THE QUEEN AND IT

There was a lot of stuff in the media over Xmas about the Queen being a martini drinker. This seemed somehow cheering, though it was all a bit of an echo chamber; the information bouncing around between English tabloids, Vanity Fair, Food And Drink, and  Business Insider and others. 

‘Royal expert’ Ingrid Seward was quoted as saying said: 'I think the Queen likes a martini,’ though I’d have expert a royal expert to be less tentative. So I tried to find a picture of her majesty sipping a silver bullet.  I haven't found one yet. There are a zillion pictures of her drinking champagne but not a martini in sight.  (Gosh, the queen does have big, manly hands).

She apparently has the martini with dinner, which may possibly be the reason we’re not allowed to see it.  Let me explain. 

My contacts with the royal family, surprisingly, are not quite zero: I was once introduced to the Duke of Edinburgh at a reception and dinner for the Greenwich Festival.  He seemed a man of some charm.  I assume he was gritting his teeth throughout the episode, but he hid it perfectly.

I can’t remember whether or not I saw him with a drink in his hand, but I do know that when it came time to eat he and the other VIPs (though I suppose nobody was more ‘I’ than him), went to a table on a dais and screens were drawn around them.  The word was that royals were not allowed to be seen eating.  I have never heard this from any other source but on that night it certainly applied.  And if the queen has her martini while eating dinner that may explain why we’re not allowed to see it..

Still, keeping up family traditions here’s Charles drinking a martini in a gin distillery in Northumberland at11 o’clock in the morning.  That’s the royal spirit.

THE PARTIES YOU AND I DON'T GET INVITED TO

  

This picture appeared in the Evening Standard a couple of nights ago (it’s from Instagram), and the caption read, ‘Cara Delevingne shared a glass of champagne with Tilda Swinton and Helen Mirren at a Chanel party.

’  

You’d think Chanel could afford to give them a glass each, wouldn’t you?

PEGGING THE QUEEN

One of the things I like about old cookbooks is that they’re often wonderfully imprecise about quantities – a pinch of this, a dash of that, a knob of the other.  Likewise with certain old cocktail recipe books. 

If you look into a copy of The Artistry of Mixing Drinks by Frank Meier, of the Ritz Bar in Paris, (and I confess I only have a facsimile of the 1934 reprint) you’ll find a somewhat inscrutable recipe for a drink called Queen’s Peg:

“In a large wineglass; a piece of ice, one half-glass of gin; fill with Champagne and serve.”

But how large is a large wineglass?  How large is that piece of ice?  Presumably the measure of gin is half an ordinary sized wineglass, rather than a large one, but how large is that?  I don’t know and I really don’t care too much.  And with this attitude I made my own, using cava rather than Champagne, natch.

    I also went with a tumbler rather than a large wineglass, but I thought that was near enough volume-wise, and I’m still on my large spherical ice ball kick, so that made for a pretty substantial piece of ice.  I put in a decent pour of goodish gin – Death’s Door from Wisconsin - and I topped it off with some run-of- the-mill cava.  It looked like this:

      And how did it taste?  Well, it tasted odd.  You could still very much taste the gin – Death’s Door is a pokey liquor, heavy on juniper, coriander and fennel – and you could of course taste the bubbly.  But it was less than the sum of its part, or maybe the problem was was that the parts simply refused to combine. It wasn’t bad and it was certainly drinkable but I think I’d rather have had a glass of gin and a glass of cava separately.  So then I tried again. 

Smaller glass, blue ice sphere (food coloring), different run-of-the-mill cava, much cheaper supermarket gin.  Friends, it tasted better, at least in so far as the tastes blended somewhat, which may be only to say that the taste of the gin receded in the mix, so the drink tasted more like a gin and tonic, with cava replacing the tonic.  Not the very worst idea, but still somehow an attempt to combine things that don’t really need combining.

Could I tell you exactly what quantities went into either of my two Queen’s Pegs? No I could not.  Could I make another that tasted exactly the same as either of them?  No, not exactly, although I think I could get near enough.  Whether you’d like it, I can’t say.

I looked up a few modern recipes for Queen’s Peg and they of course tend to be very precise - the modern consumer likes to be told exactly what to do - but they’re still variable.  Epicurious says 3/4 ounce dry gin to 6 ounces of Champagne, James Beard says 3/4 ounce dry gin to 4 ounces of Champagne, absolutdrinks.com says 1 part gin to 5 parts Champagne but has nothing to say about overall quantity.  The ice cube seems optional.  There’s also some debate about whether it should be served in a wine glass or a champagne flute, but really, that’s likely to be the least of your problems.

GLUTTON-FREE

I’ve found an extraordinary passage in MFK Fisher’s  An Alphabet for Gourmets – this is under G for Gluttony:    “It is a curious fact that no man likes to call himself a glutton, and yet each of us has in him a trace of gluttony, potential or actual. I cannot believe that there exists a single coherent human being who will not confess, at least to himself, that once or twice he has stuffed himself to bursting point on anything from quail financiere to flapjacks, for no other reason than the beastlike satisfaction of his belly. In fact I pity anyone who has not permitted himself this sensuous experience, if only to determine what his private limits are, and where for himself alone gourmandism ends and gluttony begins.”

It seems kind of interesting that she talks only about “him.”  She was of course writing in 1949 when gender issues would have seemed less pressing, when the term “man” would have included women as well.  And yet it does seem to suggest that it’s mostly men who are gluttons, or perhaps that gluttony is so much worse in a woman, which is an argument for another time.

In any case the line that really caught my attention was the one about determining private limits.  This is a weird and interesting one, isn’t it?  I mean obviously I, like everybody else, have eaten too much at one time or another, and arguably most people in the West eat too much everyday but that’s not quite the same as reaching your limit.

I’ve certainly been in a situation where I’ve been able to eat all the French fries I wanted, and then a few more, and I’ve certainly reached my limit on beer (which is now considerably lower than it used to be).  But there are some things where I can’t even imagine a limit.

Cheese for instance – I never quite eat all the cheese I want.  I always stop myself before I reach my limit, in the interest of – well, I don’t absolutely know what – maybe fear of cholesterol, maybe fear of being thought a glutton.

Cashew nuts too - I can’t quite imagine the size of the box of cashews that would actually defeat me.

And above all oysters – I don’t think I’ve ever got anywhere near my oyster limit.   True I’ve never been in a situation where I had an absolutely limitless supply of oysters, but whenever I’ve eaten what seemed like a lot, I’ve always been left thinking I could eat a few more.

Of course price comes into it.  Oysters in a restaurant are too expensive to make a complete pig of yourself.  Champagne even more so.  I’ve always fantasized about settling down with a Jeroboam of  champagne or a Balthazar if I was with a friend or two and just drinking till I’d had enough.  Of course, in one sense I’d definitely reach my limit because sooner or later I’d pass out, but passing out isn’t quite the same thing as having had enough.

And now I see some research from Reading University (that hotbed of “beastlike satisfaction”) suggesting that a glass champagne, three times a week could help prevent the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s.

This may well be true but it’s a very hard thing to investigate, I’d have thought.  Is there really anybody in the world who could drink three glasses and only three glasses of champagne per week.  After that first glass wouldn’t you want another, and another, and maybe a bag or cashew nuts and a cheese plate and a couple of dozen oysters …

The picture above and the one at the top are of Crystal Renn, photographed by Terry Richardson for French Vogue’s 90th anniversary issue.  Yeah, scandal really ruined his career.  The feature is called “Festin” (no relation).

SECRET SEVEN UP DRINKERS

 Above is the latest addition to the Nicholson Archive or Dubious Cookbooks.  This one is compiled by the Sandia Base Woman’s Club of Albuquerque, New Jersey, and it’s dated 1954. 

The foreword by Mrs. Perditta Long (who sounds like a Thomas Pynchon character to me) says the recipes have been put together by a “special investigating committee ... which penetrated the security barriers guarding treasured kitchen secrets of club members … at this atomic base,” which suggests to me that the girls maybe didn’t take Cold War rhetoric quite as seriously as their government might have liked.

Between 1946 and 1971 Sandia Base was the site of atomic weapons research, testing, fabrication, and storage.  The food recipes are as downhome and all-American as you might expect; Jello-Applesauce Salad, Georgia Dickinson’s Lobster Casserole Surprise, Ozark Pudding. 

It’s the small collection of cocktail recipes that goes really nuclear. The Percolator Punch consists of one cup of citrus fruits and pineapple, half a cup of honey, and a quart of bourbon.

But my favorite is the Champagne Punch.  No Moet et Chandon here.  There ingredients are:

Half a gallon of sauterne, 

1 pint sherry,

1 quart Branch (I had to look that up – as far as I can tell it means plain water,  preferably from a stream)

2 large bottles charged water (had to look that up too – it’s soda water)

2 Bottles of 7 Up

Then oranges, lemons and sugar to taste.

Well, that would certainly be a drink to get you through the nuclear summer, if not the nuclear winter, and I know the good folks in Champagne get very upset if you use the term “champagne” to describe a sparkling wine from anywhere else in the world, so Lord knows how they’d feel about that usage in Champagne Punch.

We do know that the past is another country when it comes to food and drink, and especially to cocktails.  Everything was so much sweeter back then.  So when I was in Cole’s restaurant in downtown L.A. a couple of days back, it seemed only natural to order the “Original Martinez” on the drinks menus, made from genever, Dolin sweet vermouth, orange curacao, angostura bitters and with a Luxardo cherry. It looked like this:

I found it a little sweet too sweet for my taste, but I’m sure the girls in Albuquerque, in 1954, would have lapped it up.