Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [0]
THE DISTILLED
Kingsley Amis
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Muse of Booze
by Christopher Hitchens
Editor’s Note and Glossary
I. ON DRINK
Introduction
Drinking Literature
Actual Drinks
Tools of the Trade
The Store Cupboard
First Thoughts on Wine
Further Thoughts on Wine
Wine Shopper’s Guide
What to Drink with What
Abroad
Mean Sod’s Guide
(Incorporating Mean Slag’s Guide)
The Hangover
The Boozing Man’s Diet
How Not to Get Drunk
II. EVERY DAY DRINKING
III. HOW’S YOUR GLASS?
Introduction
List of Abbreviations
Quizzes
Wine—Elementary
Wine—Intermediate
Wine—Advanced
Wine—France
Wine—Germany
Wine—Italy, Spain, Portugal
Wines—Others
Beer in General
Beer in Particular
Vodka
Aperitifs and Such
Gin
Liqueurs
Rum
Cognac and Armagnac
Brandy (One Step Down)
Distillation
Minor Spirits
Scotch Whiskey I
Scotch Whiskey II
Whiskies and Whiskeys
Port
Sherry
Madeira, Marsala and Others
Cocktails and Mixed Drinks
Inventors and Inventions
Pousse-Café I
Pousse-Café II
Pousse-Café III
Alcohol and Your Interior
Answers
Introduction
THE MUSE OF BOOZE
IT’S REASONABLY WELL known that the arts of brewing and fermenting arose in nice time for the dawn of human civilization (there are ancient poems and mosaics and that sort of thing, dedicated to the celebration of the fact), but it’s at least as notorious that an opened flask of alcohol is a mouth that can lead to hell as well as heaven. This being the case—and one day we shall work out the etymology that leads us to use the simple Italian word for a bottle, fiasco, in the way that we do—then it is as well to have a true Virgil to be our guide through the regions infernal as well as paradisiac.
The late Sir Kingsley Amis (who wrote these slender but thoughtful volumes before receiving his knighthood and who was also the expert to consult on things like the derivation of fiasco) was what the Irish call “your man” when it came to the subject of drink. More perhaps even than of Graham Greene, of whom he once wrote a short biography, it could be said that the booze was his muse. I cannot think of any of his fictional work in which it does not play a role, and in several of his novels that role is dominant. (The famous hangover scene in Lucky Jim, not equaled for alcoholic comedy in our literature even by Shakespeare’s night porter or portly knight, has only one rival that I can call to mind, and that is Peter Fallow’s appalling waking moment in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.) Fiascos apart, other Amis books like One Fat Englishman and The Green Man contain some incidentally sapient advice about how to keep drinking and yet remain functional.
It has been said that alcohol is a good servant and a bad master. Nice try. The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring. Kingsley grasped this essential fact very early in life, and (so to speak) never let go of the insight. This does not mean that there are not wine bores, single-malt bores, and people who become even more boring when they themselves have a tipple. You will meet them, and learn how to recognize them (and also how to deal with them) in these pages.
In my opinion Kingers—which I was allowed to call him—was himself a very slight cocktail bore. Or, at least, he had to affect to be such in order to bang out a regular column on drinks for the pages of a magazine aimed at the male population. In “real” life, Amis was a no-nonsense drinker with little inclination to waste a good barman’s time with fussy instructions. However, there was an exception which I think I can diagnose in retrospect, and it is related to his strong admiration for the novels of Ian Fleming. What is James Bond really doing when he specifies the kind of martini he wants and how he wants it? He is telling the barman (or bartender if you must) that he knows what he is talking about and is not to be messed around. I learned the same lesson when I was a restaurant and bar critic for the City Paper in Washington, D.C. Having long been annoyed by