The Spirits #14: The Old Cuban

~ Goodbye to 2020 ~ Cold Moon ~ Afresh afresh afresh ~ 'You fuck up the kitchen you do the dishes' ~ 10:15 to Leeds ~

Dec 31, 2020

~ THE OLD CUBAN ~

20ml golden sugar syrup
20ml lime juice
5-6 mint leaves
50ml dark rum
Dash Angostura bitters
~75ml sparkling wine

Freeze your glassware (flute, coupe, regular wine glass, all good). Now take your shaker. (Hi by the way! Everyone have good Christmases?) In the bottom of the shaker, muddle your sugar syrup, lime and mint. Then introduce the rum, bitters and a shovelful of ice and shake well. Fine strain (i.e through a tea strainer/sieve) into your chilled glassware and top with sparkling wine. A lime twist garnish feels right.

Some Old Cuban pointers:

1) I usually advise that you freeze you glassware. Perhaps you skip that part habitually. I feel that here it is especially worth doing. Champagne cocktails are basically fizzes; and fizzes usually take ice cubes in the glass; only champagne cocktails don’t, on account of being served champagne-style; but are often less delicious than they might be on account of being served less than optimally cold; therefore they need all the help they can get; so get those glasses nice and frosty.

2) Muddling means “bashing about a bit with something wooden” (OED); ideally a muddler, or maybe a wooden spoon if not. A muddler is one of the few pieces of specialist barware besides a shaker that I use with any regularity and would make a good addition to any Christmas list - ah! Too late.

3) I always advise that you fine-strain your cocktails too… by which I mean give them a supplementary straining through a tea-strainer to remove the tiny shards of glass. (A tea-strainer being the single most useful piece of kitchen equipment for your cocktails). I surmise from the Instagram pictures I am occasionally tagged in that this admonition is not habitually followed to the letter; but again, here, it’s especially worth it: otherwise you will end up with little flecks of mint floating in the drink.

4) Please don’t think I’m being persnickety; I am merely tipsy!

5) I’ve lost my train of thought.

6) Oh yeah! This is a ‘champagne’ cocktail; champagne cocktails are ideally made with champagne. Champagne is, however, really expensive; and if you have laid down £25+ on a bottle of it, you’ll probably want to savour it on its own. Therefore feel absolutely free to make this with prosecco, cava, crémant, etc. Almost all the fancy bars will do just that. Try to go for a sparkelr that is dry (“brut”) and has some of that yeasty biscuitiness that the best champagnes do. I used J. Laurens Crémant de Limoux Brut for the above.

MUSIC. And welcome to the END OF 2020! NOT LONG NOWWWWWWW!!!

Did you see the moon last night? The Cold Moon, it is called, and it was haloed above my street with an icy rainbow. My cameraphone couldn’t possibly do justice to it; but here it is setting this morning in Northumbria.

I have never been a huge fan of New Year’s Eve, that bloated coda, that compulsory festival, that party pressure-point, that prelude to parsimony. I mean what a time to make resolutions! Surely vows would be better made in Spring, amid crocuses and hyacinths? Or early September, with a brand new pencil case and a full calendar to look forward to… as opposed to a tax return? My favourite New Year was 2013-14 when our son Ted was born (at 4.23am, New Year’s Day). The miraculous appearance of new life can’t be discounted; but having a cast-iron excuse not to have to sing Auld Lang Syne definitely played a part. Now I am always a bit hungover on his birthday - and that’s another reason not to love it.

Oh it’s usually kind of fun in the end - USUALLY. But even when you do make it through without ingesting something you didn’t want to, it’s just a shame that the inevitable stock-taking, the totting-up, the have-I-achieved-enough, should take place at such a cold, dark moment. Imagine if we all compiled our yearly highlights reels in midsummer instead. How differently we would feel about everything! What if we simply said September or March were the start of the year? Come to think of it: I wonder if it’s any better in the Southern Hemisphere…

Still strangely enough, in this thrice-cursed year, I find myself quite happy to celebrate NYE. And not just because it’s nice to see the back of 2020 (I mean, 2021 isn’t looking like a barrel of laughs - right?). It genuinely sucks not to see anyone; how I would love to throw an enormous party! But there’s also that consolation of there being nowhere else I could possibly (legally) be other than in my home with my family. Pressure off. I’m sure there’s a German word for that; or perhaps we need a new acronym: JOMOFOMO (Joy of missing out on the fear of missing out?) And surely, while we’re doing our spiritual accounting for 2020, surely something like that applies to the whole year. Most of the things we might have wanted to do/see/acheive/attain were off limits. So you needn’t feel so bad for not having done them. Early on in the pandemic, when I was contemplating a drastic career change, an old colleague counselled me not to. The thing about this year is you just need to get through it. Any major decisions can be made later; the thing for the moment is to make it through. And we did. We’re drinking or at least thinking about cocktails - and that is a blessed position to be in.

And when I reflect, I find 2020 has brought many consolations and a few wondrous things - not least a second son, Aubrey, who is just waking up as I write these words, so I must be fast!

Anyhow: I chose the cocktail above as I felt champagne was in order… good riddance 2020! But I wanted something fresher, something more transporting than your usual Champagne Cocktails and French 75’s. Hence: the Old Cuban. It’s actually fairly new, one of Audrey Saunders’s modern classics (see the 50/50 Martini). Essentially, it’s a Mojito Royale, a minty rum drink topped up with champagne. Lime is movement; sugar is silliness; rum is soulfulness; bitters is going that bit deeper; champagne is saying too much; mint is beginning afresh, afresh, afresh. I drank one or two last night, as per my own accidental tradition of getting a bit over-pissed on New Year’s Eve Eve - and, well, for a few moments at least, I felt like everything was fizzy and fun again. I also made a small promise for my own domestic NYE tonight: we’re dressing up - black tie - and we’re dancing. Why not?

Congratulations on making it through. See you on the other side.

Tip Jar

PLAYLIST

The theme this week is simply 2020, a bumper list of some of my favourite songs of the year (though for decorum’s sake, I omit that song). I like to do this each year. Though please note: this is not necessarily a party playlist - I don’t know if you noticed, it wasn’t necessarily a party year - more of a New Year’s Day walk type playlist. But given that my playlists usually find their centre of gravity around 1956 or so, I wanted to finish up with something contemporary, something RIGHT NOW. (A couple of reissues excepting). Hopefully there’ll be some new discoveries in there for you too.

CW: Taylor Swift.

If you do want something more cocktail-appropriate: here (for one week only!) is my SPIRITS MASTERLIST - a sort of audio scrapbook that I use for dumping songs intended for future playlists. You’ll find most of what’s come before and a lot that hasn’t.

BUSINESS

Thank you so much for the incredibly lovely feedback. It seems, gratifyingly, that more of the same is generally what’s desired. I may at some stage, however, in an idle moment, compile a big on-running playlist so the weekly selections don’t disappear for good; and I’ll think about the Spirits+ in the Spring. (The Cabinet?)

I’m awarding myself a week off next week - the first week back already looking like a horror show, so I’m practising what I believe the internet kids call self-care and making it mildly less deadliney (and also less boozy). Normal service will resume on Friday 15th January; shopping list below.

WHAT I’M READING

Alan Bennett’s Diary! (LRB)

On how unrealistic the Simpsons is by 2020 standards. (Atlantic)

An Inspector Maigret mystery, namely The Hanged Man of St Pholien. Highly recommend getting into Maigret if you haven’t had the pleasure. If not, this John Lanchester piece on the series’ extraordinary author, George Simenon, might whet your appetite. (LRB)

I contributed to the Observer Magazine’s special optimism issue. (Observer).

SHOPPING LIST

For the week after next: light rum, French vermouth, orange liqueur (not essential), grenadine (recipe here).

🍸 🍸 🍸