For Father’s Day, I bought Christian a cocktail shaker, muddler, stir-spoon and citrus juicer. I also bought Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s Bar Book. You might suspect I bought the book for myself, and you’d be right. But one cannot prepare one’s husband some cocktail without proper technique, no? Morgenthaler talks about cocktails with the same kind of enthusiasm as cooks talk about recipes; I like his voice.
I still like wine. Short of becoming a sommelier, or tracking purchases, or reading reviews and finding out what oak and cherry means in your mouth and nose, wine will always be a little shrouded in fog as far as I’m concerned. Add to that the fact that wines change from year to year, that experts will declare that this label is priced at more than its value to encourage customers to buy it, or whatever, and see? Fog! Most rosés will taste refreshing on a summer’s evening. Most red wines will be fine with that piece of meat. Maybe one will be extraordinary, and that’s a treat, at a restaurant, on a date.
But you know what I imagine is even more satisfying? Preserving the strawberries you picked just the way Morgenthaler recommends you do, and making a shrub one evening, when the air is so warm that even in the darkness of nightfall, you take a careless stroll around the block with your husband and feel like the night is a gentle hug.
Don’t get me wrong… I like wine, but I think that mastering a cocktail here and there might be just plain fun. Wine is serious and sometimes makes me fall asleep, but the other day, when it was Father’s Day, I made mojitos for the first time. While my mother-in-law sat in the living room, I went outside with a bag of ice and used a rolling pin to pound it from cubes to crushed, as if I were a furious drummer: Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat-Tat-Tat... And the mojitos were a surprise! I thought they might be sweeter, but the mix of lime and mint and simple syrup and white rum was a bracing mouthful of flavour with each sip, refreshing in its own way. The glasses, served with straws and soda water, with their floating muddled greenery were their own pieces of art, the way a plate is, when you balance colours: caramelized sauce on charred meat, bright green salad and cubes of red tomatoes dressed in garlicky vinaigrette, the white sphere of potato with its earthy brown skin, and glazed carrots, like chopped orange firewood.
Sometimes I think our artistry is small and sensual. Look at this sky, for example. It’s huge and imposing and can’t fit into a glass.
Alcoholic drinks have always had, in my mind, an association with guilt and shame. Even writing about it here feels like a confession, feels like revealing a thing that should be hidden and I wonder why. I wonder why pleasures are classified like diamonds in a jeweller’s case: good, better, best. I feel like it’s necessary here to defend the happiness I take at the prospect of exploring cocktails. And yet, no one has to defend taking a road trip to see a new landscape even though people can pursue travel with just as much avidity. Why is it that I can take a picture of the sky and feel ownership of it and find that my admiration and sharing of nature is accepted on social media in a way that makes me seem more innocent than if I was to post a picture of a cocktail I made? But I no more own the sky or the praise I get for its capture than I own the recipe I follow and the disapproval it garners.