A Rare Vintage and Friendship
Cooking with my mother Alice in the late 1950s.
As September begins and Covid is again on the rise, I recall the long months of pandemic isolation in 2020. Those of us who love cooking and enjoy a bottle of wine with a meal became ever more epicurious. We prepared old family favorites again, especially during the holidays, and tried new dishes from online sources like NYT Cooking. And in Columbia, MO, The Common Ingredient—a recipe sharing-website/blog that addressed food insecurity—was launched in March 2020 by five local women. The website is still thriving and is now international in reach.
One of the comfort food submissions on The Common Ingredient website is my mother Alice’s classic meatloaf recipe; thecommoningredient.com.
Since Kit's favorite meal on the planet is meatloaf, the recipe has been a staple over the 40 plus years that we’ve been together. It’s very moist due to the addition of cottage cheese and gets its subtle bite from a dollop of horseradish. Not only is it great served with garlic mashed potatoes, green peas, and apple sauce, it is terrific in a sandwich the next day!
Ingredients:
1 ¼ pounds lean ground chuck
1 egg
Half of a small onion (chopped)
Half of a green or sweet red bell pepper (I prefer red bell peppers)
2 slices of whole wheat or multigrain bread (chopped in a blender)
1/4-1/2 cup ketchup
2 tablespoons cottage cheese
1 tablespoon horseradish (more if you like more bite)
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Mix all ingredients in a large bowl with your hands and form into a loaf.
Top with an extra drizzle of ketchup.
Bake 55-60 minutes in a lightly greased loaf pan.
After the recipe appeared on the website, our Columbia friends Nick and Diane Peckham suggested we join them at their home for a meatloaf dinner. Kit and I brought garlic mashed potatoes, an insalata caprese (slices of tomatoes, mozzarella and basil drizzled with olive oil) and a very special bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape wine that had been in our pantry for as long as the four of us had been friends. The bottle had served as ballast in our car when we moved from Breakfast Creek to New Mexico in 2005. That same year, it boomeranged back to Missouri and our new home. It rested another fifteen years at Boomerang Creek, waiting for a very special gathering that warranted its uncorking.
This account brings me to a book, as the telling of tales often does. On September 3, 2020, Kit and I hosted an online Zoom session (due to Covid restrictions) on Amor Towles’s novel A Gentleman in Moscow—the community’s 2020 “One Read” book selection. To spark conversation, I brought bottle of La Bernardine Châteauneuf-du-Pape—a renowned French appellation grown in the Rhône Valley that resembles one in the novel.
In Towles’ novel, Count Rostov, an aristocrat, is quarantined for life in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel following the Russian Revolution. When the Soviet era began, bureaucrats declared that all wines in the Metropol’s famed wine cellar must be identified as simply red or white. And with that, all wine labels were removed. The Count is horrified, but upon gaining entry to the wine cellar, he is able to identify the Châteauneuf-du-Pape by feeling the embossed papal insignia on the traditionally heavy glass bottle—a pair of crossed keys over the 14th century papal insignia of Pope Clement V who relocated the papacy to a castle in the town of Avignon, France.
As mentioned earlier, we joined our friends Nick and Diane that September at their home for a simple meatloaf meal with wine—our glorious Châteauneuf-du-Pape 1997 at last uncorked. As the wine and conversation flowed, we toasted our enduring bond of friendship across time and distances despite the challenges of a pandemic that had kept the world physically apart from friends and family for months on end.
Kit and I left Missouri and Boomerang Creek in April 2021. Gradually the threat of Covid faded and life slowly got back to a semblance of normalcy. But the final week of August 2023, Covid roared back. For the first time, Kit, our daughter Heidi, her wife Sugie, and I all tested positive. Kit was quarantined at “the Lodge” where he has been undergoing rehab since March. Heidi and Sugie self-quarantined at their home in Nevada City, and I did the same at our home a few miles away.
For five days we all took daily doses of Paxlovid, slept for hours, communicated by cell phone or texts and sent regular updates to friends and family on how we were feeling. Neighbors masked up and delivered dinners as well as freshly harvested peaches and plums to my front door. To pass the long evenings alone, I watched a series on Apple TV+ called “Drops of God”—a rich tale of wine, geography, terroir, and the power of stored memories revisited through wine.
Like the novel A Gentleman in Moscow, “Drops of God” is a nuanced, marvelous tale that took me back to a dinner and bottle of wine I will never forget. That is the power of memory. That is the power of family and friendships that run deep and true.