RIDE LIKE THE WYND

  

I know my readers are a cool lot, so I expect many of you are familiar with Viktor Wynd, he of the Last Tuesday Society, his museum of curiosities – skeletons, taxidermy, (separate) jars containing Amy Winehouse’s and Kylie Minogue’s poo; and much else besides.  And then there's his Absinthe Parlour.

 

pic by Caroline Gannon

You may also be familiar with food and drink funsters Bompas and Parr, who are equally cool in a somewhat different way.  That’s Sam Bompas below on the right:

 

And lately there’s been a collaboration, possibly a convergence, between Wynd, Bompas and Parr.  The Absinthe Parlour currently has a display celebrating the book Cabarets of Death by Mel Gordon, edited by Joanna Ebenstein.  

 

And as part of the celebration Bompas and Parr have curated a Cabinets of Death cocktail menu.  Which looks like this:

The list only contains 4 cocktails and one of them - Divine Nectar - is a mocktail so inevitably we gave that a miss, but there are a couple of real winners.

 

Below is the Captain of Death – the name refers to tuberculosis.  The drink contains Devil’s Botany Chocolate Absinthe Liqueur, Bourbon, Gold Rum, Barberry and Wild Thyme Syrup, and Clove Bitters.

pic by Caroline Gannon

I didn’t even know that chocolate absinthe was a thing – and it was very good.  But even better was the Eternal Nothingness - Devil’s Botany London Absinthe, Tequila Blanco. Sour Apple Cordial, Lime Juice, Green Apple Maggots (Green apple ‘maggots’ are in fact ‘popping boba pearls’  It looked like this:

 

pic by Caroline Gannon

Now we all know it’s easy to overcomplicate a cocktail and this sounded very complicated indeed, but it worked. You could taste all the ingredients but the drink was much more than the sum of its parts, even if I could probably have done without the maggots.

 

Also on the menu was Flames of Hellfire, which we gave a miss, largely because we wanted to be able to walk rather than crawl out of the bar.

 

Absinthe of course is made from wormwood – which I grow erratically and only semi-successfully in my own garden, by which I mean it either grows out of control all over the path or it looks like it’s about to die. 

 

And in the ‘live and learn’ department I only recently discovered that although wormwood is an ancient plant, it didn’t grow in the Garden of Eden until after all that business with the Tree of Knowledge, the Fall of Mankind and so on.  Wormwood only appeared after God had cursed the serpent (or whatever the creature was at that stage while it still had legs) and made him crawl upon his belly out into the world beyond.  Wormwood grew along the track where the serpent had slithered.  Who wouldn’t want to make a drink from an ingredient  like that?