"You can do anything with beer that you can do with wine. Beer is great for basting or marinating meat and fish"
About this Quote
Grant Wood’s line reads like a Midwestern wink at culinary snobbery: a clean, practical heresy aimed at the wine-soaked prestige economy. He’s not just defending beer; he’s downgrading the whole idea that refinement has to arrive in a bottle with a French label. The phrasing is pointedly egalitarian. “Anything with beer that you can do with wine” isn’t a tasting note, it’s a dare. Beer gets framed as competent, versatile, working-class fluent - not a consolation prize.
The specific intent feels double-edged: celebrate beer’s real utility (basting, marinating) while poking at the cultural performance around wine. Wood’s career, built on painting American regional life with crisp sincerity and a faint, unsettling edge, makes the subtext sharper. He understood that “taste” is often a class costume. By talking technique instead of terroir, he drags alcohol out of the realm of status and into the kitchen, where results matter and pretension burns off.
Context matters: Wood’s lifetime spans Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the rise of Regionalism as a pushback against coastal sophistication. In that climate, beer isn’t just a drink; it’s a symbol of ordinary pleasure and domestic resourcefulness. The quote works because it sounds casual while carrying a cultural argument: you don’t need the approved luxury object to make something good, and anyone insisting otherwise might be selling you more identity than flavor.
The specific intent feels double-edged: celebrate beer’s real utility (basting, marinating) while poking at the cultural performance around wine. Wood’s career, built on painting American regional life with crisp sincerity and a faint, unsettling edge, makes the subtext sharper. He understood that “taste” is often a class costume. By talking technique instead of terroir, he drags alcohol out of the realm of status and into the kitchen, where results matter and pretension burns off.
Context matters: Wood’s lifetime spans Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the rise of Regionalism as a pushback against coastal sophistication. In that climate, beer isn’t just a drink; it’s a symbol of ordinary pleasure and domestic resourcefulness. The quote works because it sounds casual while carrying a cultural argument: you don’t need the approved luxury object to make something good, and anyone insisting otherwise might be selling you more identity than flavor.
Quote Details
| Topic | Cooking |
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