Holiday Gift Ideas 2022

 

December 2022

Holiday Gift Ideas
From Marzipan to Smoked Whiskey… and Beyond

 

By Edward Behr

A hand-carved wooden butter mold from Zakopane, Poland, a mountain town known for its wooden architecture, has four hinged sides plus a lid — no metal, only wood. Maybe I was too skeptical to begin with, but it works astonishingly well. Stone Creek Trading in Illinois sells the mold for $45.

Rush Creek Reserve cheese, from the Driftless area of southwestern Wisconsin, is made only during the fall for year-end consumption. It’s a spruce-bound, cow’s-milk Mont d’Or-ish cheese — earthy and spoonably creamy when fully ripe, with a hint of spruce near the bark. You can order Rush Creek directly from Uplands Cheese, the maker, until mid-December or whenever the supply runs out. Before and after that, you can find it at various cheesemongers around the country. From Uplands, a ten-ounce cheese is $37.

Marchesi di San Giuliano organic orange slices in syrup have a flavor so gratifyingly deep that you almost think you’re tasting Seville oranges. The slices are produced near Siracusa in Sicily — you’ll see from this list that I’m been thinking about Italy — and they contain the merest touch of brandy. The only other ingredients are oranges and sugar. They’re a wonderful indulgence on their own and a stellar component of desserts. A 460-gr jar is €15 from Marchesi di San Giuliano or about $19 from various US online sources.

Luxardo maraschino cherries from Italy are well known to mixologists and many of their customers, but to anyone who has yet to taste them their deliciousness is a revelation. The flavor of these cherries together with the natural dark color and substantial crunch put them in a different world from the bright red kind. The syrup, never wasted, goes into drinks or pastry or onto ice cream or whatever you want. A 400-gram jar from various sources is under $25 (the cherries go a long way); the best price, assuming you don’t want to spring for a 12-pound professional can, may be the two-fer from Williams-Sonoma at $39.90.

Italian pine nuts would be perfect for a baker of sweet things or for a cook who loves pesto alla genovese. Pine nuts ought to be delicate and subtly resiny, but so often, at least on this side of the Atlantic, the ones for sale are rancid, not to mince words, from age or poor treatment or both. Not to mention that they’re expensive. (Keep them protected from light and air and, preferably, frozen, and use them fairly quickly.) Italian pinoli come from two European species of pine. In Italy, you might find special pinoli, such as organic ones from the Parco di Migliarino-San Rossore near Pisa. An excellent US choice is Gustiamo, where 50 grams are $15.50 and 250 grams are $73.

Sicilian pasta reale (marzipan), made of nothing but almonds and sugar, might suit someone for whom marzipan is utterly, imperatively Christmas. This organic one from Stramondo doesn’t come already shaped into colorful fruits. It’s a rectangle, sealed airtight, ready for someone to form strawberries or apples or peas in a pod, or employ it in sweets or simply eat it. The taste is impeccable. Ritrovo, the US importer, sells a 250-gram package for $12.50.

High Wire Distilling Benton’s Smoked Jimmy Red Corn Bourbon Whiskey was the response of the highly respected mixologist Jim Meehan, author of the authoritative Meehan’s Bartender’s Manual, when we asked him to recommend a drink outside our usual: “As the former operator of a bar (PDT in New York City) that made its mark thanks to Don Lee’s ‘Benton’s Old-Fashioned,’ made from bourbon infused with bacon from Tennessee ham baron Alan Benton, I’m obviously biased, but when I heard that High Wire Distilling owners Scott Blackwell and Ann Marshall were using Benton’s smoker to put that flavor into the Jimmy Red corn they selected for their bourbon, with the help of heirloom grain evangelist Glenn Roberts, I was ready to line up. The first release was an unaged corn whiskey in a beautifully labeled bottle by Kevin Bradley from Church of Type — which is still available — and in October, they released a bourbon that sold out immediately (which means it’s available on the Internet for three times the original price). Either one would make a wonderful gift for the ham/grain-revivalist/southern-foodways/cocktail/bourbon lover in your life.” Bottles are available in shops in certain states and Potomac Wines or Astor Wines will ship.

Modernist tabletop Christmas trees made in Vermont from hardwood have nothing to do with food — but they do have a sense of place, and to go with them you can get wooden houses and other structures made in Maine. Ordered directly from Hauskaa in Vermont, individual trees are $27 to $31, a set of three is $85, a forest of twelve is $425, and a village (without trees) is $295.

Iio Jozo premium rice vinegar, from the fifth generation of the Iio family in the quiet seaside town of Miyazu in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan, is made by hand from eight times the minimum amount of rice specified for rice vinegar. The rice is grown nearby without pesticides; it’s first turned into malt, then fermented to make sake, and then the sake is fermented to make vinegar. That second, surface fermentation lasts 100 days, where industrial vinegar of whatever kind is ready in mere hours. Iio Jozo contains less acetic acid than other rice vinegar and more of milder acids. The refinement, the depth expand a cook’s sense of what vinegar is and the possibilities for using it. Iio Jozo Brewery makes other vinegars as well, including fruit ones, though not all are easily found. Ongii in Portland, Maine, sells a 500-ml bottle of the premium rice vinegar for $42.

Something tailored to your white truffle fanatic who happens to love fine printing won’t likely be duplicated by any other gift giver. Nato coi Tartufi (“Born with Truffles”) by the Piemontese chef Cesare Giaccone is a 28-page plaquette, to use the French word, since there’s no English or Italian one for a publication with a limited number of pages printed in a small edition with particular care. The type was set letter by letter (as for Giaccone’s Tre Atti in Cucina) and the signatures were hand sewn at Tallone Editore. The opening text is a highly evocative description of white truffles, reflecting Giaccone’s decades of experience and knowledge gained from the trifulau, who hunt truffles in the dark. The core of the work is six recipes, which complement and contain white truffles and are rooted in Piemonte. The plaquette, in an edition of 104 copies, is €100 on fine Tuscan paper or €200 on still finer Sicilian paper, from Tallone Editore.●

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