The Spirits #125: The Tarragon Gimlet

Plus: The best restaurant in Albania

~ THE TARRAGON GIMLET ~

Two sprigs of tarragon
50ml gin
15ml lime juice
10ml sugar syrup (2:1)

Freeze the glass, have you noticed? This always comes first. Place the tarragon sprigs in the bottom of your shaking vessel, saving a nice leaf for the garnish. Add the gin and muddle awhile, then shove in the lime and sugar, plus a decent amount of ice and shake that son-of-a-bitch for 10-15 seconds. Fine-strain this fine mess through a fine mesh into the frozen glass and garnish w/ the aforementioned tarragon.

Some Tarragon Gimlet notes:

1) A rare confluence: a Spring evening; a little ‘give’ in the schedule; a feeling of windblown freshness. What shall we drink? I turned to Alice Lascelles’s excellent book The Cocktail Edit and chose her Tarragon Gimlet to mark the occasion. My tarragon plant has come good again; plus I know this is a particular favourite of hers. As indeed she confirmed over Instagram. Says Alice:

“Any drink that marries lime, anisey/herbal notes and hard liquor is catnip to me. I stole this particular combination from Herb by th brilliant gardener and cookery writer Mark Diacono. It’s just green, green, green - as piercingly fresh as plunging your face into a mountain stream. Also excellent over ice.”

2) Seriously the Cocktail Edit is extremely good and you should buy it.

3) I’m afraid I adapted the Tarragon Gimlet to fit the contours of my own laziness. Alice’s version requires an eight-hour tarragon-sugar syrup infusion and a slightly different sour ratio. Mine is more of an instant muddle, following the general formula of the Green Park.

4) If you like this, you will certainly enjoy The French Pearl. You should also give the OG Gimlet a try too.

Ah yes you. Sit down.

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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.
🏥 And here is a list of trusted charities who are helping people in Gaza.

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WE are back from a week in Albania. My strong advice is that you go to Albania - but also that try to leave your three-year-old behind, ideally with relatives but if it’s already too late for that, maybe take the opportunity to discard him at security along with your moisturisers and liquids. Ah I love him really. But we really shouldn’t have let him have that chocolate cake. Not before that drive. Christ.

But anyway, Albania is a delightful country, perhaps person for person the friendliest I’ve been to in Europe, generally very chill - and the hire car people didn’t even seem to notice the smell of three-year-old vomit. The food is excellent, the landscapes dramatic and the language, which as you know is the last surviving Albano varient of the Paleo-Balkan family - much as we are the last surviving hominids - was a constant delight. There is for example a town called Theth in the Albanian Alps, aka the Bjeshkët e Nëmuna - which means Accursed Mountains. Also I’m not sure if this is a genuine point of national pride, or just one of those small sample size coincidences, but Albanians seemed to me to have incredibly good short-term memories and almost made a point of not writing down complicated instructions but nevertheless getting everything exactly right.

We were based near Durrës on the coast but I’m glad we travelled too in spite of aforementioned crimes against hire-car upholstery. Shkoder in the north is a pleasant Alpine town; Berat in the centre has a beautiful riverside views; but an undoubted highlight was the country restaurant, Mrizi i Zanaze in Lezhë - the sort of place that Netflix will soon commission a pretentious hour-long special about, whereupon it will fill up with insufferable gastro-tourists. Whereas when we went I’m pretty sure we were the only non-Albanians/Kosovans there. It’s on a farm, miles from anywhere: wooden walls, geese, goats, pomegranates, vines, embroidery, country wedding vibes. There’s no menu, you just give some vague preferences and then a parade of sheeps cheeses and cured meets, bureks, pickles, delicious pastryish things, roast meats and pomegranates appear. There must have been 12 dishes between four of us and the bill was about £36. I couldn’t have dreamed up a better place.

I wasn’t drinking - it’s not really advised on the Albanian roads - but I did manage to pick up a bottle of Raki Rruga from the country store above, OK, in part because I liked the label. But damn it’s a tasty spirit. You may know Turkish raki, a cousin of ouzo, one of the many rank aniseed spirits of southern Europe. Only, Albanian raki generally dispenses with the aniseed and is more like eau-de-vie, i.e. unaged fruit brandy. This stuff is distilled from grapes and it’s clean and hard, a little floral, a little fruity but with that country alcohol taste that you only get from proper pot still small batch spirits. Brohoritje!

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I WAS talking to my Parisian friend Seb Emina the other day about Substack; he is the former editor of the sadly defunct Happy Reader and recent Substack joinee. If you like the wordier parts of the Spirits I suspect you’ll like his publication, Read Me, a lot. We were both vowing to one another that as much we like talking about Substack among ourselves we will not use our Substacks to talk about Substack. You will have noticed this trend, I’m sure, for podcast people to talk about podcasts, BBC reporters to report on the BBC, writers to talk about how to write. All part of the general media ourobouros. I don’t mind that stuff; I lap a lot of it up. But my opinion is that it’s better simply to cut to the cheese. I mean chase. I mean just do the thing rather than talk about doing the thing!

Be that as it may, I will break the rule this once to say: I did go to an exceedingly good Substack party on Wednesday at Libreria bookshop in East London, hosted by Substack’s chief UK evangelist, Farrah Storr. As a part-refugee from the old world of newspapers, I found the event rather cheering. There were many of my favourite writers in the room, a room lined with actual books by the way, which was itself pleasing. Only when writers usually get together (perhaps you’ve had the misfortune to go to the UK Press Awards?) there is usually a dreadful feeling of doom and misery and low-level bitchiniss in the air. Here, all felt full of promise. Despite the great difference in subjects, temperaments, etc

”It’s just such a great community” said one writer.
”All communities are evil” responded another.

But it was said in a communal spirit, I feel. Anyway, I’m always happy to discuss the platform with anyone who feels it might be for them; feel free to get in touch. But please tick me off if I do so on here.

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Since writing about my father’s model railway, my appreciation for the craft has grown hugely. Take for example this French model railway, Le P’tit Train de St-Lazare (a sly nod to Monet’s Gare de St-Lazare?). It captures in loving detail a side of modern Paris that many Parisians like to pretend does not exist but which has always fascinated me when glimpsed from the Eurostar.

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MUSIC

Also on a Parisan urban theme - I like how these leitmotivs emerge unplanned - I haven’t managed to do a playlist, no, but my mate Tom from Album Club (see last week) did whack together a concise playlist of French electro from the mid-00s. And what more can a person need?

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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
🕊️ Bénédictine
🦅Fernet-Branca
❄️Brancamenta
🐿️Amaretto

NEXT TIME: Pisco

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WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING

I interviewed the photographer Martin Parr on 50 years of photographing the British at play (ES Magazine)

I also interviewed the model Charli Howard about body image, mental health, dating hell, deepfakes and a lot more. Her memoir Misfit, by the way, is incredibly good, and required reading, I would think, for parents of teenage girls. (You)

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

In common with at least five people on the Ryanair Stanstead to Tirana flight: Free by the Albanian philosopher Lea Ypi, an account of coming of age in communist/post-communist Albania in the 1990s where a discarded Coke can was a precious ornament. It’s a wonderful book. You should also listen to her podcast on Freedom w/ David Runciman; it’s one for the ages. By coincidence, Lea Ypi was the subject of one of the most banally vile columns yet seen in a British newspaper (see social media; passim) which rather confirms my feeling that so much of the old media edifice just deserves to die.

I also read, while away, Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky which coincidentally happens to be Ypi’s favourite novel. A truly frightening book. The deleted chapter - you have to read that too. But I think that’s probably enough Dostoevsky for the time being.

Sam Kriss’s essay on Demons is fun. (First Things)

Johanna Thomas-Corr I happen to know for a fact wrote this review of Salman Rushdie’s Knife in like three hours. It’s great of course and the book is next on my reading list. (The Times)

And sorry but if you like a literary takedown: Ann Manov’s deconstruction of Lauren Oyler, whom I’ve always found rather dessicated, is chef’s kiss though please, no one reconstruct my probable Wikipedia search historis. (Book Forum)

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SHOPPING LIST

I’m reinstating this shopping list. Not for you. For me. And then in turn for you. On reflection it’s good to hold one’s future self to account. Anyway: dark rum, orange liqueur, raspberries, lime, sugar.
🍹🍹🍹