My memories of Nana, my paternal grandmother, are vivid. She taught me the proper way to place a single slice of lox on top of a bagel smeared with cream cheese. The trick was to spread the lox out so thinly with the back of a fork that you could see the hole of the bagel and the white of the cheese through it. Lox was a true luxury food in the 1950s and not to be eaten lightly. Nana’s emphasis on frugality was, I now understand, the psychological residue of her experience of multiple life crises – immigration from Poland to San Francisco in the early 20th century, the 1906 earthquake, World War I, the Spanish flu, the Great Depression, and World War II.

Throughout the works of Russian writers, like Tolstoy and Chekhov, the characters drink vodka like there is no tomorrow, and also wine, as in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Mead, the delicious honey wine first created by the ancients, played a significant role in Beowulf, with Beowulf, the hero, defending the king’s mead hall against the terrifying beast, Grendel. In works like Steinbeck’s classic moral tale, The Pearl, the featured drink of choice is pulque, a beverage made from the maguey plant’s fermented sap.