Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [17]
4. A Highball or Collins glass. In other words, a tall thin tumbler holding 11 or 12 ounces or something over half a pint. This will do for all long drinks from gin and tonic onwards. You can serve beer in it if pushed, but at the cost of hand-heating, and on this and other grounds I favour
5. A beer glass. The familiar pub tankard with handle. The half-pint size is the more generally useful, but a few pint ones will come in handy, not only for pints, but for Pimm’s* (the presence of ice and all that vegetation makes the half-pint Pimm’s a rather short-weight affair) and long drinks that froth up a lot, like Black Velvet. (It goes against the grain to have to spell out such common knowledge in a treatise on the present level, but this “sour and invigorating draught,” as Evelyn Waugh called it, consists of equal parts of chilled Guinness and chilled champagne, with the latter put in first. Try it with a sweeter stout if the champagne, or your stomach, is on the acid side.) These glasses are not always easy to come by. Inquire from your wine merchant or at your off-licence.
No, Sir, claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero [smiling] must drink brandy . . . Brandy will do soonest for a man what drinking can do for him.
—SAMUEL JOHNSON
* Few such things are more worth the trouble than adding a little cucumber juice and lemon juice to each portion of Pimm’s.
THE STORE CUPBOARD
. . . IS NOT THE same place as the cellar or the larder or wherever you keep your stock for daily use. In other words, I am not insulting your (in many respects) considerable intelligence by letting you know that to lay in some gin, wine, beer, etc., is a good idea if you want to get a spot of drinking done; I am taking up an earlier point of mine about the relatively uncommon liquors called for in some cocktail and other recipes, and will go on to suggest a basic set that will enable you to try your hand at some of the more out-of-the-way mixtures. A small basic set: to be in a position to make every drink in David Embury’s book, for instance, would call for a store cupboard, or room, holding something like four hundred different bottles, not to speak of a small greengrocer-fruiterer’s shop and a miniature dairy.
The liquors referred to are mostly liqueurs. (I know the latter are primarily intended to be drunk separately; I know too how it feels next day to have drunk a lot of one or more of them separately—see The Hangover.) A general word on these fatal Cleopatras of the world of booze comes in quite handily here. They are not really worth individual notice, except for kitró, little known and so justifying a brief digression. Kitró is little known because you have to go to the Greek island of Naxos to get it—the neighbouring island of Ios produces another and slightly less nectarean version. They do not export it even to the Greek mainland; at any rate, I have never found it there after plenty of looking. It is based on the lemon, but seemingly on the rind as well as the juice, hence its peculiar tang. Should you find yourself in Athens, you seriously should make the trip to Naxos, or Ios, and come away with as many bottles as you can carry. They are nice islands anyhow, even when not seen through a kitró-haze.
To resume, then: a liqueur can be defined as a strong drink with a fruity or herbal flavour. There are two main families: a thinner kind made by distilling the fermented juices of fruits other than the grape, such as pears, strawberries, apples, plums, and a thicker kind made by mingling brandy, sugar, and fruit juice or herbal infusions. The first kind is little used in mixed drinks and need not concern us here. The second kind subdivides, the largest group consisting of liqueurs with an orange flavour. These may be dark in colour— Curaçao, Grand Marnier, Van der Hum: the last is flavoured with a fruit that is