SAINTLY LIBATIONS

Gimlets have been discussed elsewhere in this blog.  I like a good gimlet, largely because Marlowe and Terry Lennox drink them in Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, in a place called Victor’s bar.

We sat in the corner bar at Victor’s and drank gimlets. “They don’t know how to make them here,” he (Terry Lennox) said. “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”

Of course, since Chandler puts the words into the mouth of one his more ambiguous characters, who knows what his actual opinion was?  It sounds like way too much Rose’s lime juice.  Five or six to one seems about right to me.  Vodka instead of gin is just fine too.

In any case, the gimlet, in one way, seems just about the least sophisticated cocktail you could imagine: just two ingredients, one of them a sticky syrup.  And yet something, perhaps something alchemical, happens when you put the two things together and create a drink that’s way more than the sum of the parts.

Last week I had a long-standing dinner date with some friends, and I’d booked a table a Morrison, a vaguely Scottish restaurant a few miles up the road in Atwater village.  What I hadn’t realized was that this was St. Patrick’s Day, and the Hibernian blood was running high.  I never thought about it when I made the reservation.

In fact the place wasn’t quite as much of a zoo as it might have been, and as the above ad shows, they’d been at it for 4 days by the time we got there so maybe they were running out of juice.

I ordered a specialty cocktail, a Morrison gimlet, which started as your standard vodka and lime juice but then they added liquidized cucumber.  It was way better than it had any right to.  It was of course very bright green.  And I did ask the server whether it was always that green, or whether this was some sort of St Patrick’s Day.  No, he said it’s always that color.  I was glad about that.  Here it is on their website.

And now I have made my own.  Liquidizing a cucumber is actually a fair amount of messy fun, and the resulting cocktail looked like this:

My version was considerably more cucumbery than the Morrison version, hence the color, and the taste.  Well, as they almost certainly don’t say in the land of St, Patrick: the other man’s gimlet is always greener.

BOXTY WITH BRILLAT

Oh America – the melting pot; a place where food cultures and national cuisines, clash, fuse together, and metamorphize to become something spectacular and new.  Take the Scotch egg I had a Morrison, a Scottish-inflected gastropub in Atwater Village, a few miles up the road from where I live.

 
I grew up faced with bad Scotch eggs.  I liked sausage and I could cope with hardboiled eggs, but put them together and they made me retch.  I’m made of stronger stuff these days but I still don’t exactly seek out Scotch eggs.  Some of them can be very bad indeed.

The Scotch egg at Morrison however contained a soft-boiled egg, which must be a really tricky thing to pull off in a restaurant, and the sausage is venison!  ALL RIGHT!!  It looked much like this, photographed artfully by my pal George Esguerra :

I’d never had anything like it, and I don’t suppose I’ll get it again unless I go back to Morrison, which I will probably do.

Across the street from Morrison is India Sweets and Spices (above), a supermarket selling delicacies, and indeed staples, from the subcontinent, and occasionally from Britain, e.g. Robinson’s Barley Water.

         I wandered in, pre-Morrison, and bought a few things, including a packet of boil in the bag Smoked Indian Cottage Cheese, aka Paneer Tikka Masala.  Now I had never tasted smoked Indian cottage cheese before, and even after having eaten the contents of this pack, I’m still not sure that I have.  The pack looked like this:

But the cheese actually tasted like small lumps of polystyrene in a nondescript red sauce: the lumps squeaked horribly if your teeth sank into them.  There was no hint of smoke.  They were awful.  The reality looked like this:

Not remotely like the image on the pack.  Still, at least I can say I’ve eaten something I’d never eaten before.

Then at the weekend we went to San Diego and had breakfast in a place called the Field (above), an Irish pub brought over in pieces from the old sod, and reconstructed in the Gaslamp district. The chef was Hawaiian, and he came round and introduced himself, and I was able to tell him that the Rasher and Cheese Boxty I was eating - imported Irish bacon and Irish Cheddar cheese wrapped inside a boxty and topped with homemade white wine sauce - was amazing and it looked like this:

I had never tasted anything quite like it. OK, I’d had all the ingredients but never in this configuration, and a homemade white wine sauce for breakfast (though I did wonder whose home) just sets a man up for the rest of the day.  It was wonderful.

Also In San Diego one evening, at a loss for what to eat, and not feeling all that picky, we ended up in a fondue restaurant that pushes “interactive” $45 set meals that include cheese fondue starter, salad, meat fondue mains, and chocolate fondue desserts. 

I think a purist would argue that if it don’t contain cheese, it ain’t really a fondue – the Swiss even railed against Brillat-Savarin for his 1812 fondue recipe which they dismissed as scrambled eggs with cheese.

We settled for the starter and salad, and although I'd certainly had fondue before, I’d never had it quite this way: an electric hot plate in the middle of the table, a double boiler, the fondue constructed table-side by a slightly over enthusiastic waitress.  We get a lot of over-enthusiasm in California, but it’s preferable to so many of the international alternatives.

But here’s the beauty part, the restaurant was part of a small chain called – maybe you guessed - The Melting Pot.  Oh America, my newfound smorgasbord!