Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

Yes, I’m back. We’ll see if it lasts, we’ll see if I don’t get distracted again by the vagaries of life or saxophone music, but for now, I’m back.

My return to the written word, predictably, was inspired by liquor, that distilled and veteran motivator and destroyer of the ambition, creativity and liver function of countless prose enthusiasts. Circumstances took me away from Kosher Eucharist, and it was cachaça, a stiff Brazilian cane juice liquor with a distinctive nose of giving head to a still, that brought me back to it. Haven’t tried cachaça? Put down a glass or three of white rum while listening to João Gilberto’s studiously laconic, ganja-hazy bossa nova…

…and contemplating Gal Costa’s brazen album cover cameltoe, and if that doesn’t give you the idea, at least you’re having a good time.

I came into possession of the telltale hooch because I had to go practice some financial obeah at the bank, which isn’t as fair a trade as it sounds. My aim, since most of my aims revolve around the mingling of spirits, mixers, ice and poor decisions, was to offer as many sacrifices to the avaricious gods of banking as they deemed necessary for the performance of their arcane duties, and then to recover from the proceedings with something suitably alcoholic. If you could appreciate how little comprehension I have of Mammon and the primly smiling Next-Window-Pleases who seem to exercise ultimate control over its ebb and flow, you would probably understand this bank-and-drink ritual.

I had in mind a frosty caipirinha, a popular Brazilian cocktail and much personally-beloved tipple whose name means, roughly, “little hillbilly girl,” which in the annals of inexplicable yet fulfilling drink names ranks right up there with “Harvey Wallbanger.” So after twirling through the half-hour fandango that is arranging an international bank transfer, I found myself down the street at the liquor store, zeroing in on the cachaça hidden between the rums and schnapps, whereupon my eyes settled upon a particularly colorful bottle. Embracing the bottle’s neck with a sultry insouciance was a bright red tag reading:

CAIPIRINHA INSTANT PARTY KIT
Includes:
* Caipirinha Drink Mix Pack
* Brazilian Music CD
* Drink Recipes Booklet

Intrigued by the concept of liquor fortified not only with the increased tolerance for existence imparted by distillation, but with a CD of music from my third-favorite country and a powdered mix for a cocktail containing only three ingredients, none of which normally come in powdered mix form, I dropped a little extra money (the only other brand of cachaça at the store, while garish, made no assurances of Instant Parties) and, after a stop at the supermarket for a bag of limes, returned home with my bounty.

I quickly discovered that the Brazilians have their own definition of “party.” Shattering my prior assumption that the average Brazilian celebration includes, over the course of any three hours, one kidnapping, two deaths by gunfire, three deaths by samba, four deaths by inexpressible saudade, five births and sixty-seven conceptions, it seems a true festa brasileira, at least as Cachaça 51 would have it, lasts 18 minutes (the length of the Brazilian Music CD) and is attended by no more than one person, since the powdered caipirinha mix makes it abundantly clear that it only prepara uma caipirinha.

Needless to say, eighteen minutes and one guest basically describes my ideal party, and I’ll be making aliyah to Brazil as soon as possible.

The powdered mix, for its part, did not inspire a great deal of confidence. It trumpeted its sabor natural, but a cursory readthrough of the ingredients revealed such sabores as “acidulante INS 330″ and “estabilizante INS 331,” which may be consecutive in the INS scale but, much like the Instant Party Kit did with the word “party,” seemed to imply a variation in the Portuguese and English understandings of the word “natural.” The mixture instructions were scarcely more encouraging. Instead of the delicate layering of muddled lime and sugar, crushed ice and cachaça in a traditional caipirinha, the powdered mix exhorted Lusophone lushes to “coloque um dose de cachaça no copo,” “adicione o conteúdo do envelope” and “misture bem e complete o copo com gelo picado,” a backwards recipe which may produce inebriant Brazilian Kool-Aid (a libation doubtless possessing its own charm), but certainly does not a caipirinha make.

So I set aside the mix, to save as a conversation starter or to pour into Chris’s mouth someday while he sleeps, and endeavored to make a proper caipirinha, a simple process I’ll explain to you so you too can throw an Instant Caipirinha Party in your own office, school, automobile or other appropriate location.

- Cut half a lime into four wedges
- Drop the wedges into a rocks/old fashioned glass
- Sprinkle two teaspoons of cane sugar over the limes
- Muddle this up real good, until the juice is freed from the lime and has had a few drinks with the sugar and is working up the nerve to ask it if it wants to go back to his place to hear his Massive Attack LPs. You will need a muddler for this. You should have a muddler in your home, because a home without caipirinhas, mojitos and Mint Juleps is just four walls with a mortgage and a shrill, inexorably aging person who wants to know why your “lovemaking” has become so “distant.”
- Fill the glass up like 2/3 or so of the way with crushed ice. If you don’t have one of those fancy fridge door devices or don’t want to run the blender, just put a few ice cubes into a plastic bag and smash the hell out of them with something sturdy. This is what I do, and I’ll continue to John Henry my crushed ice until the day it kills me.
- Pour in the neighborhood of a jigger and a half of cachaça over the crushed ice and muddled lime/sugar mixture.
- Stir it all up to evenly distribute the sweet’n’sour-ness. Drink leisurely, taking care not to spill on the floor should the urge to samba strike.

You may, particularly if you live in the sort of large, East Coastish metropolis rife with bars specializing in appalling transgressions against the art of the cocktail and operating under the assumption that all clear liquors are, like, basically the same, encounter something called a “caipiroska,” which is a terrible idea in liquid form that substitutes vodka for cachaça. If you see a caipiroska on a menu, order it so that you may dash it to the floor, aghast. These nouveau, craftless, anything-goes bartenders are the people who brought you the vodka martini - people who would mix Smirnoff, simple syrup and Angostura bitters and call it a “Old Fashionov” - and they should not be encouraged. If your local firewater repository doesn’t sell cachaça, they almost assuredly sell Seagram’s 7 and 7-UP, which you can buy and still manage to make a time of it.

But I digress. What about that Instant Caipirinha Party Brazilian Music CD with its nameless songs, nameless musicians and inability to maintain stylistic cohesion even for eight tracks and eighteen minutes?

TRACK 1

It starts off promisingly enough with a languorous jazz guitar bossa, which, if it were longer than two minutes and twenty-two seconds in length, would be pretty good music for letting your eyes get a little misty and out of focus and indulging in some saudade. However, this is not generally considered acceptable behavior at a party.

TRACK 2

Somehow, what must be the background music for a Brazilian Tourism Board commercial targeting American tourists with copious images of fruity rum drinks and dynamite Carioca junk spilling out of scantily-clad Carioca trunk sneaked onto this CD. “Brazil: Come Check Out the Ass On That.”

TRACK 4

This appears to be “When Doves Cry” done as a samba. I imagine that in being so recast, it has also been retitled something appropriately Brazilian, such as “When Doves Engage in a Manic Tropical Bacchanal Tempered Only By An Ineffable Sense of Sadness and Loss.”

TRACK 6

It is a packed and smoky nightclub on a summer night in São Paulo. The dancefloor is slick with sweat. In a back room, many lines of cocaine are being snorted. Someone is shot amidst the revelry. The people react by dancing with increased fervor, for to dance, yes, it is all they know.

TRACK 7

I can’t speak with certainty about the provenance of any of the songs on the CD, but if I had to hazard a guess about this one, it would be that circa 1986, the swirling Lurianic Technicolor angels who govern the actions of Carlos Santana exhorted him to fly down to Rio and record with the first nondescript fusion group he came across. This song is what resulted.

And so I must give Cachaça 51 its due. While both the powdered mix and Brazilian Music CD were little more than lies, they (in collusion with the cachaça) bestowed upon me the requisite fodder, and heady cane-drunk, to return to Kosher Eucharist, which I love so well. I promise to consider never leaving it again.

And to restore your faith in Brazilian music, here is the lovely Astrud Gilberto singing one of my favorite Antonio Carlos Jobim compositions, “Agua de Beber”:

Abraços e beijinhos e carinhos sem ter fim,
Michael