How to Wine Friends and Affluent People, Rabelais Bookstore, Portland
Posted 04/27/2008 at 09:36 PM by Cathy
Anyone with any interest in food and wine who finds herself in Portland, Maine should – must – visit Rabelais bookstore on Middle Street. There are obvious reasons for this: the store is dedicated to books on wine and food, they carry the latest titles as well as out-of-print and rare books, and they'll give you all sorts of tidbits, both gustatory (in the form of bite-sized cookies on the counter) and commercial.
Like this one:
Ten books on cocktails can be sold for every one book on wine. That's because wine books become outdated fairly quickly: a book published just five years ago contains information that may well be incorrect today. But pick up a book on cocktails published in, say, 1952 and you'll find the recipes for most drinks can still be recreated with their taste and essence intact.
Who knew?
Then there are the not-so-obvious reasons to visit Rabelais, namely the forgotten, fun titles that stand side-by-side on the shelves with today's bestsellers. I pulled a book – how could I not? – called How to Wine Friends and Affluent People by Robert H. Loeb, Jr., who was once the food and drink editor at Esquire magazine. This cookbook, published in 1965, was the sequel to his Wolf in Chef's Clothing which, in Loeb's words, "presented simple, basic recipes in step-by-step, blue-print form" for men who wanted to forage for themselves in the kitchen. (He meant blue-print form literally; both books are illustrated extensively with line drawings of each step of each recipe.) Wolf in Chef's Clothing, Loeb wrote, "gave wives an occasional respite from the kitchen, girl friends a home-cooked meal, and unfulfilled males a new sense of accomplishment."
The guy had a sense of humor.
He also had a thing for wine, the method of which he called Vinosophy, and at the end of the book he presented a list of 57 (mostly French) wines meant to be coordinated with the recommendations he offered at the end of each menu. He meant it as a kind of do-it-yourself sommelier course: "By often referring to this chart," he wrote, "you will get to know wines of various countries. And, before you know it, you will have become an authority. This is very important, too, in this day and age – to be an authority. It goes far in influencing people, even affluent ones."
Affluent people in 1965, apparently, were influenced for the most part by French wines, especially from Burgundy and Bordeaux, and the occasional "soft German," "dry Swiss," or Californian Pinot Noir or Cabernet Sauvignon.
The book is a lovely, and very entertaining, snapshot of wine and food in the U.S. circa 1965, just like the Rabelais bookstore circa 2008 is a lovely, entertaining way to spend part of some lazy afternoon.
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