New Years’ In-spiration
Drink: Chablis
Pair it with: Fish and chips
When I was a child, my mother used to host an annual New Year’s dinner party. I loved it: I loved how grown-up I felt sipping the Champagne my dad would pour into one of his grandmother’s tiny sherry glasses, I loved how our long kitchen table looked in flickering candlelight, and the fish fingers and peas I had for tea before everyone arrived. I loved falling asleep to the sound of the adults downstairs, laughing, and chatting, and scraping the last of the pie off their plates.
My mother, like much of the world’s population, believed that eating fish to ring in the new year was good luck, as do I. My ideal is a haddock and chips from The Tudor Chippy in Marazion, served with frozen peas I’ve cooked in butter, and a bottle of one of Eleni and Eduard Vocoret’s Chablis.
Drink: A big bottle of beer
Pair it with: Your favourite curry
If I were going to be in London this new year (North West, specifically), I would be ordering a dinner from Vijay’s, the curry house on Willesden Lane that has been open since 1964 and claims to be England’s oldest Southern Indian restaurant. I find Vijay’s rattan walls and charming service incredibly hard to resist, but it’s New Year’s Eve so I will make an exception. Furthermore, it means I can drink what I want—which is one of those big bottles of Burning Sky’s Assemblage No. 5. I love sharing a bottle with someone, and that because beer gets you half as drunk as wine, you can drink more of it. Burning Sky’s beers are delicious and beautifully made, but not so wild and crafty that the cold pint of lager lovers won’t like them, too.
Drink: Old Claret
Pair it with: Burgers
Okay, so my version isn’t actually a burger, it’s a large steak pasty, but statistically speaking, it’s unlikely you will be in the west country on New Year’s Eve, which means it’s unlikely you’ll have a Gear Farm Pasty warming away in your oven as you open, say, a 1998 bottle of Château Angludet. But there’s a glut of good burgers in the UK at the moment, and the fatty, bready, juiciness will pair perfectly with a 20-ish-year-old Claret.
Claret is not currently en vogue (like Burgundy), and they make a lot of it. You can buy good Claret, and old Claret, for not very much money. Wines these days are being drunk younger and younger, so bottle age feels even more special.
Drink: Champagne
Pair it with: New Year’s Eve in general, or chicken, or both
What I want here is very specific. It’s a bottle of Ulysse Collin Les Maillons with Nigella’s Chicken and Orzo. The champagne is prohibitively expensive, and chicken and orzo is decidedly not a takeaway, but I’m sorry—that is what I want. It doesn’t mean you have to want it, too; possible alternatives include: Pol Roger and a Boneless Bucket, or perhaps Champagne Charpantier and Chicken Chow-Mein. The world’s your oyster! You could, of course, pair your Champagne with actual oysters, which, of course, would be completely delicious.
