I realise this is going to sound strange, but after years of writing about food and restaurants, I became suddenly troubled by my drinking. It wasn’t the quantities involved — God, no! It was the jaded carelessness.
I was privileged to have great wine around, in abundance. And I’d got to the point where I was cheerfully necking a bottle a night, without really thinking about it much. I recalled liking cocktails in my twenties — largely, I think, for their literary associations and bohemian swagger. But I also remembered what my American first wife used to call them: “Attitude Adjusters”. In America, where wine with dinner has never been an automatic social norm for the well-off, the ritual of building a strong aperitif, particularly one wreathed in myth and significance, seemed — Christ, I can’t believe I’m typing this — mindful.
Once I’d hidden the corkscrew and dug out the stirring spoon, it was like falling in love again. The glorious certainty of a single, magical moment, a punctuation. Turning day into evening, their time into my time. Something entirely solitary, calmly contemplative. Something a yoga teacher or meditation coach would refer to as their “practice”.
I began to think more about “set and setting”, an idea first propounded around 1958 by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, addressing behavioural and psychological contexts as part of his General Systems Theory. He probably wasn’t too chuffed when the concept was lifted wholesale by Timothy Leary, enthusiastic proponent of LSD.
In the context of hallucinogens, “set” is short for mindset — the general state your mind is in as you approach the psychedelic experience. “Setting” is the social and physical environment in which the experience takes place. The vital thing to know here is that both radically alter the nature of the trip.
As Leary wrote: “Of course, the drug dose does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures. The nature of the experience depends almost entirely on set and setting.”
Leary is not, one should admit, a gigantically reliable source. But the important thing is that a significant majority of experts have since concluded that set and setting can be more influential on outcomes than the inherent hallucinogenic qualities of the drug itself.
Let’s just sit with that for a moment, shall we? And now apply it to our own choice of intoxicant.
This means that the cocktail you make, or that is served to you, is significant as a catalyst, a chemical key, but that your state of mind during the creation process and while drinking it, along with your surroundings and circumstances, are what really make a difference. One should, then, approach The Cocktail Hour aware of set and setting — in full knowledge of what one is about to do, informed and sanguine about the effect of alcohol, either with one’s mind cleared of the cares of the day, or at least sure that there are no toxic possibilities. (Do not text anyone from the first to the last second of the Hour. In fact, switch your phone off entirely.) Then one can be fairly sure that the effects of the drink will be a gentle dissolution of those cares, or at least a chance to postpone them with equanimity.
The setting of my Cocktail Hour centres around an Eames lounge chair, model 670, and an Eileen Gray E-1027 side table. (Of course they’re knock-offs. I’m a broke, design-literate nerd, not a yacht-owning plutocrat.)
Aside from being beautiful and dated to precisely the period at which cocktails, for me, peaked, model 670 was originally inspired by an English club chair. This is not something for simply sitting in, for resting or loafing. It is a chair purposely conceived by its designer for the leisurely consumption of a drink. The arms are actually broad enough that you can sit your Martini on them. But you need more space to play with. So, conveniently alongside, sits the table Eileen Gray created for herself and her life-long working partner, Jean Badovici, in the summer hideaway she designed and built for them in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.
She called the villa E-1027. That’s a numerical and alphabetical code: E for Eileen, 10 = J for Jean, 2 = B for Badovici and 7 = G for Gray. If you don’t find that thought intensely romantic, you have no soul. The table is also referred to as E-1027 and it holds perfectly, and with breathtaking style, a Martini and a small stack of appropriate reading matter.
Do you have an Hour? Take a seat and let’s make a cocktail.
It’s early in the evening so let’s start with something simple.
The Negroni is an easy cocktail to make — if you wish you can make it in the glass, without bothering with a mixing jug. The ingredients are simple and the proportions even simpler:
You can stir this separately with ice first, or just cut to the chase and pour over clean ice in a rocks glass. Garnish with a twist of orange peel.
Not an enormous amount of ritual, but it’s the lore of the Negroni that’s key. Because this popular mixture is the culmination of a story of drinking in Italy that long predates the cocktail as we understand it.
For centuries, religious institutions — monasteries, nunneries and abbeys — had been repositories of medical knowledge, excelling in both the distillation of alcohol and the herbal pharmacopoeia. These skills came together in the formulation of wines and spirits flavoured with complex combinations of herbs which, it was promised, would ease the common medical problems of the day, many of which were digestive in character. In short, the people of what was to become Italy were long practised in consuming an alcohol-based mixture — an aperitivo that would “open” the stomach in preparation for a meal. Something that would stimulate the palate and enhance the appetite.
Some of them also tasted pretty good. Though many people, perhaps believing that something that did you good shouldn’t be too enjoyable, had come to appreciate bitterness, and secular businesses began blending aperitivi for what one might term hedonistic rather than medicinal motives.
It is believed to have been Gaspare Campari in Milan who first mixed his eponymous bittered aperitivo half-and-half with a sweet “vermouth” Antonio Carpano had patented over in Turin.
It was a clever move. Campari is extremely bitter, and a little sweet red vermouth is pretty much the opposite. Both are aromatically complex and combine brilliantly. In Milan they called it a Milano/Torino. Perhaps predictably, they called it a Torino/Milano in Turin.
A Milano/Torino could be served lengthened with sparkling water, which came to be known as an Americano — a name which possibly arose because these pre-existing, very Italian, drinks were mixed to order a bit like fashionable “American” cocktails.
It is important to understand that cocktail origin stories are the tales told by booze makers to drinkers and drunks. Not even barfly oral history, more numinous folklore, unreliable stories — and perhaps none more so than that of “Count Negroni”, who is reputed to have walked into a bar in (which city is ferociously debated) and demanded that the barman make his Americano more potent. In replacing the sparkling water with gin, a legend was born.
The Negroni is a classic but, like all the best ideas, susceptible to subtle tweaking. There are hundreds of sweet red vermouths available and almost as many amari, the Italian term for a bitter herbal liqueur. You can tweak the ratios, adjusting sweetness against bitterness according to your constituent liquors. Possible combinations are gratifyingly limitless.
And if you lack the alcoholic sprezzatura of the count, you could go right ahead and replace his gin with prosecco or Franciacorta to create a fashionable Negroni Sbagliato.
I’m as happy as the next cocktail obsessive to retell the old tales of, for example, the Martini being created in the town of Martinez for a Gold Rush miner, or in the Martinez Hotel in San Francisco, or even how it was named after the Martini-Henry rifle.
But I must temper those happy myths against a kind of statistical belief in the collective creativity of a thousand bored, late-19th-century bartenders, eager to please and looking at a shelf containing some quite rough gin — fiddled with, watered or adulterated — and bottles of the popular new “vermouth” aromatised wines imported by Martini & Sola (later Martini & Rossi). Consistent, reliable and branded. The earlier the recipe for the Martini, the closer it approaches a 50-50 mix. The earlier the iteration, the more likely it is to have been a coarser-tasting genever or Old Tom-style gin.
Though many places and individuals would like to claim the invention of the Martini, some of whom have even published recipes, the idea of using the premium, branded, imported and exotic product to enhance tired gin, or even using gin to add some kick to a glass of fancy vermouth, doesn’t lend itself easily to a point of origin.
Incidentally, a 50-50 mix would have tasted bloody awful. I mean, seriously. An equal mix of gin and vermouth tastes like something an elderly aunt would dab behind her ears.
You don’t need me to retell any of the possibly thousands of myths about how dry a Martini should be — that’s what the internet is for. But I will suggest the following as a starting point for your experiments:
- 10g dry white vermouth
I favour Noilly Prat Extra Dry, a less complex version made specifically for US export. For half a century, European and American Martini fans have been drinking entirely different vermouths, apparently without anyone noticing. - 70g Boatyard Double Gin
Austere, clean and distilled specifically for Martinis. - A few drops of a good bitters
Orange is traditional. Still Wild Coastal Bitters are sublime, or you can leave out the bitters completely and call it a Gibson.
Stir over an approximate long ton of ice then strain into a chilled glass.
A lemon peel twist or an olive are traditional unless you’ve omitted bitters. A Gibson always gets a pickled onion.
To understand the Daiquiri (always capitalised in any context — it’s a place), you’ve got to go a long way back. The combination of distilled liquor and sugar, to round off the edges, predates the cocktail by centuries. It’s one of those things in drink history that’s such a good, obvious idea that it probably happened kind of organically everywhere that booze, sugar and citrus could be found together. That would encompass most of Central America and the Caribbean.
Rum is distilled from cane sugar. While this sounds straightforward, the process can take place in many different ways. Original rums, made close to the cane fields in simple stills, were strong stuff, full of flavours of smoke, molasses and caramelisation.
Even rudimentary storage in barrels would add not-unpleasant complexities. But in Cuba they began to execute the process in a more scientific and, to be fair, industrialised way. Sugar itself is presented to us on a scale of refinement: muscovado, for example, is full of organic compounds and flavours of dark boiling. But the same base material, taken through a longer and cleaner process of refinement, can produce pure, crystalline table sugar with no flavour but clean sweetness.
Rum can display the same range. It can make a dark alcohol, filled with the flavours of fire and field, or a clear, white, utterly pure alcohol that, taken to an extreme, would have no more character than a pure vodka.
Cuban rum was clean and pure. It was a luxury good. In the minds of its intended North American audience, it was as far from the cane fields as it was possible to get. To visiting Americans, and those who served them drinks, it was easy to place it on a continuum between the fragrant purity of gin and the more organic complexities of whisky. During Prohibition that was an extremely appealing position, particularly among those young Americans with the funds and appetite for travel and a taste for polite exoticism.
My problem with the Daiquiri concerns my own history. I first really encountered cocktails when I was working the door at a Tex–Mex restaurant of evil reputation, in a back alley off Tottenham Court Road in London. Daiquiris were something like slushies. They came in jugs and had to be scraped off your DJ after you’d thrown a bunch of blind-drunk City boys into the gutter. Sometimes they were blue. So I’d always really thought of them as comedy, get-you-wrecked stunt drinks. Stag-and-hen petrol. Paper umbrellas, sparklers and a fruit salad to garnish.
But I was wrong. Let’s go back to the beginning.
According to Charles H Baker Jr, in Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Flask (1946), it was invented and named by a couple of engineers working at a US-owned mining operation in the village of Daiquirí, near Santiago de Cuba. There are all sorts of florid details about raging yellow fever and the drink being prescribed by the mine’s doctor. However, given that the original recipe is just light local rum, enough fresh lime juice to give it flavour and enough sugar to avoid lip-pucker, it’s very hard to believe that nobody else had thought of it before. In fact, it sounds like exactly the kind of bar-expedient treatment you’d have found all over the territory for as long as rum and sugar had existed. It’s also noticeable that the village of Daiquirí is right next to the vast distillery of Messrs Bacardí.
So, the Daiquiri becomes one of the “perfect” cocktails. Strong, or as barpeople say today, “alcohol-forward”. Kind of halfway between the Martini and the Manhattan when measured on smoky complexity. Enough citrus to make it refreshing and, of course, the base of a thousand derivations.
My own is very simple but can only really be made in that vanishingly short season when big Sicilian lemons briefly grace our greengrocers.
Shake and fine-strain into a coupe.
It’s a great strong base with subtle complexity and a good balance between sweet and sour. A bit more complicated than a Martini, a touch more levity than a Negroni. No slush, no paper umbrella, but I confess an addiction to the naff cocktail cherry. The flash Italian ones might bear more resemblance to actual fruit, but they lack camp resonance.
You should be able to find something that suits you among these. You’ll need to create your own mise-en-scène. Arrange your music, your furniture, your room, before you take your Hour to consider, choose, mix and drink your cocktail. The television shouldn’t even be contemplated until after the last drink is consumed. Do not doomscroll. The radio is off. At the moment, the short stack of books on my table includes David Wondrich’s Imbibe!, James Joyce’s Ulysses and a volume of Slim Aarons’ photographs — something I want to read, something I need to read and something with pictures for when the day’s vicissitudes preclude reading. Pick your cocktail. You’ll need to pick your own books too. I hope mine will be one of them.
Adapted from “The Cocktail Hour: A Drinker’s Companion” by Tim Hayward, published by Quadrille, £20, on September 17
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There’s a stoic, elderly apple tree in my garden that has stood firm against bad weather and pests. Its bark is knotty, and its branches provide shade to a voyeuristic fox who watches me pottering around the kitchen. I wonder about the tree’s origins. Was it planted or was it the fortuitous result of the seeds from a discarded apple core?
In Britain, there are more than 2,500 distinct varieties of apples which reflect our rich heritage of orchards and cultivation. They are nuanced in flavour with notes that are sweet, tart, honeyed and nutty, and often provide fascinating clues to our social history. Take the Blenheim Orange, originally named Kempster’s Pippin after grower George Kempster, later renamed to honour the grand Blenheim Estate. Or the Bloody Ploughman, a crimson apple with blushing pink flesh that owes its name, as folklore has it, to a grieving widow who threw the apples stolen by her ploughman husband on to a rubbish heap after he was fatally shot by a gamekeeper.
Supermarkets prefer predictability and even in prime apple season (September and October) will import varieties like Gala from across the world, which makes no sense. Thanks to companies like Natoora and Shrub, which champion provenance and heritage varietals, we are seeing a resurgence in heirloom varieties. Now that the apple season is in full swing, they are worth seeking out at farmers’ markets. If we don’t preserve these gems, we’ll lose them along with great flavour and biodiversity. Here are a few ways to put them to good use.
Apple chutney and cheese pie
Serves six
Look for a sharper variety of apple for this savoury pie, such as Ashmead’s Kernel, which has a complex and astringent flavour. Otherwise, a Granny Smith or Bramley will do. Serve with some sharply dressed salad leaves.
For the chutney
For the pastry
For the filling
- 1Start by making the chutney. Put all the ingredients into a small saucepan, place over a medium heat and bring to the boil. Cover and cook for eight minutes until the apples are completely soft, then cook again, uncovered, over a low heat, for a further eight minutes, until thick and glossy. Set aside to cool.
- 2Preheat the oven to 180C. Place in a baking tray to heat through.
- 3For the pastry, place the butter into a large bowl with the flour and salt. Gently rub the fat into the flour using your fingertips until the texture resembles very coarse breadcrumbs. Add two tablespoons of ice-cold water to bind the mixture. Lightly knead the dough, dust with flour and use a beeswax wrap to chill it in the fridge for 30 minutes before using.
- 4Roll out two-thirds of the pastry until it is about 0.5cm thick and line a greased 20cm loose-bottomed tart tin, leaving any excess pastry overhanging the edge. Cover the base of the pie with half of the chutney and then cover with half the grated cheese. Season well and layer the remaining chutney and cheese on top.
- 5Roll out the remaining pastry to a similar thickness to make a lid for the pie. Brush the edges of the pastry case with milk to seal the pastry lid upon it, while also pressing the edges together lightly before trimming off any excess overhang. Brush the surface of the pie with milk. Make three small incisions into the centre of the pie using the point of a sharp knife.
- 6Place the pie into the oven and bake for 40-50 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove from the oven and leave for a good 20-30 minutes before unmoulding and cutting into generous wedges.
- 7Serve the pie warm or at room temperature.
Soy-glazed pork and apple skewers
Serves six
Pork and apples are a classic combination as the fruit helps cut through the fattiness of the meat. Choose a firm apple variety such as Kidd’s Orange Red or Braeburn.
- 1Combine apple juice, hoisin sauce, gochujang, soy, sugar, vinegar, garlic, ginger and Chinese five-spice in a bowl. Add the pork, season to taste and toss to coat and marinate for four hours or preferably overnight. Thread pork on to skewers, alternating with wedges of apple.
- 2Heat a griddle pan or grill to medium-high heat and grill the skewers, turning occasionally and basting with remaining marinade for about six to eight minutes until browned and cooked through. Serve hot with wedges of lime.
Brown sugar pavlova with apples, pecan crumble and saffron custard
Serves eight
All the cosiness of apple pie but served on a show-stopping pavlova. This pudding is a real crowd-pleaser.
For the custard
For the apples
For the crumble
- 1Preheat the oven to 200C.
- 2Draw a 20cm circle on a sheet of baking paper and place paper, pencil-side down, on to a greased baking tray. Whisk the egg whites in an electric mixer on a medium speed until foaming. Check for any lumps in the sugars and combine them in a bowl, then add to the egg whites one tablespoon at a time, allowing it to dissolve between each addition.
- 3Increase the mixer to high and whisk until you have stiff peaks, then fold in cornflour and vinegar with a metal spoon. Spoon and spread on to the paper in the prepared tray. Use the back of a spoon to flick outside edges to form little peaks. Reduce the oven to 140C. Bake until golden and crisp for about 1½ hours; reduce the temperature to 110C in the final 20 minutes. Turn off oven, prop door ajar slightly and let it cool completely in the oven.
- 4For the custard, pour the milk into a small saucepan, add the saffron and then place over a medium heat and bring to a gentle simmer. Meanwhile, whisk the sugar, cornflour, egg yolks and a pinch of salt in a large bowl until smooth and pale. Slowly pour the hot milk into the egg yolks, just a splash at a time, whisking well after each addition. Return the mixture to the saucepan and set over a medium heat. Cook, stirring frequently, for eight minutes until it thickens and coats the back of a wooden spoon. Transfer to a container and leave to cool, then leave to thicken in the fridge overnight. Just before you are ready to serve the pavlova, whisk the double cream until thickened and holding its shape. Fold in the cold custard until well combined and spoon over the top of the meringue.
- 5For the apple filling, combine all ingredients and 80ml water in a saucepan and stir over medium-high heat until sugar dissolves. Bring to the boil, cook until apple is tender, and liquid is syrupy. Cool completely.
- 6To make the crumble mix, preheat the oven to 180C. Place flour, butter and sea salt in a large bowl. Using fingertips, rub the butter into the flour. Add the sugar, pecans and cinnamon and stir to combine. Lay on to a tray lined with baking paper and bake until golden and toasty for 20-25 minutes, then cool completely. Break up any large chunks.
- 7To assemble, place the pavlova on a serving dish, spoon over the custard and apples, drizzling over some of the syrup and then top with the crumble. Serve immediately.
Ravinder Bhogal is chef patron of Jikoni and Café Jikoni at the V&A
