The Spirits #151: The Oh Gosh!
It's a fun one this week!
FLASH SALE! I’m offering 40% off all annual subscriptions until Sunday.
~ OH GOSH! ~
40ml light rum
20ml orange liqueur
15ml lime juice
Lemon zest
Throw it all in the shaker, including some zest, and add a bunch of ice. Shake hard for 15 seconds and now double-strain into a cold, cold cocktail glass. Garnish with an extra lemon zest twist, taking care to express the oils.
Some notes:
1) I don’t drink enough Daiquiris. Daiquiris are amazing. The Oh Gosh! is a variation on a Daiquiri by Tony Conigliaro with an equally delicious name. Story goes, there was a brain surgeon who used to frequent Dick’s Bar at the Atlantic, which is where Conigliaro learned his stuff under the late Dick Bradsell in the 1990s (It’s where Brasserie Zedel is now). The brain surgeon always drank Daiquiris “in large quantities” but one day he asked for something “slightly different.” Conigliaro decided to sub out a shot of rum for a shot of Cointreau (which is after all 40% ABV) and add a lemon twist.
“This simple movement resulted in a daiquiri [sic… COCKTAILS NEED CAPITALS!] with three levels of citrus, deep orange, tangy lime and a light, zesty, lemon finish. Just after his first sip, the brain surgeon wobbled on his stool and remarked, ‘Oh Gosh!’ Thus it was christened.”
2) Conigliaro would go on to open 69 Colebrooke Road and Bar Termini, meanwhile pioneering the “molecular” approach to cocktails that is still going strong. The above recipe comes from his 2012 book Drinks whose ingredients list includes neroli oil, ambrettolide, mallow root, tuberose hydrosol and agar-agar. But I feel rather nostalgic for the days when innovation meant swapping out rum for orange liqueur. Also for the days when newspapers would send no fewer than three writers to go hang out in a bar all day.
3) That said I found TC’s specs - 25ml rum, 25ml orange liqueur, 15ml lime juice, 10ml sugar syrup - unbearably sweet and have duly readjusted them. It may be that this tasted just great with Cointreau in 1994. You may need to readjust them again depending on the sweetness of liqueur and the passage of time.
4) SPECIAL OFFER! Visit the SPIRITS store. There is currently FREE P&P on all orders of Mama Waty light rum + Orancia triple sec, the very bottles I used to make the above. Simply push the green button below annd enter the code RICHARD at checkout. What else can you say but…
🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🛒 Running low on booze? Visit the SPIRITS STORE.
🧋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.
🍒 And here is my favourite poem about maraschino cherries.
Pity me. Earlier this week, I whooshed up to London for a pre-Christmas lunch organised by the Whiskey Exchange on the Caravel narrowboat. On the train I thought: “Hmm. I better go easy. I’m meeting some friends for dinner too. Hopefully there’ll be some interesting no/low alcohol options.”
I arrived to find the following waiting for me at my setting: this tequila, this cognac, this bourbon, a vintage Martinez made with 1970s Gordon’s (“the heart of a good cocktail”), 1960s Punt e Mes and 1950s Drioli maraschino - and this champagne.
Then the waiter came around with the wine.
Anyway it was fucking great. As I walked down the cold streets afterwards, my heart was bursting with love for my fellow man. This is never accounted for in the surgeon’s warnings, is it?
That vintage Martinez was really something, too. Like drinking the contents of a dug-up treasure chest - and maybe the chest too. The bottles came from Whiskey Auction - which is really worth knowing about. Sort of like eBay for people who think about Chartreuse too much. The auction happens every month. The hammer comes down on the next one on December 3rd. While there are some exxxxxtremely expensive bottles sold - 1960s Chartreuse! Dalmore 45!- there are also some bargains to be found. 1960s Campari, say? Single Cask Haitian rum? But be selective with this information, won’t you?
PLAYLIST
This playlist is brought to you by the exclamations: “Oh!” “Ooh!” and “Ooo!” From the Velvet Underground to Mary J. Blige by way of Vince Guaraldi and Buddy Holly, there is a whole lot of oohing going on. Oh! I had fun pulling this one together. Incidentally, where does one watch Sesame Street these days?
THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. The idea is, you download it and return to it each week in your Spotify. If there was an old song you’d like to hear again, you’ll find it RIGHT HERE in the ongoing archive of 2021 playlists.
WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING
I’ve had dreams about You Me Bum Bum Train ever since I was lucky enough to secure a ticket as a "passenger” back in 2012. The immersive theatre company had set up shop in a disused shopping centre near the Stratford Olympics site. There are strict rules regarding secrecy so I’m not supposed to tell you anything that happened during that hour - which actually felt like about a day. OK so at one point I found myself conducting an orchestra and then I had to lead a drugs raid and then I slipped down a slide and was driving an actual real-life JCB and then… But the closest analogy I can think of was that time we all took mushrooms on Koh Pha Ngan as opposed to any mere theatre show.
I’ve written a novel - a slightly mad novel that may or may not ever see the light of day - and it was only when I interviewed YMBBT’s creative minds, Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd, that I realised how much of it had been inspired by that mad cascade of scenes. Anyway, here is that interview. I have wanted to interrogate the pair of them for years. I think they are geniuses. One of the surprising things was that neither of them had ever actually “done” YMBBT themselves. They entered the lottery for tickets. But (like me this time) they didn’t win. And they have principles. So they’ve never actually experienced the show from the perspective of a passenger. Isn’t that something? (The Standard)
Oh I also wrote this piece about Christmas trees: “It’s one of the most stupid business models out there!” said one of Britain’s preeminent Christmas tree farmers. But therein lies the magic. (The Telegraph)
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING
Johanna compiled her 18 best novels of the year and she’s basically read all of the novels and is hard to please - so these ones really will be worth your while. For what it’s worth I’ve read nine of them (and some others too) which is perhaps my best ever year of novel-reading since I’ve owned a smartphone. So thank you, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, for making social media such a repellant hellscape I basically had no choice. (The Times)
POETRY CORNER
Reasons to Survive November
by Tony Hoagland
November like a train wreck —
as if a locomotive made of cold
had hurtled out of Canada
and crashed into a million trees,
flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.
The sky is a thick, cold gauze —
but there's a soup special at the Waffle House downtown,
and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,
full of luminous red barns.
— Or maybe I'll visit beautiful Donna,
the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe,
and roll around in her foldout bed.
I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself
with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.
But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,
and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over
and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.
from What Narcissism Means to Me, 2003, Graywolf Press, h/t Joe Dunthorne)
SHOPPING LIST: OK so Campari, Italian vermouth, fizz (prosecco, champagne, cava, cremant). And I’m going to be telling you how to host a great party 🎈