Amidst the righteous PETA bluster attending foie gras legislation and the earnest journalists trying their balanced best to cover the issue and the misslonelyhearts marching outside Union Square Café (a business that's an emblem of quality and excellence in the culture of American restaurants), indignant foodies railing, committed gourmands wailing, and the food terrorists harassing chefs–well, it's actually relatively quiet now, so I thought it a perfect opportunity to cut right to the core of the issue. The fat liver itself. Which no one seems to talk about anymore.

Foie gras is a marvel and a wonder. If I'd had some left over fresh a few moments ago, I'd have diced it and sprinkled it over my gently scrambling eggs (or should I call them unborn chickens?). That would be a treat on a Wednesday morning! Foie in farm fresh eggs. Almost reason enough to open a bottle of Schramsberg blanc de blanc to go with it (but that would kill the day, wouldn't it ((not necessarily a bad thing!))?).

What's the great fact about foie gras for American home cooks? It's this: that what's available to you is the exact same thing that's available to the country's best chefs. This is a rare circumstance. The caviar that Eric Ripert gets you and I can't get, don't even think about it (and he sends half his back at the delivery door, and you couldn't even get that). Not available to you and me, wouldn't be even if we were rich as Bloomberg. The truffles and fingerling potatoes Joel Robuchon can send to his Vegas outpost–you and I can't have it. Gotta head to Vegas and pay through the nose (entirely worth it, surely, but a nose is a nose). The lamb Grant Achatz lovingly heats sous vide, fragrant with the smells of the carefully grown alfalfa raised and cut and stored by Keith Martin in Pennsylvania–gotta go to Chicago for that.

But foie gras, here the playing field between the chef and the home cook is leveled. There are four growers in the United States, and you can buy from the same one most chefs do, Hudson Valley Foie Gras. Daniel Boulud's A foie is going to be of the same quality as the A foie you order. Yes, he's going to pay a little less because his volume is greater, but even so, and even though it's considered a luxury item at restaurants, it's not really more expensive for the home cook having a dinner party, say, than a beef tenderloin. An A foie, will serve ten healthy portions and it will cost about a hundred bucks with shipping. Ten bucks a head, which, if you're one to go all out for your guests or you're having a special party, is not out of control. And it's a very cool thing to offer your guests, if you run with that kind of crowd.

Moreover, foie gras is one of the easiest things in the world to cook, one of those the-less-done-to-it-the-better food items. Salt the whole thing, put it in a hot pan to give the top a beautiful golden brown, flip it, drop some thyme and garlic in the pan and pop it in a hot oven for ten minutes, basting once or twice with the copious fat that renders. Slice at the table. Or slice it an inch thick, pluck out any large dark veins, salt it, and briefly cook in a really hot pan on either side till you have a nice crust (you'll need a good exhaust system for saute, not a method for the unventilated fifth floor studio walk up).

Or for something truly amazing, the foie-iest foie of all, spread out the lobes, remove the veins, give it a healthy sprinkle of salt and some white pepper and some pink salt if you have some, pour some milk on it to help leach out any residual blood and refrigerate overnight. Then rinse it roll it into a cylinder in cheesecloth and poach it for a couple minutes, just so it all melts together inside. Chill, unroll, slice an inch thick and serve with something sweet and acidic and some good bread and Champagne. That is a luxury beyond luxuries, and available to you, home cook. (This preparation has the fancy name torchon with the unfancy translation dish towel–really all you need for this preparation: a dishtowel to roll it in.)

Foie gras can be roasted first, then pressed into a terrine mold and chilled, maybe layered somehow with a fruit that goes well with it, mango or quince. Slice and serve it cold. Poach it in wine. There are so many wonderful thing you can do with foie gras, so easily, there's so much fun to be done, so much pleasure to give to your closest friends, it saddens me that we've lost sight of the foie itself amidst all the noise.

There's nothing else like it in the culinary world. It's a gift. We need to protect it or we'll lose it.

Over the weekend while I was cleaning out a closet in my apartment, I stumbled upon a copy of The Vegan Guide To New York City. Before you jump to conclusions, let me just say that it was left behind by previous tenants, hidden high up at the back of a shelf. Yesterday while we ate lunch, we thumbed through it and enjoyed the following passages:

On the chefs at Pure Food & Wine:
In previous incarnations, both had won fame as chefs de cuisine cooking animal flesh for carnivores.

On uptown Juice Bar's tonics to cure whatever ails you:
Of course, if you're a vegan of long-standing, you probably don't have any of these ailments, so toast your good health–and your good fortune in being a vegan–with a fruit smoothie instead.

On Why veganism?:
Olympic gold medalist Carl Lewis is a vegan–need we say more?

That's just a sample of the sanctimonious writing that fills this book, perfect for gratifying your ego if you're vegan, or making you laugh a lot if you're not. Also by the same author (I'm not kidding, it's advertised in the Guide): Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover.

Summer drinks should be like summer evenings: long, light and cool. These are the days of G&Ts, mint juleps, caiphirinas, mojitos, where the sign to pack up is an ice bucket down to its last inch of meltwater. This year, though, I've forsaken the old mainstays for something a little more challenging to the tastebuds.

When rain intervenes at Wimbledon, the lines at the Pimm's tent grow fifty-deep. Given English summers, that's a lot of drinking, and it's a scene repeated across the upper-class 'season': continuously-refilled cauldrons topped with a fruit-salad flotsam, their contents ladeled into plastic pint glasses where the precise shade of rusty orange betrays just how badly you've been stiffed on the mix.

The base spirit in Pimm's No. 1 Cup is gin. Not enough gin as before, say the purists, who'll add a glug of the pure stuff to make up the difference. The mixer is lemonade: not the cloudy uncarbonated stuff, but a clear fizz that's just enough unlike Sprite to make it worth splashing out on 'French limonade' if you're making it by the glass. (Otherwise, stick with ginger ale.) The heart is a melding of fruit and spice and herbs, its grassy undertones accentuated by the traditional garnish of mint, borage or cucumber. There's a paradoxical warmth to Pimm's that speaks of English summers, a comfort in days of sun and showers, like a parasol that serves double-duty as an umbrella.

Head south to summers that bake the clouds out of the sky, and the tastes grow equally intense. The Mediterranean coast is the aniseed belt, from pastis to sambuca, ouzo to raki: cloudy and heady and palate-numbing. But there's another family of summer drinks that enlivens the senses without overwhelming them.

Vermouth is too often bought grudgingly, to be waved at a martini or splashed into a risotto pan, then left to go bad. Now's the season to rediscover it. The lighter varieties, particularly the vins aromatisées of France, give up their initial bitterness to sweeter notes: serve white Lillet or Noilly Prat well-chilled and in small glasses, as you would a dry sherry; or try Dubonnet on the rocks with a splash of soda, its intense berry flavors underlaid with spice and the tonic tang of quinine.

It's Italy, though, that gave birth to vermouth and still nurtures it, with a range that extends far beyond the liquor store bottom shelf. The best whites are dry, crisp and herbal, but the real discoveries are to be found in the bittersweet varieties. Carpano lays claim to the original recipe, recreated in the hard-to-find Antica Formula, and to the more widely-available Punt e Mes, to my mind the best 'red' vermouth. Although based on white wine, its aromatic infusion gives it a tawny translucence; its opening spicy sweetness is reminiscent of cola, but soon overtaken by an astringent orange kick. (The name stems from its 'point and a half' dose of bitters.) Serve it on ice, with or without a splash of soda, or be brave and mix it with freshly-squeezed orange juice for a combination that goes down much better than it looks.

What do you get if you replace the wine base of vermouth with distilled liquor, doubling the alcohol content? One answer is Campari, the quintessential summer apéritif. Again, the recipe is secret, dating to the mid-1800s, and the ingredients hard to discern: certainly quinine and gentian, a hint of rhubarb, the bitter chinotto citrus that's the signature of so many Italian drinks. It's traditional to drink it short in a chilled glass, with a splash of soda to open up the aromatics just as plain water invigorates a single malt; others ritualise it: three fingers in a tall glass, ice, soda and garnish on the side, refill at leisure while the evening lasts. For those who prefer the kick of a cocktail, equal parts Campari and red vermouth on ice with a splash of soda gives you a Americano, a tip of the hat from 19th-century Florence to the Henry James set; replace the soda with gin for a Negroni, and drink it as slowly as possible.

Close relations to Campari, though less well-known outside Italy, are the 300 or so varieties of amari alle erbe; originally designed as herbal tonics, many are still served straight up or with coffee as a digestive. While the most assertive are best left to that role — I'm thinking of you, Fernet Branca — others adapt well to a little ice, a little more fizz and tall glasses.

Although some of the most popular amari are now under larger corporate ownership, production remains typically Italian: highly localised, usually out of a single distillery, with dominant flavors that speak of the region that created them. To the north, herbal ingredients take precedence: the menthol of Genoa's Santa Maria al Monte, the alpine yarrow and juniper of Amaro Braulio, made close to the Swiss border, and the wintergreen and anise that make the Milanese Ramazzotti a very grown up root beer when served long. A little further south, warmer notes enter: Bologna's Amaro Montenegro has plenty of vanilla sweetness to accompany the floral orange bitterness, while Abruzzo and the Marche bring hints of cardamom, cinnamon and saffron to their many offerings. Reach the heel of the boot, and the Basilicata's Amaro Lucano adds sage and nuttiness to the mix, while the Sicilian Averna, perhaps the most accessible amaro for the uninitiated, is heavy on fruit, especially chinotto, and rich with butterscotch and candied fruit.

If there's a downside to all these drinks, it's that they don't pair well with food, or at least not with complete meals; they'll find better companions in succulent summer fruit: sliced melon, peaches, mangoes. But if you want to put the taste of the season in a glass and make it last until sunset, I can't think of anything better.

Our roving correspondent Anonymous Drinker knows his liquor. Having traveled the world, he's sipped the best. From the framboise of France to the boozes of Bourbon Co., Kentucky, there is nothing he won't put to his lips.

Photo credits: Pimm's Cup © Dave Morris. Campari © Marie-Louise Avery.