… in which FPR resuscitates some of its old low unseriousness.
The season of Bright Sorrow can get a bloke thinking about all the things he won’t be allowing himself for a while. One of them is prime rib cooked properly, which is to say hardly at all. (Beef, said the great Michigander Jim Harrison, is a comfort food we deserve because our lives are miserable enough already. And if that mountain of appetite ever denied himself anything, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.)
Another one of those things is The Clementine, a cocktail of my own invention. It is named for my first grandchild and will soon be accompanied by another cocktail, as will the grandchild herself. The only problem is that I haven’t begun work on it yet—the drink, I mean, not the baby—and damned if the arid fast isn’t already upon us, that all-bibulous-destroying and all-raucous-crushing tenebrous penitential Tartarus whence all steak tartare has been interminably—in the sense of temporarily—banished. Indeed, the Great Fast stretches out before us, a Mojave of deprivations on the far other side of which awaits, barely visible, Resurrection Sunday, rib-eye caps mooing still on the dinner plate, and cocktails sparkling in the chilly champaign glow of springtime’s low afternoon sunlight.
What all this means is that I might have to conjure an oasis of time somewhere in the middle and take a little break from the grim discipline of self-control that is so disruptive of a man’s evening rituals and the general jocularity of his pious xenia. I might have to carve out a space for invention not of the rhetorical but of the mixological sort. The good news is that I’m pretty sure I can be forgiven for this. At least I can forgive myself. I am not a strict confessor. After all, I’ve got the birth of a child to celebrate, and the birth of any child in these evil times is worth celebrating, even one ’got twixt unlawful sheets—which, let me be clear, ours wasn’t!
There are obstacles in addition to the fast, and I don’t mean its emphasis on metanoia, although that emphasis is a great inconvenience for those of us who excel at misery and fail miserably at repentance. I mean, in the first place, the problem of the base spirit, which, believe me, is a real problem. The Clementine is a whiskey, more specifically a bourbon, cocktail. But I am sore tempted to make its companion, whatever it will be called, a gin-based libation. Vodka, you understand, is out of the question. I’ll permit it in a Bloody Mary, but it is otherwise to be used for cooking only or else grudgingly for what I call, perhaps not charitably, “girlie drinks.” And if like James Bond you are one of those who imbibes a so-called “vodka martini”—which is manifestly not a martini—you can pound sand right now. Double-O Seven might know guns and girls; on the topic of drinks he is clueless.
But gin (speaking of martinis), which is so glorious on its own, and more glorious still when it’s very cold and modulated with just a suggestion of dry vermouth and a lemon twist, is itself a problem for the reason I just stated: it is glorious on its own, very a glory unto itself. You almost don’t want to violate it. Emboldened, however, by such concoctions as the gin fizz of Huey Long fame, or the beautiful G&T (a marriage as heaven-sent as love and money), anyone sharing my Germanic inclinations—pecca fortitor!—is likely to embark upon the challenge.
And so I shall.
Until such a time as this new concoction comes into being, however, let me describe my temporary leave-taking of bourbonic delight. On the eve of the fast, which in the Byzantine-Constantinopolitan East is a Sunday but in the Roman and outward-rippling West is a Tuesday—Fat Tuesday—I combined into a rocks glass a quarter-ounce of slightly warmed maple syrup (from our own trees here), a half-ounce of Cointreau, an ounce of Averna (Fernet Branca will also answer), and four ounces of bourbon. I stirred these ingredients lovingly and I then added a large ice cube—a real cube—and, finally, the preferred garnish to this work of art: a thick strip of bacon, a plank sticky with caramelized maple syrup.
I’ve broken the sacred cocktail rule of three, I know, but it’s my granddaughter I’m honoring, and I can do whatever I damn-well please, because I’m the best grampaw ever.
I’ve also shared a recipe with the vast FPR readership. Call it Lenten alms-giving.
In news wholly unrelated but not to be hid under a bushel: a splendid student blooper from long ago crossed the desk of my memory recently. I’m ashamed to have forgotten it. It seems Odysseus wasn’t the only one buttering Calypso’s bread those seven long years: “By echoing his earlier struggle with Clapso in Book 5 … ”
“Clapso”? O frabjuous day! Callooh Callay! No need to keep reading! Suffer gold no time to be turned into lead!
I just have to believe that, sometime during Hermes’ visit to spring Odysseus from the island, Hermes and Calypso found time for one of the Homeric gods’ favorite pastimes: a quickie. I’m no classicist, but wouldn’t it be grand if Hermes were also the god of what Bob Seger, meaning something slightly different, would later call “the fire down below”?
I’ll say this much for Odysseus: he is lucky to be leaving Ogygia. He will thereby avoid connubial congress with a gonorrheal goddess.
Clapso! I think a third cocktail—and maybe a variant (The Clapsomaniac)—is in the making.
A successful Bright Sorry to all of you who observe it and a Merry March and April to all of you who don’t. (Me—I’m what you’d call “on the spectrum.”)
Image Via: DeviantArt
