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» Features » Maguffin » Reviews
| FEATURES Mixing Your Drinks Kathy Hofmeyr “We watch the barman, but we don’t take it in. It’s the reassuring movement of the hands, the pleasing fitness of bar stock and cocktail apparatus, the colours, the noises, the rich, speaking scents.” – Stephen Fry, The Hippopotamus There is a distinct difference between meeting for drinks and meeting for cocktails. The former is something friends do once or twice (or more) a week to unwind; something colleagues do to discuss informally matters far too important to discuss soberly; something strangers do in order to get to know each other better and something men and women do as a prelude to getting to know each other a lot better. But meeting for cocktails is “refined”. It somehow implies a sophistication above and beyond that attainable by the average human being. Meeting for cocktails frequently requires appropriate attire, the right setting, sparkling conversation, specific etiquette and very tiny food. Part of the glamour resides in the paraphernalia. With the pretty glasses and cherry kebabs and foil twists and olives on sticks and little umbrellas it could be petrol and fish oil we’re drinking and we’d still lap it up. Ditto the clever names, whether drily referential (Sidecars and Tom Collinses confer an instant, knowing wittiness on the drinker) or sophisticatedly crude (offering someone a Slow Comfortable Screw Against the Wall is a sure, pardon me, ice-breaker). We invest so much in the appearance and branding of a thing these days. No-one would ever buy a two-gallon plastic bottle of Chanel #5; would we drink the same nonsense we drink from martini glasses if it came in a “World’s Greatest Dad” mug? So when one gets down to it, what is a cocktail but a legitimate excuse to mix one’s drinks? A Manhattan, for example, is a combination of whiskey, sweet vermouth and bitters – three versions of alcohol one would probably never consume in the same night were they not presented with a bit of fruit in an intriguingly-shaped glass. Two of these, certainly, most sane people wouldn’t drink unmitigated, even for a bet. A cocktail is a glass containing too much liquor in combinations which, according to the rules of cocktails, must look vaguely appetising and taste either like angels dancing on the head of a tastebud or utterly bloody diabolical. Fuelled by a generation that decided sour sweets and fireballs were a good idea, the latter, more reprehensible type of cocktail currently is favoured. At a soiree recently, I was presented with something that looked out of place in a glass. I could swear the layers were fighting with one another. The effect was much like that of a snake I once saw in the reptile house at Halfway House during my childhood. This snake (I hope it will forgive me, its exact scientific name slips my mind this minute) was striped brilliant orange and deep black – nature’s universal “Danger” sign – hues so strident and alarming they made the eyes water and threatened constantly to overlap one another. The drink took me several hours to get down properly – not least because parts of it had the consistency of molten chicken grease left over after the roasting of a particularly obese fowl. The entire concoction was, needless to say, foul. With all the apparent romance and glamour we perceive as forming part of this ritual, it is easy to forget the cold, hard truth. Technically, most of us really shouldn’t be drinking cocktails because most of them in a single serving put one over the legal limit for doing anything that requires fine motor skills, such as lighting a cigarette or greeting the boss’s wife with a kiss (there’s nothing worse than a mouthful of hairy ear). But because they taste deceptively un-boozy and they don’t seem to act on the brain and hand-eye coordination as quickly as, say, wine or sodium pentathol, we have several. They’re often little, too, so we drink them more quickly than we would a beer or a highball. The next morning, with a hangover visible from space and one’s good name mud, one drags one’s corpse from the wreckage of bed and off to work. For some reason, cocktail parties are always held on school nights. | | |
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