“I thought you said muskRAT love.”
I don’t know where you were in the 70s, but I was a teenager living in Forest Hills, watching television during dinner every night while my parents glared at each other over canned asparagus and turkey loaf. The only thing that broke their silence was our small Sony Trinitron, which sat perched on the dining room table like it was another guest, or my sibling.
Because my mother is a singer, we tended to watch shows with musical themes: Sha-Na-Na, which seemed completely ridiculous because my father hated 1950s rock with a vengeance; Name That Tune, which my mother was fixated on because she could always Name That Tune in three notes and was always right, and she liked always being right, so it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The other show that we always had on at dinner time was The Captain & Tennille . I’m not entirely sure why beyond the fact that my mother liked Toni Tennille’s bowl haircut as well as her music, which included a very unfortunate anthropomorphic song about rodent romance.
Muskrat Muskrat,Candle light,Doin’ the town and doin’ it rightin the evening….it’s pretty pleasing.Muskrat SusieMuskrat SamDo the jitterbugout in muskrat landand they shimmySammy’s so skinny
One of my favorite groups of the time, America, also sang this song, but they got away with it because there were probably some light pharmaceuticals involved, and so it wasn’t that much of a stretch. But when The Captain and Tennille sang it in sincere earnest, it was just plain wrong, especially when the Captain flipped a switch on his synthesizer during his solo and made what he clearly thought were muskrat love sounds.
Still, the drone of the song was the background music at a not-terrific time in my life, and I focused on the words, which is why I know them now from beginning to end, some thirty-odd years later. So when we found ourselves out at the small, remarkable Husch Vineyards in the Anderson Valley last month on a day that hit 105 degrees in the shade, sipping some of their outlandishly sensual muscat, I started to sing Muscat Love to Susan. She thought I’d snapped my cap for a few obvious reasons, not the least of which was that I knew all the words to this song that she’d never heard me sing in the ten years we’ve been together. There just hadn’t been any appropriate time, until right then and there, and it was all because of the wine I was tasting.
Courtesy of Husch Vineyards
I’m not much of a sweet wine person, no matter how dense or floral or voluptuously round or mouth-filling it is. I’ll have Banyuls when Susan makes chocolate pot de creme (its natural mate) on New Years. A few years back, someone gave me a gift of icewine from upper New York State, and I didn’t know whether to drink it or pour it on my pancakes. Another well-meaning person once gave me a nice bottle of zinfandel port, and I wound up simmering it down with thyme and garlic and braising a lamb shank in it. It was quite delicious as a sauce, and when I added canned San Marzano tomatoes to it the next day, pulled the meat off the bone, and tossed the whole thing with fresh, ribbony pappardelle, it was even better.
Perhaps this is a holdover from my childhood Manischewitz days, when my aunt gave me a thimble full of the sweet wine during holiday dinners and I always somehow felt like my teeth were going to careen right out of my head. But because I’ve been eating a lot of Asian food these days and intend to continue to, I’ve also been drinking sweeter, off-dry food-friendly wines, like Pinot Gris (I particularly love Stringtown‘s, from Oregon), Alsatian Riesling, and Gruner Veltliner. So on this blazing hot afternoon at the Husch Vineyards, the nice lady in the tasting room first poured me a Gewurtztraminer, and I was completely smitten, and I don’t even like Gewurtztraminer because it always reminds me of the perfume my grandmother used to get doused with on the first floor of Bloomingdale’s that eventually just made her throw up. It can just be too floral: but this Gewurtztraminer was chewy and a bit dry, and had a nice toasty edge of ginger spice on the finish, but without all the cloying residual gunk that can hit the back of your throat like a choking semi.
We moved on, and while I was at first reticent about tasting wines that were even sweeter than the Gewurtz, I noticed fairly quickly when the nice lady poured Husch’s surprising 2007 Muscat Canelli that it made me so salaciously happy that I spontaneously erupted in song, which is just about as odd as it gets in a public place, even though Muscat and Muskrat are admittedly pretty close, audiometrically speaking.
Muscat Muscat,
Candle light,
Doin’ the town and doin’ it right
in the evening….
it’s pretty pleasing.
See?
Courtesy of Husch Vineyards
It’s hard to imagine drinking something with food that I’ve always considered a dessert wine– I was certain they’d compete, weight-wise, rather than complement each other –but what startled me about the Husch Muscat was that sure, it was sweet. But it was totally exuberant, and so earthy that you could actually taste the grape and its minerality. This muscat was crystal clear, spicy and edgy, and it finished with an unctuous heat that just made me want more in the most human of ways. Of course, there was that other bit of peculiar happiness that it induced. I talked to a friend about this phenomenon the other day and she said “oh yes; the same thing happens to me when I drink Rioja. It’s very strange.” And I too once admittedly had a similar experience after a bottle of Barolo, but that also could have been the fact that I was in Italy at the time, during a particularly bountiful and robust harvest.
I’ll never know the impetus behind the writing of Muskrat Love; I’ve attributed it to 1970s excess and weirdness and all the crazy drugs that were kicking around the water supply at the time. As for me, the song gave me something to focus my attention on during those long, long dinners in Forest Hills when my father and mother and I would stare at the television on the dining room table and watch a woman with a bad haircut sing a song about rat sex during prime time.
I hated it.
Then again, I also wasn’t so crazy about Muscat.
And just look at me now.
Port-Braised Lamb Shanks
I would never advocate braising lamb shanks (or anything, for that matter) in a wine as remarkable as Husch’s Muscat, although a friend tells me that she makes a fabulous coq au riesling with a fairly pricey Alsatian wine. That said, if you’re on the receiving end of a heavy red wine that leaves you less than interested in drinking it, have at this recipe, which was born on a cold night when Susan was sick with a cold and a bottle of off-year port was staring me in the face. Pull leftover meat off the bone, add back to the sauce along with a can of San Marzano tomatoes, simmer slowly for an hour, and toss with pappardelle the next day.
Serves 2
flour for dredging
salt and pepper, to taste
2 medium lamb shanks
2 tablespoons grapeseed oil
1 carrot, peeled and diced
1 celery stalk, diced
1 small onion, peeled and diced
2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
2 cups Ruby or Zinfandel port (Malbec will do in a pinch)
1 cup beef or veal stock
3 sprigs fresh thyme
1. Dredge the lamb shanks in flour, salt, and pepper, and set aside. In a heavyweight Dutch oven set over medium high heat, heat the oil until it begins to shimmer. Add the shanks, and brown on all sides. Remove to a plate, and preheat your oven to 300 degrees F.
2. Lower the heat to medium, and add the carrot, celery, and onion. Cook until tender, about 6 minutes, and add the garlic, stirring to combine. Continue to cook until the garlic softens, about 3 minutes. Nestle the lamb shanks in the pan amidst the vegetables, and pour in the wine and the stock. Bring to a boil for 3 minutes, uncovered, reduce to a simmer, add the thyme, cover, and place in the oven for 1 hour.
3. Rotate the shanks in the sauce and continue to cook, covered, for another 45 minutes or until the sauce is dense enough to coat the back of a spoon. Remove the cover, stir the sauce, and taste for seasoning. Continue to cook, uncovered, for another 5 minutes.
Serve the shanks and their sauce over egg noodles.
