Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [18]
There are other necessary liqueurs which are not interchangeable, which I include below, together with one or two miscellaneous items. Your store cupboard, then, should contain:
1. An orange liqueur.
2. A cherry liqueur.
3. Bénédictine—which needs no introduction.
4. Crème de Menthe—ditto. Pundits say the white sort is better than the green, but I cannot tell the difference in flavour, and the green is much prettier, and you can never find the white anyway.
5. Crème de Cacao. A very thick drink supposedly tasting of cocoa. Gives mixtures an individual twist, but not recommended for drinking straight. The least indispensable on this list.
6. A pseudo-absinthe such as Pernod or Ricard. True absinthe (the name is from a Greek word meaning “undrinkable”) has been illegal in most places for a long time. It is, or was, flavoured with the herb wormwood, which, as the French authorities noticed after years of using absinthe in their army to combat fever, “acts powerfully on the nerve-centres, and causes delirium and hallucinations, followed in some cases by idiocy” (Encyclopaedia Britannica). The perfectly wholesome successors to absinthe are flavoured with anis, or aniseed. The result always reminds me, not unpleasantly, of those paregoric cough-sweets children ate before the war, and I see that paregoric does contain aniseed, but throws in opium, camphor and benzoic acid as well, so I am probably just being nostalgic. Anyway, when recipes call for absinthe, as they can still do if their compilers and revisers have been too ignorant or lazy to make the change, use Pernod or Ricard instead.
Incidentally, what happened about vermouth, which is or was also flavoured with wormwood?—“vermouth” being a French or German attempt to say “wormwood.” Could the idiocy, or bloody foolishness, which comes to afflict the multi-martini-man be the result of the wormwood in the vermouth? No. It is the alcohol, you see. (And I suspect it was the alcohol in the absinthe, too, that caused the trouble all along, when the stuff was taken to excess.)
7. A bottle of orange bitters, a decent-sized one. Avoid the little shakers got up to look like the Angostura article.
8. A bottle of grenadine. A non-alcoholic, sweetened sort of pomegranate juice, nice to look at, odd in flavour—I am never sure whether I like it or not. But quite a few recipes include it.
9. A bottle of sugar syrup, a preparation continually called for in mixed-drink books. To have a supply of it will save you a lot of time when making up, for instance, my Old-Fashioned and Normandy recipes. Concoct it yourself by the following simple method:
Down a stiff drink and keep another by you to see you through the ordeal. Put a pound of castor or cube sugar in a saucepan with half a pint of water and bring the dissolving mixture to the boil. Keep it there for five minutes. Let it cool and pour into an old (clean) spirits bottle. The Constance Spry Cookery Book recommends adding a teaspoon of liquid glucose to the sugar and water, as a guard against later crystallization.
Remember you are dealing with one of the stickiest substances known, so select with forethought the surface where you will do the pouring, and cover it with a month’s old newspapers. For the same reason, bind some flannel or something round your bottle to absorb stray dribbles from its mouth—so see that its neck is long enough—or make a collar for it from one of those plastic sponges that harden when dry.
Your bottleful will last for months, and you will have been constantly patting yourself