Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers (10 page)
Read Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers Online
Authors: Mark Bailey,Edward Hemingway
LONG ISLAND ICED TEA
Notorious, the Long Island Iced Tea (when made correctly) is incredibly potent, but tastes and looks like nonalcoholic tea. It’s perfect for discreet drinking, which McCullers indulged in often. But be warned, invented in the Hamptons by bartender Robert Butt, the Long Island Iced Tea will knock you out cold if you’re not careful.
½ oz. gin
½ oz. vodka
½ oz. tequila
½ oz. light rum
½ oz. Cointreau
¾ oz. lemon juice
Top with cola
Lemon wedge
Pour all ingredients except cola and garnish into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake, and then strain into a Collins glass filled with ice cubes. Add cola until color of tea. Garnish with lemon wedge. Serve with two straws.
The Ballad of the Sad Café,
1951
T
HE WHISKY THEY DRANK THAT EVENING
(two big bottles of it) is important. Otherwise, it would be hard to account for what followed. Perhaps without it there would never have been a café. For the liquor of Miss Amelia has a special quality of its own. It is clean and sharp on the tongue, but once down a man it glows inside him for a long time afterward. And that is not all. It is known that if a message is written with lemon juice on a clean sheet of paper there will be no sign of it. But if the paper is held for a moment to the fire then the letters turn brown and the meaning becomes clear. Imagine that the whisky is the fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of a man—then the worth of Miss Amelia’s liquor can be understood.
“I drink exactly as much as I want, and one drink more.”
An ardent and vocal opponent of Prohibition, Mencken wrote letters and essays railing against the Volstead Act. In
The American Language,
he devoted pages to the etymology of bar slang. With his friends in New York, Mencken spent an inordinate amount of time searching for the perfect watering hole, the Alt Heidelburg in Union Hill, New Jersey. In Baltimore, he joined drinking clubs, such as the aptly named Stevedores, a group that “devoted itself to the unloading of schooners”—schooners of beer, that is. When not out drinking at speakeasies or clubs, Mencken was drinking at home. An avid home brewer, he once gave Sinclair Lewis a home brewery system with the hope that it would keep him off the harder stuff.
..........
1880–1956. Newspaper editor, critic, journalist, and linguist. A reporter for the
Baltimore Herald,
Mencken later joined the
Baltimore Sun.
He edited the satirical magazine
Smart Set
and founded the
American Mercury.
Mencken’s six-volume collection of essays,
Prejudice,
stands as a major literary achievement, as does
The American Language
.
STINGER
Created during Prohibition, the Stinger was invented to cover the taste of cheap speakeasy swill. Either you will love or hate this after-dinner drink. We are going to venture that Mencken loved it. After all, he once claimed, “I’m ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.”
1½ oz. brandy
1½ oz. white crème de menthe
Pour ingredients into a mixing glass filled with ice cubes. Stir well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
For a dryer version, increase brandy 1/2 oz. and decrease crème de menthe 1/2 oz.
The Baltimore Sun,
c.1910
W
HAT WOULD BECOME OF ROMANCE
if there were no alcohol? Imagine a teetotaler writing
Much Ado About Nothing,
or the Fifth Symphony, or
Le Malade Imaginaire,
or
Peer Gynt,
or the Zend-Avesta, or the Declaration of Independence or any other great work of feeling and fancy! Imagine Wagner, bursting with ginger-pop, at work upon
Tristan and Isolde.
Imagine Leonardo, soaked in health drinks from Battle Creek, fashioning the unfathomable smile of Mona Lisa!
“Who cares what tripped a fallen woman?”
To pay for a holiday in Europe, Millay agreed to write some quick pieces for
Vanity Fair
under the byline Nancy Boyd. She would need liquor and company to help her get it done. Late one night, while writing and drinking bootleg gin with Edmund Wilson and the poet John Peale Bishop, a drunken Millay asked the two men to hold her in their arms. She instructed Wilson to take her lower half, Bishop the upper. Whether this resulted in a ménage à trois is not entirely clear, but it does support Millay’s famous declaration, “My candle burns at both ends.”
..........
1892–1950. Poet and playwright. Millay was one of the most celebrated lyrical poets of her era. At age twenty, she won a scholarship to Vassar for her poem “Renascence.” With her collection
The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems,
she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.
BETWEEN THE SHEETS
Greatly sought after in her day, Millay was known as much for her love affairs as she was for her verse. What better a cocktail then? Basically a Sidecar with rum, a Between the Sheets is the perfect nightcap. Like Millay herself, it is wonderfully seductive.
¾ oz. brandy
¾ oz. light rum
1 oz. Cointreau
½ oz. lemon juice
Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
I drank at every vine.
The last was like the first.
I came upon no wine
So wonderful as thirst.
I gnawed at every root.
I ate of every plant.
I came upon no fruit
So wonderful as want.
Feed the grape and bean
To the vintner and the monger;
I will lie down lean
With my thirst and my hunger.
“I started Thursday. By Saturday morning I’d drunk myself sober.”
O’Hara was a notoriously temperamental drunk. He tried at various times to punch out Robert Benchley, actor Paul Douglas, renowned neurologist Dr. Howard Fabing, and at the “21” Club, apparently once, a dwarf. The owner of the Stork Club, Sherman Billingsley instructed his staff to always seat O’Hara by the door so they could be rid of him more easily.
..........
1905–1970. Novelist and short-story writer. O’Hara built his reputation writing about class differences. A large number of such stories appeared in
The New Yorker.
His first novel,
Appointment in Samarra,
established him as a major literary figure.
Butterfield 8,
another major success, solidified his standing. His later novel
Ten North Frederick
won the National Book Award.
PLANTER’S PUNCH
One, two, three, four, punch. Punch, which literally means five in Farsi, Hindi, and over a dozen other languages, should have a minimum of five different ingredients. O’Hara probably did not know this. Something of a barroom brawler, he believed a punch needed only five clenched fingers.
2 oz. dark rum
1 oz. light rum
½ oz. Grand Marnier
½ oz. simple syrup
½ oz. lime juice
1 oz. orange juice
1 oz. pineapple juice
1 dash of grenadine
2 dashes of Angostura bitters
Maraschino cherry
Orange slice
Pineapple wedge
Pour all ingredients (except fruit) into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake, and then strain into a Collins glass filled with ice cubes. Garnish with cherry, orange slice, and pineapple wedge. Serve with two straws.
