The Spirits #35: The English Martini

~ Foraged cocktails ~ Mangy, short-lived, opportunist and foul-smelling ~ Who knows where the thyme goes? ~ The Land of Grey and Pink ~ FOMO rears its hornèd head ~

THE CABINET IS OPEN! The first subscriber-only post went out this week; more will follow soon. The next one will tell you everything you could possibly want to know about Green Chartreuse and what to do with it - and I will declare a winner of this week’s AROMATIC CHALLENGE. I would HATE for you to miss out. So, you know:

~ THE ENGLISH MARTINI ~

A fresh rosemary sprig
50ml gin
10-20ml elderflower cordial (depending on sweetness)

Freeze your glassware. Place the rosemary, gin and elderflower cordial in a mixing vessel and muddle a little to tease the herbaceous oils from the rosemary. Now add a large amount of ice and stir, for quite a long time actually, until you feel a slight give in the fabric of the universe. The drink is now ready to strain. Do this through a tea-strainer into your frozen glass, otherwise you’ll get bits of rosemary floating in it. I garnished the drink with the tender leaf of a young nasturtium. You do you.

Some English Martini notes:

1) I recommend you steal the rosemary from a neighbour’s garden if you don’t have your own supply. Go for the new growth, the tender young shoots, as opposed to the woody old ones. They will release their aromas more willingly. With elderflowers, go for creamy blossoms that are fully opened - and watch for aphids.

2) I have linked to the BBC Good Food elderflower cordial recipe above. That’s the one I have found to be most successful in the past (tl;dr: it involves steeping elderflower blossoms and lemon zest in sugar syrup for 24 hours). I did try to make a different kind (a simmering kind) and even took step-by-step photographs but, unfortunately… it was kind of gross. If you are hit by elderflower calamity or simply can’t be arsed, borrow some from your friend Bea, who is an expert in these matters (THANKS BEA!). Or you could buy some. Belvoir is decent. An elderflower liqueur is also good here: St-Germain is French and brandy-based and extremely good. But even better is St Maur, which is English and pink and all sorts of luscious.

3) I’m aware that not everyone lives in a temperate zone of the northern hemisphere. Please take that as license to go and see what’s growing out there and use it in however you see fit!

4) Do note that you may need to vary these proportions depending on how sweet your own cordial is. As ever, do taste as you go along. A splash of dry vermouth, fino sherry or even white wine might mellow things a bit.

AND hello. What say we get outside for some fresh air? SOME GENTLE PASTORAL MUSIC. Yes, a different kind of post for a different kind of cocktail. And off we go.

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Hi, I’m Richard Godwin, this is the Spirits. Subscribe for the full experience. You will find instructions for making sugar syrup, grenadine, ice, etc here and my 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS here. I have also assembled some bottle recommendations for a cabinet here - and this here is the full archive of weekly specials. Do please share the Spirits with anyone who might like it - and feel free to tag me with your creations on Instagram or Twitter. Also scroll to the bottom for what to get in for next week! 👇

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THERE’S a patch of hill, not far from my house, that became quite dear to me during the first lockdown. It’s on Purdown, a patchwork of common ground in North Bristol that has somehow remained common since the middle ages, now linking allotments, hospitals, estates (both kinds), plus Aldi, Lidl and Ikea with bands of grassland, orchard and wood. You can easily get disoriented, leaving one field and emerging into another - but you can just as easily find yourself again by looking for the vaguely Soviet-looking telecoms tower that sit at its centre. There’s also an old WWII anti-aircraft battery where goats are sometimes grazing. People go there to walk dogs, or make a horrible racket with dirt bikes, or toss a frisbee, or gather elder blossom for their newsletter, or quietly watch the sunset.

The part I particularly like is just a bit down the hill from the tower - a sloping wildflower meadow in which I’ve counted about 50 different plants (and three or four different mushrooms too). The M32 cuts through the view, but it’s in a dip, so you can almost kid yourself, as you look east, that it isn’t there and the 20th century didn’t quite happen. It’s never the same across any two visits, changing in different lights as much as different seasons - an Amazon of weeds. At least, my plant-identification app classifies teasel, knapweed and oxeye daisies as weeds (“plants in the wrong place”). It warns that common sheep sorrel “is one of the most troubleseome weeds in the world”. But here, all is in dynamic balance. The rusty pink spires of the sheep sorrel looked so composed and restrained, swaying about the daisies in the 9pm light when I went out to fetch elderflower. Jackdaws did their toy-like squeak. Nitrous oxide canisters hissed far away. I saw at least a dozen rabbits, munching buttercups, scattering as soon as I came near. The M32 roared. And I felt a pang of nostalgia.

It was fairly clear to me, even during the panic and anxiety of the first lockdown, that this was a golden, never-to-be repeated period that we would become intensely sentimental about in future. Not the horrible pandemic stuff of course - merely the ceasing. No calls from work. No word from school. No fixed routine. And no cars on the M32 either. During that first lockdown, the constant swoosh of cars turned down and then… off. And we could hear ourselves think for a bit.

This, coupled with the unceasingly delicious weather, did something interesting to time. It seemed to stretch in a way that it hadn’t since childhood. The familiar shape of the week dissolved. My son Teddy and I would head out, usually through this meadow, sometimes on adventures, mostly on something a bit less than that: a vague attempt to climb a tree. A picnic in the cave we found on the other side of the motorway. Or a game of two-person cricket against some garages. The exact sort of shapeless summer that Ysenda Maxtone-Graham extolls in her wonderful book British Summer Time Begins - a collection of reminiscences of summer holidays, 1930-1980 - and which she feels died with the invention of the computer game.

Anyway, it was during one such garage Test Match that we noticed that there was a shrub by the wicket with some delicious smelling cream flowers on it: elderflower. And that became that day’s mission. We gathered a ton of it and made elderflower cordial, much nicer than any of the stuff you could buy in the shops, and enough to hand out to various locked-down friends. And that delicate, honeyed scent now has that association for me. There were only really a few weeks of this but to me it felt longer. Teddy remembers it as an aeon, two or three years at least.

So, on Wednesday evening, I gathered the elderflowers from the field’s edges, hoping to make a potion to dissolve time once more. Only they weren’t quite as fragrant as I remember. Perhaps it simply hasn’t been so sunny this year? Perhaps I shouldn’t have picked them in the evening? Perhaps I picked giant hogsweed by mistake! But when I started to prep them at home, I began to see what Richard Mabey means when he writes, in Flora Britannica: “It is hard to understand how this mangy, short-lived, opportunist and foul-smelling shrub was once regarded as one of the most magically powerful of plants.” I used a different recipe from the one I used before too - one that involved simmering the heads in water as opposed to giving them a long patient steep - and soon the house had filled with a weird gluey fug. Elder was once associated with the Devil. Burn it and he appears. But apparently if you boil it, what happens is your partner comes downstairs and says: “What the hell are you DOING?!”

But that’s foraging for you. Sometimes you make something that is 100x better than anything you could buy in the shops. Sometimes you very much don’t. But you did see some rabbits, so there was that.

The cocktail? According to the indefatigable Simon Difford, it was invented at a now-defunct restaurant called Mju in a posh hotel in Knightsbridge in 2003 - about as far from bucolia as is imaginable. I suppose that makes it an accidental bridge between the non-Martini-Martinis of the 1990s and the sort of bracing, wild, foraged, locavore approach that bearded people began to fetishise in the 2010s. If we’re going to be pedantic, there’s not much that’s “English” about rosemary, a Mediterranean herb. But then again, it is perhaps the most easily foraged of all culinary plants, readily available in so many English front gardens, and so good in so many contexts. And it’s essential to the cocktail, providing some earthy ballast to the etheral shimmer of the elderflower.

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PLAYLIST

Forgive me, I am in wistful pastoral mode this week - and this is entirely made up of songs that in that spirit. One is in Welsh. At least two are Canadian. A few of them mention rain and a couple are set in cities. But I find them quite sympathetic for long green summer evening wanderings.

PLEASE NOTE! THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. Well, not automatically, I do it by hand, but my point is, follow the list and you will find musical refreshment. If you want to retrieve an old list, here is an ongoing archive master list compiling all past songs.

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FOR NO OTHER REASON THAN I THOUGHT IT WAS COOL

Andy Riley @AndyRileyish

Punched the Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy theme into a strip for the music box because why not, eh

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WHAT I’M WRITING

I interviewed the Brit Rising Star winner Griff in Bekonscot Model Village. We talked about what it’s like becoming a popstar in lockdown, sharing chips with Taylor Swift and her lifelong love of Jesus. A joy to do these things face-to-face again, at last (ES Magazine).

I also wrote about how ambition fell out of fashion during lockdown (Mr Porter).

WHAT I’M READING

Ian Penman’s music writing is always a delight. After reading his Prince essay a couple of years ago, I listened to nothing but Prince for about three months. Here he is on the Beatles(!) (LRB)

Tax the rich. (ProPublica)

FOMO is BACK, baby!!! (The Cut)

What’s Boris Johnson’s game? (The Atlantic)

"That flaccid fuckhead. He was detestable. I called up the Ayatollah, nobody knows that.” Maurice Sendak gives his opinion of Salman Rushdie in this vintage 2011 interview. (The Guardian)

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SHOPPING LIST

Dark rum, honey, Italian vermouth, Angostura bitters.

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