Sorry that this is a bit later than normal. I would place the blame on Stephen Fry for writing such a good version of the story of Troy, but really, I have just been generally distracted. Yet the allure of a good book has rather nicely given me a topic for this newsletter.
I was thinking about what to write, and thought about books and so I briefly considered just writing a review of the Café Royal Cocktail Book, but that might be a tad niche. Instead let me consider the wider role books play in drinks. And here I do not mean books that might mention, or even create, a drink, such as the Vesper of Casino Royale. Instead, I am just focusing on books that purport to be collections of recipes.
For these books, might contain recipes, but also contain so much more. In this case The Savoy Cocktail Book is a great example as it has long sections that just discuss drinks and drinking etiquette, rather than any recipes. This does not, however, make them any less useful. These days if I want to look up a cocktail recipe quickly, I am most likely to use the internet, and probably get a few results which might diverge, and so I look at where the recipes come from and normally find most come back to one or two of the older cocktail books.
Indeed, I very rarely actually make cocktails directly from books. Instead, I enjoy reading them to get ideas, and will make note of particular cocktails. Sometimes I will then note the recipe down, slightly altering it perhaps, and thinking about how other variants are made. Then much of the time I forget those anyway and go back to making the same collection of about 10 drinks that I know by heart and that I generally have the things for.
But, those recipes I read, are not fully forgotten. Especially if I fancy a drink but do not have one of the ingredients. I could of course just substitute it and call what I am drinking a variant of what I originally intended, but often any substitution will have transubstantiated the cocktail I had in mind, into a wholly new cocktail with its own pedigree and reputation. It would then of course be wrong of me to ignore it. So, this is the time that I will look up those half-remembered drinks to see if one of them fits what I fancy/have in.
I do on occasion see a cocktail in a book and think that it sounds rather good so try it. This does not often lead to me making it regularly, but it does open me up to new ideas for how to balance the flavours in a drink.
For example, the first time I made a dream, it sounded like a rather odd combination, but now that idea of mixing a spirit with one liqueur and then adding a touch of something potently herbal seems like a rather good way to invent new drinks. Especially as it does not require any ingredient that has a short shelf life so can be used when stocks are rather low.
That really is what cocktail books are for. Without them it would be all too easy to fall into a rut of making the same style of drink over and over. Plus, it helps that they tend to be rather interestingly written with phrases, and elegant designs, that put you in mind of a totally different age. And so, plays a part in the theatre and self-deception that is so vital to cocktails.
One of my favourite bits of The Savoy Cocktail Book is a rather funny section which discusses when cocktails should be drunk and I struggle to think of anything better than Harry Craddock’s exhortation that cocktails are strictly a predinner drink and that anyone who serves cocktails after a dinner is really suggesting that their food was so bad that you will have to go and find a proper dinner elsewhere. This is the sort of thing that has nothing to do with the drinks, and even when it was written was more than slightly ridiculous, and could only be supported by maintaining nonsensical distinctions between cocktails and after dinner drinks.
In a very different way, I really like the index at the end of the Café Royal Cocktail Book, which lists a great array of cocktails that were not deemed to be important enough for inclusion in full. Many of these sound almost as if a writer had been paid to just come up with names rather than being drinks that actually existed.
What is more relevant, as this is January and many people do Dry January and so might be reaching for mocktails which feel rather new, is that there is a short section of the Café Royal Cocktail Book dedicated to non-alcoholic drinks. Some do sound rather “interesting” such as the Parson’s Special, which is orange juice with a dash of grenadine, mixed with an egg yolk and topped up with soda water. Others also are rather unoriginal, such as the Tomato which is just a Virgin Mary.
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