Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [44]
I always try a Martini out of curiosity if offered one at a private house. I would never ask for one in a pub, as opposed to a cocktail bar. Even if I got it across that I didn’t want a glass of plain dry vermouth (horrible muck on its own), I would be bound to be given a drink with too much vermouth in it. In an emergency I’d consider calling for a large gin and a small vermouth, dipping my finger in the vermouth and stirring the gin with it.
The best Dry Martini known to man is the one I make myself for myself. In the cold part of the refrigerator I have a bottle of gin and a small wineglass half full of water that has been allowed to freeze.
When the hour strikes I half fill the remaining space with gin, flick in a few drops of vermouth and add a couple of cocktail onions, the small, white, hard kind. Now that is a drink.
There was a man in New York one time who bet he could drink fifteen double Martinis in an hour. He got there all right and collected his money but within another minute fell dead off his bar stool. Knock that back and have another.
“Do you want to muck up your digestion good and proper?” asked a doctor friend over large gins. (Those were not his words but they will have to do.)
“Not particularly,” I said.
“Well, if you ever change your mind, just go to a lot of wine and cheese parties, they’ll do it for you.”
“You mean, because I’d be drinking on a nearly empty stomach?” I asked intelligently.
“No,” he said. “You’re doing that now, but gin on an empty stomach won’t hurt your digestion. Wine will, Think about it.”
I have. Wine has a great deal to be said in its favour, but it has to be treated sensibly. It goes with food—meaning not just that it tastes better with food, though it does, but also that it stimulates the digestive juices. Give them nothing or too little to work on and the result is unlikely to be beneficial. So steer clear of your three or four unaccompanied glasses of rough red.
The other point is that, although wine goes with food, it doesn’t go with all food, or even most food, not in the UK, which is not a wine-producing country. People know a lot of this just by common sense. Not much wine gets drunk with British lowbrow food, such as sausages and baked beans or fish and chips. Beer, stout, or (a favourite of mine) weak whisky and water are what to go for there. But pricey red wine is often drunk with the classier British dishes—extraordinary when you come to think of it. Why wash down roast beef served in the English style—which means accompanied by Yorkshire pudding, horseradish, mustard—with a good Burgundy, or waste a vintage claret on roast lamb with mint sauce and redcurrant jelly? A pint of real ale is a much better idea.
British drink with British food, then, seems right, and naturally when abroad you drink and eat as the locals do, or there seems not much point in going. Sure, but what about those foreign-inspired dishes, from humble spaghetti to elaborate French-type concoctions that you find on your plate from time to time? Well, if you can, you drink the appropriate wine, the wine that comes from the same place as the dish. But alas, it won’t taste the same here as there.
The drinks and eats of a nation, or region, have grown up together over the centuries in a very close relationship, so that they set each other off perfectly. And clearly the eats include not only the basic materials, but everything from the herbs to the fuel in the stove, all of which will be different from place to place. Even, incidentally, the local sun, humidity, air, etc.
Now, of course, a bottle of fine wine is fine, if the accompanying food is intelligently chosen. And in summer a glass or two of chilled dry white wine is good, too. But, as I say, don’t overdo it.
Scotch whisky is a great, an enormous subject. To expect me to cover