The Spirits #38: The Suffering Bastard

~ Juniper descant ~ Raheem Sterling's eyelashes ~ The master suite of the Shepheard ~ Fire in Cairo ~ Incredible passing ~

Jul 02, 2021

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~ THE SUFFERING BASTARD ~

30ml gin
30ml bourbon
10ml lime juice
~5ml golden sugar syrup
Dash Angostura bitters
~120ml ginger beer

Shake up those first five ingredients with ice cubes and pour unstrained into a big old glass. Top up with ginger beer, stir well, and garnish with orange and mint.

Some Suffering Bastard Notes:

1) If you’re fussed about authenticity and have some Rose’s lime cordial to hand: use 15ml lime cordial as opposed to the fresh lime and sugar.

2) Cocktail archaeologists inform me that the original version of this drink demanded brandy as opposed to bourbon - but it was bourbon that caught on as the drink’s fame spread. By all means try it with brandy if you have some.

3) And actually, here are two noteworthy variations! The Dying Bastard features 20ml gin, 20ml bourbon, 20ml brandy, plus the rest. The Dead Bastard features 15ml gin, 15ml light rum, 15ml bourbon, 15ml brandy, etc.

IT’S COMING HOME IT’S COMING HOME IT’S... Some MUSIC. No don’t worry, not that music. Ladies and gentlemen, the Spirits.

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I am Richard Godwin and this is my newsletter. You will find instructions for making sugar syrup, grenadine, orgeat ice, etc here and my 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS here. I have also assembled some bottle recommendations for a cabinet here - and 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! And please consider subscribing for the full experience! 👇

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I CHOSE the Suffering Bastard as I have always thought it was a good name for a cocktail… particularly a cocktail that was to be drunk in the midst of an international football tournament at which England were deemed to “have a chance”. As any Tottenham fan will tell you, it’s not the despair, it’s the hope that kills you - and England have always done a good impression of Big Tottenham over the years. They usually Spurs it up somehow. So I thought it wouldn’t hurt to line up a nice commiseratory cocktail for the inevitable second-round defeat.

But I hadn’t quite counted on two things. One was the fact that we might play and actually beat Germany! And two - and this is awkward - I didn’t appreciate how on the nose my choice would be, since the Suffering Bastard was literally invented in the middle of the Second World War and played an incidental role in the actual military defeat of the German Army. This was, I stress, entirely unintentional. This newsletter is not The Sun. Or one of those people laughing at that poor little German girl on Twitter. Nationalism: who would have thought it would be so complicated?

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I always felt that the England vs Germany football rivalry deflated anyway with that scrappy 1-0 win at Euro 2000 (which was swiftly followed by surprise defeat to Eastern European opposition). The famous 5-1 win in Munich the following year finally exorcised all remaining Italia ‘90 / Euro 96 ghosts. I haven’t felt any particular animus towards Germany since then. Under Joachim Löw, they’ve usually been pretty sprightly. I remember getting over that disallowed goal in the 2010 World Cup fairly quickly. Besides, it’s been fairly obvious, over the course of years, that England’s wounds have been largely self-inflicted. The team’s supposed “rivalries” - with Argentina, Portugal, Italy, France, Romania, Iceland… basically any country that routinely beats us - have played out in our heads alone. Rather like Cliff Richard’s “rivalry” with Elvis, “who he never met or had anything to do with”, as Barney Ronay wrote in this rather good curtain-raiser for Tuesday’s match:

“Could the shadowy hand of The King have been behind Cliff’s “jinxed” US tours where no one bought any tickets? How else to explain the fact Elvis was “never home” when Cliff turned up at Graceland, leaving his feared rival to pay for a guided tour instead? England-Germany has shades of Cliff-Elvis dynamic, serial winners versus hopeful not-quites.”

Ha. But then again, simply belittling England no longer feels quite right either? How nice to win…! And to win in a way that a modern, quietly confident, well-organised team playing to their strengths might win. Plus what lovely eyelashes Raheem Sterling has. And what a sensible, modest, clear-sighted leader Gareth Southgate is. The last grown up in England. And there is something rather pleasing about seeing his young, multiracial, school-meals-improving and seemingly quite self-aware side modelling another way for England to be. Not overpromising or underwhelming or running around red-faced with their heads in bandages but quietly setting about their business. Is that… pride? Hope? Surely not!

Well, anyway: the Suffering Bastard was indeed invented in 1942 by the bartender Joe Scialom at the Long Bar at the Shepheard Hotel in Cairo. (That was the same year as Casablanca was released, by the way). Scialom was an Egyptian-Jewish chemist of Italian descent who got into mixing drinks while working for the Lever Brothers in Sudan in the 1930s. He mixed drinks in Cairo, Puerto Rico, Havana, London, Paris, Rome, Istanbul and New York. He spoke eight languages, served so many heads of state he was suspected of being a spy, and somehow got caught up in both the Suez Crisis and the Cuban Revolution. And the Suffering Bastard earned him particular fame during the North African Campaign, as British servicemen used to come in to his bar complaining of terrible hangovers from other less salubrious establishments - whereupon Joe would mix them up the best thing he could, which was this.

At the time, things weren’t going so well for the British. The Nazi tank commander, Erwin Rommel, had set his sights on Cairo. “I’ll be drinking champagne in the master suite at Shepheard’s soon,” quoth he. But he was not reckoning on the suffering bastards of General Montgomery’s 8th Army. They roundly defeated the German attack on Cairo in the battle of El Alamein in November ‘42 and at last, the war began to turn. It was this victory that prompted Winston Churchill’s famous proclamation: “It is not the end, nor is it the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning”. Scialom reported that at the height of battle, he received a telegram from the frontline, saying: “Can you please send eight gallons of Suffering Bastard, everyone is really hungover.”

But as I say, I had no idea about any of this - and I certainly didn’t intend to find myself quoting Churchill and writing about Gareth Southgate in the same post. This is why football should, on reflection, be banned.

As a drink? Well - the Suffering Bastard is the only cocktail I can think of that combines gin AND bourbon. Which works quite well actually: a whiskey baritone with a juniper descant. Chemistry. Other than that it’s just a variety of mule/buck, really, a slightly zhuzhed up ginger highball that would never have endured were it not for the name and the story. Names and stories matter though, don’t they? And hangover cures, well - they’re always handy.

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PLAYLIST

I decided not to inflict Three Lions on you after all... Instead, in a nod to the cocktail’s originator, here is an extremely loosely Egypt/North Africa-inspired list: Champagne at the Shepheard! التمتع