Tequila Mockingbird (4 page)

1 ounce light rum

½ ounce coffee liqueur (like Kahlúa)

2 ounces light cream

Ground cinnamon or nutmeg, to taste

Combine the rum and coffee liqueur over ice in a rocks glass. Pour the cream on top and sprinkle a little spice. Now, drink to the heady brew of passion—even if the only foreign doctor in your life is on TV.

I
magine a world dominated by antidepressants and governmental control over reproductive rights. (Oh. Wait.) Written in the thirties,
Brave New World
could've been copy-and-pasted from today's headlines. Huxley penned a dystopian world in which embryos are preprogrammed for certain behaviors and needs, and technology is so revered that “Oh my Ford” is a commonplace utterance. While Huxley was an outspoken fan of psychedelic drugs, you can
legally
freeze your own brain with a swirly smoothie featuring a surprising aphrodisiac: watermelon. Hey, what you drink (and who you drink it with) ain't nobody's business but your own.

1 ounce vodka

1 cup seedless watermelon, chopped into coarse cubes

¼ ounce lemon juice

½ teaspoon granulated sugar

½ ounce melon liqueur

Add the vodka, watermelon, lemon juice, sugar, and a handful of ice to a blender, running until smooth. Pour into a cocktail glass and float the liqueur on top. No matter your political leanings, one gulp of this and you'll be more than brave enough to fight The Man.

F
or readers of
All the Year Round
, a weekly journal that Charles Dickens published himself, it took over thirty issues to tell a tale set between Paris and London during the French Revolution. Though the cities are the real stars, there's a tragically romantic love story that plays out on their streets, starring a golden-haired beauty and the two men who are willing to die for her (talk about “the best of times”). Toast to sooty chivalry with our take on a famous drink that hails from “The New York Bar” in Paris: a Cocktail of Two Cities that requires nary a passport.

1 sugar cube

1 ounce gin

½ ounce lemon juice

Champagne, to fill

Place the sugar cube in a flute. Pour the gin and lemon juice into a shaker with ice, and shake well. Strain into the flute. Fill to the top with Champagne. The result is
revolutionary
.

T
his winner of both a National Book Award
and
a Pulitzer inspired a movie
and
a musical for its depiction of black southern life in the first half of the twentieth century. Alice Walker tells her novel in letters, first from a fourteen-year-old Celie, spilling her confusion to God, and later between a maturing Celie and her sister, whose correspondence from Africa highlights similar racial woes back home in Georgia. A modern classic,
The Color Purple
blooms bright for anyone willing to face its painful beauty. Cool off an oppressively warm night with a sweetly hued shot, pondering how far our world has come—and how much further we've got to go.

½ ounce blackberry liqueur

½ ounce peach schnapps

½ ounce light rum

½ ounce lemon juice

Combine the ingredients in a shaker with ice and shake well. Strain into a shot glass. Alternatively, double the recipe and invite your sister over. Nothing bonds as fast as booze.

A
cat named Bloomberg, a dude named Zooey, and a girl who smokes in the tub: we spy hipsters! Originally appearing in two
New Yorker
installments as part of a larger series about the Glass family, J. D. Salinger's
Franny and Zooey
concerns a college coed who is so at wit's end with campus poseurs and politics, she faints while at a restaurant with her boyfriend. He flees—hell, there's a football game—and Franny's left chanting a prayer, all by her kooky lonesome. With a religious wink to Frangelico, the nutty liqueur in a monk-shaped bottle, find your center by icing down those troubles over some decaf.

2 ounces decaf espresso, chilled

1 ounce hazelnut liqueur (like Frangelico)

2 ounces light cream

Put on a cardigan, a jazz album, and a frown. Then pour the espresso and liqueur over ice in a rocks glass, adding the cream on top. Not smiling yet? For the love of Brooklyn, be thankful you've got this much time—and this little responsibility—to feel so full of angst. It won't last forever, baby!

C
hildren can be so cruel. Sixteen-year-old Carrie White is already a social outcast when she adds every girl's nightmare to the list: having her first period in a gym class
shower
. It gets messier from there, with scheming teens setting Carrie up to win prom queen, only to crown her not with a tiara, but—can't get
this
at Walmart—with pig's blood. Little do her fellow classmates know about Carrie's secret telekinetic powers (it's a Stephen King novel after all, his first to get published), and our heroine buttons the novel with a fair impression of Satan going through puberty. Spice up a legendary drink with ingredients even a schoolgirl has on hand—though there's no way you're serving this one virgin.

5 ounces tomato juice

2 ounces vodka

½ ounce lime juice

½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

¼ teaspoon wasabi paste

3 dashes hot sauce

Salt and pepper, to taste

Add the ingredients to a shaker with ice. Shake well and strain over fresh ice in a Collins glass. Traditionalists would finish with a celery stalk, but if you're a gal who likes to stir
trouble
instead of drinks, you'll be too busy doubling the wasabi.

S
ad that the writer of “Only connect”—
Howards End
's epigraph—had such a tortured time doing so himself. Edward Morgan (E. M.) Forster, the long-closeted novelist of the literary masterpieces
A Room with a View
and
A Passage to India
(the last book he'd write for fifty years, until his death), imagined three distinct families in
Howards End
, an English estate at the center of class tensions, inheritance resentments, and the rare death-by-falling-bookcase. Here, we blend the three distinct flavors of the vintage “Janet Howard” cocktail, for a posh but pronto drink. This'll have you connecting in no time—with other people, God willing, not toppled furniture.

2 ounces brandy

½ ounce orgeat syrup

2 dashes Angostura bitters

A perfect drink for the day you receive word your wealthiest relative has finally
kicked the bucket
passed on. Shake the ingredients with ice and strain into a cocktail glass—and gather the bravery to ask if you were left anything in the will.

Y
ou know what's too tragic to be funny? A feminist survivor story published under a male pseudonym. With Charlotte Brontë writing as Currer Bell,
Jane Eyre
(think: Gloria Steinem in a bonnet) is the retrospective of an abused orphan-child turned bored teacher-girl turned lovesick governess-lady. Unfortunately, her groom already has a wife—Brontë didn't give the heroine any breaks—and Jane sets off on a soul-quest, refusing subsequent marriage proposals and eventually landing the man, the baby, and the happy home. Brontë wasn't so lucky; she died while pregnant, less than ten years after
Jane
debuted to acclaim. Raise a glass of English gin to a legendary lady, worthy of a sweeter finish than befell her.

8 sprigs fresh mint, washed

2 ounces English gin

1 ounce lemon juice

1½ teaspoons granulated sugar

2 dashes orange bitters

Add the ingredients to a shaker with ice, with bonus points if you tear the mint leaves first. Shake well and strain into a cocktail glass. Now nurse that drink like a good nanny.

A
n apple a day may keep the dentist away, but the Devil's no doctor.
Paradise Lost
, Milton's seventeenth-century blank verse poem (don't hold your breath for Dr. Seuss rhymes), was one of the first examples of Christian literature to paint Adam, Eve, and even your old friend Satan in gray strokes—it's less good vs. evil than complicated vs. conflicted. Remarkably, Milton didn't just
write
a twelve-part book, he
spoke
it: the author was blind, so he had to dictate the entire text to some kind of angel. Toast Milton's Godlike effort with a recipe that features a sinful apple at its core. It'll be worth the price tomorrow morning.