Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [105]
(e) Even worse, and so not asked for, gin—the French 75.
8. (a) Rum
(b) Strega
(c) Benedictine
(d) Drambuie
(e) Galliano.
9. (a) Gin, lime-juice, sugar.
(b) Brandy, Cointreau, lemon-juice.
(c) Vodka, orange-juice.
(d) Brandy, white Crème de menthe. A favourite of James Bond’s.
(e) Gin, cherry brandy, lemon-juice, sugar. But there are a dozen different recipes.
10. (a) Tequila, Galliano, orange-juice.
(b) Vodka, Galliano, orange-juice.
(c) White rum, Blue Curaçao, pineapple-juice, coconut cream.
(d) As (c), omitting Curaçao.
(e) Scotch or bourbon, Amaretto.
INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS
1. Angostura bitters. Siegert worked in the hospital at the river-port of Angostura (which is Spanish for “narrows”), not long afterwards renamed Ciudad Bolívar. His bitters were intended as a tonic and digestive remedy. See Aperitifs and Such, q 8.
2. The continuous or patent or Coffey still. Coffey showed his invention to the Irish distillers, who didn’t want to know, then to Scottish or Scotch ones, who did. The Coffey still, not much modified, is used to this day for the making of grain whisky, gin, vodka and other spirits.
3. The continuous still. Stein came up with his invention five years before Coffey, but was superseded. His name may sound German to some people, but there have been Steins in England and Scotland literally as far back as 1066.
4. The Kir (rhymes with “beer”), an aperitif of Cassis blackcurrant liqueur topped up with white Burgundy. Félix—to give him his accent—was a mayor of Dijon, where Cassis comes from.
5. Absinthe, an infusion of wormwood (“Artemisia absinthia”) and other herbs in alcohol. Not specially more harmful than other strong drinks, but thought to be, and banned in many places for many years. Once thought to be an aphrodisiac. The most successful brand was Pernod. Present-day Pernod is flavoured with aniseed.
6. Jean-Antoine Chaptal, Napoleon’s Minister of Agriculture, authorized and encouraged it. He was faced with a glut of sugar-beet and a rash of under-strength wines.
7. Eugène Charmat, a Bordeaux chemist, in the last century. Sometimes called the Charmat process or method.
8. Bartholomew Sikes, an English excise officer, in 1816. The Sikes system is in process of being replaced by the percentage-of-alcohol-by-volume system, whereby 70° = 40 per cent. See Pousse-Café I, q 9.
9. Dom Perignon, cellarer of an abbey near Epernay, certainly had champagne-as-we-know-it going in France by 1700, but there is evidence to show that English importers had anticipated him in the 1660s. See Patrick Forbes, “Champagne,” 1977.
10. Martini di Arma di Taggia, barman of the Knickerbocker Hotel (where it was also or earlier known as the Knicker-bocker Cocktail), nyc, 1910. Jerry Thomas, a California barman, invented the Martinez Cocktail, a different drink. Martini Rossi Ltd make vermouth. The Martini-Henry gives a different kind of kick, being a nineteenth-century rifle. John Doxat, in his “Stirred, Not Shaken” (1976), puts the case for di Taggia most persuasively. Yet I cannot feel we have found out all there is to be found out of the matter.
POUSSE - CAFÉ I
1. It crushes the grapes without also crushing the pips and releasing their unpalatable oils. Devising a machine to do the same proved not to be easy.
2. A burra peg. A “peg” is nineteenth-century, mainly Anglo-Indian, slang for a drink of spirits, usually brandy and water. “Chota” and “burra” are Hindustani words for “small” and “large.”
3. A glass of Byrrh, a vermouthy brand of wine aperitif. Paris, because a waiter or barman there would be more likely to pretend wittily that he thought that that was what you wanted.
4. True. A cotton-gin is a machine for separating cotton from its seeds. But a gin-mill is punningly a drinking-saloon (US nineteenth century).
5. If you were there. Mascara (a different word from the cosmetic) is a wine-producing district of Algeria—but they probably export it all to Russia for blending.
6. A Dutch mixture of brandy, egg-yolks, sugar and flavouring. Improved when thinned by stirring