I am tackling once again after a long hiatus The Interrogative Mood, by Padgett Powell, a marvelous little novel (?) that consists of nothing but questions. To wit:
“If you had enough money to live on, could you see yourself retiring to a small village in France and never being heard of or from again, and not speaking French when there, mostly because you can’t, but also because you have nothing to say and you’d have no one to say it to if you had something to say, and mostly just sleeping in your quaint medieval stone cottage? Could you make do with a little exercise once in a while and a piece of Beaufort of very high quality? And maybe a look-in on the pigs? What if the cartoonist R. Crumb were your neighbor?”
And that’s where I had to stop reading.
I am in Beaufort, SC, and the Writer’s Almanac email this morning heralded R. Crumb’s birthday, noting that he had retired to a chateau in France.
This kind of thing happens to me all the time, and it’s unnerving. Usually it’s with the crossword puzzle: this morning I read that Slawomir Mrozek, the Czech playwright had died, and I mentioned it to my lovely first wife, who was doing the crossword puzzle. I reminded her of the the production of The Cuttlefish for which we had had to work on costumes at UGA—I was mistaken: Cuttlefish was by Witkiewicz—and she immediately said, “The clue I’m looking at is ‘cuttlefish kin.'”
In yesterday’s post, I began rambling about the joys and challenges of exploring vintage cocktails, those drinks that have vanished from the beau monde for one reason or the other, and we had gotten to the part where I’m enumerating the problems that arise with this hobby.
The first one was availability of materials, and it’s often a problem in Jigger, Beaker, & Glass, since it’s a reprint of a book from the 30s. Everybody used to have pastis just sitting around, I suppose, but today you really have to look for it.
It’s not as much of a problem with this book:
Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, by Ted Haigh (no really), is a spiral-bound notebook of 100 recipes, accompanied by their histories and photographs of period bottles, etc. Mr. Haigh (no really) made availability of materials part of the criteria for inclusion, and where the liquid in question no longer exists he lists acceptable substitutes. There are still rarities—it took me forever to find Parfait Amour, for example, and that was before I got this book—but on the whole it’s a great book in that regard.
In fact, Mr. Haigh relates how he was involved with the revival of bitters as a staple of the 21st century bar. I remember recipes calling for something as simple as orange bitters, and for the longest time there was no such thing on the market. Finally my friend Jim discovered that the Fee Bros. were making bitters again (and Mr. Haigh talks about that), and he sent me a starter kit of orange bitters, orange blossom water, mint bitters, and regular Fee Bros. bitters. Now of course there are all kinds of bitters on the market. I’ve added lemon and grapefruit bitters, plus Peychaud’s from New Orleans. Celery is next on my list.
I have taken to writing notes on the drinks in the margins, both in Forgotten Cocktails and J/B/G, so that I remember from one exploration to the next what I thought of any particular drink, including any notes to changes I might make the next time I make it. I feel like the Half-Blood Prince.
And that leads to our second problem: vintage cocktails often taste funny. Charles Baker lays down very strict rules about the number of ingredients in J/B/G, so that helps avoid the car crashes of some of today’s libations, but tastes change. Most of those neo-glamorous Mad Men cocktails, for example, are sweeter than you might be used to.
A great many of the Forgotten Cocktails involve fortified/aperitif wines like vermouth or Lillet Blanc or Dubonnet Rouge, and to my palate they tend to overwhelm most cocktails. (I am one of those who will shake gin in a shaker, pour it into the martini glass, then spray a light mist of vermouth on top and call it a martini.) In the front of the book I have written that many of these cocktails have “a sticky/sweet foretaste, a bitter aftertaste, and a vermouth-like overtone.” I then abbreviate that as SBVO for use throughout the book, and I tend to avoid recipes with more than a hint of vermouth.
Having said that, Forgotten Cocktails is more successful than J/B/G in its selection. (I don’t think J/B/G was curated so much as poured out.) Some of Baker’s concoctions are just plain funky tasting; most of Haigh’s are at least valid even I don’t like them.
The problem of taste means that once you’ve mixed one of these and you find that the thing is an assault on your sensibilities—what then? Be resolute, my friend, and dump it. Straight into the sink. Don’t be a man about it and finish the nasty thing, or worse, finish it because it would be a “waste.” Dump it.
Because we have to consider the third problem: Exploring these recipes can make for a very short night. You are after all pouring a lot of alcohol down your throat, and it would be smart to stop before consuming three. Don’t waste one of your slots on a vile drink. Toss it and pick a new one.
The sensible option, of course, is to make a tiny version using the proportions of the recipe. Teaspoons instead of ounces, so that you’re swallowing a tablespoon instead of half a cup.
For this you need the following device:
It has a four-ounce capacity, and it’s marked for tablespoons, teaspoons, ounces, and milliliters. It’s an excellent way to make a tiny Algonquin Cocktail so you can confirm that it has too much vermouth in it ever to pass your lips again, without having to waste a whole jigger of rye.
So what fabu cocktails have I discovered that have become part of my stable of offerings?
The Miyako Hotel Special is one of my earliest discoveries (in J/B/G): gin, Grand Marnier, pineapple juice. Yummy.
The Gin-Blind: gin, cognac, curaçao, orange bitters
From Forgotten Cocktails so far:
The Pegu Club Cocktail… and friend
The Bebbo: gin, lemon juice, honey, orange juice
The Brandy Crusta: lemon juice, cognac, orange curaçao, bitters
The Corpse Reviver #2: gin, Cointreau, Lillet Blanc, lemon juice, drops of absinthe
The Honeymoon: Calvados, Benedictine, orange curaçao, lemon juice
The Jack Rose: applejack, lime juice, grenadine
The Jupiter: gin, dry vermouth, Parfait Amour, orange juice
The Mamie Taylor: scotch, lime juice, ginger beer
The Monkey Gland: gin, orange juice, grenadine, absinthe (This one is phenomenal!)
The Moscow Mule: lime juice, vodka, ginger beer
The Pegu Club: gin, Cointreau, lime juice, bitters (This one is also phenomenal!)
The Seelbach: bourbon, Cointreau, Angostura and Peychaud’s bitters, champagne
The Twentieth Century (as in the train): gin, Lillet Blanc, creme de cacao, lemon juice
The Vesper (yes, the James Bond martini): gin, vodka, Lillet Blanc
The Widow’s Kiss: Calvados, Chartreuse, Benedictine, bitters
Those are the ones I’ve tried and would repeat. There are quite a few I haven’t tried yet for lack of the proper ingredients. (Swedish Punsch, anyone?)
I like my hobby—it’s always a blast to discover a cocktail from another age. It keeps the palate from getting bored with the quotidian gin & tonic, but beware: once you start down this path you will have one more problem facing you, and that is that these are in fact forgotten cocktails. You have to type your favorites into your notes and be prepared to whip out your iPhone at any point to show a bartender what you want. However, most are extremely obliging if they have the ingredients, and the really good ones already have a copy of Forgotten Cocktails behind the bar.
If you are at all of a drinking disposition—and who among us is not?—you have spent time in bookstores/cookery* stores looking at books of cocktail recipes. (Other than the two main books I am about to discuss here, buy the Ultimate Bar Book and be done with it. Or pony up for the iPhone app Mixologist. Trust me.)
Once your grown-up palate is accustomed to the basics, you start looking abroad, and the first thing you check upon being seated at any new restaurant is the cocktail list. Do they have anything interesting, i.e., not a sweet argle-bargle for the ladies who lunch? Leon’s in Decatur always has the most interesting, but not a lot of it is transferable. What is one to make of their “bullet & trigger”: bulleit rye, zucca amaro, cocchi rosa, cherry, acid phosphate. Wait, what? Hold that thought, it will resurface in a moment.
So as I browse through bookstores/cookery stores, one of my fascinations has been cocktails from the past. What concoctions did our forebears enjoy, how were they made, and why can’t I just step up to the bar and order a “Miyako Hotel Special” without whipping out my iPhone? I present a couple of those here:
These two are just chock full of COCKTAILS EVERYBODY ALREADY KNOWS ABOUT. I mean really, a Manhattan? Or a French 75? Honey, please. These books are just hipster posers for novices.
No, I’m talking about the seriously long-gone concoctions that no one any longer orders. Just imagine Leon’s’s “bullet & trigger” fifty years from now.
Fortunately, I have two books that will sate anyone’s appetite for these things. The first is Jigger, Beaker, & Glass: drinking around the world, by Charles H. Baker, Jr. (It’s a re-issue of Baker’s original Gentleman’s Companion, and I just noticed features a new foreword by the authors of Vintage Cocktails. Oops.)
Baker was a bon vivant who swanned around with Hemingway and the gang back in the 20s and 30s, and he collected cocktails.
From the original preface, in which he pooh-poohs Prohibition:
We also doubt if any lemonade social ever afforded a thrill like the moonlit night in Ceylon when we went to a Hollander friend’s beach bungalow out beyond Galle Face, where we swam in the blood-warm Indian Ocean and drank enough of his Flying Fish cocktails to do, and lay on the cool sand and listened to Tauber sing Dein Ist Mein Ganzes Herz on the gramophone. Then when we swam again we slipped out of our suits to make the water feel better, and finally, when it was very late indeed, we dressed and said goodnight and vowed eternal friendship to our host; then for precisely no reason at all dismissed our waiting carriage with a flourish of gross overpayment and walked all the way back in our evening clothes through a new quiet rain to the jetties and the motor launch, just in time to prevent one of our best American cruising friends from consummating bribery of the Quartermaster on the good ship RESOLUTE into letting him hoist a purchased baby elephant—whom he said was Edith, and over whom he politely held a Burmese parasol of scarlet oiled silk—from a hired barge onto the forward cargo hatch in a sling!
Well, hello sailor!
Here he is talking about an actual cocktail:
THE RANGOON STAR RUBY, a Wonderful & Stimulating Cocktail from Lower-Burmah
In 1926 we disembarked in Burmah from a round-the-world ship, and spent several days there before hopping off to Calcutta in a little “Bibby” boat carrying a mess of Mohammedan pilgrims headed for Mecca as deck passengers, and who did all their own cooking right down there in plain sight. In Rangoon we joined up with several folk in the Strand bar of evenings to chin about the romantic Mandalay country far up the Irrawaddy River, and to talk over gems with Hamid and his brother from Colombo and Bombay, and to acquire a really fine zircon for someone else and a set of star sapphire dress studs for ourself. One American headed out on leave from certain ruby mining operations up-country told us he had invented himself a drink that everyone up at headquarters liked so well he was going to shout it to the world so that no man might be denied its virtues. He popped behind the bar before we could say “knife” and whipped up the following mixture which, due to its color, he had christened the Star Ruby.
Take 1 jigger of good cognac, 1/2 pony of cherry brandy, 1/2 pony of French vermouth, 2 dashes each of orange bitters and lemon phosphate, then for added flavour 1 tsp of kirsch, or 1/2 tsp of maraschino. Shake with finely cracked ice, pour into a wine glass leaving a little ice floating, and let fall 6 drops of grenadine in the center of this chilly expanse for the ruby color touch.
Who can resist that kind of style? However, the experienced drinkers among us will already recognize a couple of problems.
Our first problem with vintage cocktails: many of the ingredients are no longer freely available. Lemon phosphate, anyone? (Well, actually…) It’s like trying to make a bullet & trigger at home. (And don’t get me started on Cynar, which shows up with depressing regularity in modern cocktails, or at least did last year, and which is unavailable in any liquor store I’ve checked.)
And even the ones that are freely available—who has all that stuff lying about? It leads to madness, trying to collect all those liqueurs and mixers and bitters and phosphates, and I should know: my bar now occupies the 1920s French pastry display case in my living room, two shelves in the front hall closet, and a separate bar for single malt scotches in the playroom downstairs. But, hey, I can make you almost anything but a bullet & trigger.
It’s lunchtime, and I will postpone my further ramblings (and the second book) till tomorrow.
_____
* Cookery was the actual, honest-to-God subject heading from the Sears List of Subject Headings the last time I looked. I think. The PTB might have changed it to Cooking before I left the media center, but I don’t think so.
I know, I haven’t written about the labyrinth recently. For that matter, I haven’t written anything recently, but I’m hoping to change that in the next few days.
Yes, I lost my dream job and will probably never see the Magic Square again, but hey, let’s not bicker about who killed whom, let’s check in with my second-favorite spot on the planet. (Seriously, I will blog about all that. Some day.)
The large problem this summer is that the place is absolutely sodden. It’s a marsh out there, and the rain does not promise to let up even this week. It let up enough last Tuesday for me to get out there and reseed it where it was absolutely nothing but bare dirt, and for that the constant rain has been a benefit: barely a week later and tiny little wires of fescue are poking out of the dirt now.
Hardly worth admiring at this point, and it certainly precludes any use of the facility for another couple of weeks.
But there are a few things to admire at this point. I was out there this afternoon and was delighted to see these:
These are spider lilies, and what is now the labyrinth used to be covered with them. This was 20 years ago before we added onto the house, and the excavation of the basement dumped three feet of clay onto what had been very luscious soil. As the link discusses, they pop up out of nowhere, and they’re quite lovely. I’d love to have more of them return. Perhaps I should go back to that link and buy some?
Next to the lilies is our old friend Apollo:
Doesn’t he look radiant in the setting sun? Those are Dixie Wood Ferns behind him, plus ivy which will be beaten back as soon as I can get back out there. His patina is real, because he’s really bronze.
His counterpart, the Dancing Faun/Dionsyus:
His corner, downhill from all the rain as it is, definitely needs some cleaning up. Those are bristle ferns behind him, I think, along with some errant ivy and vinca major.
And finally, the northpoint:
Some tidying to do, but the outgrowth of the peacock fern is exactly what I had planned. The clusters of tall fescue are kind of nice as well, although for the life of me I can’t understand why it infests the northern bank and won’t grow just one stone over on the path.
With any luck, the rain will begin to clear out this week and I will be able to get back there and really do some maintenance in preparation for the Vernal Equinox. In the meantime, I need to get out there right now and see if the full moon is at all visible…
Walking around the Magic Square tonight, I witnessed scores of kids playing a game called Manhunt in the deepening evening out on West Lawn. (Essentially, it’s a land-based version of the swimming game Sharks and Minnows.) I was reminded of the game of Tiger, that I and my siblings invented around 50 years ago (really??) to play in our grandmother’s back yard.
We played it endlessly, from summer dusk until deep night, and it never paled. Even now, I think I would enjoy a good game if I could keep up with the young.
I came up with the idea after watching some television program about some explorer/adventurer—Lowell Thomas, perhaps?—who was “hunting” tigers in India. What struck me dumb was the fact that the narrator adventurer was safely ensconced atop an elephant while native beaters went ahead in the waist-high grass, wherein a tiger might very well be lurking. It might have been a man-eating tiger terrorizing the village, even. It was damned creepy.
Anyway, the vacant lot down on the corner of Winfield and Dixon had at the time a small field of tall, dry grass, and so we played at the experience. It was fun, and we soon codified it into a game.
The rules are simple:
There is a Home base. Everyone gathers at Home.
One person is the Tiger. The Tiger goes and hides somewhere on the grounds. (Strict boundaries must be set, of course.)
After a decent amount of time, the rest of us call out, “READY?”
If the Tiger is not ready, he simply yells, “NO!” and we wait a little while longer.
But if he is ready, there is silence… deadly, deadly silence.
Then we all go hunt the Tiger.
If you find the Tiger, you yell, “TIGER!”; the tiger springs out with a roar; and you sprint for Home. So does everyone else, needless to say.
The Tiger attempts to tag as many people as he can before they reach Home.
The last person tagged becomes the next Tiger.
That’s it, just a simple little reverse Hide and Seek. But oh, the variations!
The Tiger, for example, is under no obligation to pop out upon being discovered, forcing the hunters to come closer to verify his hiding place. (Any person who touches Home before the Tiger actually pops out is tagged.)
Nor is the Tiger obligated to remain hidden until someone discovers him, perhaps waiting until all the hunters have passed him by and then springing out between them and Home. A particularly crafty Tiger might not even hide to begin with, just sneaking around in the gloom until he can spring out behind all the hunters.
As a hunter, you have options. Sacrificing a little sister is one, for example. Another is forcing the Tiger to chase you all the way around the house, staying just close enough to make it not effective for him to double back, so that you can dash for Home. You could, if the Tiger is already guarding home, hide yourself and force him to come looking for you. (Standoffs at Home which dragged on too long could be terminated by majority vote and a subsequent countdown.)
There were five of us, plus any friends we had along for the trip, and so we always had enough to make the game interesting and complex. Some of us were eager to be the Tiger, mainly because they had evil evil souls. Others were as scared of hiding in the azaleas as they were of the Tiger itself. Some hunted in groups, others headed off alone. Was the location of a “NO!” a clue as to where the Tiger might be, or (remembering the evil evil souls) a deliberate deception? You can see how it might be addictive.
All in all, a game worthy of promulgation and preservation.
Last night, a very strange thing happened: I got to hear one of my pieces performed. Live.
The composer and his Muse
Maila Springfield, that goddess of the piano, asked me to write her something that she could play when performing with her estimable husband David and another friend. She was their accompanist, and she wanted something cool for herself. That was in 2009/10, and so when I took the summer of 2010 off, that became my project.
The result was Six preludes (no fugues), and I think I did an admirable job, if I do say so myself.
Maila premiered them in the fall of 2011, but I didn’t get to hear them because of something something argle bargle. Last summer, after the Music Faculty Recital, she confessed to me that she thought about asking to perform them but didn’t think I’d like it. Conflict of interest, etc. I set her mind at ease: any time you want to play them out loud with me in the audience is fine with me.
And so this year she did.
Wow. She launched into #1 with a ferocity that took my breath away (and I think a lot of the audience’s). #2 was gorgeous. #3 was once again everyone’s favorite. #4 was quiet, sustained, simple. #5 was massive, and the ending rocked me back in my seat. #6 wended its way through each variation, and the ending was boffo. The crowd went wild.
She did lose her way in #1, a ferocious little two-part invention that careens down the keyboard like some X-treme snowboarder in an 11-measure passage before sticking the dismount at the bottom, and then jumping back to the top and doing it again. She said, “I don’t know what happened; I looked up and suddenly didn’t know where I was. I shouldn’t have looked up!” She’s wonderful.
It has inspired me to wish I were actually working on Five Easier Pieces for her.
It seems that I missed the party at which the young UGA ladies were to be fêted. Although I was not given a deadline before which I needed to develop the signature cocktail, I nonetheless feel bad.
I have assuaged my guilt by revisiting one of the drinks I explored during the process. Unfortunately, all I could remember that it was a tequila/pomegranate concoction, i.e., a margarita with pomegranate juice (of which I now had a refrigerator-plenty). I could have gone in search of it, but overcome by my grief, I just made up a new version. I’m sure it had a name already but since I had to reimagine the whole thing, I’ve given it a new name.
Srta. Dawg
1-1/2 oz. tequila, your choice, but for the love of Dionysus, don’t use cheap stuff
1 oz. orange brandy, e.g., Grand Marnier
3 oz. cranberry/pomegranate juice
black salt
lime wedge
Rim the glass with the lime wedge and black salt; dump the wedge into the glass with ice. Pour all the other stuff into the glass. Drink.
The combination of the salt and the sweetness of the juice is a very nice touch.
If I choose to make another one—it is Cinco de Mayo, that distinctive American holiday—I’ll take a photo.
I was asked recently to come up with a red and black cocktail for an upcoming graduation party, and so I’ve spent a lot of time playing with some interesting and not very appealing combinations. It devolved into looking at any recipe online that had a picture of a red drink.
However, last night I got down to basics, and here’s my proposed solution:
Ms. Dawg
1 oz. orange brandy, e.g., Grand Marnier
1 oz. cranberry/pomegranate juice
1 tsp. blood orange bitters
champagne/prosecco
lime
black sugar
Take a small slice of lime and juice the rim of a champagne flute. Rim with black sugar. Drop the lime slice into the flute. Add the first three ingredients, then top off with champagne or prosecco.
Some helpful tips: Make your own Grand Marnier. (This is also useful.) The blood orange bitters is amazingly available at Publix in the mixer section. I haven’t checked locally, but both Michael’s and Hobby Lobby should carry Wilton Black Sugar.
Other than the black sugar rims making the young ladies at the party look awfully Goth, it should be a hit.
“If you had enough money to live on, could you see yourself retiring to a small village in France and never being heard of or from again, and not speaking French when there, mostly because you can’t, but also because you have nothing to say and you’d have no one to say it to if you had something to say, and mostly just sleeping in your quaint medieval stone cottage? Could you make do with a little exercise once in a while and a piece of Beaufort of very high quality? And maybe a look-in on the pigs? What if the cartoonist R. Crumb were your neighbor?”
Ms. Dawg
4/23/13, 10:36 pm