Remember, remember, the Fifth of December,
When cognac, Scotch whisky and beer,
Once more flowed from the tap, ev’ry bottle uncapped,
So to Prohibition let none adhere
‘Twas on this day in 1933, 74 years ago, when the government realized that the best way to combat the malaise gripping America, with Depression and Dust Bowl ravaging the heartland, was to allow the poor and downtrodden to forget their sorrows with their first drink in 14 years guaranteed not to contain turpentine.
It was, save for (eventually) entering World War II, arguably the last good decision the federal government ever made.
So celebrate your constitutional right to cirrhosis with a frosty one, and on your way home from the bar, don’t forget to urinate on your local chapter of MADD.
Last night I ate dinner, only because it was convenient, at one of those restaurants. Those restaurants. The kind where most of the waitstaff is comprised of blond girls named “Kellye.” The kind that try to conjure up an atmosphere of eclectically homespun Americana - even though they have locations in the United Arab Emirates, China and Saudi Arabia, and are thus, in a corporate sense, at odds with the very idea of America - by decking the walls with carefully aged random shit ranging from farm tools to turn of the century dry-goods-general-store handbills in splintery wood frames and lynchin’ ropes, all hearkening back to a simpler, purer time, when rugged pioneers conquered the vast prairies and settled down to traditional home-cooked meals of bacon-and-cheddar potato skins, jumbo shrimp and portobello Swiss burgers. I got to wondering if these chains’ foreign locations attempted a localized variation on the same concept, if the one in Riyadh was plastered with Saudi Arabiana such as Bedouin daggers, kaffiyehs, torched Bibles and the severed heads of minor criminal offenders and presumed-unchaste teenage girls, and that was when I decided that I needed a drink.
Despairing slightly, I picked up the drink menu and was predictably presented with a long list of garish Cointreau- and blue curacao- infused concoctions ending in “-tini,” along with the strangely ubiquitous mojito and an awful, awful lot of fruity rum drinks cutely named after devastating natural phenomena. Slight relief came when I saw that they listed, as a service to people with any taste, all the liquors they stocked. I narrowed in on the gin, martini in my heart. Bombay Sapphire? No, too faltzani to order something specifically with Bombay Sapphire, and Bombay Sapphire is best drunk chilled and straight up anyway. Vermouth distracts. Tanqueray? Too brusque. Beefeater. There we go.
Thinking that this would ensure me a proper martini mixed without vodka, I asked the waiter to bring me a Beefeater martini and sat back to contemplate the dry-goods-general-store handbills. But the waiter did not bring me a proper martini. No, I got something else entirely.
The waiter, whom I do not blame, and whom I plan to notify, Irgun-style, before I plant the C4, brought out to my eternal horror the Abomination of Distillation - the Anathemartini. The Anathemartini came served in a tiny rocks glass over crushed ice, and was garnished with two absolutely monstrous olives skewered on a cocktail sword, the purpose of which was apparently to immobilize the olives long enough for me to finish the drink before they rolled off to attack Tokyo. I removed the garnish and the level of liquid sank nearly a third of the already puny glass; students of history and science will recall that Archimedes made his “Eureka!”-punctuated discovery of specific gravity when he realized that placing overlarge, liquid-displacing garnishes in his guests’ drinks saved him money on retsina. I took a trepid sip - it’s a shame to waste gin, even defiled gin - and thus was the full extent of the bartender’s Calvinist disregard for mixological orthodoxy revealed: the Anathemartini had no vermouth.
There is, of course, a school of thought which holds that a proper martini contains little to no vermouth, which manifests itself in behaviors that range from the ridiculous (swirling a drop of vermouth around a glass then pouring it out before adding gin) to the obscene (making statements along the lines of “To make the perfect martini, picture a passionate tryst you had with a woman who once while on vacation had a Cinzano Bianco with lemon at a sidewalk cafe in Perugia, then pour three jiggers of gin down your pants.”). These people are wrong, and if there is a just God, they’ll be cast into the seventh circle of Hell (blasphemers, sodomites and usurers) to wait, for all eternity, on a crowd of thirty-something loan officers in the midst of a perpetual “girls’ night out” who are earnestly discussing America’s Next Top Model and ordering appletinis. They tip poorly.
Sigh. So there I was, drinking a martini served in the wrong glass, missing a key ingredient, and rapidly losing flavor due to icy attrition. And I wondered: how could anybody who serves drinks for a living fail so utterly to conceive of what is arguably the classic American drink? What has gone wrong in the nation that invented the cocktail to bring us to the point where in order to get a real martini, you have to specify “with gin and vermouth, straight up”? Is the day far off when we’ll have to order a rum and Coke by saying “With rum and Coca-Cola, on the rocks, in a highball” to avoid getting served a plastic sippy cup of vodka and lukewarm Dr. Pepper? Will proper bar glassware eventually be entirely replaced by the Patron-filled navel of a sorority girl on her sixth Cosmo, “cuz that’s what Carrie drinks”? Am I only sticking my finger in the dike, vainly struggling against the inevitable drowning of cocktail culture by a Biblical deluge of Midori and “Hpnotiq”? Or am I just drunk?
I don’t really do Thanksgiving, but I do appreciate an opportunity to turn one of the many random dishes gracing tables across America into a cocktail, and I’m not talking about anything pumpkin-flavored. So with a nod to Brazil, and my mother, who came up with the cranberry idea, I present the Thanksgiving Batida:
Directions:
- Take an amount of your Thanksgiving cranberry compote - using real, whole cranberries, nothing from a can - and blend it with a little cold water until it turns nice and smooth.
- Shake over ice: 2 1/2 jiggers cranberry, 1 1/2 jiggers cachaça, and 1/2 jigger simple syrup.
- Strain into glass with ice using fine strainer to catch the bits of cranberry detritus. A tea strainer should work fine.
- Drink.
I bring you today the second entry in the newly-minted “Michael Drinks Mildly Exotic Liquors and Reports” series on Kosher Eucharist, since we at KE feel it’s important that our readership be presented with strictly unbiased accounts of various alcohols by someone who hates nearly everything. Last time I covered cachaça, a Brazilian firewater teetering on the cusp of sudden and insufferable popularity, and now the moment has come to contend with mezcal, that notorious proletarian cousin of tequila, that Mexican agave distillate whose preeminent feature, besides its incendiary aroma, is the inclusion of the gusano or worm, a generously-sized moth or weevil larva floating reproachfully in a Davy Jones’ locker of sinister amber brew.
I was at the supermarket on a routine gin run, and I saw that its liquor store had just started stocking a single brand of mezcal, Monte Alban, a supposedly 100% agave Oaxacan product containing a fat white worm. Feeling adventurous, and also slight pangs of withdrawal, I decided that the supermarket’s open-minded liquor stocking policy should be rewarded, and I put the mezcal in my basket. The checkout girl, apparently unaware that such a zoologically-enhanced potation existed, asked me what it was. “It’s basically tequila,” I said, “but even more likely to make you go blind.”
Around the Monte Alban bottle’s neck was a small brochure which purported to recount the history and traditions of mezcal, which I quote below (with my comments in bold):
You are holding in your hands one of the most legendary drinks in the world. (Just like absinthe, except favored by raging, pumice-livered drunks instead of sad-eyed, fin-de-siècle-nostalgic youths with Toulouse-Lautrec prints on their walls.) Its mystique, created over hundreds of years, follows it to this day. What is it about Mezcal that has given it such an avid following? (The foolishness of man perverteth his way.) What makes it so unique? (The rustic charm of paint stripper wedded to the price of mid-level tequila.)
Mezcal dates from the middle of the sixteenth century, when the Spanish conquistadores had conquered the New World. When they ran out of their traditional rum, the battle-scarred fighters (or more accurately, the spread-highly-contagious-foreign-diseases-then-sit-back-relax-and-worry-about-what-to-distill-scarred fighters) looked for something else to celebrate with. (The native women were understandably reluctant at that point). The (surviving) Aztecs near the mountaintop settlement of Monte Alban in Oaxaca had cultivated a certain species of agave cactus for juice which they would ferment into what they called pulque. The Spaniards, wanting something much more potent than pulque, began to experiment with the agave. First, they chopped it up to be cooked. The juice was then pressed out, fermented for several days, and finally distilled. The result was Mezcal.
Traditionally, every bottle of true Mezcal made in Oaxaca Province contains an agave worm (since 1940, anyway). Since the agave worm inhabits only the species of cactus that Mezcal is made from the agave worm signifies genuine Mezcal, made the traditional way. The worm isn’t there for looks. (It’s fortunate that this was clarified, since most people agree that a dead grub floating in embalming liquor is the very pinnacle of aesthetic splendor.) It is meant to be eaten. Because it is believed by many (note the subtle, lawsuit-skirting qualification of that statement) that within the worm lies the key. Some say it unlocks the door to a world of wondrous experiences (such as a night in county lockup on charges of urinating in public while screaming “I JUST ATE A FUCKING WORM! FUCK YOU!). Others say it sets free a spirit of celebration (such as urinating in public while screaming “I JUST ATE A FUCKING WORM! FUCK YOU!). Still others say that eating the worm locks in the enchantment and excitement of Mezcal. (”I JUST DRANK A SHITLOAD OF LIQUOR THAT HAS A FUCKING WORM IN IT! FUCK YOU!”) The worm then holds different keys for different people (like your high school janitor, except the mezcal-preserved worm has, on average, a lower BAC). And there’s only one way to see what yours will open. (If I drink enough mezcal in one evening to make it all the way down to the worm, I’m betting the black-market price of my corroded liver that all that’s going to be opened is my digestive tract.) Try it.
That I was dealing with a mezcal distillery apparently unaware that agave is not a cactus should have alerted me that something sinister was afoot.
Stapled to the brochure was a little spice packet along with instructions stating: “Mezcal is traditionally drunk like Tequila: that is, with a lick of salt and a bite of lime. For true tradition, use the mixture of sea-salt and spices attached to this brochure.” Of course, the salt ‘n’ citrus tequila cruda is actually not the traditional way to drink tequila - it is, by and large, an invention for tourists - but I decided that anything that would temper the sledgehammer in the teeth that is a shot of mezcal was probably advisable. I filled my faithful Route 66 shotglass, I readied a slice of lime, I took a lick of salt, and I sent the whole shot of mezcal hurtling with violent intent towards my esophagus. Now, I am a man who can consume and hold his liquor with aplomb, a man who can down a stiff martini like so much water if so inclined, so please understand the significance of the fact that I gagged. Oh, I kept it in and I swallowed it, but I gagged. And I reeled. The lime slice lay forgotten as my stomach microbes began to die a million tiny, screaming deaths. I have, in my early-college salad days, taken a shot of 151 rum, and I promise you, a gut slug of unadulterated mezcal is worse.
I reasoned to myself then that perhaps by-the-gulp was not the best method of downing larva-infused agave juice, Monte Alban’s strangely non-traditional take on tradition be damned. I poured another shot and resolved that I would get through this one like a man - with polite, wincing sips. And that, surprisingly, turned out to be somewhat less corrosive, placing the mezcal just on the Ciudad Juárez side of the Rio Grande of palatability (the key to getting it down smoothly, I think, is to not smell it). It is surprisingly sweet, and I couldn’t begin to describe its flavor - so I went looking for someone who could. And thus I discovered that even mezcal, a liquor that could reasonably be sold in the same aisle as 409 and Clorox, has not escaped the condescendingly refined palates of the Liquor Cognoscenti:
Consider this review of a Oaxacan variety from the Beverage Tasting Institute, a publisher of buyers’ guides for wine, beer and spirits. It wrote of the mezcal: “A granular attack leads to a slightly sweet, light-to-medium-bodied palate with a bright, tart, berry, herb and chipotle pepper notes, with a true, floral agave character.”
Excessive, use of, commas blooms coquettishly to reveal a puckish, yet invidious, incomprehensibility which gives a dutiful-yet-faintly-reluctant handjob characterized by notes of industrial solvent, preserved invertebrate, salsa verde and oenophilic pretense.
I don’t know how a liquid could ever be considered “granular,” although the word “attack” is a not entirely inaccurate depiction of what mezcal does when it hits your lips, to say nothing of your higher cognitive functions. And of course “chipotle pepper notes” were only mentioned because the chipotle is a Food That Is Mexican, and “bean and cheese burrito notes” seems faintly racist.
But drinks are meant to be savored, not grimaced through, so I thought I’d make an honest attempt to class up and render drinkable mezcal by giving it the same treatment its cousin gets in bars and Mexican restaurants the world over. I mixed a Mezcal Sunrise.
Now, a Tequila Sunrise is about the most reliable method I’m aware of for masking the flavor of the rotgut tequila served in your average Mexican joint, other than simply forgoing tequila-based drinks altogether in favor of Negra Modelo (this is a good idea). And since all tequila is is un-larvafied mezcal made in Jalisco using only blue agave, I figured what’s good for the goose is good for the Oaxacan engine degreaser.
Well, I was wrong.
Perhaps Monte Alban is just a lousy mezcal - it does run for $20 in the kind of liquor store that sells five flavors of Pucker and only one kind of rye - but, much like cloud cover or chatty company, it goes a long way towards ruining a Sunrise. The peculiar sweetness, the “enbalmy” character that Roast Beef remarks on in the above-linked Achewood, manages to completely overpower a full glass of orange juice and a shot of grenadine, two liquids never noted for lacking distinct flavors.
So what have we learned?
a) If you’re going to buy liquors with a high capacity for inspiring terror - mezcal, arak, coconut rum - don’t scrimp. More money means less ocular degeneration. Except in the case of coconut rum, which you should simply never buy because it is distilled Ortho Tri-Cyclen.
b) Don’t shoot it, sip it. Shots are tacky anyway.
c) Mezcal seems to make about as poor a mixer as single malt scotch, although for a different reason. If a liquor can’t play nicely with orange juice and artificial pomegranate syrup, it probably shouldn’t be let outside.
d) Stick with gin.
Aren’t you glad I’m here, finding these things out so you don’t have to?
All I wanted to do was look up how long sparkling white wine stays sparkling once it’s been opened. So I began typing something to that effect in the Google search bar in Firefox, which attempts to save you time by displaying a list of popular searches that begin with what you’ve typed. I got as far as “how long does” when it presented me with this list of options:
- how long does marijuana stay in your system
(Depends.)
- how long does cocaine stay in your system
(Not long enough, considering how much it costs.)
- how long does it take to get a passport
- how long does weed stay in your system
- how long does alcohol stay in your system
(Long enough to make the next morning pretty unpleasant.)
- how long does it take to get pregnant
(Anywhere from 3 seconds for low-income teenagers up to 3 years for financially successful couples in their mid-40s who “waited until they were secure.”)
- how long does implantation bleeding last
(Who cares about a little hemorrhaging? Check out how fantastic your tits look now!)
- how long does pot stay in your system - how long does marijuana stay in system
- how long does thc stay in your system
Ladies and gentlemen, Kosher Eucharist in conjunction with Google presents to you America’s most pressing concerns: getting stoned, getting high, getting out of the country, getting stoned, getting drunk, getting knocked up, getting new tits, getting stoned, getting stoned and getting stoned.
It also turns out that sparkling wine loses its sparkle pretty fast, so this should be an interesting evening.
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…
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.
You will need these things.
- 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.
Quero a vida sempre assim, com você perto de mim
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
Remember, remember, the Fifth of December,
