Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [43]
One worthy variant is wine and fizzy lemonade, which means you can forget the sugar—perfectly okay. What is not okay is short-changing on the wine. It should be cheap but drinkable, good enough to be drinkable on its own, in fact. Although this is a Spanish tipple, the Spanish reds you get in this country are in my experience to be treated with reserve, and I would go for something modest from France or Italy.
When you next see fresh limes on offer, grab a couple of dozen and a couple of bottles of rum—the Jamaica is the best for this—and give a Planters Punch party. There are dozens of recipes. The traditional version, a kind of rhyme, specifies one part of sour (lime juice), two of sweet (sugar), three of strong (rum), four of weak (soda water and ice). Very good, but perhaps a little bland. I prefer the so-called American formula, one sweet, two sour, three weak, four strong. Serve in tall glasses, with sprigs of mint, a maraschino cherry and straws for the full treatment.
Here is a Victorian recipe for something called a Cool Cup, unusual but straightforward. Take a quarter of a pint of Amontillado sherry and stir in sweetened lemon juice, say one lemon and 6 teaspoons of sugar. Add ice cubes, stir and pour in a quart bottle of chilled dry cider. The book tells you to add a sprig of borage, thyme or mint but here you can afford to suit yourself. Makes 10 drinks.
If you have a bit of money to throw around, try what Cyril Ray calls his Swagger Sling. This is a bottle of champagne, a bottle of claret, a glass of brandy, a glass of Grand Marnier, lemon and sugar and nothing else. No ice, he says. Chill the ingredients beforehand. Calculated to put young ladies completely at their ease.
Shandy is an old hot-weather drink on which the great and thirsty Evelyn Waugh produced his own variation. Put into a silver tankard, or failing that a pint glass, some ice cubes, one or two double gins according to mood, and a bottle of Guinness. Fill up with ginger beer. One advantage of this is that you can get it run up for you in the pub. Or, of course, club.
Warning: when your host offers you anything called any sort of punch or cup, try to avoid it unless you trust him and/or have had a peep at the bottles the stuff has come out of. Some chaps seem to think that any old muck is good enough if you ice it and throw some fruit into it.
The Dry Martini is the most famous and the best cocktail in the world. It was probably invented in New York about 1910 and some say it was the favourite tipple of John D. Rockefeller, the original oil tycoon. (He died at the age of ninety-eight, a fact worth remembering when you find yourself under attack for excessive boozing.)
The basic ingredients are gin and dry vermouth. Any nationally known gin is suitable, but the vermouth must be Martini Rossi dry—the name is a coincidence, nothing to do with the name of the cocktail. The standard recipe tells you to pour four measures of gin and one of vermouth into a jug half full of ice, stir vigorously for at least half a minute, strain, and serve in small, stemmed glasses.
There are variations on this. Some authorities, including James Bond, recommend shaking rather than stirring the mixture, which looks good but which I regard as a bit flashy. Rockefeller and his chums probably drank equal parts of gin and vermouth. Since then, people have come to prefer their Martinis drier and drier, i.e. with less and less vermouth. Sixteen parts gin to one vermouth is nowadays considered quite normal. Anyway, that’s about how I like it. Finding out by experiment the precise balance you favour is no great ordeal. Don’t hurry it.
Such is the classical or “straight-up” Dry Martini, with ice used in the mixing jug but no ice in the glass. The problem is that it starts to lose its chill from the moment of serving. Far more than any other drink, it deteriorates as it warms up.