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?

 

DRINKING IN THE WOMB

The past, as I have said before elsewhere, is another country: they eat and drink things differently there, and in any case America is not the country I was born in, so contemplating food and drink of the American past involves a double alienation.  

For one reason or another, I just happened to find a copy of Esquire magazine dated March 1953: that’s it above.   The magazine is certainly from the past, but it also feels strangely “present,” since that was the month and year that I was born.

Now, for perfectly obvious reasons, I know I’m likely to find the contents of that Esquire unfamiliar but even so, as a magazine junkie and longtime student of American life and letters, the magazine was still stranger than I was expecting, especially in matters of food and drink; and the latter was obviously the far more important of the two as far as the magazine was concerned.

The Esquire reader, at least as imagined by advertisers, was first and foremost a whisky drinker.  There are a great many ads for the stuff, and some for brands remain familiar, while some don’t: Lord Calvert, Seagram’s, MacNaughton’s, Johnnie Walker, Old Crow, Vat 69, Dewar’s.  There are also ads for Harvey’s imported sherries and ports, and various ads for sweet sticky drinks: Drambuie, de Kuyper cordials  (12 delicious flavors including blackberry), Benedictine and Cherry Heering.

Whether the Esquire reader drank these straight or in mixed drinks isn’t clear, but certainly the evidence suggests that cocktail culture was alive and well in March 1953. I love the very elegant ad above for Gordon’s Dry Gin, and Booth’s House of Lords Dry Gin is described elsewhere as “the essential ingredient of a perfect martini.”

But the ad above is the one that really got me.  It’s for Heublein’s ready-made cocktails, which had in fact been around since 1915, and although this ad features the Manhattan, the range of ready-mades included dry and extra dry martinis, as well as the Yellowbird, the Screwdriver, the Hobo’s Wife at al.  But it isn’t the drink that appeals to me (and in fact ready-made cocktails are pretty damn unappealing), it’s the offer of two monogrammed cocktail glasses for a dollar!  There are so many reasons for wanting a time machine but going back to get your initial on a pair of classic, 1950s cocktail glasses is just about the best I can think of.

The suggestion in the magazine is that the Esquire reader ought to be eating out in restaurants: there’s a review of Black Angus on East 50^th Street where you could get a sirloin steak dinner for 2 for $8.50.  But no doubt many readers couldn’t live up to the advertisers’ fantasies and probably lived in pokey little apartments.  For them General Electric had come up with this fabulous appliance: 

It was a combined cooker, sink, refrigerator and storage drawer, in fact “a complete kitchen in five square feet,” as they proudly say.  Here the time machine seems to have taken us into the future when women can be cloned, and three of them can hover around your “complete kitchen,” and although the one on the right with the glass in her hand may actually be doing the washing up, I’ll bet she’s a dab hand at mixing cocktails too.

Also in the issue is an article titled “How to Imbibe: A Guide to Drinking at British Bars without Fear or Befuddlement” – other ads elsewhere in the magazine suggests that  by 1953 post-war international travel and tourism was taking off again.  The article offers information about who drinks what in English pubs.  Mild ale is drunk by the working man, while the white collar classes drink light ale.  These white collar types also drink brown ale, as does  “the younger generation.”  And who drinks Guinness?  ”Women,” Esquire tells us with authority,  “especially when pregnant.”  Did I say something about another country?  Alas, the ad below does not appear in the magazine.