Cracked ice

1 ounce gin

1/2 ounce Cointreau

1/2 ounce Campari

1/2 ounce dry vermouth

Orange twist, for garnish

1. Fill a cocktail shaker or mixing glass halfway full with cracked ice. Add the gin, Cointreau, Campari, and dry vermouth. Stir well.

2. Strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with the orange twist.

Darling, would you run out and buy a bottle of Champagne? I can’t entertain as shabbily as this and I’ve spent everything I have buying vulgar things like Scotch and gin. I daren’t even cash another check.

–Virginia Rowans, House Party

Cracked ice

1-1/2 ounces gin (I would stick with the WA theme and use Voyager if you can get it)

1/2 ounce Sidetrack Strawberry liqueur

Chilled brut Champagne or sparkling wine

Lemon slice, for garnish

1. Fill a cocktail shaker or mixing glass halfway full with cracked ice. Add the gin and liqueur. Stir well.

2. Strain into a flute or other charming glass. Top with chilled bubbly and garnish with that lemon slice.

Saturday night at the Canterbury was about to take its toll. He had not planned his night of gin and song. A visit to the Canterbury was not indelibly inspired in his social diary, like evenings at the dome and the Theatre Royal.

–Peter Lovesey, Mad Hatter’s Holiday

Cracked ice

2 ounces dark rum

1 ounce Rhum Clément Creole Shrubb

1 ounce amaretto

1. Fill a cocktail shaker or mixing glass halfway full with cracked ice. Add the rum, Creole Shrubb, and amaretto. Stir well.

2. Strain into a cocktail glass.

A Note: I think cracked ice is crackingly good for stirring here, but if you have only ice cubes and don’t feel like cracking, they’ll work too.

PS: This recipe is from Ginger Bliss and the Violet Fizz. Which you should get, for gosh sakes.

The meal began, according to custom, with a selection of exquisite soups–considered by all epicures to be the essential health-giving aperitifs of any great dinner. They included consommés such as Potage à la Victoria, a delicate veal broth garnished with blanched cockscombs; Potage à la Colbert, a vegetable soup flavored by glazed Jerusalem artichokes laboriously cut into pea-sized balls, and Potage à la Comte de Paris, a sherry-colored, intensely flavoured meat soup filled with macaroni ribbons and delicate chicken quenelles. As the tureens were cleared, and as the noise levels rose to compete with the band, the members moved on to the most delicate dishes, the hot fish. Turbot à la Mazarin, light poached and served with a delicately beautiful pink cream sauce made with butter and lobster roes; pan-fried trout in a sherry sauce; a pyramid of whitings, deep friend and served à la Egyptienne in tribute to the guest of honor, and wild salmon from the river Severin–which Alexis considered the very best–line caught that morning and brought in on the afternoon train, to be pounced on by the kitchen staff and immediately scraped, gutted, washed, and prepared in a simple cream gratin.  Then came the dishes for the main service, carefully arranged on the crisp white damask cloths–two, four, or six platters of each item laid out in perfect symmetry. These included a choice of róts, such as young, tender turkeys, no bigger than chickens, their necks skinned but heads left intact, tucked under their wings. There were also hares in a red-currant sauce, capons with watercress, plump white ducklings, spit-roasted and served with the juice of sour bigarade oranges. The first relevés were also waiting: an almighty baron of beef; haunches of mutton roasted à la Soyer and saddle of lamb à la Sévigné, served with veal quenelles, stewed cucumbers, and asparagus puree. There were also more elaborate removes, such as Chapons à la Nelson, a complex dish which involved gluing truffle- and mushroom-stuffed capons into pastry croustades shaped like the prow of a ship–complete with sails, portholes, and anchor–and fixing them into waves of mashed potatoes. Soyer adored these elaborate culinary trompes l’oeil, and at the same banquet produced for the first time his Poulardes en Diadem, this the time pastry croustade resembling a jeweled crown, stuffed with roasted chickens, boiled ox tongues, and glazed sweetbreads. He adorned them with attelettes–another Soyer innovation–newly commissioned gold and silver skewers with carved tops representing fantastical animals, birds, shells, and knight helmets. The attelettes, or hatelets as the popular electroplated copies were called, were the equivalents of culinary jewelry, and would be strung with crawfish, truffles, and quenelles before being stuck into the dish as the ultimate sparkling garnish.

Okay, that’s only about half of this dinner. But what a half! To get the full menu (and to read the full story of Soyer), pick up or download Relish. And give a toast to Soyer!

PS: Missed the other Soyer Cocktail Talks? Read up on Soyer Cocktail Talk I, Soyer Cocktail Talk II, and Soyer Cocktail Talk III.

Beneath this terrace, reached via a wooden staircase, was an American-style bar called The Washington Refreshment Room, which was to all intents and purposes the first cocktail bar in London. It provided thirsty customers with such daring modern concoctions as ‘flashes of lightning, tongue twisters, oesophagus burners, knockemdowns, squeezemtights . . . brandy pawnees, shadygaffs, mint juleps, hailstorms, Soyer’s Nectar cobblers, brandy smash, and hoc genus omne.’ More than forty cocktails were on offer, and among the candidates for the job of barmen, said Sala, was ‘an eccentric American genius, who declared himself perfectly capable of compounding four at a time, swallowing a flash of lightning, smoking a cigar, singing Yankee Doodle, washing up the glasses, and performing the overture to the Huguenots on the banjo simultaneously.

 . . .  the festivities almost came to a dramatic end when a paper lantern caught fire and the flames quickly spread across the roof–but a young officer hoisted himself up to the beams and managed to extinguish it. The band resumed, and Alexis produced his special punch–Crimean Cup à la Marmora–a lethal blend of iced Champagne, Cognac, Jamaican rum, maraschino, orgeat syrup, soda water, sugar, and lemons.

He did not have to wait long for yet another bundle of ecstatic reviews. On 13 July The Sun declared: ‘It beats all the lemonade, orangeade, citronade, soda-water, sherry-cobbler, sherbet, Carrara-water, Seltzer, or Vichy-water we ever tasted.” The Globe dubbed Soyer the ‘Emperor of the Kitchen,’ and duly recommended the addition of a tot of rum.

The Nectar was particularly popular as a mixer, and Alexis, who with some justification could be called the pioneer of the English cocktail, published a variety of recipes for ‘Nectar Cobblers’ and other glamorous boozy compounds.

Cowen’s Soyer biography is packed with descriptions of the almost impossible to believe dinners he made, sometimes for groups by the hundreds and thousands. Whenever, going forward, I hear people talk about their decandent dinners, I’ll laugh and point them to Relish. The following quote is part of one of the more restrained meals in the book, one Soyer created for the Grand Dinner of the Royal Agricultural Society festival:

The bill of fare included–on top of a whole Baron and Saddleback of Beef à la Magna Charta–33 dishes of ribs of beef, 35 dishes of roast lamb, 99 galantines of veal, 29 dishes of ham, 69 dishes of pressed beef, two rounds of beef  à la Garrick, 264 dishes of chicken, 33 raised French pies à la Soyer, 198 dishes of mayonnaise salad, 264 fruit tarts, and 198 dishes of hot potatoes. It also included 33 Exeter puddings, which Soyer had invented especially for the occasion. There were essentially an alcohol-steeped reworking of his boiled Plum Bolster, for which, in The Modern Housewife, he had applied the alternative name of ‘Spotted Dick’ for the first time in an English cookbook. They were big, rich, doughy balls of suet and sugar, to which Alexis added rum and ratafias and then smothered with a sweet, shining blackcurrant and sherry sauce.

…he was particularly skilled at mimicking the comic turns of whichever show was playing. He had a musical ear and sang, by all accounts, nearly as well as Levasseur, one of the most admired bass singers in France. A dandy with a penchant for outlandish costumes, a terrible flirt, a skiller storyteller and an impish practical joker, Alexis had even considered switching careers to try his luck on the stage.

By two in the morning he would be at the Provence Hotel, the Ceder Cellars, or Evan’s Late Supper Rooms in Covent Garden–also frequented by Thackeray–where customers descended a flight of stone steps to a smoky basement called the Cave of Harmony, which was in fact a large raucous music hall and café serving simple, alcohol-absorbing meals of fatty chops, sausages, grilled kidneys in gravy, Welsh rarebit, and baked potatoes. Here the exclusively male clientele would stay until the early hours, cheering and heckling the professional glee singers and comic acts while knocking back the cheap booze–stout, pale ale, punch, grog, hot whisky and water.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.

–Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

Drake said, “Here’s a car with three of my operatives now. What do we do first?”
“Put them out the way I said, so they can watch the apartment, the garage, and the windows.”
“Okay, then what?”
“Then,” Della Street interposed with firm determination,“we get a cup of hot coffee and it there’s any brandy in the car, we spike it with brandy. My chattering teeth are chipping off.”
“That,” Mason agreed, “is an idea.”

–Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife