The Spirits #107: The Chrysanthemum

~ The Land of My Oppressor ~ Bénédictine ~ It's a Flaubert World ~ Nothing But Flowers ~ A New Way of Doing Things ~

ENJOYING THE SPIRITS? By all means, forward this email on to any friend who might like it too.

~ THE CHRYSANTHEMUM ~

45ml French vermouth
15ml Bénédictine
2.5ml absinthe

Place the above in a mixing vessel. Add the ice. And then stir, in a slightly wistful way, contemplating the end of summer and the passage of time. Now snap out of it. Strain into a dainty glass. Garnish with an orange twist - though as you can see, I used lemon.

Some Chrysanthemum notes:

1. The original 1917 Chrysanthemum was equal parts vermouth and Bénédictine with a dash of absinthe. The 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book version (“a popular drink aboard the SS Mariposa”) was 2:1 vermouth to Bénédictine. Here I have gone for 3:1 which I find offers the correct balance. Absinthe, I am aware, is an acquired taste. To my palate, somewhere between a dash and a teaspoon was optimal - but you may prefer to dial it down.

2. A little fizzy water mightn’t go amiss (see: Vermouth and Soda) or indeed a drop of champagne. There’s a version too, by Jamie Boudreau, that calls for a scant 7.5ml lemon juice, which turns it into a featherlight vermouth sour.

3. Bénédictine? I am most of the way through a lengthy guide to this saintly liqueur which subscribers to the Cabinet will receive early next week, God willing. So, if you’re considering buying a bottle - or you already have one and are wondering what else to make with it - sign up and soon you will be in Bénédictine heaven.

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🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, etc are here.
🧑‍🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full A-Z recipe archive is here. 
➡️ Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.

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I HAVE SPENT most of the last couple of weeks in Normandy on “holiday”. It had its moments - a beautiful wedding, a lovely dinner in Honfleur, my nine-year-old beating me at chess, the scamp! - but I hold the word between punctuational tongs as it was the sort of holiday that requires a holiday afterwards, or at least, a couple of days of sitting quietly in a room not doing anything at all. An AirBnB disaster; a car constantly on the verge of breaking down; far too much packing and moving on; and a three-year-old singing the theme from Thomas & Friends on loop for days on end… I was glad to be home.

Also, somehow, I didn’t quite warm to Normandy - despite the Bénédictine, despite the calvados. I had the palpable feeling - unfamiliar to an English person - of being in the homeland of my oppressors, Normandy being where the British Ruling Class came from, 1,000 years ago or so. There was something about the fussy, narrow architecture and the meanly low skies that reminded me of everything I don’t like about the English aristocracy. “Oh, right,” a part of me thought. “I get it now” though it was such a diffuse feeling I’m not sure I could quite explain why. Gustave Flaubert, of course, came from Normandy, and retained a lifelong antipathy for its snobbery and narrow-mindedness. In Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot the definition of Normandy is: “Always wet. Inhabited by a sly, proud, tactiturn people.” And M. Flaubert - c’est moi.

But perhaps I would say that, being a Godwin. Without the Norman arrow that implanted itself in my dear ancestor Harold’s eye at Hastings (and, admittedly a long streak of illegitimacy in my family….) why, I would be King of the Anglo-Saxons!

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Anyway, where was I going with this? Merely to say that when I arrived back in Bristol, I was quite happy that our sunless Summer had stopped its pretence and that Autumn had finally come clean. I like these melancholy back-to-school acoustic days. And I found, in the Chrysanthemum, the perfect accompaniment. It is wistful and mature, aromatic but with a coppery ‘ting’ that aligned with my mood so well, I stopped composing my Bénédictine post and composed a Chrysanthemum post instead. It is a wonderful vehicle for Bénédictine - Bénédictine being the great Norman liqueur - and one that makes minimal demands on the rest of your bar shelf. But as is so often the case, it is the absinthe that really makes the drink.

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OK - I think I’ve hit upon the way to do the Spirits for the foreseeable future. I’m going to try to create more synchronicity between these regular Friday Spirits posts and the monthly (or so) Cabinet posts. So, free subscribers will continue to receive weekly recipes, which will now occasionally highlight interesting ingredients like Bénédictine… and paid subscribers will then receive more-in-depth examinations of these ingredients with ten or so EXTRA recipes. I think that should work quite well and keep us all well-supplied in delicious things to drink. The Bénédictine is almost ready - and I intend to follow up with Fernet-Branca before too long.

I take requests, too.

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PLAYLIST.

I thought this might be a opportune moment to resurrect the vintage floral playlist that I first put together for the Rose cocktail, another French classic. Features hyacinths, lilacs, roses, violets, and now, chrysanthemums, courtesy of that excellent rapper, MF Doom.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labutet. Mesmerising, terrifying.

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes. A pleasure, if you’re familiar with Flaubert though it may have coloured my impressions of Normandy.

Oh and:

“Pinballing around London, Vittles guide in hand, in search of undiscovered culinary gems is about as bourgeois as it gets. But somehow the loyal proponents of Vittles (if not Nunn himself) have adopted a patina of class activism: no better way to demonstrate the right kind of thinking than trading Covent Garden for Tottenham Hale.”

Despite mostly thinking Vittles is a good thing, I enjoyed this takedown of it (and the online reaction to it) which confirms that the absolute worst insult in progressive bourgeois circles remains: bourgeois. It’s a Flaubert world, we’re just living in it. (New Statesman)

What I think is interesting is how food has become the way that the urban hipster now demonstrates their superior aesthetic and therefore moral judgment. As I mentioned on the site formerly known as Twitter, it used to be music - or maybe movies or literature or visual art. Whereas Vittles writers now drop the names of regional Malaysian noodle dishes rather as Vice writers c.1998 would drop electroclash bands. There’s an intersting essay to be written - maybe I’ll write it! - about this transition from artistic discernment to culinary discernment. I mean, one thing Vittles does extremely well is to use food as a window into the culture at large - and, more specifically, aspects of that culture that are not covered in mainstream media (the car park turbots of Park Royal, for example.) But still. One key difference is that food basically always has to be nice. It has to be edible; the venue has to be vaguely hygienic; a depressing meal cannot be a good meal. Whereas a depressing song might just be the best kind of song.

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CABINET POSTS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

🌿Green Chartreuse
🍒 Maraschino
🍑 Apricot Brandy
🍫 Crème de Cacao
🌷Cynar
🏝️ Falernum
🌵 Mezcal
🐂 Sherry
🧡 Aperol
🍌 Crème de Banane
🐻 Kümmel

See you next time.