FROM A CLUBMAN’S CHAIR

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19945, 1 November 1934, Page 11

FROM A CLUBMAN’S CHAIR

THE ART OF MAKING COCKTAILS

ALL-EMPIRE CONTEST (Specially written for “ The Timaru Herald ” by Charles Martin.) LONDON, September 27. There are people who regard cocktails as an invention of the devil, tolerable only by a coarse and untrained palate. There are other people who consider them the last fine flower of the art of drinking. And there are yet others who have no dogmatic views about cocktails, but just prefer sherry. However that may be. cocktailmaking is clearly a flourishing art—call it a black art if you will. This autumn there is to be an all-Empire cocktail-making contest in London, which is sure to produce many new recipes. Most of the contestants, I gather, will be professional bartenders; but there is a special prize offered for the best drink made by an amateur. Just “Unusual.” I am not a cocktail connoisseur myself. But I confess to an academic interest in the new names which are continually blossoming from the fertile imaginations of bar-tenders. They must often be hard put to it to find new titles for their latest concoctions; and I should like to see a prize for the best-christened cocktail as well as for the best-made one. I recollect a cocktali-making contest in London some months ago when one of the new drinks was simply labelled “Unusual.” It certainly was unusual in that it needed no shaking; the ingredients (with Swedish punch as the foundation) were simply stirred in the glass with a spoon. “Dragon’s Blood.” But the best name (if not the best drink) which came out of that contest was “Dragon’s Blood.” If I am to believe a man who sampled it, the cocktail certinly merited its name; it was blood-red in colour, and the fiery foundation was—Tobasco sauce! “All right for people with asbestos-lined throats,” pronounced my friend. Passion Fruit. For an uninspired name, commend me to “Jinx.” It gets its liveliness from passion fruit juice and apple brandy—passion fruit juice being a recent novelty in the cocktail world. With ingredients like that, I feel the man who named the drink must have a very prosy imagination. Think what a store of romance there is in the name of “apple,” to say nothing of passion fruit. And the best he could do was “Jinx”! Still, one must not be too hard on the bartender: like the new novelist, he probably finds all the best names taken. Reviving: the Art. America, home of the original cocktails, has begun to revive the art and science of making them now that Prohibition’s shackles have been shaken off. There is a National Association for the Advancement of the Fine Art of Drinking. It concerns itself with other drinks than cockails, but one of its first activities was to organise a competition in that branch of the art. Sinclair Lewis, the novelist, and Marlene Dietrich, the film actress, took part in the contest. They have had what one may call “European experience” of drinks, which may account for the fact that they both got into the “final,” though the first prize escaped them. Mr Lewis’s drink had a foundation of brandy, peach brandy and Jamaica rum, with a strong flavour of lemons. Forty Years of Lyons But cocktail art is mere trifling when you come to the serious business of eating—especially eating steak-and-kidney pudding. That was one of the main items on the bill of fare at an historical luncheon given at Lyons’s teashop in Piccadilly this week. It was an historical meal because it marked the fortieth anniversary of this cafe; and as the Piccadilly shop was the first Lyons ever opened, and the first of its kind London had even seen, it was really the fortieth birthday of a new epoch which we were celebrating. It seems that steak-and-kidney pudding was one of the favourite dishes of the time; so it had to figure on the birthday menu. Beginning A New Age Younger Londoners have grown blase amid the garish splendours of the great corner Houses which now epitomise the name of Lyons. They do not realise that old Joe Lyons revolutionised the life of London—and after that, of the Provinces—when he opened this first cafe in Piccadilly. Nothing like it had even been seen. In the trite phrase, “it filled a longfelt want.” We had big hotels and fashionable and expensive restaurants. There were cheap eating-houses for City men, too. But there was no place that was both cheap and “respectable” —above all, no place where a woman might lunch or dine unescorted. A Nine Days’ Wonder. No wonder this first tea-shop was one of the sights of London when it opened. People queued up to get in; and those who didn’t want to go in stood on the pavement and stared. Police had to control the “traffic.” The waitresses in their neat grey uniforms were also something quite new to Londoners. People came to stare at them as well as at the shop, and at closing time their fathers and brothers came to escort them home. It was apparently a necessary precaution then—you see, it was the “naughty nineties” when Lyons first saw the light of day. An Erring “Nobleman.” A story which is going the round of the clubs just now tells of an angry member who wanted to have posted up on the notice-board the followingrequest : “Will the nobleman who stole my umbrella kindly return it?” The secretary naturally wanted an explanation, and the member promptly turned up the rules of the club. It was laid down therein that the Institution was founded “for noblemen and gentlemen.” Quite obviously, declared the irate member, no gentleman would misapproprite an umbrella—so, by elimination, the thief must be a nobleman.