Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [45]
The beginnings of Scotch are unknown. Perhaps originally it was the Irish who taught the Scots the process of distillation. The books say that while invading Ireland in the year 1170, Strongbow, Earl of Pembroke, noticed that the locals were drinking some sort of spirit as well as getting killed in large numbers. But who had taught them how to make the stuff? The idea of medieval Irishmen inventing a rather complicated technique like that of distilling, or anything at all for that matter, is hard to credit. And it was over three centuries before the Scots were recorded as producing spirits of their own, so they would have had plenty of time to learn how from the French or, being a clever lot, to find out for themselves. The art of distillation probably originated in more than one place, like the use of fire, another important step in human progress. My bet is that Scotch, or what became Scotch, started in Scotland.
That sixteenth-century liquor would have been pretty harsh by modern standards and so full of impurities that the hangovers it dealt out can only be imagined. I expect the boys were quite glad of it, though, to help them through a Scottish winter with nothing but a plaid to put round them and only porridge and an occasional bite of haggis to keep the wolf from the door. It went on like that for ages. Scotch stayed in Scotland, and the English only saw it when they went up there to shoot the jolly old grouse.
Then, about the middle of the last century, two things happened. A clever fellow invented a new method of making whisky with a gadget called the patent still, many times more efficient and faster and therefore cheaper than the pot still, the type that had been in use from the beginning. And the French vineyards were devastated by an insect plague, so quite suddenly there was no more brandy, the well-off Victorian Englishman’s preferred tipple. Gin was much too lower class to fill the gap, but Scotch was acceptable and available. The consequent expansion of sales was followed by another lucky accident, the coming of Prohibition in the USA in 1919 and the establishment of a whole new market there. The biggest boom of all came in the sixties and seventies, with exports going up by over 400 per cent in twenty years. But recently, production has been cut back substantially. Is there too much Scotch about? Never, while I’m alive.
Scotch whisky is my desert-island drink. I mean not only that it’s my favourite, but that for me it comes nearer than anything else to being a drink for all occasions and all times of day, even with meals. Not many people think of it as a table wine, but with water and no ice it suits a fry-up quite well, also cold food and other, unexpected, dishes. Try it as accompaniment to fish pâté and, after a decent interval, chocolate mousse.
Most people probably think of vodka as a version of gin, a refined or degenerate one according to taste. By manufacture, though, it’s a straight (unblended) grain whisky and the makings are rye, barley and/or maize without artificial colouring.
So the books say. Things are different in Russia, where they don’t only drink to get drunk, they drink to stay drunk too, and no wonder. The demand for vodka is so enormous that any and every form of vegetable protein gets shoved into the distiller’s pan, from potatoes and mangelwurzels to the nuts and dried fruit that a delinquent female keeper should have fed to the monkeys in the Moscow zoo, as in a famous case reported in Pravda.
Stolichnaya, Krepkaya and other Russian vodkas on sale in the West are another matter altogether—Kremlin tipple made by the rules, smooth, expensive, often stronger in alcohol than the British norm. They are well worth a try, especially in someone else’s house, and should by rights be drunk chilled and neat with a bite of smoked salmon and, of course, caviar if there’s any going. All