AN EYE FOR A GIMLET

 

My pal Joel was over from Philadelphia with his wife Anne, and among his other British adventures he tried to order a gimlet in a pub, actually two pubs, one in Scotland one in London

 

He reports on Facebook:

 

‘ A pint and a vodka gimlet:

- Islay and Kilmartin: 6 pounds 50p, and taught bartender how to make gimlet.

- London: 13 pounds, 40p and bartender didn't know gimlet either, had no lime syrup or even sugar, settled for vodka tonic.

Thank you for attending my Ted Talk.’

 

I can’t say this lack of knowledge altogether surprises me -  ignorance seldom does - though most bars used to be able to provide you with a lager and lime – lager with a splash of lime cordial, which might or might not be Rose’s. It was how some of us learned to drink before we developed a taste for bitter.

Anyway thinking on this and digging around in the archive I discover I have quite a lot of gimlet–related material, some of which I’ve used before in this blog, but there’s still quite a bit that I haven’t.  

Much of it, I think, makes the gimlet seem rather more exciting than it ever is, than most drinks could ever be.

MARTINIS WITH EVERYTHING

 

I was reading a January article from New York magazine by E. Alex Jung about the joys of drinking martinis with a side order of French fries.  He apparently first enjoyed this combination at Café Loup, a place I’m reasonably sure I went to at least once in my Manhattan days. It’s gone now anyway.

 

Jung goes to an establishment called Mimi and the article is illustrated with this picture. 

 

I don't know if you read the caption, it says 'Mimi offers a romantic mood: its martini glasses leave something to be desired.'  Yes that glass is an oddity, but in fact I was rather intrigued by it, thought it was quite a bold move, though I see the obvious disadvantages.

 

The combination of martini and French fries sounds a good one, the problem I see, as a man with an English palate, is that I’d want some vinegar on those French fries, and I fear that would play havoc with the taste of the martini.  I’m not saying I wouldn’t be able to drink it, but I’d fret.

 

In general however Jung is very sound on the nature of the martini – what I call a meniscus, he calls a baby bump. And he also says, ‘These are feral times, and there’s an invitation of madness with a martini — a willingness to see where the night may go. There are dedicated martini menus and endless variations with everything from MSG to seawater drawn from Montauk. (The Ocean Martini at Honey’s, dotted with two cured autumn olives that look like blood clots, is fantastically briny.)’ Well it would be, wouldn't it?

I’m still working out how I feel about that, but I suppose it’s just an extreme version of a dirty martini.  Apparently it looks like this:

 

Below is E. Alex Jung who doesn’t look like a typical   martini and French fry kind of guy, but we know that martini enthusiasts come in all sizes and shapes.

 

Meanwhile in similar news here’s a (rather cloudy) gimlet I made earlier, with a bowl of Keogh’s Mature Irish cheese and onion crisps; similar concept, different execution.

BUTTER WOULDN'T WASH ...

I’m living in Chelsea, round the corner from a Waitrose supermarket.  The food and drink they sell are perfectly decent but they publish a free tabloid titled “Weekend” which makes me want to kill.

The current issue has Elton John on the front, and inside there’s an advertorial from Sipsmith for “Hot Gin.”  Hot water seems to be the main ingredient.  I mean, really?

Elsewhere in the paper there’s a Heston Blumenthal-inspired recipe for a gimlet but this ain't no ordinary gimlet.  It's one of these, the one on the far right I imagine:

And this is how you'd make it if you were of unsound mind:

Of course this isn't really a gimlet, and I balked at the nonsense about butter and cider, but I can think of one gimlet-fetishist who’d have reached for his roscoe at the very idea.  I mean Raymond Chandler of course.

And it so happens that Chandler lived, briefly, in Chelsea in 1958, not half a mile away from where I am, in Swan Walk.  Hold that thought.

         The best thing about my local branch of Waitrose is that they sell oysters – 79 pence each, which isn’t bad, but if you get there at the end of the day and there are just a few left, fewer than 6 I assume, then they knock down the price.  Last night I got three at 32 pence each.  They looked like this:

         Oysters appear here and there in Chandler, usually as similes or occasionally as an adjective – somebody wears an oyster-white raincoat, someone has oyster-white luggage.

I do like this from “Red Wind” which is about the implement rather than the bivalve - “She jumped as if she had been stuck with an oyster fork. Then she tried to smile. It wasn't very successful.”

       And there’s this from “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” Chandler’s first published detective story (1933):

“Mardonne came out from behind the desk. He moved jerkily, like a marionette. His eyes were as dead as stale oysters. Saliva drooled down his chin.”

Almost enough to put you off your oysters, but somehow not quite.

GIN AND I

It was, apparently, Gin Month while I was in England, and although you and I may think that every month in England is gin month, I suppose the marketing departments of liquor companies need to keep busy, and obviously they wanted June to be even more gin-sodden than the other months of the year.  I did what I could.

Not so very long ago the only place I knew in London where you could be sure of getting a good dry martini was the American Bar at the Savoy.  I’m not saying there weren’t other places, I just didn’t know them.  But the game has changed completely.  Bartenders all over the city now know what a dry martini is.  The days when they served you a glass of warm vermouth are passed.  And the Savoy endures.  Like this:

They make their house martini with Bombay Sapphire which, given the availability of a thousand and one artisanal, handmade, special edition gins, seems a little pedestrian but I had no objections to the taste.  However, should you have a 120 quid burning a hole in your waistcoat, you can turn to the “vintage cocktails” page of the drinks menu.

You’ll notice the presence of three cocktails using “vintage gin.”  Now, I don’t mean to spoil the party, but I’m not sure there’s any such thing as a vintage gin and I’ll tell you for why.

A friend of mine had an aunt and uncle who were happy and unrepentant alcoholics, and gin was their favorite drink.  As they approached retirement, and knowing they wouldn’t have much money to spend on booze once they’d stopped working, they filled the basement of their house with many, many crates of gin.  And when they retired they started to drink the first gin they’d laid down, which was now a couple of decades old, and they discovered that unlike whisky or brandy, gin did not get better with age, in fact it went off.  They ended up with a basement full of gin, most of which was undrinkable.  That’s the story anyway and it may not be 100 per cent true but the moral is clear:  drink your gin as soon as you get it.

Next stop was Dukes bar in the Dukes hotel in Mayfair.  This is where Ian Fleming drank – he lived close by – and they serve a Vesper which is a version of the martini Bond orders in Casino Royale.  He demanded Kina Lillet in his drink and Lillet can still be bought but they changed the recipe some years back.  So Dukes adjust their recipe accordingly - No. 3 London Dry Gin, Lillet Blanc, Angostura bitters, and Potocki vodka.

And this is the beauty part: the Dukes Vesper is neither stirred nor shaken but rather constructed tableside from ingredients that have come straight from the deep freeze.  If you like ritual you’re going to like this a lot.

And later a return to Mother’s Ruin in Walthamstow – a gin palace with, on the night I was there, the slowest bartender I’ve ever encountered.  He was Dutch, I think, and he said he was tired and he had to keep checking the drink recipes. It made you want to give him a good shake, although when the martini came it was perfectly fine.  Yep, that's a sage leaf.

And you know me, there are only two cocktails I really like: the martini and the gimlet and there it was on the Mother’s Run’s list – “Gimlet – Hendricks Gin, Ancho Reyes Verde chili liqueur, lime juice, gomme” - so I ordered one.  A different, far zestier bartender had swept into action.

The gimlet looked like this (yeah, I spilled some):

I think Raymond Chandler (and indeed I) would have preferred something a bit more translucent – and without a slice of cucumber - but it tasted very good.

And finally, because I was coming to the end of my time in London, I had a cocktail in Fitz’s bar at the Principal Hotel - the bar is named after Charles Fitzroy Doll who was the architect of the hotel and, among other things, designer of the dining room of the Titanic. 

Above is the Baby Babel made from “Tanqueray No. TEN Gin, Visciolata del Cardinale, LBV Port, Cream Sherry, Egg, Burr & Co. Coffee Ground Tincture.”  And of course I had no idea what “Visciolata del Cardinale” was, but research shows it to be a cherry dessert wine.  And frankly the whole thing tasted very much like dessert. But once in a while an alcoholic dessert in a glass goes down extremely well.  The bartender was absolutely wonderful.

THE GIMLET EYE

You know, in the past, it seems that people used to get a lot more excited about Rose's Lime Juice than they do these days.

I guess they figured it was a ladies' drink.  

Raymond Chandler (and Marlowe) would have been appalled. But they'd both have agreed (see The Long Goodbye) with the sentiment of this ad "always with Rose's." 

THE THREE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS

The pre-Christmas Blue Points:

The Christmas Day gimlet:

The Boxing Day goose sandwich.:

Is it bad and wrong to prefer Christmas leftovers to Christmas dinner?

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.