Drink - Victoria Moore reveals how she deals with the party dregs
Of all things, it's distressing to find that you're more square than Delia Smith. And when Delia recently announced that, contrary to any claims Glenys Kinnock might make, she would not countenance doing anything so mimsy as freezing leftover wine in ice-cube trays to use for cooking, that's just what happened.
Yes, it's true. I freeze wine compulsively, although not into ice cubes. Should I really feel embarrassed by this? Delia - who spent January on the wagon because she was "partied out . . . I'm simply never going to be a one-glass girl" - seems to think so. Ditto Glenys.
Even Nigella Lawson, who will at least admit to putting alcohol in the freezer, has to pretend she only does it after giving house space to hordes of drinkers. "You can stop yourself from wasting leftover wine after dinner parties by measuring out glassfuls and freezing them, well labelled . . ." she writes in How to Eat.
Well, a word in my defence. My sneaking suspicion is that Delia thinks the idea of freezing wine is detrimental to her image because she doesn't want anyone to think she can't polish off a bottle in a single sitting. As any wine lover knows, it's not the dregs of the first bottle that risk going to waste, but those of the second. There's no point trying to save it for the next evening - why, you'll want to open something else then. Better by far to pack the rest into the freezer and dream of the risottos (red wine risotto made with red onions and chestnut mushrooms is delicious with sausages) and coq au vin that it will enrich when next you see it.
More extravagantly still, if you open some wine and it is disappointingly ordinary, or a bit sub-standard, there's no need to feel you have to journey with it to the base of the bottle if you have a supply of plastic cups in the cupboard. I just sling duff wine in the freezer (unless it's actually horrid, in which case I take it to the boys upstairs rather than pour it down the drain) and get on with uncorking the next in line from my stash.
But I don't just freeze leftovers. I spend far, far too great a proportion of my income on drink and, in an effort to reduce it, I have introduced a two-tier wine system into my kitchen. I now buy cooking wine and freeze virtually entire bottlefuls in one go. It makes you feel much less guilty as you lob the second glass of red wine into a simple Bolognese sauce. That said, I still don't buy trash, or it would spoil the food.
We recently had a relative to stay who left - presumably as a thank-you present, though possibly as an insult - a bottle of white wine in the fridge. It was called "Medium-dry table wine". We lifted it on to the work surface and gazed at it in awe. I said, limply, that I supposed we could try it for cooking, but my cousin, with monumental panache, buried it unopened in the rubbish bag and said crisply that it would "be certain to ruin anything you put it in".
In short, freezing wine is not something Delia should be ashamed of, even if she doesn't do it - although I'm afraid to say I think the ice-cube tray side of it is pretty indefensible. A serious cook would never use such a small amount of booze when cooking.
No, the only line of defence for the maker of wine ice cubes is to claim that he needs them for cocktails because he cannot bear the unnecessary dilution of alcohol with water. There is a kind of style precedent for this. At least one posh bar in London has taken to freezing the tomato juice element of the Bloody Mary and dropping the red cubes into seasoned neat vodka to make a paralysingly strong version of the drink.
It's a neat idea, but one that's hard to adopt for your cubes of Beaujolais, if only because wine cocktails are few and far between. I can think of only one, sangria, that might benefit from this treatment. Now there's an idea. Sangria is always disappointingly watery towards the bottom of the jug. Anyone got a spare ice-cube tray?
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