CLASSIC SPIRITS: The Charlie Pie

From November 6th, 2020

Aug 30, 2024

Buongiorno. By the time you read this, I will be safely in Ischia, hopefully drinking something red and bitter. But I didn’t want to leave you thirsty. This week’s archival post is about a French cocktail from the 1920s combinined gin, Italian vermouth and Campari YEARS before Count Negroni wandered into an bar with an idea for a drink. The anxious tone is because there was a US ELECTION happening as I was writing which shows how long the Spirits has been going. Clearly, I thought it would be a good idea to channel my nerves into an essay about crab evolution. If you make it through that you’ll find 3x(!) ice cream cocktails that I mixed in honour of Joe Biden - a noted lover of ice cream. How industrious I was in those early days! I’m afraid the playlist for this one is lost to the mists of time… but never mind, click the link and you’ll get the excellent GUN one I recently compiled. And scroll down to the bottom for next week’s shopping list.

Ciao for now! x

~ CHARLIE PIE ~

40ml gin
30ml Italian vermouth
10ml Campari

Place a cocktail glass in the freezer before you begin. Stir everything up in a cocktail tin type thing with tons of ice and strain into your cold glass. Garnish with… a maraschino cherry and a dash of juice from the jar, if you have some? Otherwise an orange or lemon zest twist would do fine.

ARE WE OK?? IS EVERYONE OK?? IS IT SAFE TO LOOK?? IS IT SAFE NOT TO LOOK???????????????

Ahem. Sorry. Flashbacks to 2016, running around West Hollywood for WiFi with 30 minutes to my deadline, 30 minutes tear up everything I’d complacently written about the US Election, along with all my complacent assumptions about the world… But I think that weird, unfamiliar feeling, might be… hope? ARGH. Being a lifelong Tottenham fan is also not good prepation for moments like this. I think I’m going to have a drink. And put on some music. Aaaaand relax…

(You might like to know that there are three more US ELECTION SPECIALS down the page.)

Share the Spirits

King crabs, porcelain crabs and hairy stone crabs all look pretty similar. All three are classed within the Anomura infra-order of decapods. All three have ten pereiopods (that’s the term for a crabby limb); all three have similar-shaped pleons (that’s the term for a crabby abdomen); and in terms of ganglia, plastron, cephalothorax, maxilae and other decapod parts I am mainly using for the pure pleasure of typing them… well, they’re all pretty damn crabby.

So it may surprise you to learn that the porcelain crabs pictured above all evolved independently of king crabs, independently of hairy stone crabs - and independently of any of the species within Brachyura, the infraorder of true crabs. The coconut crab took yet another evolutionary route towards crabbiness. It is, in the words of the 19th century British zoologist Lancelot Alexander Borradaile, “one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab". The process is known as carcinisation - a term coined by Borradaile in 1895 to describe the tendency of animals to turn into crabs. The arc of the universe bends towards crabbiness.

I’m imagining evolution as a bit like fivethirtyeight.com. You feed in the data, run the simulations, and see what it throws up. And it’s: CRAB FLEA CRAB CRAB CRAB RAT CRAB SPIDER CRAB CRAB SPIDERCRAB You reach out to stop the machine! But your crabby appendage can no longer operate the computer. You try to run! The world moves sideways. You try to hide! And you realise that maybe being a crab isn’t all bad.

Carcinisation is a famous example of “convergent evolution”. Sometimes, there’s just a particular adaptation that works. Human eyes and octopus eyes are extremely similar - but evolved independently of each other. Marsupial mammals and placental mammals split from a common ancestor when dinosaurs were still about - but Australian flying squirrels and American flying squirrels now look almost exactly the same. And if you left them to evolve for long enough, they probably would end up looking like this.

Sorry! SORRY. I know, I know. Enough horror. Have some nuts. Have a sip of your Charlie Pie.

Why am I telling you all this? WELL partly because the last week has done weird things to my brain. Partly to divert myself. Partly because as a Cancerian, I have an astrological affinity with crab-kind. Partly because, with a second lockdown underway, I strongly recommend we turn our minds to nature. But mostly because cocktail morphology also contains examples of convergent evolution; and the Negroniferous infraorder is one of the most fascinating branches of evolutionary mixology.

🦀🍸🦀🍸🦀🍸🦀🍸🦀🍸🦀🍸🦀🍸🦀🍸🦀🍸🦀🍸🦀🍸🦀🍸🦀🍸

No cocktail has had more press in the last decade than the Negroni: 25ml gin, 25ml Italian vermouth, 25ml Campari, stirred over ice and served in the glass with a slice of citrus. If you have spent much time drinking Negronis (or reading any of the articles I am periodically commissioned to write about this voguish mixture), then you may be aware of the Negroni’s origin story. It evolved out of the the Americano (Campari + Italian vermouth + fizzy water), itself an evolutionary offshoot of the Cretaceous-era cocktail, the Milano-Torino (Campari + Italian vermouth). At some point during the 1910s, so the legend goes, a Florentine Count named Camillo Negroni walked into a bar and demanded an Americano oomphed up with a bit of gin. The bartender obliged and ⚡KABLAMMO!⚡. The Negroni was born.

Only: this is anecdote; oral history; hearsay. To the best of my knowledge, the first Italian recipe for the Negoni wasn’t noted down until 1947. While it has long been popular in Italy, it wasn’t really until the 21st century that the Negroni took its place in the international cocktail pantheon. HOWEVER: numerous recipes for Negroni-like drinks were published before that Italian Negroni was recorded. French recipes. You are drinking one now.

The Charlie Pie, contains the precise same combination of gin, Italian vermouth and Campari as the Negroni - and it was first recorded in 1929. It is attributed to the French champion fencer, Lucien Gaudin who apparently named it after a barman named Charlie from the Cheval Pie bar. Negroni-like creatures seem to have scuttled all over Paris in Gaudin’s time. There was the Camparinete, a similar cocktail of two parts gin, one part Italian vermouth and one part Campari. Lucien Gaudin also had his own eponymous cocktail which is suspiciously Negroni-esque but with French vermouth and orange liqueur in place of the Italian vermouth. And there are numerous recipes from the era for Le Tunnel, which is composed of gin, French AND Italian vermouth and Campari.

Am I say that the Negroni is therefore… a French drink? I feel that merely to pose this question is tantamount to asking Gruppo Campari and the Italian Tourist Board if they might like to leave a horse’s head in my bed. Or maybe a coconut crab. However, what it does show is that a good idea is a good idea. Given the right conditions, Negronis will emerge.

The Charlie Pie? It’s really not bad. The Negroni formula being so easy to remember (which explains it popularity) I had never given much thought to playing around with it. But why not? The cherry is my addition and let me tell, you a lick of cherry roundness sets it all off beautfully. Think of the Charlie Pie as a missing link. One of nature’s many attempts to evolve a Negroni. Maybe, just maybe, the arc of the universe bends towards deliciousness.

SELF-PROMOTION

Do please feel extremely free to send the Spirits to anyone you think might like it. Also:

Tip Jar

PLAYLIST

The weather - I can’t help noticing when I look up from CNN/Twitter/the chess app I have taken to stress-playing - is wonderful. This week’s playlist is quite simply autumnal. We may be locked down but we can still, legally, walk.

CW: Occasional intrusions of topicality!

ASK RICHARD

Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden writes:

Hey Richard, loving the newsletter! You had me going with the whole triumph of the crustaceans thing but things turned out just about OK in the end, right???? Anyhoo. As you know, I LOVE ICE CREAM. Ice Cream Joe, they call me. You got any ice cream cocktails up your sleeve?

Thanks Joe! Lovely if somewhat surprising to hear from you during what I imagine must be an incredibly busy time. But I’m glad you asked. YES I DO HAVE SOME ICE CREAM COCKTAILS. I got three, just for you. Don’t drink them all at once.

~ SILVER STALLION ~

50ml gin
25ml lemon juice
15ml golden sugar syrup
15ml egg white
Fizzy water
Scoop vanilla ice cream
Dash Angostura bitters

Shake the first four ingredients over plenty of ice until extremely cold. Strain into a spare vessel, discard the ice and shake it up again with no ice (this is to froth up the egg-white). Pour into a highball glass filled with ice cubes. Top with fizzy water. Place a scoop of ice cream on top, drizzle over the bitters and serve with a spoon.

A curio from the Savoy Cocktail Book, the Silver Stallion is a gin fizz with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it. I mean if you’re ever going to attempt that, might I suggest, now? The bitters is my addition and it’s a good one.

🍦

~ ATLANTA JULEP ~

50ml bourbon
Two scoops mint choc chip ice cream

Chuck this in a blender - Nutribullet is good - and whizz up until everything’s combined. Serve ‘up’ in a cocktail glass with a short straw or spoon. Mint garnish if you got some.

Jerry Thomas lists a Real Georgia Mint Julep in his Bartender’s Guide of 1869. Here is my Unreal Georgia Mint Julep, in honour of the fine citizens of Atlanta, who have fought hard for the right to vote. This is not elegant but it is delicious.

🌿

~ PHILADELPHIA FLOAT ~

50ml spirit of your choice
~150ml soda
Ice cream of your choice

Fill a highball glass (or a knickerbocker glory type glass) with ice cubes. Pour in the liquor, top with soda, and float some ice cream in there too.

The ice-cream float hails (like American Democracy itself) from the fine city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was invented by a pharmacist in 1874. It’s classically made with root beer. I love root beer and wish it were more widely available here; use Coke or Dr Pepper if you can’t find it. But suffice to say that any ice cream float is improved by hard liquor.

The example above is… Campari… Root Beer… and white chocolate ice cream. I’m drinking it now. It’s appalling and amazing all at once and sort of reminds me why I once fell in love with America.

🥤

OFFER!

Online alcohol shop The Drop Store is giving readers of the Spirits a discount. Head HERE, have a mooch and if you add thespirits10 (i.e. lowercase!) in the promo code you will get 10% off at checkout.

WHAT I’M READING

The news. (CNN).

Also some papers on crab evolution. (Biological Journal).

You might enjoy this! Why Trump Can’t Afford to Lose (New Yorker).

And you might also take solace in this essay from Oliver Burkeman, The News Is Not Your Life. I always enjoy Oliver’s Guardian columns and am delighted to see he has launched his own newsletter. (The Imperfectionist)

Tomorrow is four years since the death of one of my great heroes, Leonard Cohen. Here’s what I wrote at the time. (Evening Standard).