I am going to explain something to you about vodka, which is having a really terrible moment right now. Bartenders are saying it doesn’t taste of anything (which is patently false, as it clearly tastes of a combination of fire, sugar, and nail polish remover), and–according to the New York Post, anyway–substituting gin.

The thing is, vodka isn’t supposed to taste of anything. (Even though we have already established that it does. Perhaps the bigger sin, in a bartender’s reckoning, is that, regardless of what Grey Goose and Chopin want you to believe, there is little in the taste to differentiate individual vodkas from each other.)

Or, rather, the taste–on its own–is not the point.

The reason we have trouble with this relatively neutral liquor is that ours is one of the few cultures in the world (Britain is another) to have completely divorced the act of drinking from the act of eating. This is not to say that Americans never eat and drink at the same time, but there is no cultural imperative that we must. And so we have never embraced vodka in its true spirit: a complement to food.

Look around. Spain has tapas for its sherry, China has xiao tsai to go with its rose-scented sorghum liquor. In Korea, there is no soju without anju. And France, birthplace of such food-centered drink concepts as apéritifs and digestifs, imported the concept of wine bars from us. Likewise, in Russia, vodka and zakuski go hand in hand. To drink vodka without even coarse, symbolic zakuski (a heel of bread, some cucumber trimmings), is, in the Russian understanding, to have reached a special, acute form of alcoholism from which there is no returning.

Meanwhile, America has some sports bars, and sports bars have Buffalo wings, but mostly it just has bars.

A meal I enjoyed in Moscow last summer. We alternated sips of vodka with sips of mors, a rustic berry punch, and an array of pickles, crudités, and Uzbek dishes.

They say that taking food while drinking keeps you steadier longer, and even wards off hangovers. That may be true, but I don’t think the origins of the practice are so pragmatic. I quote Octavio Paz, Mexico’s great poet:

The variety of the meal’s delicacies should be matched by an equal variety among the guests. Wines, liqueurs, and alcoholic beverages are the complement of food; their function is to stimulate the relationships that develop around a table.

He goes on:

Unlike wine, pulque, champagne, beer, and even vodka, neither whiskey nor gin is a good companion for a meal. They are neither aperitifs nor digestives. They are beverages that accentuate withdrawal and unsociability.

Paz is a bit hard on the Americans, maybe. These lines are part of a larger essay titled “Eroticism and Gastrosophy” in which he systematically tears the country (though he really focuses on the Puritan Yankee tradition) a new one. But I agree with him on those points. There really is something solitary and grim about whiskey, and the way we in America drink it, that even beautifully crafted cocktails cannot redress. Think of how rare it is to really drink as a family in the U.S.; here, drinking is something you do with friends or even with strangers, but there is very little sitting around a table with colorful, delicious food and getting joyfully smashed with your kin. There is plenty of getting quietly and inappropriately drunk at family gatherings because of suppressed animosity, but I don’t think that’s quite the same thing. The way I see it, tapas and anju and zakuski are physical manifestations of conviviality and rejoicing, sentiments that are not always present in American drinking sessions. (We’re the guys who came up with Prohibition, remember? Culturally, we have some issues with alcohol.)

So yes, if you wrest vodka from its culinary context, where its cool fire slices clean through the fat of cured fish and its almost floral sweetness makes a cucumber pickle picklier, somehow, it hasn’t much to recommend it as the foundation for a cocktail. (Although, should you just want to get drunk on something unassertive that blends harmoniously with tonic water, that is your right, and mixologists need to get over themselves. Anyway, alarmist trend pieces aside, I think most bartenders are over themselves.) But remember that vodka, as it was intended to be consumed, offers as balanced a taste experience as a fine cocktail–only the mixers are spread out on the table, and they’re called zakuski.

“The breadseller from rue Lepic,” Zinaida Serebryakova, 1927.

(Details unknown.)

This is a book I chanced upon in the library’s G stacks today. G, in the Library of Congress classification system, is for Geography, Anthropology and Recreation. This book has a bit of all of those things.

And yes, that is a real, metal fork hammered into the cover. You see, now, why I had to check it out of the library, even though it was too big for my handbag and I had to carry it around Manhattan for three hours.

Eda (“Food”) is a book of illustrated memories, by Andrei Bilzho, of all the best dishes of his Soviet boyhood. Bilzho is a well-known cartoonist who lives in Moscow and has a pair of Soviet-nostalgia restaurants called “Petrovich” (named after his most famous character) in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Soviet nostalgia: what’s that all about? As Bilzho has noted, three of his four grandparents were either executed or packed off to the gulag during Stalin’s time, so he’s not at all nostalgic for the Soviet system of government. Rather, his is an artist’s nostalgia for the artifacts of everyday Soviet life.

(I totally get it. It’s like how I get really teary-eyed about any number of silly Hong Kong objects, when in fact my childhood was mostly miserable.)

Shproty/“Sprats”

Each illustration is of a single dish, drawn on a cheap paper plate and accompanied by a short, chatty essay. There are 40 of them, followed by a reproduction of a typical Soviet restaurant menu circa 1977–a time when you could dine for under a ruble.

I love this book.

Russia’s cuisine is so compact and homogenized that–despite having spent maybe seven months in that country, tops–I feel that I know every dish in this collection intimately. (Contrast this with the cuisine of a country like China, where I have spent so much of my life and yet have only begun to scratch the culinary surface.) In my own way, I’m as nostalgic for them as the author is. Our associations are different, of course.

Here is what he has to say about kotlety po-kievskii, chicken à la Kiev:

I drew the chicken à la Kiev wrong. They shouldn’t have sticks poking out of them, of course, but chicken bones–only I always imagined them on sticks, like ice cream bars. These chicken cutlets are pretty tricky; I put them on the menu at Petrovich as “The Tragedy of Optimism,” because if you stick your knife in one straight away, hot butter squirts out all over your shirt and tie or your blouse. With this tricky little chicken cutlet, first you have to strategically puncture it and let the butter leak out, and only then can you proceed. Why they’re called “à la Kiev,” I don’t know, but they go by this name in a number of countries. I’ve heard that in the US, which I’ve never been to myself, they eat them on the go. Like ice cream bars, as a matter of fact.

I wonder how that rumor got started. Did a Russian tourist come upon a particularly greasy corndog?

My own chicken à la Kiev memory would be quite different–a composite of the big old chicken football (the coinage is my husband’s) I ate nearly a decade ago at The Shamrock, an Irish bar in St. Petersburg that was always crawling with ballet dancers from the Kirov across the street, and an even bigger, older chicken football that I once ordered on a date in Hong Kong because I was very young, had butterflies, and had no idea what I really wanted. The tragedy of optimism struck both times.

(All photos cribbed from a Russian online bookseller that has quite magnanimously scanned most of the pages.)

Originally published in 2004, the Onion article announces the discovery of a children’s menu on the back of the original copy of the U.S. Constitution. A menu that the authors of “Compatibility of Menus to Children’s Needs in Selected Hotels in Nairobi, Kenya,” which appeared in the journal Food Science and Quality Management, carefully considered before interpreting to mean that “the original framers…probably intended that serving food to children be a way to distract them while the elders created a system of representative national government.”

I am going to take my chance discovery as a sign from the universe that I am done with my research for the day and can in good grace take leave of the library. I leave you with the Onion illustration, which the paper includes as an appendix, and the scholars’ annotations:

(From the impassioned introduction to 1916′s Allied Cookery: British, French, Italian, Belgian, Russian, whose proceeds were to be donated to victims of the Great War. It is available in its entirety on Google Play.)

I followed a recipe yesterday that took me way out of my comfort zone. I took a four-pound bottom round rump roast, put it in a stew pot with three finely sliced onions (the recipe called for six, which I didn’t have on hand, so I made up the difference in liquid with some water and white wine), a spoonful of white vinegar, and a bay leaf, and then I boiled it for four hours. That’s it. No searing, nothing.

A lot of water comes out of those onions, and a fair amount comes out of the meat, too. At the end of it all, you’re left with a very tender piece of meat sitting in several inches of what is basically French onion soup. You can thicken it up with some flour or corn starch and reduce it to a gravy. It’s great.

In an odd way, I think I followed this recipe because I didn’t believe it would work. That’s a big risk to take with a 27-dollar piece of meat, but I can be perverse that way. The method went against everything I thought I knew about meat (the importance of browning, the deglazing of sucs), and I just needed to know. And now I do.

The existing scholarship looks at the issue from all sorts of angles–except, it seems to me, the most obvious one. I’m not ruling out other influences, and I think it gets a lot more complicated the older a person becomes, but is it possible that what is characterized as “food neophobia” among small children might just be an appropriate response to bad food?

None of the research I’ve seen is interested in challenging the accepted but deeply flawed notion that there is such a thing, gastronomically, as “broccoli” (or any other ingredient). As a physical article, yes, broccoli exists. Culturally, though, broccoli is a spectrum. There’s raw broccoli, steamed broccoli, unseasoned broccoli, overcooked broccoli, sautéed broccoli with garlic and lemon, broccoli and cheese soup…you get the idea. All of these things offer entirely different flavors, textures and overall experiences. So when a social scientist says to me, “This child does not like broccoli,” I don’t know what that means. Does it mean that the child has been presented with the full spectrum of broccoli possibilities and rejected them all, or that he hates the way his mom makes it? Those are very different responses.

It’s funny that researchers will control for almost anything in a family, from socioeconomic status to the mother’s own eating habits, but no-one will take into account whether the food served in that household actually tastes good.

What if it just doesn’t? I’m serious.

Nearly a year later, I’m still thinking about that article. Because I remember that I, too, used to just find things on the internet, I really did. I used to keep these big long lists of weird and wonderful links, and I miss that.

I don’t remember when it happened, but one day I stopped finding things on my own and started being shown them on Facebook and Twitter. Often, those things were cats.

Morozov blames the social networks for the death of cyberflânerie, and I agree that they’ve played a big part in it. But lately I’ve been looking at it from another angle. Sociologists like to think about how the physical features of a city shape the experiences and behaviors of its inhabitants; what if the “architecture” of the web, the way information is organized and presented, helps determine how we engage with its contents? I’m thinking, in particular, of the architecture of the blog.

Before blogs, there were “personal homepages.” Yeah, we look back at them and laugh. There really is plenty to laugh about: flashing GIFs, elaborate “Under Construction” signs, psychedelic tiled backgrounds posing varying levels of challenge to anyone seeking to actually read the superimposed text. Ah, Geocities. But forget all that, and think back to how these pages were organized.

In their most basic form, there’d be a main page that acted as a table of contents.  If the “webmaster” wanted to get fancy, that table might live in a frame on the side of the screen, which would let you go deep into the site without getting lost. There were limitations to this format, to be sure. Drawing attention to new content meant moving things around, highlighting things with GIFs that blinked “NEW!” But the advantage to this structure was that everything on offer was laid bare for the first-time visitor. There was so much to click on, so much to discover.

Then came the blog.

We were all so excited about the blog! It was fast and easy and you barely had to know HTML to use it. It looked so polished with its tidy columns, and you couldn’t miss the fresh content because it would be right up top. I got on Movable Type right away, and immediately began compiling my blogroll. I was 19 years old.

Like most early bloggers, I didn’t question the conventions of the form. Of course you needed a blogroll. Of course posts should be presented in reverse-chronological order. Of course content was archived by month.

After more than ten years of blogging, I’ve come to see that these conventions don’t make any sense for me, or for the majority of blogs. Most personal blogs–and this is particularly true of food blogs–aren’t dealing in time-sensitive or timely material, so there’s no good reason to privilege over all else the date on which a post was written. Certainly, a regular visitor to the site might appreciate being able to see what’s been added since his last visit, but most visitors aren’t regular visitors. The blog format ensures that the first-time visitor sees not your best work, or even all your work, but only your most recent work.

I don’t have a fleshed-out solution to this problem. But I am proposing that we stop treating our blogs as stacks of paper and start thinking of them as bookshelves. Every time I add a post to this blog, the stack gets higher, and the barrier to unearthing older content rises with it. In contrast, a bookshelf makes sure that all titles are visible and equally likely to be thumbed through. As in a bookstore, there ought to be ways of indicating new arrivals and staff picks, but we don’t bundle the classics into a closet just because we got a new shipment that day.

I want to see the navigation really serve the content. I look forward to discovering again.

The word “cheese” appears 27 times in Johanna Spyri’s famous novella for children, Heidi. (Well, in its English translation, at any rate.) I recently revisited the text after a great many years, and was surprised to find that I remembered my favorite cheese passages almost word for word.

Here are the best ones:

“and meanwhile the old man held a large piece of cheese on a long iron fork over the fire, turning it round and round till it was toasted a nice golden yellow color on each side. Heidi watched all that was going on with eager curiosity.”

“the child…was now hungrily beginning her bread having first spread it with the cheese, which after being toasted was soft as butter; the two together tasted deliciously, and the child looked the picture of content as she sat eating, and at intervals taking further draughts of milk.”

“The grandfather meanwhile had been preparing the meal, and now appeared with a steaming jug of milk and golden-brown toasted cheese. Then he cut some thin slices from the meat he had cured himself in the pure air, and the doctor enjoyed his dinner better than he had for a whole year past.”

Bla bla bla picky eating is a cultural construct bla bla bla self-fulfilling discourse bla bla bla.