• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

MIDORI MELON LIQUEUR

The world’s most famous melon liqueur can be imitated at home by pureeing fresh honeydew melon. After the liqueur sits for a week or so, strain out the melon, put on your drinking cap, and enjoy thoroughly.

1 cup pureed honeydew melon

¾ cup granulated sugar

1 cup 80-proof vodka

4 drops green food coloring

3 drops yellow food coloring

1. Puree the honeydew melon by first slicing ¼ of the melon away from the rind. Remove the seeds and then slice the melon into big chunks. Put the chunks into a medium bowl and mash with a potato masher to create some juice. Pour the mashed melon and juice into a blender and blend on medium speed for 10 to 15 seconds or until pureed. Measure 1 cup of melon into a jar with a lid.

2. Add sugar, vodka, and food coloring to the jar. Cover and shake until sugar is dissolved.

3. Store liqueur at room temperature for a week, then strain the melon pulp from the liquid by pouring it through a paper towel-lined strainer.

• MAKES 2 CUPS.

SPIRITS : COCKTAILS

I’m fascinated by Prohibition. There’s something intriguing about the way drinking alcoholic beverages in the United States reached a new level of hip when the federal government took away the right in 1920. Forever chiseled into history will be clear proof that when people are told too often how to live their lives, it has the reverse effect. Sure, you can take the cocaine out of their Coca-Cola, but stay the heck away from their whiskey.

Before Prohibition drinking was mostly a man’s sport. The drinks were pretty dull, and they were usually made with whiskey. When the cocktail parties went underground as fancy private shindigs and secret speakeasies, women got into the party full swing, and many of the mixed drinks that are still around today were invented at those gatherings using creative new ingredients.

At that time, gangs ran the liquor industry. Bootleggers imported alcohol into the country and got filthy rich. Murders, beatings, and bribery were commonplace. Shipments of booze were smuggled secretly into the U.S. from Canada and the Caribbean, and homemade distilleries were built in darkened cellars and on backwoods riverbanks. Many local governments and law enforcement officials got on the gangs’ payroll and looked the other way. Some joined in on the party because even they thought the law was lame.

The United States lost somewhere around 500 million dollars in whiskey taxes every year during Prohibition and the economy skidded into a deep depression. When the government realized that Prohibition was causing more harm than good, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed by the Twenty-first in 1933, and the bars reopened for business. By then, though, the damage was done.

Since American distilleries had shut down, European booze-makers captured the U.S. market by immediately flooding the country with their own brands. Some domestic distillers struggled to start from scratch again, only to be forced to shut down during World War II to produce industrial alcohol for the war effort.

After the war, the distilling industry finally got back on its feet. A wider variety of spirits were in demand and the market’s taste shifted from the old standards of whiskey, rum, and gin. Vodka became the number one spirit in the later decades of the twentieth century as a new generation of drinkers enjoyed festive happy hours with fancy designer libations that edged out old cocktail formulations their parents used to drink.

Newsweek and The Saturday Evening Post reported that the beginning of the “singles age” started when the first T.G.I. Friday’s opened in New York City in 1965. Bars in growing casual restaurant chains became hot spots every night of the week where the professional crowd gathered after a hard day’s work.

The ability to quickly serve up a well-mixed cocktail with flair from an expanding number of combinations had grown into a welcomed and appreciated social art form, even overcoming a slight setback in 1988 as the subject of a really bad Tom Cruise flick.

HOW TO USE THIS SECTION

In