I keep flashing back to an old Honeymooners episode where Art Carney goes through a really complex rigamarole to pour himself an inch of milk from Jackie Gleason’s milk bottle, erasing the line and redrawing it, washing the glass and drying it, rearranging the furniture and straightening the doily on the kitchen table, with much physical comedy ensued as he wipes down the bottle for prints. He ends by whispering “The Phantom strikes again!”
Only to have Gleason walk in with the line “Enjoy your snack, Phantom? Okay, listen up, here’s my idea for tonight’s bowling prank…”
“Oh Mr. Rythmdvl, yesterday, while you was out visitin’, I went and drank 27 bottles of your scotch. Now, I know you said drink the cooking sherry, but it was kinda sour. So, I stopped at the package store and got you 27 bottles to replace them. You want me just to go on and put it in the box down in the basement?”
That reminds me, whatever happened to cooking sherry? I remember as a kid ever other TV show and book had a line about the maid getting into the cooking sherry. But nowadays? It’s gone the way of quicksand.
You’ll see lots of recipes that call for wine, but it’s always just wine, or a particular variety. What happened to the bottle of sherry that was specifically for cooking and not for drinking? Was this a thing people who didn’t drink alcohol kept so they could cook (or have the staff cook) in the classical French style? But surely such people would be drinking wine and brandy and such with their meals?
People soon realized that “cooking sherry” was called “cooking sherry” because it is not fit for human consumption, so you might as well dump it in some sauce and pretend you’re a gourmet or some shit.
It is cheap fortified wine that has salt and other preservatives added. It is apparently exempt from the laws regulating alcohol sales, at least in many places, so you can buy it without ID.
I think in the past, conventional middle-class Americans didn’t typically buy wine or keep it in the house. It would probably have been seen as too expensive, snooty, alien, and French. Plus, some people consider it un-Christian to drink alcohol. But once French-style cooking became popular (thank you, Julia Child) there was a need for wine to cook with. So there was a market for “wine” that was good for cooking but not for drinking.
Now that we’ve become a nation of food and wine snobs, this is no longer an acceptable compromise; people say “Never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink!” and cooking wine has become something of a relic.
If only it had been his manservant instead of his nanny. One can thrash one’s manservant. One cannot thrash one’s nanny without being a cad and a cretin.
Just remember to tell your wife to give her a bad reference. After all, you should never recommend help to another lady of breeding if you wouldn’t keep them on yourself.
You think he should hire her back so he can fire her?
Of course it’s a fire-able offense. I don’t think the OP says it isn’t. If people bothered to read they OP, they’d realize the nanny no longer works for him. It’s a pit thread and not even a bad one. He wanted to bitch about his stolen Scotch. The time for solutions to a thieving nanny already passed, so people should probably stop trying to offer them.
