Question: Is it okay to serve Coq Au Vin–or other alcohol-soaked dishes–to someone in recovery?

Answer: Not necessarily.

Holiday season is houseguest season, which means cooking for a crowd, which means knowing your guests’ food allergies, aversions and issues.

While most of us understand that it’s important to have a selection of nonalcoholic beverages for those who don’t, or can’t, drink, many of us wouldn’t think twice about serving alcohol-soaked dishes to those same people. “The alcohol’s cooked in!” we say. But is it really?

In a recent post for the Diner’s Journal blog on the New York Times website, Tara Parker-Pope explored the issue. When she asked Dr. Harry Haroutunian, physician director of the Betty Ford Center, he said, “Alcohol’s boiling point is lower than that of water, and many cooks assume that little or none of its potency remains after cooking…that is simply not true and quite dangerous thinking for anyone in recovery.” Cooked food, according to Dr. Haroutunian, can retain from 5 to 85 percent of the original alcohol, depending on the cooking method and how much alcohol was used in the preparation.

You can read Parker-Pope’s entire discussion here.

What has your experience been—have you served dishes prepared with alcohol to people in recovery? Why or why not? If so, what was their reaction?

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By J.L. Scott

I love you more than anything right now. I love you even when you’re shitty beer, or at the bottom of somebody’s abandoned cocktail glass left on a sticky bar or when I drink an entire bottle of wine before a first date, then head to the bar, already knowing I’ll probably do something I regret. I love you more than the four iPhones, two friendships, and one pair of shoes I’ve lost or broken while drunk.

It wasn’t a straightforward romance. I knew I was looking for something, but I didn’t know it would be you. After all, bulimia and I were flirting pretty hard and heavy when I was introduced to you, a month after I turned 16. I met you via tequila shots in my friend Viv’s basement after a homecoming game. My hands were chapped from the cold of walking the mile from the football field to her house without gloves, and I hated the way my cracked skin tasted as I licked the salt that lay above the knuckle on my thumb. I hated the way the tequila burned down my throat. But I did four shots anyway. Afterwards I felt alive, funny, enervated. The world seemed a lot less scary and cold.

Still, for a long time, we maintained a pretty tepid affair. My main concern was the calories. I desired to be skinny more than anything else, and I didn’t know how to reconcile the amount of booze it would take to get a buzz, with the endless minutes on the treadmill or the effort it took to find an empty bathroom stall and stick my finger down my throat. Maybe I would have tried coke, but by then, I was attending a rural woman’s college, and the idea of trying find it seemed far too daunting. Besides, I was an annoyingly good girl—one of those people who never missed a lecture, who always had her hand raised, who felt guilty if I skipped a workout.

But I was also hungry—for carbs, always, but also for adventure, for breaking the rules, for the dark corners of my mind I was afraid to explore. And so even though I didn’t drink a ton, I still went out a lot, felt the rush of excitement when my roommate and I went to a neighboring school’s frat parties and I let a guy’s hands touch me everywhere, allowed his fingers to flutter against the waistband of my jeans and knew that was code for heading to a barely-used meeting room upstairs. And so although I wasn’t drunk when I lost my virginity—a frat boy on top of me, me still wearing my pink faux vintage t-shirt that read Wildcat in glittery script—I might as well have been. And that night, coming back to my own dorm room, after terrible sex, was when it clicked: Alcohol made things happen. It was a conduit to excitement, a conduit to being someone I wasn’t. Being someone extraordinary.

So the seed was planted. But I was still coy with you—I remember, I had leftover beers in my dorm room when I was packing up after freshman year. I tossed them in the free box without a second thought. “You actually have leftover alcohol?” a sophomore asked incredulously, popping the cap with her dorm key. “That’s incredible.”

I shrugged. I felt superior to her. I had better things to do than drink beer at 2 P.M. on a Saturday afternoon.

And then came sophomore year and a transfer to a college in New York City and endless amaretto sours and cosmos all over Manhattan. My roommate and I always got drinks for free, because we were pretty-ish and we ordered ridiculous technicolor drinks, and it seemed the drunker we were, the more boys and bartenders would pay attention to us. We drank like it was our job, and we were very, very good at it. I loved the fact that five drinks could slide a Saturday night into a night of adventure, into so many firsts: First time making out in the back of a cab, first time having sex outside, first time staying up all night and watching the sun rise while drinking wine from the night before.

And then there were the bad firsts: First time blacking out (shitty complimentary boxed white wine at the Chinese restaurant that didn’t card), first time having no clue whether or not I had sex (a flurry of text message exchanges the next day confirmed that I had), first time throwing up all over myself (at a black tie affair where I was supposed to be a volunteer.)

But ultimately, it didn’t much matter, because I was in love. And once I graduated from college and began working an entry-level job at a magazine, it seemed the feeling was mutual. My salary wasn’t glamorous, but the perks—endless parties, open bars, plenty of three-course lunches with literary idols and an office where champagne was often uncorked as a reward for getting through late nights—were amazing. Drinking served as the common ground I had with my seemingly way more sophisticated colleagues, and the drunker I got, the more comfortable I felt in my skin. Each drink was bringing me closer to becoming the sexy, smart girl I desperately wanted to be.

“What do you like more, drinking or sex?” I was 23, and the question—ridiculous, implausible—was asked by the guy I was sleeping with. At one time, we had been on track to actually date, but that had been before I’d called his number 12 times in a row, before I showed up at his door, bleeding and crying, before he told me one night that I was too drunk to sleep with and put me to bed on his couch.

I paused, silence hanging between us. The answer was so obvious. Sex was awkward, embarrassing. It was the opposite of drinking.

“I know,” he sighed and rolled away: A jealous lover. “You love your booze.”

By that point, it was so obvious. I loved drinking, at happy hours, at work events, alone in my apartment. For the past five years, it’s been a one-sided love affair, and the stakes have only gotten higher and higher. I’m older. Fewer of my friends think that an open-bar invite has the same appeal that it did when we were in our early twenties. It’s not cute anymore. And I don’t seem to have the same handle on drinking as I did. I’ve had five blackouts in the past two months. I know that’s not okay. What’s even worse is the endless effort and energy it takes to parse together the events of the previous evening, and then, once the pieces are put together, to try as hard as humanly possible to forget them—usually by drinking again.

Snapshot: In bed with my ex-boyfriend, making myself throw up into his wastepaper basket next to his night table, so proud that I still remembered the exact right touch on the back of my throat that would make myself heave. I’d come to his place directly from girls’ happy hour. As soon as I came in, he was worried I had alcohol poisoning, and was about to bring me to the hospital. I thought vomiting in front of him on purpose would prove that I was okay.

Snapshot: In a cab with my boss, who was nice enough to take me home from a party, and me totally forgetting my address until she walked up and down the street with me until I finally recognized my building.

“Feeling okay today?” She asked the next morning, avoiding eye contact.

“I should have eaten last night,” I said ruefully, staring at a spot on the floor.

“Lesson learned?” She asked, half-grimacing.

I knew I was supposed to say something else: That I was sorry, that it would never happen again, that it was completely inappropriate and I really appreciated her trying to gloss over everything. But I didn’t. Because saying all that would be an admission that the night before had really happened.

I stayed at the office extra-late that night, chugging coffee, attempting to seem responsible and in control.

Snapshot: Waking up on my couch, surrounded by empty bottles and half-eaten plates of food. It had been my housewarming party, and I only remembered the first ten minutes.

Snapshot: Waking up next to my cracked phone in the hazy light of five A.M. I’m in my bed, but there’s a huge purple bruise that extends from the top of my shoulder to my elbow that takes my breath away. A trail of dried blood sticks on my forehead and in my hair, all coming from a scratch on my temple. Did I fall? Did I get into a fight? Was I attacked? I text the last friend I remember seeing that night, and she says she put me in a cab. That day at work, I kept shrugging my shoulder out of my cardigan, in awe of the purple-ish bruise spreading down my arm.

But after the embarrassments subside and the bruises disappear, I can smooth over each incident and make it sound like no more than a kind of cringe-worthy mishap. But I’m so terribly afraid that my luck is going to run out, that I’m going to lose what I’ve still managed to hang on to. My job, my friends, my life.

So I’m going to try so hard to quit. But right now, I love you so much that I can’t imagine how I’m going to live the rest of my life without you. There’s so much I still don’t know about you: I still don’t know the difference between Malbec and Merlot, I never got around to drinking Scotch straight up, I’ll never have you in my hands during my wedding.

If I even get married.

Because that’s the thing: In every possible way, I’m worried you’ve ruined me for anyone. You’ve turned my life into a series of mishaps and mistakes and awful nights and even worse mornings after, but I still keep going back to you. And you’re always there.

Which is why even though I’m scared and angry and confused as all hell, I’m going to bow out of happy hours. Pour out the vodka in my freezer. Head to A.A. I’m going to try to walk away from the twisted life we’ve created together. But I’m keeping the wine glasses in my cabinet. Just in case.

This piece originally appeared on The Fix, a website about addiction and recovery. J.L. Scott is the pseudonym for a prominent magazine writer who lives in New York.

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I don’t know about you, but I drank like a fish in college. Part of the reason was that alcohol was everywhere: free and cheap. The “campus pub” across the commons from my dorm (yes, the drinking age was lower then) offered one dollar kamikaze shots in little plastic shot glasses, so we’d line em up on the bar. Fraternity parties lured unsuspecting freshmen girls with free beer (even if it did taste like water).

So–does free and cheap booze lead to binge drinking? Which came first–the chicken (in this case, the eager freshmen) or the egg?

The UK is dealing with this problem in a big way, especially since the statistics about rising alcohol use are sobering. According to the Economist: “In the past 50 years Britons’ consumption of alcohol has more than doubled, though it remains somewhat lower than it was at the start of the 20th century. British livers are feeling the strain: cases of cirrhosis are on the increase, just as they are declining elsewhere in Europe. The national binge has at least in part been caused by low prices: although booze has got more expensive in real terms over the past 30 years, it has become a lot cheaper relative to earnings, and is about 70% more affordable now than it was in 1980.”

In some supermarkets in Great Britain (Sainsbury’s and Tesco, for example), beer is cheaper than bottled water. At Sainsbury’s, a two litre plastic bottle of alcoholic “cider” costs the equivalent of $1.94, according to the Economist. Also on the shelves: an even stronger variety of cider, with the incentive that the more you buy, the deeper the discount will be.

Does dirt-cheap alcohol cause people to drink more than they normally would? Supporters of a growing temperance movement in the UK, along with health experts, are saying it does, and they are seeking to end the sale of cheap booze. A compelling parliamentary report released in December detailed Britain’s growing alcohol problems, but the government has yet to approve minimum pricing laws.

Instead, on Tuesday, according to the Huffington Post, the government said it would ban “irresponsible promotions and boozy contests such as the “dentist’s chair”–where alcohol is poured directly into customers’ mouths – in an effort to tackle Britain’s binge-drinking problem.”

Some feel that it’s unfair to take away cheap booze during a recession, and they argue that if minimum pricing is enforced, responsible drinkers will be unfairly penalized. I say: As much as I love my ice cream and my wine, those are luxuries, so I don’t mind if they’re priced a bit higher. And I don’t really need a stockpile of cheap ice cream or wine in my fridge to tempt me.

So what do you think? Do you think cheap booze encourages drinking? Do you mind paying a bit more for your luxuries?  Can you imagine if stores did 2 for 1′s and promos on fresh fruits and vegetables instead of junk food and cheap liquor? I’m just saying..