Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [42]
The staff, much more often than in the past, are inclined to be indifferent or surly, lazy too, leaving glasses uncleared, ashtrays overflowing and litter piling up. Pride in the job seems to have gone.
And if, despite everything, you look like having a good time, there are Space Invaders machines to distract you and, lately, new improved fruit machines with more advanced lights and noises.
However it started, why does it still go on? Because we put up with it. In shops, in restaurants, in places of entertainment, in pubs, however bad it is, we troop back for more.
British people of all classes hate complaining and making a fuss. I suppose if they ever started to, it wouldn’t be in the pub. But what a nice thought.
The Bloody Mary is a delicious and most sustaining concoction, universally popular, just the thing for a Sunday morning party or pre-brunch session—or indeed any time when the afternoon is vacant. When you’re making up a large quantity of the mixture in advance for an occasion like this, you reckon on using a rather more elaborate formula than the simple double vodka, plus tomato cocktail, plus Worcester sauce you get in the pub, perfectly good as that is.
My recipe, perfected after years of experiment, goes like this (the proportions are not critical): ½ bottle vodka, 2 pints tomato juice, 2 tablespoons tomato ketchup, 4 tablespoons orange juice, 4 tablespoons lemon juice, 1 tablespoon (perhaps more) Worcester sauce, 1 flat teaspoon celery salt, and lots of ice. Other recipes include tabasco, cayenne pepper and similar heat-producing agents. Best avoided—it’s all too easy to overspice this drink.
Mixing the ingredients together is no problem with a blender. In its absence, put the vodka in some smallish container and stir the ketchup into it till fully emulsified, add celery salt and stir till all lumps are broken up, then stir in the orange and lemon juice. Add this mixture to the tomato juice in large jug, stir vigorously with ice and remove ice before serving in wineglasses. Makes 12–15 drinks.
Doing all this is quite a lot of trouble, as making good drinks always is, but if you really want to be told you make marvellous Bloody Marys, as opposed to just being given a grunt of thanks at best, you will find it well worthwhile. What does the trick is the blandness of the orange juice, which seems to soften the acidity of the lemon juice, and even more the sugar in the ketchup. Although they don’t much care for being told so, quite a lot of people in this country don’t like dry drinks and often prefer a hint of sweetness. (Remember this when choosing wine for dinner parties.)
With mixed drinks you can sometimes cut corners, and with this one the cheapest supermarket vodka will do very well, but the tomato juice must be the most expensive you can reasonably find; make sure, though, that it’s free of added flavouring. The fruit juices must, of course, be fresh and freshly squeezed.
This is a sustaining drink, as I said, which means among other things that it fills you up. Bear this in mind when you come to feed the fellows. Instead of any kind of full-dress lunch, give them cold cuts, salads, baked potatoes, cheese, that kind of thing. In winter you can probably rise to a soup. Keep beer and some light wine handy, but their lack of enthusiasm for this is likely to be quite noticeable as, clutching what may or may not be their last Bloody Mary, they slump down at the table.
The Bloody Mary is sometimes thought to be good for hangovers. This seems odd to me. All those acid fruit juices, plus Worcester sauce, would be apt to go down rather badly on any sort of upset stomach. A whisky and dry ginger is far kinder.
The most popular summery or out-of-doorsy drink is undoubtedly Sangria, that old Spanish concoction with the three great advantages of being cheap, easy to make up and pretty harmless—so that you can drink a lot of it without falling down. The standard recipe calls for red wine and soda water in the proportion of two to one plus a spot of sugar, say four teaspoons per bottle of wine melted