Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [10]
The Salty Dog
1 part gin
2 parts fresh grapefruit juice
Salt
Ice cubes
Take two saucers and fill one with plain water, the other with table salt. Moisten the rim of each glass and then twirl it about in the salt, so that it picks up a thickish coating about a quarter of an inch deep. Carefully add the gin and juice, stir, add ice, stir, and drink through the band of salt. You either like it or not.
The MacCossack
Equal parts of vodka and green ginger wine poured over ice. Very good if you like ginger wine (and vodka). I do.
The Kingers
2 parts montilla
1 part fresh orange juice
1 small shake Angostura bitters
Ice cubes
Montilla is a lightly fortified wine from Spain, similar to sherry (as the sherry-growers, a couple of hundred miles down the road, have often taken advantage of noticing in an unproductive year), but nuttier: well worth drinking, chilled, on its own. The present drink is a sort of cobbler—if you think that means it will mend your shoes, you are wrong. Just mix everything together, stir with ice, remove the ice and serve.
The Dizzy Lizzy
4 oz. Chambéry
1 teaspoon framboise
1 teaspoon cognac
1 small shake Angostura bitters
Ice cubes
Chambéry is the classiest French vermouth, and framboise a fine raspberry liqueur. Both are very drinkable on their own, framboise with caution. Mix with ice, remove ice and serve. Named, not all that inappropriately, after its deviser, my wife.
Queen Victoria’s Tipple
½ tumbler red wine
Scotch
I have it on the authority of Colm Brogan that the Great Queen was “violently opposed to teetotalism, consenting to have one cleric promoted to a deanery only if he promised to stop advocating the pernicious heresy,” and that the above was her dinner-table drink, “a concoction that startled Gladstone”—as I can well believe.
The original recipe calls for claret, but anything better than the merely tolerable will be wasted. The quantity of Scotch is up to you, but I recommend stopping a good deal short of the top of the tumbler. Worth trying once.
Scholars will visualize, pouring in the whisky, the hand of John Brown, the Queen’s Highland servant, confidant and possibly more besides; and I for one, if I listen carefully, can hear him muttering, “Och, Your Majesty, dinna mak’ yoursel’ unweel wi’ a’ yon parleyvoo moothwash—ha’e a wee dram o’ guid malt forbye.” Or words to that effect.
The Old-Fashioned
Theoretically, one should be able to make up a lot of this in advance, but I have never done so successfully. For each drink, then, take
1 huge slug bourbon whiskey (say 4 fl. oz.)
1 level teaspoon castor sugar
As little hot water as will dissolve the
sugar completely
3 dashes Angostura bitters
1 hefty squeeze of fresh orange juice
1 teaspoon maraschino-cherry juice
1 slice orange
1 maraschino cherry
3 ice cubes
This is far less complicated and bothersome than it may look, and the result is the only cocktail really to rival the martini and its variants. Put the dissolved sugar into a glass, add the bitters, the juices and the whiskey, and stir furiously. Add the ice cubes and stir again. Lastly, push the orange slice down alongside the ice, drop in the cherry, and serve. You may supply drinking-straws if it is that sort of party.
Note. You really have to use bourbon. The Rye Old-Fashioned is not too bad; the Irish version just tolerable; the Scotch one not worth while.
The (Whiskey) Manhattan
4 parts bourbon whiskey
1 part Italian (red) vermouth
1 dash or so Angostura bitters
1 maraschino cherry
Ice cubes
As above, stir the fluids together very hard before adding the ice and fruit. Whatever the pundits may say, this is in practice the not very energetic man’s Old-Fashioned, and is an excellent drink, though never, I think, as good as a properly made Old-Fashioned, As above, again, or even more so, you really have