Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [71]
To my mind the best vodka of all is not Russian but Polish. Among the straight kinds is some stuff called Pure Polish Spirit, which is 80 per cent—not proof—alcohol, a drink to be tiptoed up to. They also export Zubrowka, which has a blade of special primitive grass in the bottle and I think tastes pretty ropey, but it’s quite popular and you may like it. There’s also a cherry or cherry juice variety which I can disrecommend without reserve. On the other hand, the Polish vodkas flavoured respectively with lemon peel and rowanberries (mountain-ash berries) are excellent and most unusual, though to my knowledge to be seen here only in specialist shops.
In comparison, an Anglo-Saxon domestic vodka such as Cossack or Smirnoff is a plain straightforward affair, unflavoured, rather dull on its own, good for stiffening punches and other mixes, but not so good, I think, in cocktails where the other ingredients smother it. For instance, I don’t really like the Vodka Martini because I don’t really like the taste of French vermouth, which is about all you get. But you might care to try my personal variant, which changes the odds by adding cucumber juice. Proportions: twelve vodka, one Martini Rossi dry vermouth, two juice (easily made on an ordinary glass or plastic lemon squeezer and strained). The Lucky Jim is my name for it. Well, I had to call it something.
Here’s how to make another great unknown, which some nice lady described to me at a party in the sixties and I’ve never heard of elsewhere. It takes a bottle of British vodka, a lemon and a hell of a lot of patience. Cut all the peel off the lemon without also cutting off any of the white pith underneath. (There are clever dicks who can do this in one go, so that they end up with a single long strip of peel.) Poke the peel into the vodka and screw the cap on again. Put the bottle on a shelf and leave it for about a week, giving it a shake whenever you happen to be passing. Finally, take the peel out, chill the vodka and pour into small prechilled glasses. Tastes like the Islands of the Blest. Use carefully.
Recently my local shut itself up for several weeks to be redecorated. The first time I went back in I proceeded with caution, mindful of the assorted horrors perpetrated on our pubs over the last decade and more. My first look fetched a sigh of relief. The small room, which in days gone by was probably called the private bar, had been smartened up but not transformed, likewise the tiny snug opening off it—rather dark, quiet, un-luxurious, almost dowdy. The main bar, which was bright and cheerful enough, had a sort of thirties flavour, with copper trays on display, what could have been a genuine post horn, and colourful plates that looked like earthenware but were really paper, not that it bothered me.
How I’d hated all that kind of thing in the past! How I welcomed it now! It wasn’t flashy or aggressively up to date or eye-catching—though you couldn’t help noticing some pictures here and there, they were small, conventional and above all not by local artists. There were plenty of comfortable places to sit. And, wonder of wonders, no music. But, alas, every so often a horrible racket was kicked up by a pair of giant fruit machines, loud fluting, piping noises like a steam organ alternating with bursts from a First World War machine gun. At those times, sitting there stopped being enjoyable and became no better than bearable.
All the same, the place is a paradise compared to the common run of London pubs where bawling music from the Bottom Twenty hinders conversation and even thought, or where, in the middle of the day at least, you often can’t put your glass down for the pepperpots and bottles of sauce, and you find yourself discussing the SDP across someone