BUT THERE WILL BE FOOD AND DRINK, RIGHT?

 

THE MIXING MACHINE

 If you go to see Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City (and why the wouldn’t you?), you’ll  notice the presence of the Martini dispensing machine.

 

It’s a not a terrible idea and it’s certainly not a new one, and here of course it's fictional, but in the real world there have been all kinds of cocktail making machines and robotic bartenders, to serve different purposes, the Drinkomatic was obviously for small scale domestic use, 

 

while the “Cocktailmatic” introduced by Auto-Bar Systems in the early sixties was for large-scale commercial ventures, “where dispensing of drinks in a hurry is a problem” 

 

And so we come to George Jean Nathan – 1882 -1958 - drama critic and editor of The Smart Set and The American Mercury, the man who apparently said, ‘ I drink to make other people interesting.’ 

There is a story, apocryphal I imagine, that Nathan had a system or device or some Rube Goldberg-style contraption in his home that sprang to life when he put his key in the front door of his apartment building, so that by the time he got into his own apartment a martini had been mechanically and magically prepared.  If this is true I haven’t been able to find any visual evidence of such a machine.

But leaving aside whether the story’s true, I can’t help thinking that the real problem is that although making a martini certainly involves mechanical processes it also somehow requires some human intervention and intervention to make it live (though this obviously does not apply to, for instance, the Pina Colada).

 

It would obviously be ideal to have a loved one waiting at the door with a martini when you got home, possible a butler, 

 

or just conceivably Vincent Price.

 

THE PRICE OF COCKTAILS

 

Mr Price is in the house

If you live in Manningtree, as I currently do, and even if you don’t, you may well be aware that this was a centre of operations for the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, played in the movie by Vincent Price. 

 

There are so many reasons to love Vincent Price, for his acting primarily, but also for his art collecting and his gourmet skills, including authoring a few cook books, usually with his second wife Mary:

 

These are well known but only recently did I find this wonderful series of adds with Price as a spokesman for, would you, believe Angostura bitters

 

And you know, Pink Gin is really just a martini without the vermouth.  The two editions I have of the Savoy Cocktail Book both instruct you to use a shaker and strain the cocktail into a conical martini glass but last night, to do honour to Vincent, I made one on the rocks.

 

However, regardless of how much I honour the man, I resisted the urge to cook hot dogs cooked in Angustura.  You have to draw the line somewhere.