The Spirits #159: Remember the Maine

I'll provide the war

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~ THE REMEMBER THE MAINE ~

50ml rye (or bourbon
25ml Italian vermouth
10ml cherry brandy
Dash of absinthe

First place your cocktail glass in the freezer - we’re not animals. Now carefully measure your liquids into a mixing vessel, add copious ice and stir patiently for at least 42 seconds. Strain the result into the now-cold glass and garnish with a cocktail cherry or failing that (I failed that) a length of lemon peel.

Some notes:

1) The Remember the Maine is one of the many drinks documented by the Prohibition-era American roustabout Charles H. Baker Jr in his Gentleman’s Companion of 1939. He describes drinking one of these in Havana, 1933, while the Hotel Nacional was under shell fire. “Treat this one with the respect it deserves, gentlemen,” is his advice.

2) The drink’s name is a little droplet of American propaganda beading down the centuries. The U.S.S. Maine (above) was a warship that exploded off coast of Cuba in February 1898. This was one of the precipitating incidents of the Spanish-American war of that year, which would eventually see the US seize control of Puerto Rico, the Phillipines and Guam from the Spanish. These were the high days of William Randolph Hearst’s tabloids, which enthusiastically promoted the idea that the Spanish were committing all sorts of atrocities in Cuba at the time - including dynamiting US warships. Hence the slogan, ‘Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!’

3) As you will recall, the manufacture of the Spanish-American War is one of the central events of Orson Wells’s Citizen Kane (1942), based on the life of Hearst. Kane, let’s not forget, is no self-made man but a scion of the elite who inherits a media business from his father and makes it much, much more financially successful by confecting outrage, disregarding truth and generally not giving a damn. Of course, the more seasoned journalists are appalled. “That’s no way to run a newspaper!” complains his editor. A senior reporter who has been sent to cover the unrest in Cuba complains that there is no war and offers to send back prose poems about the lovely scenery instead. This prompting the famous reply from Kane: “Dear Wheeler. You provide the prose-poems. I’ll provide the war.” Thank goodness we don’t allow amoral narcissist nepo-babies this much unchecked power these days, eh?

4) Citizen Kane is Donald Trump’s favourite movie.

5) The “unpleasantnesses of 1933” that Charles H. Baker witnessed (“each swallow” of his cocktail “…punctuated with bombs going off on the Prado”) would have been the Revolt of the Sergeants led by Fulgencio Batista. He would eventually become military dictator of Cuba until Fidel Castro and Che Guevara ousted him in 1959.

5) The drink itself? Well it’s a Manhattan variation, clearly - maybe the best one. It helps if you use actual rye as opposed to bourbon for its steelier backbone (I used Never Say Die Kentucky Straight Rye) and a rich vermouth, like Antica Formula or Caelestiale. The cherry brandy oomphs up that deep jackpot bloom at the heart of the Manhattan - I always feel that the whiskey and vermouth create a sort of cherry-shaped inversion. Try using a spoonful of syrup from some jarred cherries as an alternative? But then the absinthe dries the whole thing out.

7) That would be my left clavicle, which I managed to fracture in two places playing football on Sunday night. (My left arm is my cocktail-shaking arm - which is why it’s a stirred cocktail this week). I’ll spare you the pictures of my actual flesh but suffice to say that my left shoulder is the colour of yellow Chartreuse with a deep cassis stain right on the top where my shoulder hit the 5G pitch, having rebounded off an extremely robust semi-pro defender named Elijah, whom I slightly over-enthusisastically challenged towards the end of the game. As soon as I landed I thought “Ouch, I’ve broken my shoulder” and goddammit I was correct.

7) It’s not so bad, actually. I’m lucky it was a clean break. I was seen at Southmead hospital fast, treated well and it cost me nothing. I can still type. The sun is out. And my incapacity has occasioned a family recalibration that I, dare I say it, I’m kind of enjoying? Teddy has taken over as lead cook; Aubrey as it turns out can put his own shoes on; and I am choosing to embrace it all as sort of six-week stoicism challenge. OK, so I can’t do everything. I normally try and do everything. What do I really want to do, then?

8) The Spanish probably didn’t sink the Maine. That thing was by all accounts a hulking death trap, obsolete as soon as it was built. In 1976, a US admiral commissioned an inspection of the wreck and concluded that there was no evidence that ship had been mined or torpedoed. “The available evidence is consistent with an internal explosion alone. We therefore conclude that an internal source was the cause of the explosion. The most likely source was heat from a fire in a coal bunker adjacent to the 6-inch reserve magazine.” In other words, it probably blew itself up.

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✨WELCOME TO THE SPIRITS✨
The neighbourhood bar of the internet

🖊️I am Richard Godwin, journalist by trade…
📚… cocktail writer when I’m skirting deadlines.
🧑‍🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, etc are here.
📃My full A-Z recipe archive is here.
⚗️The bottles I think you should get in first? Here.
🍾The bottles you should get in next? Here.
🛒A great place to get these bottles is the SPIRITS STORE.
➡️Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.
🏥And here is a list of trusted charities helping people in Gaza.
🍒Here is my favourite poem about maraschino cherries.
📱And if you like The Spirits, please forward this to your friends.

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PLAYLIST

There were an abundance of options this week! Songs about Cuba; songs about war; songs about US states; songs about ships; songs about propaganda. Hell for a minute I figured why not indulge myself with a broken bones playlist? However, I decided to be a little more tangential and complile some songs about remembering. Can’t remember why.

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 past playlists.

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SOME CABINET POSTS YOU MIGHT ENJOY

🐿️ Amaretto
🧡 Aperol
🍑 Apricot Brandy
🕊️ Bénédictine
❄️ Brancamenta
☕ Coffee Liqueur
🍌 Crème de Banane
🍫 Crème de Cacao
🫐 Crème de Cassis
🌷 Cynar
🦌 Drambuie
🌸Elderflower Liqueur
🏝️ Falernum
🦅 Fernet-Branca
🌿 Green Chartreuse
🐻 Kümmel
🍒 Maraschino
🌵 Mezcal
🦙 Pisco
🐂 Sherry
🧙‍♀️ Strega (incorporating Yellow Chartreuse)
🌻 Suze

COMING SOON… Cherry Brandy.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

Language geeks will heart this essay on how le langage Anglais n’existe pas (LRB)

Tina’s Brown’s Substack is a tonic (Fresh Hell)

The DOGE takeover is worse than you think (WIRED)

“There is something spiritually bad going on.” Ella Dorn on the weirdness of the New Right (New Statesman)

Patient readers may recall indulging my Dostoevsky phase last year… well, perhaps this essay on a new translation of the Brothers Karamazov will help my case. (LRB)

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SHOPPING LIST: OK, so still on the cherry brandy. Next week, you’re going to need… Scotch, Italian vermouth, (blood) orange juice, cherry brandy.