The Spirits #127: The Between-the-Sheets

Plus: More Samuel Taylor Coleridge than anyone signed up for

~ THE BETWEEN-THE-SHEETS ~

25ml brandy
25ml light rum
25ml orange liqueur
10ml lemon juice
~5ml sugar syrup (to taste)

Freeze that glass! Think about democracy. Now measure the liquids and pour into the shaker. Taste and adjust if you feel it needs more sugar. Add copious ice and shake. I need hardly stress that you should put the lid on first. Strain the mixture into the afore-chilled ice. Think about socialism. Garnish with a lemon (or orange)-zest twist and serve to someone you’d like to bed.

Some Between-the-Sheets notes:

1) The drink was born in Paris, 1922, Harry MacElhone’s name on the birth certificate. Harry’s original specs actually call for the drink to be stirred as opposed to shaken - and also, for a scant larme of lemon juice as opposed to the usual half gill or so you’d find in a sour-type cocktail. Thus the drink is dinstinguished from the Sidecar not only by virtue of its rum component - but also, by its relative roundness; the Sidecar being rather more tart.

2) MacElhone also specifies Cointreau specifically and given that Cointreau is a hefty 40% ABV - oof, that’s quite a wallop, not sure how energetic any Between-the-Sheets action is going to be after a couple of these puppies. I recently used up my Cointreau and bought the fabled brandy-based Pierre Ferrand Orange Curacao instead. If you can bear the outlay, I recommend you do the same. It has a bitter depth that’s more redolent of Grand Marnier but brings a tropical sunny roundness too. It’s not as sweet a Cointreau; hence that little extra sugar.

3) Thanks to Between-the-Sheets aficionado Mike Gibson for his specs! Which I slightly adjusted.

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I’ve been doing a little housekeeping this last week. You may have seen, you may have heard, I’ve introduced a full A-Z index of drinks. Think of it as a to-do list.

You might also like to know that I have made a long-overdue update of my journalistic portfolio page.

And I have also travelled deep into the Andes on the Golden Condor in order to unearth the mysteries of pisco cocktails.

The Cabinet: Pisco

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I SPENT a portion of last week walking the Coleridge Way in Somerset, from Lynmouth to Porlock via Xanadu with my friend Tom. Readers with freakishly acute memories will recall that around this time last year, I recommended the Samuel Taylor Coleridge biography, Early Visions by Richard Holmes - truly one of the most rewarding and companionable books I can remember reading. I retain from it the fond sense the Coleridge was a brilliant old university friend I someow lost contact with or something.

If you’re totally new to S.T.C., perhaps start with the ‘In Our Time’ episode on the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and then turn to Richard Burton’s excellent reading of said poem (plus my favourite, Frost at Midnight). But then read the biography. Holmes’s signature innovation was to tap Coleridge’s sources - the very places where he lived, worked, thought, talked, walked - and reconstruct him from the inside out. Coleridge was a great walker, maybe even (with his slightly backstabby friend William Wordsworth) the inventor of the whole idea of going out for a walk for fun. He liked to compose poetry outside too, much in the way that romantic landscape painters would take their paints into the wild.

As it happened, by total coincidence, my friend Tom happened to reading Early Visions more or less concurrently and experiencing a similar state of romantic communion with this long-dead poet. And so it felt doubly, triply apt to follow in his footsteps. The pair of us set out with a rucksack full of opium and albatross snares, hoping to find the very farm where, holed up w/ dyssentry, Samuel T.C. tripped out his hallucinatory poem, Kubla Khan. Or at least, as much of Kubla Khan as he could until he was rudely interrupted. Famously, he was just getting into his stride, giraffe armies at the gates, pashas melting into fountains, dulcimers chiming when -

“At that moment the Author was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock and on his return found to his mortification that though he retained some vague recollection of his vision, yet with the exception of eight or toil scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away.”

We later learned that this “person on business from Porlock” was (according to local legend anyway) the landlord from the Old Ship pub who turned up at the farmhouse asking Coleridge to settle his debts. The residents of Porlock, it seems, have mixed feelings about the the fact “person from Porlock” has entered the language as harbingers of banality, puncturers of the sublime, human iPhone notifications - for are not a thousand stately pleasure domes razed each and every day by these merciless interrupters? Shared event change. Richard, you have a new memory. Screen Time notification. Hey I was building an ice-palace for my Abyssinian maiden! Porlock, we are in you.

Anyway, honestly? I think this might have been the best English walk I have ever done, 360 degree gorgeousness more or less the whole way, barely a phone-mast in site. We passed about three people too; truly, “alone, alone, all all alone!” (I learned afterwards that Exmoor is the least visited of all our National Parks - most people simply zoom past on the way to Cornwall.) Much like Coleridge’s Mariner, we lost our way several times and had to scramble up and down hillsides, run away from cows and bless some slimy water snakes before finding our way again using our romantic intuition - arriving for an extremely welcome fish supper in the aforeshadowed pub.

The Old Ship, as it turns out, claims to be England’s oldest pub (don’t they all) and buttresses this assertion by proudly displaying many of England’s oldest jokes in the bar. “Beware the Mother-in-Law”; “Ladies: low-cut tops will be looked down upon,” etc. My first thought was that this taproom misogyny was entirely out of keeping with Coleridge the pantisocratic dreamer, the conjuror of visions, the ecological prophet! I then wondered if maybe the person from Porlock who turned up mid-Kubla Khan was in fact the great-great-grandfather of the current landlord, and maybe he too brought with him a supply of terrible bawdy gags, like a sort of Georgian Roy Chubby Brown. A terrible comedown.

The next morning however, as Tom and I paused by the River Lyn for crisps and sonnets, we discovered in the Complete Works a piece of juvenilia that felt fairly in keeping with the Old Ship décor. It’s about an amusingly mismatched couple, the man being rather skinny and the woman… well:

She large and round beyond belief
A superfluity of Beef!
Her mind and body of a piece,
And both compos’d of kitchen-grease
In short, Dame Truth might safely dub her
Vulgarity enshrin’d in blubber!

Written After a Walk Before Supper, 1792.

A superfluity of Beef! I mean above all you just have to admire Coleridge’s range. Wordsworth would never have come up with that.

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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
⛰️ Pisco

NEXT TIME: Elderflower liqueur

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THE PLAYLIST

"Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing
Beloved from pole to pole!”

Said Coleridge. As tempting as it was to lean into the steamy connotations of Between-the-Sheets and give you some songs about fucking - I thought I’d lean into the more wholesome sleepy connotations with a somnambulant playyyyylistzzzzzz.

NB: This playlist (ideally) updates with fresh songs each week, rather in the manner of Spotify’s ‘Discover Weekly’ list. But this is personally curated by me. Save/download and you should have a fresh supply of cool music in perpetuity. I store all the archive lists in one long megaplaylists, which you can find here.

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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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WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING

Not much, to be honest, but as I say, there’s lots here.

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

A vintage interview with Paul Auster, RIP. “…Keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.” (Paris Review)

(The above is from Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s amazing graphic adaptation of City of Glass from Auster’s New York Trilogy.)

I can’t say I lose sleep over NYC ravioli portion sizes, but I liked the cut of this piece about ravioli’s jib. (Jezebel)

The battle for attention (New Yorker)

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SHOPPING LIST

Now listen carefully: tequila, orange liqueur (or agave syrup), lime… and a jar of capers.