The Spirits #130: The Bijou
Plus: how to create a truly outstanding home bar
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~ THE BIJOU ~
40ml gin
20ml Italian vermouth
10ml green Chartreuse
Dash orange bitters*
Freeze a jewel-encrusted goblet or, failing that, a cocktail glass. Stir, (patiently, over ice) your gin, vermouth and Chartreuse. Add a dash of orange bitters if you like. Refract a beam of morning sun through a sapphire and discard. Now strain the cocktail through topaz into the cold glass and garnish with one of the following: an orange zest twist; a cherry; an emerald tortoise.
Some Bijou notes:
1) There is something mildly occult about the Bijou (“the Jewel”), something I can’t quite explain. It was invented by Harry Johnson in the 1890s and it was originally an equal parts cocktail, with gin, vermouth and Chartreuse playing the parts of diamond, ruby and emerald respectively.
2) Equal parts is interesting and curiously, almost better drunk at room temperature. Nevertheless, the Bijou cocktail is a little more palatable rearranged into the more Martinez-esque form above.
3) The original contains orange bitters. It is my custom to replace orange bitters in drinks with either a teaspoon of Pierre Ferrand Orange Curaçao; or a little spritz of orange zest; or to omit altogether.
4) I don’t know if the great choreographer George Balanchine was a cocktail aficionado, but curiously his ballet Jewels, which premiered at the New York City Ballet in 1967, was inspired by the same combination of precious stones as the Bijou. For the first act of the ballet, all the dancers wear emerald green and dance to Fauré; for the second act they wear ruby red and dance to Stravinsky; for the third act they wear diamond white and dance to Tchaikovsky. I only bring this up because Balanchine spent most of the 1920s in Paris with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes - and it’s not only entirely conceivable that the company would have fetched up at Harry’s New York bar on rue Daunou (just off the Avenue de l’Opéra) at some point; it’s reasonably likely that the Bijou featured on the menu (since it’s in the book). I for one would be extremely pleased if the cocktail turned out to have inspired the dance. Isn’t that what cocktails are supposed to do?
And if you want to go deep, unnecessarily deep on the synaesthesthic correspondence of music and liquid - and learn how to greatly improve both your home bar and your musical set-up, I strongly suggest you read on. But first, a gem-encrusted playlist.
💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎
The following nonsense is adapted from an essay I wrote for the now sadly defunct magazine The Happy Reader, issue no.14, under the title: LET’S GET HAMMERED: A Fun But Important Experiment. The edition in question was themed around J.K. Huysman’s À Rebours. It’s not online but thought Spirits readers needed to see it as it is shiny, shiny like a jewel…
IN THE home of Des Esseintes, the hero of Joris Karl Huysmans’s classic decadent novel À Rebours (Against Nature, 1884), there is an item of furniture that has always filled me with wonder. Actually, there are many such furnishings, including a bejewelled tortoise that wanders from room to room. But no adornment is quite so covetable as Des Esseintes’s “mouth-organ”, nor of such relevance to Spirits readers, I suspect who will immediately head to their cabinets to fashion their own. It really does make the old Bluetooth speaker seem a little humdrum.
The instrument consists of a fin de siècle spectrum of spirits and liqueurs, dispensed from barrels into tiny cups at the touch of a button. The organist doesn’t play music so much as taste it. Here is how Huysman describes Des Esseintes playing the thing:
He made his way to the dining-room, where there was a cupboard built into one of the walls containing a row of little barrels, resting side-by-side on tiny sandalwood stands and each broached at the bottom with a silver spigot. This collection of liqueur casks he called his mouth organ.
A rod could be connected to all the spigots, enabling them to be turned by one and the same movement, so that once the apparatus was in position it was only necessary to press a button concealed in the wainscoting to open all the conduits simultaneously and so fill with liqueur the minute cups underneath the taps.
The organ was then open. The stops labelled ‘flute’, 'horn’, and 'vox angelica’ were pulled out, ready for use. Des Esseintes would drink a drop here, another there, playing intense symphonies to himself, and providing his palate with sensations analogous to those which music dispenses to the ear.
Indeed, each and every liqueur, in his opinion, corresponded in taste with the sound of a particular instrument…
In one sense, this synaesthetic synthesiser was very much of its time. Arthur Rimbaud had recently assigned colours to letters in his sonnet ‘Voyelles’ (“A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue – vowels / One day I shall speak of your strange beginnings”). Claude Debussy would soon discover that modulating from pentatonic G to B major via C sounds exactly like swimming into a cathedral. Meanwhile Joris-Karl Huysmans was intuiting that violins are brandy, flutes are crème de menthe, and green Chartreuse is distilled in a major key - for he goes on to delineate the precise correspondence of tone to taste in great detail.
We should not overlook Huysmans’ far-sightedness as a mixologist, for we must remember that he was writing before the cocktail had entered the French home. It is true, American-style Sherry Cobblers and Mint Juleps had caused a sensation at the Exposition Universelle of 1878 in Paris, where they were served in the head of the Statue of Liberty – but it wasn’t until 1889 that the first cocktail book appeared in French: “Méthode pour composer soi-même les boissons américaines, anglaises, italiennes etc”. (Note how the new drinks were to be “composed” - like sonatas). À Rebours was published five years before this, in 1884. The idea of mixing spirits and liqueurs to create new harmonies, triads, chords was therefore highly avant-garde.
But not only did Huysmans predict the language of the cocktail, he anticipated its grammar too. The mouth-organ is no capricious assembly but a machine of careful engineering. Let’s take the string section, whose parts Huysmans assigns as follows.
Violin = old brandy (“choice and heady, biting and delicate”)
Viola = rum (“stronger, heavier, and quieter”)
Cello = vespetro (“poignant, drawn-out, sad and tender”)
Double bass = “a fine old bitter” (“full-bodied, solid, and dark.”)
Vespetro, if you’re wondering, is a sweet yellow Italo-French liqueur, usually home-made by steeping saffron, cinnamon, star anise, vanilla, angelica and similar aromatics in alcohol and sweetening with sugar. Galliano L’Autentico is perhaps the closest available equivalent. As for the “fine old bitter”, Huysmans might have had Amer Picon in mind – a popular bitter orange digestif of the time – or more likely, something dark, woody and medicinal, one of your heavier amaros.
Anyway, what a harmonious quartet that is! It’s remarkable how close this string section is to the basic architecture of the original ‘Cocktail’ (spirit + sweetness + bitterness), these days known as an Old Fashioned, though it was still pretty new when Huysmans was writing. Indeed, Huysmans’ combination is precisely the sort of clever Old Fashioned twist I can imagine being served in a hip speakeasy-type bar like Dead Rabbit in New York, 135 years later. It would be called ‘The Des Esseintes’ and it would be served in a diaphanous crystal tumbler with a large cube of ice and an orange zest twist and a monologue from the barman about this crazy French book he’s been reading.
There is a shrewdness to Huysmans’ woodwind section, too, comprised of fruit and herbal liqueurs that you wouldn't want to drink too much of on their own (much as a solo flute is a little sweet), but which are delicate and suggestive in cocktails:
Clarinet = dry curacao (i.e. orange liqueur)
Oboe = kümmel (i.e. caraway liqueur)
Flute = crème de menthe or anisette
It seems a shame to have the flutes represented by two liqueurs – but perhaps we could tweak that by assigning anisette (sweet aniseed liqueur) to the piccolos? But if we are in the business of reorganising and modernising the Mouth-Organ, we might add a few new sounds. I would suggest fleshing out the woodwind section as follows:
Cor anglais = crème de violette
Bassoon = coffee liqueur
Bass clarinet = Grand Marnier
Which brings us to the brass. Here, Huysmans opts for neat spirits:
Trumpet = kirsch
Cornet = gin
Trombone = whisky
Tuba = marc-brandy (i.e. unaged brandy)
I would personally switch gin and kirsch around, but again, the logic is sound: big clanging spirits for big clanging instruments. Much as the contemporaneous Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev had left spaces in his Periodic Table for elements still to be discovered, so Huysmans leaves ample room for the modern reader to make his own additions. Might I suggest:
French horn = pisco
Flugelhorn = aquavit
Euphonium = grappa
Saxophone = tequila?
Now that I come to think of it, the different age expressions of tequila (silver, reposado, anejo) could correspond to the soprano, alto and tenor saxes respectively. Mezcal I suppose would be the baritone sax.
Ah but now we are really tinkering we may as well fully renovate the instrument. The only section where Huysmans’ judgment goes awry is, in my opinion, his percussion section. He specifies arak (a dry Levantine anise spirit) for cymbals and mastic (a resinous Greek liqueur) for bass drum. But percussion… it’s rum, surely? Rum countries have unfailingly good rhythm. It even rhymes: “a rush on rum / of brush and drum” as Laura Nyro sang in New York Tendaberry. And just as there are brooding Jamaican dark rums and good-time Guyanese golden rums and spirited Cuban light rums and they all get along famously in a Zombie, well, there are also congas and maracas and hi-hats and tambourines and the more of them being bashed at once, the better, I say. So I say we reassign the viola rum part to, ooh, calvados. And go for:
Percussion = rum(s)
And since rum is made from sugar and sugar is in itself a key cocktail ingredient, I would add (bear with me):
Drum kit = sugar syrup
And now we are in the 20th century. Oh, well, we better make some more updates:
Acoustic guitar = Irish whiskey
Electric guitar = Bourbon
Distorted electric guitar = Rye
Bass guitar = Angostura bitters
Fender Rhodes = Campari
Hammond organ = Aperol
The following geographical specialities almost assign themselves:
Banjo = corn whiskey
Pedal steel = Southern Comfort
Accordion = absinthe
Bouzouki = ouzo
Hawaiian guitar = okolehao
Javanese bonang = arrack
However:
Bagpipes = baiju
As for electronic instruments, I’m pretty sure that:
Electric synthesiser = vodka
Which leaves the quandary of the piano for which Huysmans makes no suggestion. It would have to be something rich and versatile that satisfies all on its own.
Wine? Not a liqueur, you protest! Well, it’s true, you wouldn’t waste an 1882 Chateau Lafite Rothschild on a cocktail (the 1883 on the other hand…). But champagne is a frequently-used cocktail ingredient. And consider all the spiced and fortified wines that ushered in the golden age of the cocktail: upright French vermouths; honky-tonk Italian vermouths; jazzy quinquinas like Byrrh and Dubonnet; Lillet Blanc, the Steinway of aperitifs; Carpano Antica Formula, the Bösendorfer of the back-bar…? And this is before we have considered all the ports and sherries! I suppose you might need a dozen or so tiny cups to capture all of the necessary tones. But yes, the more I think about it the more:
Piano = wine(s)
Still, before we add any more embellishments to Des Esseintes’s instrument, we should appreciate its original subtleties. Huysmans wouldn’t be so basic as to have a unidimensional instrument. “The music of liqueurs had its own scheme of interrelated tones,” he notes, before supplying the mind-blowing information that green Chartreuse corresponds to the major scale and Bénédictine to the minor. Des Esseintes plays crème de cassis to suggest the song of a nightingale, and cacaochouva (an old-fashioned chocolate liqueur) to summon a pastoral lullaby. Clearly, there is a whole painting-box of sonorities to be evoked by crème de peche, Cherry Heering, blue curacao, Pisang Ambon, pear eau-de-vie, etc – to say nothing of the tonalities of lemons, limes, cream, eggs, mint, etc. My overall feeling is that:
‘80s production = Midori
‘90s production = Baileys
‘00s production = Jagermeister
‘10s production = Fernet-Branca
‘20s production = crème de banane
Now! So far as I can ascertain, no one has every actually made a commercially viable Mouth-Organ. Still, it’s not too hard to rig up a rudimentary home-made version with a few shot glasses and egg cups. If you have a decent booze collection, you might even build up to, say, Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in the key of lemon-Chartreuse. Drink along. I’m sure you’ll agree, there’s something lovely about the way the Galliano heartbeat gives way to muted pisco in the first movement - and the Kahlua-anisette blast at the end of the second movement is inspired. Still, the breakdown of tonality in the fourth movement is not to be attempted lightly. Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in raspberry-Chartreuse is perhaps more rewarding for the novice, and the Noilly Prat theme returning as violette in the second movement is particularly charming. With practise, you might even work your way up to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in orange-Bénédictine.
If your tastes are more contemporary and your alcohol budget more modest, the rock and pop canon is equally rewarding. You can replicate Nirvana’s Nevermind with little more than a rye whiskey, sugar syrup and bitters, i.e. a punchy sort of Old Fashioned. Fela Kuti’s Expensive Shit is a riot of rum and tequila; Kraftwerk’s The Man Machine is iced vodka with a few pipettes of flavoured-schnapps. Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way still tastes wonderfully avant-garde - a mournful gin solo over layered washes of Campari and Aperol - but I most enjoyed drinking the entirety of Joanna Newsom’s second album Ys. Huysmans specifies that the harp is “dry cumin”, a little love-it-or-hate it, but the brandy of the strings mellows it out.
If you have a few musicians lying around, it is equally possible to reverse-engineer cocktails into sound. As we’ve seen, the Old Fashioned (whiskey + sugar + bitters) is guitar, bass and drums. The dry Martini (gin + vermouth) is a trumpet accompanied by a piano. The Stinger (brandy + crème de menthe) is violin and flute. The Bijou, a very Huysmanian combination (gin + sweet vermouth + green Chartreuse + bitters) is trumpet, piano and bass playing in a major key.
There are some gems to be found among the modern classics too. The Conference, a favourite at New York’s Death & Co (rye + bourbon + calvados + cognac + bitters) translates as a Velvet Underground-style line-up two guitars, viola, violin and bass. The Fernando (bianco vermouth + Fernet-Branca + Galliano) is a piano-cello duet with bang-up-to-date production.
“The poet becomes a seer by a long, prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses,” Rimbaud wrote in 1871. After all these years, there is still no more reliable way to do that than by listening to music, drinking alcohol, or preferably both at once. Gin green, ice white, rum blues, jazz red, peach sad. One day we will learn of your strange affinities.
PLAYLIST
Diamonds, pearls, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, amethysts and even a lazuli. It’s a really good one this week even if I do say so myself.
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING
There’s gonna be an ELECTION. FINALLY. Jesus.
Oh and if you like your literary takedowns both merciless and extremely well-considered might I recommend Johanna Thomas-Corr’s thoughts on Rachel Cusk’s new novel… “like walking over shards of glass”. (The Times)
SHOPPING LIST
Listen carefully now. Cream. Light rum. Fresh passion fruit. Vanilla essence. Orange liqueur.
😉