Other Alcoholic Beverages

Beers and ales lack the subtleties and gastronomic importance of wines. Some fanciers talk interminably on the varieties of beers and ales, but these beverages have only limited virtue in connection with good food. Beer has a special affinity for raw oysters, but otherwise it goes best with plain hearty, fatty foods that have little place in a cuisine designed to let you eat well and stay well. But you may disagree and we have no objection to beer in your diet, provided you count your calories.

Among distilled liquors, rum and brandy provide useful flavours for a few desserts. Some low fat cakes can be made interesting, with improvement in both flavour and texture, by adding rum or brandy after they are baked, but these are not flavours to repeat very often. Do not stint on the price of rum or brandy for such use; you need little and the difference in the flavour result is great.

Liqueurs are of small concern to us here, except to remark that most of them are much less alcoholic than whisky or brandy, they are full of sugar (and calories), and we think their best use is in fruit compotes and ices where Chartreuse, Kirschwasser, Cointreau, Cherry Heering (and the like), Anisette, and Orange Curacao may be used to great advantage (see Recipes).

Wine In Cooking

Wine is used in cooking for the indefinable flavour and zest it imparts and not for its alcohol content. With few exceptions, all alcohol used in cooking is lost before the food is eaten. Some of the alcohol in cold brandy sauces may remain, and the alcohol in liqueurs used with fruit compote is not lost, but the amounts per serving may be ignored in counting calories.

The end flavour of cooked wine bears little resemblance to the original wine, but good sauces cannot be made from spoiled or basically bad wines. If the wine is on the turn, do not try to cook with it; let it go on to make vinegar for use in salads later. It is foolish to buy vintage wines for cooking. Only a fair grade of ordinary sound wine is needed; robust young, even rough, wines are usually best.

The rules for the kinds of wine to be used in cooking different kinds of foods are even less fixed than the choice of wines to drink with foods. Forget the idea that cheap Sherry will do for all wine cookery. Sherry can be used for some dishes, and a few drops in soup is a good trick. White wines are used for most fish cookery, and red wines cook better with red meats and game. But delightful fish sauces can be made with red wine. Chicken dishes can be prepared with either reds or whites.

Champagne, too, can be used in cooking, and we have recipes for such strange uses as making onion soup and a sauerkraut dish. Personally, these extravagances offend our Puritan instincts; we like to use Champagne where some of its character persists. Try Champagne poured over fresh sugared peaches in sherbet dishes (Peches aux Champagne). Strawberries, too, take kindly to a Champagne bath.

Only a small amount of wine is called for in most recipes, so take the cupful or so needed from the bottle of wine destined for the table for the same meal. Opened table wines keep only a few days, even when the half-empty bottle is corked and kept cool. To keep that half bottle perfectly, use it to fill a smaller bottle. Or pour a spoonful of bland oil over the top to help seal out the air. In some Italian households open wine is stored in a wide mouthed jar under an eighth-inch layer of oil. If you are deft, you can skim off the oil so completely that the wine can even be used for drinking with little or no damage to the flavour.

Fortified wines (Sherry, Port, Madeira, Marsala) keep well after the bottle has been opened. Replace the cork and store in the cool. These wines, incidentally, go a long way in cooking. They are heavy in flavour, so do not take the same quantities when using them in place of the usual table wines. Remember, too, that when you cook down these wines the sugar remains; allow for the sweetness that will result.

Personal preferences in sauce flavours differ, especially in the far-from-standard flavours imparted by wine cookery. The only way to learn what you like and how to attain the effect that pleases you best is to experiment. You will seldom make an impossible mess in wine cookery and you are sure to make some enchanting discoveries. Try a few of the recipes we suggest so as to get the general idea, and then start off on your own for real fun.

Calories In Alcoholic Beverages

The old practice in books about the diet was to dismiss alcohol with a few remarks about its evils and then to proceed with instructions for counting calories as though only drunkards - who are hopeless anyway - ever take more than the occasional small drink. The fact is that in the moderately well-to-do sector of society today a substantial proportion of people get from 5 to 20 per cent, or more, of their total calories from alcohol. In parts of France and Chile the average is over 10 per cent of all calories from alcohol. Among 300 prominent business- and professional-men we have been studying for 10 years, the "champion" gets an average of over 30 per cent of his calories from alcohol - and successfully holds down a responsible job.

One gramme of alcohol yields 7.1 calories in the body. Persons unaccustomed to drinking can burn alcohol at only a limited rate, perhaps 30 calories per hour. But the conclusion that alcohol cannot be an important source of calories is in error because the person who is accustomed to drinking easily metabolizes more than twice this "limit" and, besides, the metabolism of alcohol goes on for a long time - up to 48 hours or more - after it is drunk. Only a small fraction is lost in the urine and in the expired breath unless you are positively "saturated". The rest of it stays in the body until it is used up and the total calories in food and drink during the week must balance the energy you expend in that week or you will get fat.

You can estimate the calories you get from alcoholic beverages from Table 16 at the end of this book. Suppose you had a whisky and soda poured out in a large glass, you probably drank 2 ozs.

(by volume) of whisky, 134.4 calories (there are no calories in the soda). Then at dinner you drank a fourth of a bottle (6 ozs.) of Claret (13 per cent alcohol) and before going to bed you had half a pint of beer. This adds up to a total of 430.9 calories. If you drank your whisky with six ounces of ginger ale, another 63 calories should be added for a grand total of 493.9 calories. If obesity is a problem, alcoholic beverages can be a major source of trouble.

In regard to the above calculations, the calorie values for alcoholic beverages are wrong in most books on the diet and reducing. Apparently, long ago someone mistakenly assumed that the volume percentage values on liquor containers could be used as though they were weight percentages, forgetting that alcohol has a density of only 0.789 (at 68° F.). As a result, the calorie values commonly attributed to beer, whisky, etc., are much too high.