clothing enthusiast.  And yet familiar categories exist—the sneaker obsessive, for instance, or the hard-boiled bespoke client.  Some groups are organized by things—those that collect and wear vintage clothing—whereas others more loosely gather  around a concept, like minimalism or, a crowd favorite, that which is deemed classic.  Lurking somewhere between all the limited-run tweed and fabled design is a small faction whose raison d’être is versatility.  I number myself in this curious group.  

    Oh to be a sneaker-head!  How satisfying it must be to chase the tangible!  Instead I snatch at an idea whose manifestations might seem harmless—a do-all blazer, the perfect flannel trouser—but require endless revision and numerous reissues.  How utterly self defeating; the repeated indulgence of versatility is admission that the premise is no more than a fable.  But ideas with compelling narratives can be dangerous things.   This is how the J. Peterman Catalogues found a following.  Who wouldn’t be drawn by the promise of a perfect travel jacket?

    My latest attempt at versatility was born in response to the success of an excellent brown herringbone tweed jacket.  Success is the slipperiest slope; if a thing is good, another, slightly different version must be better, no?  The brown tweed seems, indeed, versatile, and its limitations are purely theoretical.  Are the patch pockets too casual?  Or, is brown not a tad too brown for a night on the town?  And so a vision, foggy at first, appears.  Soon it focuses, and then hardens: a gray tweed odd jacket would be awfully versatile…

    For those less versed in the machinations that lead to this sort of an idea, permit me a brief explication of time, place, color, material and configuration.  An odd jacket (commonly sport coat) is a traditionally casual garment in that it is not a suit.  Of course any jacket these days is considered an attempt at dress.  Tweed is a casual, sports cloth that literally repels the elements but also figuratively repels associations with the worsted cloths of business or city clothing.  Gray, however, is what might be termed a business or city color.  Gray tweed, then, is somewhat of a chimera; a casual cloth in a downtown sort of palette.  The way in which a coat is styled also sends messages.  Patch pockets are rather casual, so on this coat, in an attempt to fine-tune that great unknown quantity, versatility, I’ve asked for standard flap pockets.  

    Versatility is less frightening an organizing principle when its faithful concede that everything, no matter how well conceived, has limitations.  Even the unicorns—the garments that perennially seem perfect—have one fatal flaw: a need to rest.  Rotation is the great slayer of versatility.  Perhaps this is why those of us who chase the notion can sleep at night; applied to a whole, say a wardrobe, versatility is a noble goal.

Where It All Comes Together

    The meeting of lapels on a single breasted jacket invites a handful of similes, too many, in fact, to choose a single one for describing this important conjunction.  What’s wrong with multiple similes anyway?  Who am I to quarrel with Langston Hughes and his drying raisins and syrupy sweets etc.?  And so I offer three rather less elegant examples with the hope of creating a figurative ideal of what, to my mind, seems the most important aspect of a tailored coat.  

    A good buttoning point is singular, like a correctly placed fulcrum.  Higher or lower ones can happen, but at the risk of ruining balance.  Today’s fashionable suits often button near the sternum which has the effect of creating large hips and a rather sunken chest.  The opposite, very low buttoning points, join the jacket right over the stomach, emphasizing even the slightest paunch.  Where is the correct buttoning point?  Depends on the person, but generally at the narrowest point between the hips and chest—the natural waist.  For me this occurs slightly above my navel.  

Plenty of body.

    Like mouth-filling wine, a good lapel has body.  It rolls rather than lays flat, ripples rather than creases and springs back when crushed.  In short, it has life.  The five inches of lapel above a buttoned coat is probably the most significant difference between readymade and handmade. Extraordinary effort goes into creating the effect, first cutting a shapely lapel which will enhance the dimension, then hand-stitching the cloth to the canvass creating an ineffable dynamism, and, finally, by pressing-in shape.  A good lapel has memory; a great one seems semi-conscious.

    The lower quarters should fall away as deciduous leaves—naturally and quietly.  Those that cut dramatically to the sides revealing too much trouser are performing, over-emphasizing a slim waist to the detriment of the whole.  Those that plummet straight down seem sad in their smock-like concealment.  There is of course no ideal here, and certain regional styles call for open or closed quarters.  I’m happy if a jacket looks like it could close (which, of course, it ever should), with slight overlap near the bottom button but decidedly rounded corners to the hem.  

Mr. Hughes sidesteps the matter by opting for a DB.  

    Mediocre similes aside, the placement, body and shapes found where a single breasted jacket joins are vital to the overall silhouette.  Adjustments here are also usually impossible; they must be cut into the garment from the start. Bespoke offers this flexibility, but the client must be specific (or quiet while the tailor gets things correct).  The greater difficulty is in ready-to-wear, where the overall fit might be good, but only one or two of the three above elements ideal.  In this instance, I might offer a few more Langston Hughes lines:

“I got the Weary Blues

And I can’t be satisfied.

      Got the Weary Blues

   And can’t be satisfied…”

The Case for Concassé

Concassé in the flesh.  Actually Concassé is the flesh.  

    Demi-glace and roux get all the attention.  Unfair, really, as today fewer dishes call for a rich base.  Far more likely are meals with raw components and uncooked sauces, or, my favorite, a well-roasted piece of meat anointed with its own cooking liquid alongside some gently treated vegetable.  And yet a classic and fundamental method trundles along, loyally serving with barely an honorable mention.  Pity: tomato concassé is easy, delicious and versatile.  

    Perhaps the maltreatment begins with the name, derived from the French verb concasser—to crush or grind.  One could be forgiven for confusing the finished product for irregular pulp, but like most culinary fundamentals, tomato concassé is far more prescribed:  Clean, remove the stem root and score with an x one pound of ripe tomatoes.  Bring a large pot of water to the boil and prepare a large ice bath.  Boil tomatoes for 30 seconds before immediately plunging into ice bath for another minute.  Remove to a colander.  Peel skin, half widthwise, de-seed, and roughly chop into pieces approximately 3/8ths of an inch square.  This is specific stuff, and plainly free of any grinding or crushing. The novice will immediately discover that concassé's bluster is in the appearance of careful technique; the doing itself is easy.

    Apparent expediencies exist.  Canned tomatoes aren’t bad, but also effectively demonstrate the advantage of small batches of fresh concassé.  The benchmark for canned tomatoes is Italian. San Marzano, a type of plum tomato, has a high flesh-to-skin/seed ratio, the most consistent examples of which come from Apulia and Campania in the south.  I’ve also seen rare cultivars grown on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius selling for more than a tenner a can.  High or low, canned tomatoes are no more concassé than a bouillon cube is stock.  Canned tomatoes will be skinless, but not seedless. They are mostly cooked through as opposed to blanched.  They are also packed in a puree; the flesh is necessarily waterlogged, which is fine for the long-cooking scenarios of Italian sauces, but unsuitable for quicker application.  Concassé is the opposite in almost every respect: obsessively seedless and skinless, essentially raw, and comparatively drained of liquid—not dry, but concentrated.  The taste is rounder, fruitier and far more vibrant.  

The canned Italian stuff: not bad, just not concassé.

    Concassé is an ingredient rather than a one-dimensional preparation.  Anyone who has spent time perusing Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire will have noticed, often with a frown, that the terse descriptions feature ingredients like “1 deciliter of fish glaze” or “500 grams of forcemeat.”  Of course Escoffier might not have anticipated the amateur referencing his tome.  But the principle of well-understood components serving as ingredients is fundamental to more advanced cookery.  Put another way, if one wishes to improve as home cook, recipes are far less important than technique and ingredients.  Just like roux or a simple pan sauce, tomato concassé is endlessly versatile.  Concassé becomes a familiar and luscious spaghetti sauce when simmered with sautéd mirepoix.  It is essential in rich winter braises of oxtails or short ribs.  Seasoned with salt, concassé is also useful alone: as dollops on a plate of mashed potatoes and roasted chicken, on goat cheese canapés, or as a spread on a sandwich.  

    The lynchpin of all this famous ease, flavor and versatility is the tomato itself.  In case the smarty-pants bit of trivia has been forgotten, tomatoes are fruits.  This is significant; generally speaking, fruits are sweeter and less fibrous than vegetables, but tomatoes also have a pliable vegetable character alongside vibrant acidity.  These characteristics get amplified in concassé and the result is an ingredient that instantly adds desirable complexity to a dish.  Underrated indeed.

With the Grain

    What unearthed memory has led me to a modest collection of brushes?  What stale bristles did I encounter in youth that impressed upon me their worth?  I wish I had some Proustian moment to point to; the best I can muster is a foggy memory of my father whisking sand from my ankles with a dime store hand broom before leaving the beach.  And yet I can barely hold a good brush without studying its design, noting some feature likely invisible to most.  Brushes are tools, but reverential ones.  

    By collection, however, I do not mean a precious and well-lit display.  Each brush is used; when no longer able to perform its intended role, a demotion to some more menial brushing awaits, usually associated with shoes.  Shoes are a terrific excuse for brushes.  So are clothes, teeth, whiskers and felt hats.  A few brushes even deserve their own essays—coming soon, I think.

    Brushing itself is terribly nuanced though.  The brisk passes required to bring up a shine on a toe-cap have nothing in common with the circular nudging used to lather a two day beard.  And brushing a suit deserves five hundred words of its own.  Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to brushes: each possesses an invitation to uncover a latent technique.  Once learned, the skill remains well past the life of the brush itself.

Seeing the Light

    My favorite style dictums—rules, if such a thing as style could be governed—are those that seemingly, and sometimes blatantly, contradict with other principles of dress.  I’m not referring to matters of opinion; one peacock is always going to disagree with another over sleeve length.  And the current fixation with artful dishevelment—or sprezzatura—is self-defeating because, like irony, the instant the notion is acknowledged its foundation goes poof.  Instead I refer to the hiccup in logic—the disconnect that some fusty tradition creates.  Take the opera pump, the very pinnacle of men’s footwear formality.  We may all agree on the pump’s courtly lineage, and there’s no disputing the slender and elegant line wearing a pair creates.  But we can also agree that even the best pumps are merely loafers with stapled-on silk bows and glued soles—likely the least expensive pair of shoes in the well-dressed man’s wardrobe.  

    And if that keeps some men up at night, imagine what the light-colored tie does?  The one rather dependable rule for neckwear is this: a tie should be much darker than the shirt.  This perhaps was, or should have been, the very first thing taught to every tie-wearing man.  Happily, adhering to the rule is easy as most earnest attempts at pairing tie and shirt seem to naturally abide.  But exceptions—magnificent ones, I might add—exist.  

    The wedding tie is a specific thing, rather than a concept, as most current stylists would have it.  Consequently, an image search turns up very few true examples.  Instead what fills my monitor are anything but: madras, regimentals, knits.  Strictly speaking, a wedding tie is a densely woven silk in a black and white pattern that resolves to silver or gray from a few yards away.  The traditionally small patterns are shepherd’s check, houndstooth and glen plaid, all running on the bias.  I prefer less stringent examples where navy is substituted for black and the pattern is larger.  As a side effect though, a tie like this displays quite a bit of white silk, and the result is a rather light tie.  So what shirt?  Strangely, and for reasons that contradict the aforementioned logic of ties being darker than shirts, my preferred pairing for this type of festive tie is a blue broadcloth shirt—something that reads slightly darker than the tie.  The effect is irrefutably formal, elegant and, I suspect because of the abundance of white, happy.

    The other way of flouting convention is with a buff or palest-yellow tie.  These are largely connoisseur’s items; the majority of printed silk features motifs in lighter color combinations laid over darker grounds, likely for reasons of versatility and ease of pairing.  But the reverse—a lighter ground with a more saturated motif—can be very handsome.  Enter the dress stripe shirt—the fail-safe pairing for most foulards.  On the surface, the problem seems to be that a pale buff foulard will be too light for anything other than a white shirt, let alone a saturated striped shirt.  But the pairing works, somehow amplifying the dark stripes and setting the buff silk aglow.  

    These are happy discoveries, but come with a caution: the light tie can go quickly and dramatically wrong.  The wedding tie with lots of white in the pattern should really be reserved for festive occasions where at least some of the celebration is during the day.  And pale foulards are happy and casual, but almost never look right in the evening.  Perhaps that is the uniting principle: most occasions call for a tie that’s darker than the shirt, but a small collection of pale ties should occasionally see the light. 

The Wine, The Ritual and The Wardrobe

A decanter can be purpose-built, or, as is the case here, the destiny of a cut-glass and silver wedding present.  

“The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather, it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.”

- C.S. Lewis

    As wines age, insolubles agglomerate and precipitate in the form of dusty-looking sediment.  If the wine has been correctly stored, which is to say horizontally, this sediment will have collected in a crop-row along the length of the bottle.  And so the first step to decanting is to stand the bottle upright, gently so as not to cause too great a plume, and for several hours until the sediment has resettled in the ring at the bottom.  Uncorking the bottle without disturbing the sediment requires a steady hand, or—and it pains me to admit this—one of those high-tech lever-action screw-pulls.  The decanter itself need not be one—any wide-necked glass or crystal pitcher will do—but it must be absolutely clean.  The other, rather more exciting accessory is a light source illuminating the bottle’s neck so the pourer can see and prevent any sediment from escaping.  This can be done dramatically with a low candle, but the flashlight function on a smart phone is just as effective.  The decanted wine will not just be sediment-free, but opened up from its long stay in the bottle.  

    The other type of decanting isn’t just a less refined process; it demonstrates quite effectively what is meant by that particularly obtuse term, opened up.  Younger, less complex wines also benefit from leaving the bottle before drinking, but the reason isn’t sediment—it’s air.  In the virtually airless environment of the bottle, a young wine might take several years to find a pleasant balance of tannin, varietal flavor, alcohol and acid.  The introduction of air—oxidation—speeds things up considerably, toning down astringency and amplifying the rounder, fruit flavors lurking just below the surface.  I also find the strong ethanol nose some warm-weather wines can have disappears altogether after decanting.  The method is blessedly simple: unceremoniously uncork a bottle and pour it vigorously into a clean carafe.  Let sit for some unspecified amount of time and drink.

A good hook is indispensable when setting out clothes.  

    I might be unique in drawing the comparison, but I’m always reminded of decanting wine while laying out my clothes.  I rarely remove something directly from a closet or armoire and pull it over my head.  Folded sweaters or polo shirts usually need some mild reshaping; trousers always benefit from a quick shake and smoothing; shirts I snap into life with a flourish.  The practice also affords the opportunity to inspect for marks, missing buttons or creases—those minor emergencies, correctible as they are, still better discovered at home.  But the main purpose is to knock some of the drawer and closet shape out of the garment before wearing—to allow the garment to breathe.  

    Like old wines, more formal clothes require significantly greater attention.  If a suit is needed, I remove it to a hook for inspection.  Despite precautions, lint and dust settle on shoulders and lapels—something remedied by a few gentle sweeps of a quality lint brush.  If a shake doesn’t release the errant wrinkle, out comes the iron and board.  Shirt, tie, handkerchief, socks and shoes are chosen, each carefully inspected and no less subject to brush or iron.  I arrange the various components; an hour later the results have either found a natural harmony or require some minor adjustment.  Either way, it’s the time spent out of ordinary enclosure that reveals.

    The truly devoted rotate their wardrobes and regularly inspect their wine collection; they shine shoes religiously and faithfully note cellar temperature.  These activities are executed in the name of practicality, and the tangible benefits—fresh suits and wine—suggests that practicality alone is motivation enough.  But it would be foolish to deny the ceremony; hobbyists are always aware of ritual.  As C.S. Lewis infers, forgetting oneself is the point.

The Skinny

Paillards, post grill.  Notice they aren't so thin as to shred.  One quarter to one half inch is best.  

    The worst part of making this dish is having to stand in front of a glass case brimming with well-larded red meat and request, out loud, that most anonymous and constant lobe: boneless, skinless chicken breasts please.  I’m always tempted to substitute adjectives; tasteless and soulless seem more accurate anyway.  I can almost hear the butcher’s inner dialogue as he wonders, once more, why his customers pass on the richest fruits of his labor in favor of the dullest.  Allow me to offer a reprieve to both parties.  Ask instead for several chicken cutlets, pounded to a 1/2 inch thickness and separated by wax paper.  There are enough specifics there to suggest a more interesting preparation than mere health food.  Those morsels are the start of that most ignored classic, chicken paillard.

    I say ignored because, of the dishes that begin with pounding flat a piece of meat, the paillard is usually unfamiliar to guests at my table.  What drove the world’s schnitzels and Milaneses, the saltimboccas and tonkatsus to popularity over the humble paillard is a mystery to me.  I’ve nothing against the breading and subsequent frying that most flattened meat undergoes, although if blindfolded, I wonder how many diners would be able to say which similar cutlet was pork, chicken or veal.  Perhaps that’s why I love paillard; it is singular in resisting the fryer.

    But back to the pounding.  Why lay into a cutlet with a mallet anyway?  Is it the crudest, fastest way of tenderizing less prime cuts?  Is it a way of thinning meat for quick, a la minute cookery?  Can a flattened cutlet be stuffed or rolled around some filling?  Does a flattened piece of meat look bigger and fill a dinner plate?  Yes to all of the above, with the common principle being manipulation.  I could tell half a dozen stories of using frying pans, Champagne bottles, rolling pins and pestles to flatten meat, a few of which ended humorously, but the more interesting anecdote is this: I have it on first-hand authority that butchers are secretly thrilled to flatten whatever you request.  No doubt something to do with getting back to the fundamentals of the profession—or perhaps it’s a release for the accumulated anger behind the popularity of boneless, skinless chicken breasts.  In any event—leave the pounding to the professionals.  

Paillards dressed with fried potatoes, arugula and marinated tomatoes.  Chilled Beaujolais, anyone?  

    A considerably gentler touch is required for cooking.  Begin with the marinade.  I find an oily mixture of herbs, crushed garlic, salt, pepper and white wine is the best, as long as at least half of the result is olive oil.  Let the pounded chicken sit refrigerated in this mixture for an hour or so, but bring it back to room temperature before cooking.  Prepare a very hot grill.  Place each paillard at a 45 degree angle.  Close the lid for two minutes.  Rotate each paillard 45 degrees and close the lid for another two minutes.  Flip and close for another two minutes.  There is no need to rotate again; the first side is for presentation.

    Witnessing this dish from start to finish, one might be struck by the brutish, almost unrefined method.  The results are anything but though.  This is elegant, light fare—the sort of thing well-turned-out guests at good hotels order for lunch, or, as it might be put, luncheon.  Oh, and in case your grade school French is rusty: chicken pī-ˈyär.  There's no place for embarrassment at luncheon.

The Ape Apes

    I’m reluctant to say anything regarding vintage clothes, let alone reveal an opinion on the stuff.  As divisive topics go, positions within the genre are seemingly chiseled in granite, and experts are as plentiful as the orphaned suit coats that populate most of the vintage shops I’ve visited.   I’m not even certain what constitutes vintage, a designation that, when said aloud, sounds awfully near a more familiar, less obtuse term: old.  And yet I have unwittingly contributed to the concept, having given away (and in a few instances, sold) good quality clothing and shoes for which I no longer had a need—items that in forty years or so might haunt the racks of scattered second-hand shops.  Actually, I’m in deeper than that: I own a few vintage pieces myself.  What’s more, I cherish them.  

    My father is the primary source, and it never fails to tickle him seeing these garments reanimated.  I suppose the first layer of entertainment comes from seeing something familiar worn in an unfamiliar way.  In my twenties I used to wear a stodgy old houndstooth odd jacket of his with battered denim and driving loafers—a fate no one could have predicted when he bought it from Harrods in the sixties.  But I think a deeper current of pleasure exists for the original wearer: the bittersweet realization that garments that might not seem particularly old have gained an ironic appeal for the current wearer.

    The question of irony is a constant in the matter of vintage clothing.  I must admit a particular distaste for calculated irony in clothing, a category that for me spans from clever slogans on t-shirts straight through to bespoke button boots.  I prefer ernest attempts at personal style.  The problem, of course, is any line between the genuine and the affected is invisible, or purposely obscured, or verboten from being identified.  Put another way, irony vanishes the instant it is acknowledged.  I have a vintage Pringle sweater of my father’s with a single, exploded argyle rendered in pastels.  In university, to emphasize its unlikely presence, I wore it beneath a black motocross jacket.  The effect was singular, striking—but unrepeatable in its contrivance.  Fifteen years on, I feel comfortable wearing it again—this time over mid-gray flannels, and not even on Easter.

    And what would wearable postmodernism look like?  A high-concept couture gown that rejects its own label and categorization as a dress?  Androgynous Lycra separates which simultaneously display and conceal?  My vintage entry into postmodernism is the result of a more literal self-reference: the dustiest of ancient madder prints—buff and red paisleys on a gold and navy ground—but rendered in cheap cotton twill and cut and sewn into a humble button-collar work shirt.  The ideas at play have been deeply mined from the masculine cannon, but the result is surprisingly soft, feminine even.  I wear it for lounging at home, and more than once has its reflected image startled.

    My own contribution to the constant gyre of vintage clothing will materialize in waves.  It’s too difficult to discern a pattern in gestational period—how long some garment must hang in stasis before regaining its appeal for someone new.  Will it be only a few years before my graphic-print t-shirts— embarrassingly tight, occasionally threadbare—lure my daughters with the same irreverent slogans and self-conscious images that once seemed important to me?  Or will it take forty years before a curious nephew unearths my favorite trilby?  Are my tailored garments really just costumes for some unknown grandchild?  Among these unanswerables is a certainty: old clothes have value.