Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [59]
Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book is the most practical I’ve ever seen on the subject and bang up to date, with the author’s vast knowledge skilfully deployed. The main part is a midget encyclopedia of wine world wide, including the more farflung producing countries like Cyprus, Chile, New Zealand and, of course, England. The various entries not only give information about the kind of wine produced by a given area or vineyard, they also list recommended years with ready-to-drink vintages in bold type. A star system shows the quality to be expected, along with a box sign meaning “usually particularly good value in its class.”
On the important question of what wine to drink with what dish, some wine books include a page or two of patchy general indications about Burgundy and beef and so on. This one mentions a couple of hundred eatables from artichoke vinaigrette to zabaglione and offers in most cases a full choice of accompanying wines. Not always wines. Hollands gin is suggested with pickled herrings, beer with sauerkraut and, with kippers, “a good cup of tea, preferably Ceylon.”
Johnson might have taken the principle further and told us what to drink with other lowbrow dishes like sausages and mash, pork pie, etc.—cocoa perhaps. But he could fairly retort that after all he was writing a book about wine. And jolly good it is, calculated to take the terror out of the subject and nice reading too. Revised yearly.
Other, more specialized books in the same series deal with wine tasting, Italian wines and Californian wines. Like the previous two, they sell at £3.95. All excellent value.
I bet you didn’t know there was a drink called a Falkland Island Warmer. I didn’t myself until the other day, when I came across it while looking through the bible of mixer drinks, Trader Vic’s massive Bartender’s Guide, in search of something else. You put an ounce of Drambuie in a mug or heated glass and add hot water and half a teaspoon of lemon juice. The recipe also calls for a dash of rock candy syrup, rock candy being what we call rock in the Blackpool sense, but stirring in a flat teaspoon of brown sugar will do as well. We might have guessed that the stalwart Scots would have been leading spirits in the settling of those remote and chilly isles, and also that they wouldn’t have left their beloved Drambuie behind.
As the discerning will already have discerned, this warmer is to some extent a classy and handy version of the old Whisky Toddy, which uses Scotch and sometimes honey in place of the Drambuie. You can scatter some grated nutmeg or cinnamon across the top if you feel like it. In my youth you reckoned to knock off a cold by taking a double dose last thing with a couple of aspirins crushed up in it and putting an extra blanket on the bed. Helps you sleep, anyway.
What I was actually after in Vic’s tome was his formula for Hot Buttered Rum. It’s even more elaborate than I remembered. He starts by making up a dose of what he calls his bat-E ter, which is 1 lb brown sugar, ¼ lb butter, ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves and a pinch of salt all beaten together. Each drink is 1½ oz rum and a heaped teaspoon of the batter stirred into boiling water, with cinnamon stick added as decoration. My own simpler version, from New England, calls for rum and boiling water with a teaspoon of maple syrup and a knob of butter. If you cut out the butter and substitute milk for water you get a Hot Rum Cow. The Cow is going a bit far possibly but the Hot Buttered Rum itself seems to me a major compensation for the arrival of the cold weather.
I have to tell you however that a great authority on the subject, David A. Embury, whose book The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks is a standard work, can’t imagine how anyone could consume it with pleasure. He goes on: “I believe that the drinking of Hot Buttered Rum should be permitted only in the Northwest Passage, and, even there, only by highly imaginative and overenthusiastic novelists.” Wow. He can’t have