The Spirits #132: The Lychee Martini
Plus: Comprehensive proof that lychees are sea creatures
~ THE LYCHEE MARTINI ~
50ml vodka
10ml lychee syrup (see below)
10ml French vermouth
Drop of lime juice
Pinch of salt
Dash of Peychaud’s bitters
First place the most 1990s glass you own in the freezer. Now add all the ingredients to your mixing vessel (and I really do mean the merest spritz of lime and tiniest pinch of salt by the way). Add copious ice and stir patiently for a good minute or so. Now strain into the frozen Martini glass. A lychee garnish is conventional but to be quite honest, when I tried that, it looked like I’d coughed up an adenoid. So I picked an edible flower (love-in-the-mist) from the front garden and used that instead.
HOW TO MAKE LYCHEE SYRUP!
There are a few different strategies here. Mine was to use a tin of lychees in syrup (I used the AROY-D brand, available from a half-decent Asian supermarket or online) and some white sugar. Pour the lychees and the accompanying juice into a saucepan (maybe saving a few for nibbling?) and add approximately 200g white sugar. Gently heat while mashing the lychees so as to extract as much juice as possible. Bring to ever-such-a gentle simmer, still squelching those ‘chees. After a minute or so, remove from the heat and give it a little stir to make sure the sugar has dissolved - then cover and allow to cool and infuse for about 15 minutes. Strain through a mesh sieve into a suitable container and it should keep for a month or so in the fridge.
If you’ve fresh lychees in season, lucky you. Peel and stone a teacup’s worth and place in a pan with an equal volume of sugar and water and perform the procedure detailed above. You might alternatively use lychee juice (Rubicon, for example) as the base for a simple syrup: simply combine one part lychee juice with one part white sugar, heating until it all dissolves.
Some Lychee Martini notes:
1) No, the Lychee Martini is not a Martini as, say Myrna Loy would recognise it. It contains no gin and I don’t recommend you put an olive in it. The Lychee Martini instead dates from the Fruitini Era, i.e., the 1990s, when “Martini” tended l to refer to the glass (always triangular) rather than the drink itself. These were sweet, fruity and vodka-based: see also the Appletini, the French Martini, the P*** Star Martini, etc. The Lychee Martini is among the classiest and most enduring of the variants. It has lately been leading a faintly unlikely 1990s cocktail revival and rightly so as it’s fucking delicious.
2) The lime droplet and the salt pinch are really there just to amp up the lychee flavour a little bit. The Peychaud’s adds a little anchoring depth but also makes the drink a more fetching colour. (Maybe a drop of Campari would do the same if you’ve no Peychauds?) I did experiment with gin for this but the juniper was a bully. Vodka (I used Dima’s from Ukraine) proved more gentlemanly, standing back to let the lychee subtleties take centre stage.
3) The idea of using tinned lychees for the syrup? (Americans: tinned = canned; I’m sure you know that but I once had an extremely confusing conversation with a guy in Trader Joes who didn’t). That came from Felix Cohen of Daisy in Margate. As a general rule, I’d rather retool a kitchen ingredient than buy an expensive syrup or liqueur that will take up shelf real estate (if you have no such qualms, Giffard’s Lichi-Li is recommended). I also like rooting around Asian supermarkets.
4) You can actually made a pretty decent minimalist Lychee Martini simply by mixing 50ml vodka and 10ml of the tinned lychee juice.
…AND WELCOME. Especially to the intimidatingly large amount of new subscribers who just signed up on account of THE SPIRITS being a Featured Publication. I can only disappoint you. Click on the green button for a lychee-appropriate playlist. And read on for an explication of the mating rituals of the Chinese lychee.
🖊️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 WAS standing in the tinned aisle of 168 Oriental Supermarket on Nelson Street yesterday, contemplating the cocktailing potential of various genera of imported fruit, when a shoal of lychees swam by.
“Hello you,” they sang in a tiny pink chorus.
It was midday. The shop was calm. A couple of students were perusing Japanese crisps; a shopkeeper was putting labels on kimchi. There was nothing to indicate that anything unusual was happening at all, besides the fruit swimming around me, pulsating, pleading with their wet emoji eyes.
“Remember us?”
To say I was surprised would be putting it mildly. It has been many years since fruit of any kind spoke to me - let alone a monotypic taxon of the soapberry family.
“Remember your lies?”
I flushed. To respond would be to give credence to this absurdity - perhaps to succumb to madness. For who wants to be seen conversing with lychees at 12:14pm on a Thursday in central Bristol? Not you, not me. But the lychees were insisting. And they were barbed, like puffer fish about to strike. I didn’t want to get stung by one of those things.
“Erm…" I began quietly. “I’m really sorry, I’m just doing some shopping for my Substack…”
“We remember your lies.”
And all at once a quarter century dissolved. I tried to scream. But my head was underwater. I was in my room in my first year of university, 1999. Blue carpet, lava lamp, maybe 300% Dynamite or Jeff Buckley on the CD player. Four or five of us sitting, smoking, rolling, easing into our new selves. On the coffee table: lychees, the colour of pot pourri. I had picked them up in the Covered Market, flush with my Student Loan and my-new found freedom. Lychees were an extremely rare novelty at home. Now I could buy whichever goddam fruits I pleased.
“What are these?” said new friend J—— picking one up during a lull in conversation.
“They’re lychees,” someone responded. “What. Don’t you have them in Lancashire?”
“Lie-Cheese?”
“Lychees. They’re delicious. You eat them like this.”
Those of us versed in the ways of the lychee took a fruit and showed him how to peel the thing, pinching the rough skin until it split to reveal the inner surprise: a slimy white eyeball.
“Uh, weird” yelped J—— as the vile jelly popped out, sticky with juice. But then it revealed its lush, girlish perfume.
“Honestly they’re delicious.”
We popped them into our mouths and sat for there a while, swirling the slippery gobstoppers around our mouths, contemplating the pale rainbows on our tongues. Silk-draped opium parlours. Jungle palaces. Strawberrymelons glistening in the sun.
“Good God!” said J—— as we spat our smooth brown stone into the ashtray. “That is such a delicious fruit.”
“Fruit?” said I. “It’s not a fruit.”
All eyes on me.
“It’s not a fruit! It’s a sea creature.”
“Shut up… it’s got a stone?” protested J——.
“That’s cartilidge. You know like a cuttlefish bone.”
“What?”
At this point the lie magnified, multiplied. No it was a kind of mollusc, someone else put in. Native to the South China Sea. No it’s closer to an anenome. They’re found in coral reefs. Did you see that thing on Blue Planet about them, how they ping out? Amazing. No, that’s not peel, it’s a kind of exoskeleton. Actually, the lychee is soft and slimy in the water, it only becomes hard once it’s been fished.
“That’s digusting!”
We batted away questions with growing assurance. These ones were farmed, of cours, but Shanghai businessmen pay thousands for the hand-dived ones. The reason they’re sweet? Lots of natural sugars. How come not salty? Oh they have to be desalinated otherwise they sting. Yes they sting. Lychees kill approximately 300 Malaysian fisherman per year. Smaller conversations branched off the main path. Never been stung, but my brother was on his gap year. Luckily it was a male. Aren’t they hermaphrodites? Yes I suppose it is a form of sushi.
“How come you don’t have to keep them in the fridge?” said J——.
“Oh they’re still alive.”
“WHAT?”
“Yeah they stay alive for a while after fishing. That’s why it’s considered such a delicacy. Didn’t you feel it twitching on your tongue?”
“How can you eat that,” J—— actually angry. “WHY didnt you say?!” Were all monsters.
“But you liked it!”
Lychees were flung. Lychees were squashed. Lychees swarmed with rambutans and loquats, durians and banana blossoms and dissolved and I was standing once again in 186 Oriental, the faint smell of five-spice in the air.
“I remember,” I whispered to the lychees.
“It was a good lie, wasn’t it?” they chorused.
“One of my best, I think,” I said. But they had gone.
The shopkeeper kept on tagging. The students decided upon: cuttlefish. I went back to my tins. Silly stoned lies. We would come to convince each other of this sort of nonsense all the time. The Queen has abdicated. Aural sex is a growing menace. A young Steven Seagall played slide guitar in Wings. Almost all of these pointless fantasias would have been quashed in five seconds if any of us had smartphones. But we were one of the last cohort of students who didn’t. Sad to think of all of the future in-jokes, scraped out of the seabed of the imagination by the dredge-trawler Google before they had a chance to mature! Killed - like so many lychee pups, floating in the South China Sea.
You shouldn’t feel too bad for J—— by the way, who later got his revenge on my by writing ARREST ME I’M SMUGGLING HEROIN on a blank page of my passport as we were waiting to change planes in Abu Dhabi. He is alive and well and living in Stroud and makes a very decent Negroni.
But presumably they have lychees in Lancashire now anyway. If anything, it seems faintly passé as a fruit. A bit late-Nineties, like Morcheeba or… Carole Smillie. The food hipsters - your Bear watchers, your Vittles subscribers - they’re all into soursop and paw paw now.
But taste a lychee. Really try to taste it afresh as if you never had anything like that before. It’s a magical, otherworldly, horrifying thing. I just gave one to my ten year old from the tin and he refused to eat it, believing it to be a sort of invertebrate. You can almost believe that it has three brains, obscure spawning rituals and occult significance in the island religions of the Malay Archipelago. Delicious.
CABINET POSTS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
🐿️ Amaretto
🧡 Aperol
🍑 Apricot Brandy
🕊️ Bénédictine
❄️ Brancamenta
🍌 Crème de Banane
🍫 Crème de Cacao
🫐 Crème de Cassis
🌷 Cynar
🌸Elderflower Liqueur
🏝️ Falernum
🦅 Fernet-Branca
🌿 Green Chartreuse
🐻 Kümmel
🍒 Maraschino
🌵 Mezcal
🦙 Pisco
🐂 Sherry
🌻 Suze
THE PLAYLIST
In honour of the South Sea Lychee, here is a playlist of sea creatures. You will find terrapins, marine iguanas, porpoises, belugas, various species of fish and much more besides. I’d particularly draw your attention to the Welsh psychedelia of Anelog, the Monkees at their trippiest and Anemone by the Brian Jonestown Massacre which was apparently one of Anthony Bourdain’s favourite songs - and we all know what good taste he had, don’t we?
NB: The thing to do is save/download this playlist. I refresh it with a new set of songs each week (most weeks anyway) so as to match the weekly cocktail. It’s a bit like Spotify’s ‘Discover Weekly’ list only it’s made by a human not an algorithm. I store all the archive lists in one long megaplaylist, which you can find here. Put it on shuffle and you have a pretty good cocktail party soundtrack.
SHOPPING LIST
Scotch, Bénédictine, lemon.
This is amazing; I laughed out loud. Thank you !