THE COOKBOOK TEST #0092: NOW, *THAT'S* LUXURIOUS

INSTALLMENT #0092 (FREE)

Dear Readers,

I'm on the road this week, so in lieu of my usual exhaustively reported, test-kitchen supported, impeccably sorted cookbook review and recipe presentation, I'm offering something a little different.

I have always been obsessed with value. It's a fascinating question: What makes something worth a particular price? How is it that we can get some forgettable semi-garbage for free under the right circumstances and it's manna from heaven, but if we pay too dearly for a little slice of perfection, it can feel like getting mugged?

I'm not a luxury maven. Granted that I've been to a few Michelin-starred places in New York (and elsewhere), and they're generally real good, but they’re also something I'm not always eager to repeat. The food and service are necessarily polished to a mirror-like sheen and the target audience is the 1% or, in certain cases, the .1%. I am not the 1%, so some of the formalities and preparations go over my head. I am more like the 30%, or possibly the 40%. College-educated, sure. Elite? Only if we're assessing net worth by wordcount. Nobody appears to do that, which is a real shame.

I like to get out to one or two deranged fancy meals every year just to stay in touch with what's possible when you bring incredible amounts of money and intellectual focus to bear on a specific bite of food, but it's not how I would generally choose to eat, even given the millions of dollars in income it takes to make that generally practicable.

Once I'm done beer-boiling bratwurst, grilling jerk chicken, noshing on bagels, chasing after perfect tacos and platters of Ethiopian food and cruising the avenues for Vietnamese food, I don't have all that many free evenings for nine-course meals with sommelier-led wine pairings.

But the nature of my work and the general tilt of my personality means that I do think about luxury and value a lot, so I thought it might be interesting to unpack my thoughts about some of the most prized and sought-after bits of fancy food that I've eaten over the years.

CAVIAR

My grandfather's 90th birthday featured a caviar and blini service, a little something that fit my maternal family background (Ukrainian) and the importance of the occasion. I'd never really interacted with caviar before, but I have to say that I found it absolutely terrific - served on little pancakes with sour cream and chased with vodka, the briny pop of the tiny eggs was just terrific.

Now every year, a couple weeks ahead of New Year's Eve, I hit a Russian market here in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs and pick up a tiny tin of caviar for about $50. It seems like a lot of money, but 4-6 people can have a delicious heavy appetizer or light meal out of that little container with enough onions, sour cream, and freshly made blini.

Value Verdict: Hell yes. Honestly a great value if you - like me - can make good blini from scratch and set up a caviar service at home.

FOIE GRAS

Becca Dilley Photography

The first thing that many people think about when they hear "foie gras" is "animal cruelty," but birds living on a typical foie gras farm typically have far better lives than their poor compatriots eking out a brief existence within America's hellish factory farming system. You might insist that both factory farmed chicken and foie gras are unacceptably inhumane, and that's absolutely fine and morally consistent, but there's no world in which you should be both protesting foie gras and eating at KFC.

At any rate: I'll eat foie gras, and I've had it enough to form some opinions on the dish.

When it works: As a skillfully blended pate, or a minor accent on a dish.

Another time it works: When you order an entire prepared foie gras (something I've been lucky enough to do only once) at a place that really knows its business. In my case: The sadly defunct Brasserie Zentral, a downtown Minneapolis restaurant that specialized in the food of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

When it doesn't work: When it's jammed onto a dish to drive the price up in defiance of good taste (like the foie gras lobster roll I ordered, like a chump, when I was in Montreal.)

Another time it doesn't work: As a $65 "add-on" during a coursed menu - inevitably it feels shoehorned in and exploitatively expensive.

Value Verdict: Highly dependent on skill level and actual price, but in general: Thumbs up.

CHAMPAGNE/FINE SPARKLING WHATEVER

I'm no sparkling wine expert and I haven't explored the world of incredibly pricey wines nearly enough to know my way around. But I'll say this: I don't dig a really good bottle of champagne ($100-200 at a liquor store, say) nearly as much as I dig a really well made craft cocktail ($20). You might personally love to pair it and have dug deep into the category to find the bottles that speak to you, and I respect that, but I don't have a handle on the category enough to endorse.

I will say that I freakin' love drinking sparkling wine while sitting in a hot tub. I know. It's STUPID. I love it! I have a champagne bucket and everything!

Value Verdict: A personal "skip," with the important qualifier that I get how it can work for certain situations and/or people.

OYSTERS

Becca Dilley Photography

When I first got into oysters (the early oughts, I guess, sigh), it wasn't too hard to get them on the half-shell for a buck a pop, or even less during happy hour. Those halcyon days are gone forever, but I will still happily pay the price for good oysters at a reputable restaurant - nothing tastes quite so much like the essence of the ocean, and few things feel as luxurious and delicate. Plus! Once you start parsing where oysters come from and keying in on the little differences in texture and flavor, trying new varieties and making comparisons is a blast. Love oysters. Oysters are the best. They may be pricey, but done correctly they are a tremendous value.

Value Verdict: Now and forever.

TRUFFLES

Here's where my mouth-breathing middle class origins really bring me down. Pretty much any time I've had a dish featuring truffles, they've been applied with such aggression that they overtake and more or less spoil whatever they've been applied to. (A lot of this is the difference between the acrid attack of truffle oil and a freshly pigged mushroom shaved delicately onto your pasta). Maybe you've been to Piedmont and had a truffle that changed your life? I get that and accept it, and eagerly look forward to having a similar experience. But as of now: when I see truffles on a menu I steer away.

Value Verdict: Hard pass.

MORELS

When we were researching Lake Superior Flavors, Becca and I stopped at a bakery in the woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The proprietors wound up telling us a story of a massive fire that almost wiped out their business a few years earlier. The next year, however, come spring, they were able to extract so many morel mushrooms that they bought a new truck. Morels are elusive, weird-looking, and - base on my incredibly limited experience with them - really just the tops in terms of mushroom-derived deliciousness. I was at a chef-catered meal at a private residence and morels were in season, and I will say that if I ever ended up at that restaurant (Alma) and saw a morel dish on the menu, I would pay whatever it took to taste that flavor again.

Value Verdict: Yes, when in context and prepared correctly.

JAMON SERRANO

Every so often, Becca and I like to get an entire leg of jamon serrano and carve away at it over the course of December and January. It's chewy, salty, incredibly bold in flavor, and even at a few hundred bucks per leg, a pretty damned good deal for a really large pile of the best ham in the world. Plus, it's festive and looks amazing in the jamon serrano holder thing.

Value Verdict: One of the finest values in the food universe, right up there with quality aged Scotch.

JAMON IBERICO DE BELLOTA

Look: Is jamon Iberico de Bellota better than jamon serrano? It really is. More delicate, more subtle, really fantastic on its own - no bocadillo style baguette-plus-butter preparation needed. Is it like $1,200-a-leg good? It truly isn't, unless you're one of those money-is-no-object people, in which case this column isn't really written for you anyway, go away and enjoy diving into your Scrooge McDuck-like vault of money while the rest of us sadly carve away at our ordinary legs of jamon serrano.

Value Verdict: Stick with the "pedestrian" ham, it's only slightly less amazing and is a lot, lot less expensive.

10-YEAR CHEDDAR

Becca Dilley / The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin

This subtle, mellow, crunchy-thanks-to-calcium-crystals cheese from heaven pairs absolutely beautifully with any quality bourbon. A true treat for the thinking adult, and even at $45 a pound, not a bad price for real luxury. I like the stuff from Hook's, in Mineral Point, Wisc.

Value Verdict: Absolutely. Any day of the week.

20-YEAR CHEDDAR

Only arguably better than it's 10-year cousin (I guess it's even a little more mellow?), and more than four times as expensive.

Value Verdict: Skip!

18-YEAR HIGHLAND PARK SINGLE MALT SCOTCH

As far as alcohol goes, nothing for me can top a glass of 18-year-old Highland Park. It's bold and fierce but also balanced and tempered, full of depth and complexity and both sophisticated and ass-kicking. There are a handful of wines and cocktails and other spirits I've enjoyed as much, but not as reliably, and not in the same way. And for $120 a bottle, it's a ridiculous value - you can get many, many drinks out of that bottle, and they bring MUCH pleasure.

Value Verdict: This is the best value of any food or drink on Earth.

50-YEAR HIGHLAND PARK SINGLE MALT SCOTCH

I gotta say: for something that now prices out at about $25,000 a bottle, this isn't real great. Honestly, it's much like the 18-year expression but considerably more muted - the same drink, in many ways, with the volume turned down.

Value Verdict: Utter and complete rubbish, unless you're trying to impress people at a fancy dinner, in which case it'll be good for that.

Cheers,

James