Well, milk goes with curry easily enough - Indians know this full well, hence mango lassis - as the neutrality of the dairy offsets the spice.
As far as other soft drinks go I am not sure that your idea works so well. In my experience the science of pairing wine with food is based on the style and flavour of the wine, which can be dry or fruity or oaky or creamy, and have many different tastes, all different kinds of fruit and so on. Wine is not just alcoholic grape juice - well, it is but it doesn't taste of it.
The problem I run up against when theorising about pairing a soft drink with something is that the flavour of orange juice or lemon and lime is WYSIWYG. They're nice flavours that do exactly what it says on the tin, but they're one flavour only, and don't compare in the same way the multiple - and often so subtle that I can't spot them - flavours of a good wine.
Thinking about your challenge, however, I would have the OJ or the lemon with cheese on toast, for the opposite reason to the curry - the acidity of the fruit might go well with the more neutral dairy flavours. I think either of those flavours would also be perfectly pleasant with the spag bol but wouldn't complement it. Coke I wouldn't have with anything on that menu, Coke is for American food only.
Of course there are some foods that wine will never go with, including most - some would say all - British foods as we have no wine-making tradition. A good example is fish and chips, which works best with a drier lager, such as an Italian beer, or very well chilled apple juice (Kingsley Amis recommended Guinness, but I've never tried that particular combination).
People are also now producing guides for pairing artisanal, micro-brewed beers with food. However I don't know of any equivalent for non-alcoholic drinks. Maybe there's a market?
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Date: 2009-06-07 02:58 pm (UTC)As far as other soft drinks go I am not sure that your idea works so well. In my experience the science of pairing wine with food is based on the style and flavour of the wine, which can be dry or fruity or oaky or creamy, and have many different tastes, all different kinds of fruit and so on. Wine is not just alcoholic grape juice - well, it is but it doesn't taste of it.
The problem I run up against when theorising about pairing a soft drink with something is that the flavour of orange juice or lemon and lime is WYSIWYG. They're nice flavours that do exactly what it says on the tin, but they're one flavour only, and don't compare in the same way the multiple - and often so subtle that I can't spot them - flavours of a good wine.
Thinking about your challenge, however, I would have the OJ or the lemon with cheese on toast, for the opposite reason to the curry - the acidity of the fruit might go well with the more neutral dairy flavours. I think either of those flavours would also be perfectly pleasant with the spag bol but wouldn't complement it. Coke I wouldn't have with anything on that menu, Coke is for American food only.
Of course there are some foods that wine will never go with, including most - some would say all - British foods as we have no wine-making tradition. A good example is fish and chips, which works best with a drier lager, such as an Italian beer, or very well chilled apple juice (Kingsley Amis recommended Guinness, but I've never tried that particular combination).
People are also now producing guides for pairing artisanal, micro-brewed beers with food. However I don't know of any equivalent for non-alcoholic drinks. Maybe there's a market?