Our friend Peter loves Champagne. I mean really loves it. Loves it enough that he got sick of having a long-distance relationship with the stuff and moved to the tiny town of Dizy to live among the vineyards and drink the wine. He was in town a couple weeks ago and we invited him over for dinner. “I’ll bring the wine,” he said, “half a dozen or so open bottles from the Champagne tastings I’ve been going to.” That was when I realized I had just signed up to cook an all-Champagne dinner.
There’s a cottage industry devoted to helping people figure out what wine goes with what recipe, but I had the inverse problem, namely, how to come up with a menu that would show off Peter’s beloved. I had a few panicked moments before I realized that I could think of the Champagne as just another ingredient. Remember those high school “compare and contrast” essays? To my mind, what makes ingredients play well with each other, within a dish or on a plate, is when the flavors and textures either rhyme with or differ from each other in interesting ways.
Champagnes have three or four main flavors: sweetness; acidity; a creamy, toasty flavor; and, in some (blends with a high percentage of older wines, according to my local wine expert) a mushroom-y, almost salty umami character. The bubbles in Champagne give it a refreshing, piquant texture, too.
I shopped for the meal at the farmers market, but at this time of year there’s so much available that the difficulty is choosing what not to buy. Dinner started with sweet corn blini topped with silky crème frâiche, chives, and smoked Pacific Coho salmon, which played up the wines’ sweet and savory qualities with a lovely textural counterpoint. (This was a riff on the traditional pairing of caviar and buckwheat blini with Champagne, of course; that pairing emphasizes the toasty and salty but seemed too wintery.) Next up was fresh fettucine topped with obscene amounts of wild “chicken of the woods” mushrooms sautéed in lots and lots of butter and softened with a little white wine—such a direct flavor rhyme that several of the wines seemed to jump up and sing. For the main course there was a big plate of corn, sweet summer onion, pepper, and fresh shell bean succotash, a taste of American summer for our expatriate friend, topped with a single, fabulously marbled slice of roasted pork belly. Rich and salty as the pork was, the Champagne was acidic and bubbly enough to cut right through it, with sweetness from the vegetables and earthiness of the beans there as a counterbalance.
My wife and I adore Peter and would be happy to have him over for takeout pizza and cheap beer. But he loves his wines, and takes them seriously—a mutual friend once referred to him as “the wine monk”—so it seemed more generous to come up with a dinner that would enhance his pleasure by celebrating the flavors he loves. It’s just that sometimes the easiest way to do so is by pointing in the opposite direction.
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