Ever since Americans started drinking real wine, the concept of pairing has been a popular topic. Plainly, what food flavors play well with certain alcoholic beverages? Everybody knows the old standards of red wine for red meat, white wine for fish, maybe a rose for poultry. Intermediate pairing techniques start to veer into more adventurous territory, the red wine and chocolate crowd or the people who get fussy about the long-lost cheese course. This is all well and good, but the process is starting to get a little esoteric. The idea behind pairing is to make every element of a meal harmonize, to make sure you're getting the optimal experience out of whatever you taste. Pairing for the sake of pairing turns this search for pleasure into a game of challenging palates. The following pairing suggestions aren't intended to be novel or at all counter-intuitive. Like classic wine pairing, their one and only aim is to make a meal better.
Scotch and Chinese Food
This one usually seems a little out-there whenever I suggest it, but it never fails to impress. Though scotch comes from the opposite side of the world from China, it pairs remarkably well with the keynote flavors in Chinese cuisine. At the most basic level, Chinese food gets a lot of its character from strong peppers, rich oils and intense spices like ginger. Even the driest wine is going to be too sweet and too mild to really mingle with those flavors properly. The unique smokiness of scotch complements the sharp, hot oil notes in many Chinese dishes while the heavy grain flavors present in all whiskey bridge the gap between the sweetness of Chinese sauces and the necessary blandness of rice. Most importantly, scotch is, itself, rather insistent stuff. It doesn't want to play nice, so the resulting competition of flavors is lively without clashing.
Vodka and Cold Salad
A lot of the best vodka drinks are halfway to salad anyway, so pairing a plate of mixed greens and garden vegetables with the simple, acquiescent tones of a good vodka isn't that unusual. Vodka is one of the few liquors that work well with salt, and anyone with a culinary eye knows that a little salt goes a long way to liven up vegetables. Salt coaxes moisture to the surface of plants, releasing the essential oils that hold much of their flavor. Similarly, neutral alcohol also has a way of doing flavor-improving chemistry. Hell, a lot of Italian dishes hit tomatoes and tomato sauces with wine or vodka because certain flavor compounds in the fruit just won't activate without alcohol. A clean, chilled vodka with no extra flavorings is the ideal match for a proper, varied salad. It wants to share these flavors, so let it.
Rum and Salmon
This one is a simple matter of shared flavors. There are four things that make both rum and salmon better. They are, in no particular order: Butter, citrus, brown sugar, spice. A good, buttery, spiced rum (especially with a twist of fresh lime) will carry all of the flavors that make salmon, an already flavorful fish, the Prime Steak of swimmers. Also, because fish tends to be pretty light, pairing a drink with it is precarious. Beer may work with bland white fish, but something with as much character as salmon really wants something more nuanced. Most white liquors are just going to be too slight to really have a presence with salmon while most brown liquors will overpower it. Spiced rum is middle-of-the-road, which is why it succeeds.