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That which is commonplace offline can sometimes become very rare online. The addition of liqueurs to sauces and stews is certainly no innovation our little group can take credit for - one can find this practice referred to on restaurant menus walking down the street in Chicago, and recipes calling for the same in Provencal, Nicoise and Greek cookbooks. Yet, to look at the recipes one find online, one would scarcely guess that such a thing was ever done. This is an ommission that should have been corrected years ago.

Liqueurs, used with a little caution, can open up possibilities that would otherwise be achieved only with great difficulty. Add mint leaves to a simmering stew, hoping to season it thusly, and one is likely to end up with a promisingly aromatic kitchen, and a disappointly bland stew. Mint offers the frustration of having tough, chewy leaves that must be simmered for a while to be softened, and at least briefly to develop their flavor, and yet derive their flavor from oils that evaporate swiftly. Use it fresh in a dish, and one is aiming for a very narrow target. Use the homemade liqueur, however, something made like an ethanol based analog of mint tea, and one has something that one can toss in at the last second, off the heat, in which the flavor and aroma are already fully developed. One can simmer almonds in a sauce as long as one wishes, and the sauce will never taste of almonds. Put in a little noisette or amaretto, though, and instantly, the flavor is there. Drop a little pernod into a ragout with slices of fennel in it, and the fennel tastes more of fennel. These and other liqueurs can be used to give just the faintest whisper of a taste, or to make a last minute correction to something that, if decent, could easily be better. The spices from which a liqueur might be made will offer no such choice.

Subtlety and lightness are what one should be encouraged to strive for, when using liqueurs as seasonings in the dish. An amaretto flavored egg thickened cream sauce sounds like it should be wonderful, but it really isn't - one will add more and more amaretto to the sauce, not seeing any difference, until a tipping point is reached, and then, suddenly, the sauce will become harsh and bitter in a way that surprises, because all of the ingredients going in were sweet, or at least balanced in flavor. Think of the liqueur as an aromatic. If you put down a cream sauce, the little molecules fail to escape and reach your nose. Everything is flattened. But, say, deglaze a pan with a little broth and cointreau, and lightly thicken with a little butter quickly blended into the gravy off of the heat, giving the sauce just enough body to flavor the meat, and the results might be a little more pleasing. The aroma reaches one, and the presence of the liqueur matters. Is this really what happens? I don't know, but it does seem to describe experience in the kitchen, what does work as opposed to what should work.

It's a hard lesson for Midwesterner cooks to learn, in part, perhaps, because so much of our own ethnic heritage (and the cultural roots that come with them) comes from places where sauces were thick and heavy, and our ancestors would speak disparagingly of this food that was all bones and no meat - an attitude passed along to their descendents right down to the time of our grandparents. We respond sharply, perhaps, to the "plain food" fad of the late 20th century, one that left us dealing with so many dry and flavorless meals growing up, shoved down our throats by parents who seemed desperately afraid that their Americanness might be thought of as being hyphenated in the least, that as we turned back to our roots (and our grandparents) we exaggerated the richness of that to which we had returned, thinking that more must always be more. But this is not so.

As I say in the rules, while I do allow the posting of pictures of an recipes for food that goes with liqueurs as opposed to food seasoned with liqueurs, I do so with some misgivings. What, really, is to keep somebody from posting a picture of any food item he wants, and saying he drinks his beverage of choice with that? The answer is - my willingness to act on my own skepticism, and my insistence that there be something that very specifically favors the consumption of the liqueur in the items being offered. The consumption of something with a plain roast, for example, is hardly unknown and I'm well aware of it. In a way, this could be said to be an indirect way of effectively seasoning a bland dish, the flavor of the liqueur lingering as one chews on a slice of roast. While there's nothing wrong with that, the roast could have just as easily been eaten with wine, or even an iced herbal tea, and so one wouldn't really think of a roast as being bar or tavern food, even were bars or taverns to start offering them to their surprisingly well served clientele. The liqueur isn't central to the meal, it's just there as an afterthought. On the other hand, a place of meze is so much a prelude to the ouzo or raki that follows it, that Muslim restaurateurs in Turkey have been known to refuse to serve them for just that reason - they don't want to encourage a breach of Sharia in their own establishments. This, then, really is bar food and not just food brought into a bar.

Is that a vague standard, one calling for an aesthetic judgment call on which you and I might disagree, and in which my decisions might reflect my own cultural background more than it does anything even slightly objective? Yes, it does, but then one might say the same of any evaluation of the quality of a creative work, and yet one does see administrators making such evaluations in deciding what does stay in the pool and that which does not, every day. The inescapable fallibility of judgement calls doesn't and shouldn't keep us from making them. Will my freely admitted cultural biases tend to make this a Mediterranean-centric group? Yes, they will, but where are liqueurs used in cooking, the most often? And, I might add, those biases won't make me turn away a recipe for a cheese fondue flavored with kirsch, in the manner of Neuchatel an old classmate of mine from Switzerland tells me, even though that city is very far from the Mediterranean. Biases aren't always based on hatred or contempt for somebody or something. Sometimes they are based, lovingly, on an affection for home that makes no pretense of universal validity, and in the end, we all have them, anyway, even if we aren't always honest enough with ourselves or others to admit this.

It is, after all, only a flickrgroup, and if my little show does not meet your needs, there are always others, which will be run by others with biases of their own, and that's the beauty of it all. So long as we try, however imperfectly, to treat our members decently. Under the different sorts of nudging each of us give, each group will develop its own personality, its own aesthetic, and become its own place, instead of becoming a clone of every other place. Thus, fallibility and human frailty, in their own way, can become virtues of a sort, which is just as well, because we certainly aren't going to escape them.

Let's continue to the group.