Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [51]
I have never come across a sure-fire cure for a hangover. In my time I have been told of two: half an hour in an open aeroplane and a stint at the coal face on the early shift. By all means try them if you can get at them. Otherwise, rest is a great healer. And—the one certainty—time works in the end. That sounds obvious enough, but on really rough mornings it’s what you most need to remember.
Until almost the other day, 1970 or so, rum was hardly visible in this country. It was dark, treacly stuff with vaguely medicinal and naval associations. Then quite suddenly there appeared a new drink also called rum, but transparent, white, used in mixed drinks and popular with the young. The usual brand name—nobody remembered the others—was Bacardi. Last year Bacardi outsold every other brand of spirit in the USA and its success in the West generally has probably done more than anything else to set going the trend for light-coloured, light-flavoured drinks. Such drinks strike me as suitable for people who don’t care a lot for drink or drinking, but then I’m a Scotch man.
Rum—here comes the statutory nugget of information— is a spirit made from the sugar cane, a type of giant grass not native to the Caribbean but brought there from the Azores by Columbus on his second voyage. White rum, like grain whisky and gin, is made by the patent or continuous still and emerges in a high state of purity.
The elaborate Bacardi process involves a unique strain of yeast in the fermentation of the sugar liquid. Founded and long situated in Cuba, the company moved out when Castro came and today operates in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere. The Bacardi sold in the UK comes mainly from the Bahamas. Recently a tinted “gold” variety, a little fuller in flavour than the familiar colourless version, has become available.
The sign of what I call a serious spirit is that it’s profitably or even preferably drinkable neat or with a little water. There’s a rum, or rhum, from the French Caribbean island of Martinique you can approach like that, and very satisfactorily drunk it’ll make you, but Bacardi not really. It’s a mixer, though a most agreeable one.
A lot of it goes into rum ’n’ Coke, quite wasted in my view when teamed with that horrible stuff. I love America, but any nation that produces drive-in churches, Woody Allen and the cola drinks can’t be all good. You can, of course, top up your Bacardi with tonic, bitter lemon, lemonade or anything else you fancy; it’s a free country. But where Bacardi really comes into its own is as the basis of the Daiquiri (pronounced like “dikery,” I think).
This world-famous cocktail, bland and powerful, requires you to have made up in advance some sugar syrup, which is no more than sugar dissolved in water. The cocktail consists of four parts Bacardi, one part fresh lime juice and sweetening to taste, shaken or vigorously stirred with ice.
Important note: if there’s no fresh lime juice, substitute twice as much fresh lemon juice. And if there’s none of either, forget it. Bottled juice kills the drink.
Some authorities recommend adding a dash of grenadine, which is a sweet reddish non-alcoholic syrup lightly flavoured with pomegranates. It looks quite nice.
Earlier this year I went off the booze for a few weeks, a purely voluntary move, let it be said. Among other things, I thought it might be interesting to look at life from the Other Side, so to speak.
It wasn’t quite what I’d expected. Ex-topers, those warned off by the doc, will tell you emotionally that if only they’d known how much better they were going to feel without it, they’d have given it up years before they actually had to. This is a pathetic lie, designed to make you look like the one who’s missing out and motivated by their hatred and envy of anybody who’s still on it. In fact, not only is one’s general level of health unaffected by the change,