A Chilly Dinner

An odd sort of dinner, I can’t look at it and see any real theme to it, not even particularly related to the season, or being the start of the new year, or even a coherence to the menu. Perhaps the choice of caviar as a starting course was a celebratory one. I have for years maintained that the choice to pair the fish eggs with the iced Maraschino (not the disgusting, vermilion sweet cherries, but the slightly bitter, intense liqueur) was a page out of, one of my favorite sci-fi authors, Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, where one of his characters is describing it as a far better match than caviar and champagne. The timing fits, the book was published in mid to late 2003, so I’d likely just read it, but I’ve just done a word search through my ebook version of the tome and not found it. There is a caviar eating scene in his book Cryptonomicon, but no Maraschino mentioned. So I’m at a loss now to recall where I read the scene. Nonetheless, at the time, I decided to give it a try, and it’s actually quite true – it’s an amazing combination. Where whomever wrote it got the idea from, I have no idea, it’s not something that I’ve encountered anywhere else in gastronomic literature (or any other literature for that matter).