The Spirits #45: Enchanted Catnip

~ AKA the Tamarind Daiquiri ~ Fire! ~ Pnin's Punch ~ For God's Sake Burn It Down ~ Like strippers at a church social ~

ENJOYING THE SPIRITS? Join the Cabinet. It’s like the Spirits but for the real heads. Tell your friends about it too. 👇👇👇

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~ ENCHANTED CATNIP (aka The Tamarind Daiquiri) ~

50ml white rum
15ml lime juice
15ml tamarind syrup (see method)
A black grape and a strip of orange peel for garnish
Overproof rum (optional…).

Tamarind syrup is one part tamarind paste to two parts sugar syrup. Just stir them together until the two sticky liquids become one. Then shake the rum, syrup and lime up with a decent amount of ice and then fine-strain into a coupe. Oh but now comes the fun part. Cut a thin length of orange peel, wrap it around the equator of a black grape, and spear with a cocktail stick. Now douse the thing in the highest proof spirits you’ve got - I used an egg cup full of 69% ABV rum - and set it on 🔥🔥🔥. Drop it into the drink to extinguish before taking a sip.

Some Enchanted Catnip Notes:

1) I used Cabby’s Rum, made by the London taxi driver Moses Odong. It’s extremely good.

2) Tamarind paste shouldn’t be so hard to find - most supermarkets do their own brand these days. Here’s a little intro to tamarind paste/water if you’ve never used it before. It’s sour, pungent and extremely useful in Southern Indian curries, marinades, dressing, dips, Margaritas, etc.

3) The mathemixologically-minded will note that the above recipe breaks down to a standard Daiquiri (50ml rum, 15ml lime, 10ml sugar syrup) plus 5ml tamarind paste.

4) PLEASE BE CAREFUL WITH THE FIRE. But please not, higher proof spirits (55% ABV+) will set on fire much more readily than lower-proof spirits. However, as with Christmas pudding, a lower-proof spirit will ignite just fine if you warm it a little beforehand though it won’t burn for as long. I recommend using a candle for igniting as it’s just one less thing to hold, especially if you’re trying to take a picture on your phone at the same time..

5) Don’t feed this to your cat whatever you do.

YOU AGAIN? Seriously.

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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! Please consider subscribing for the full experience! 

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ENCHANTED CATNIP, friends! I mean, how could you not fall for a drink with a name like that? It was dreamed up by the journeyman bartender Joe Scialom while he was resident in New York Plaza Hotel in 1958. Attentive readers (hi mum) will remember Scialom as the inventor of classic WW2 cocktail, the Suffering Bastard, which inspired British troops to victory in the Battle of El Alamein. And it was likely Scialom’s time in Africa that prompted him to reach for tamarind paste here, in what is essentially Tamarind Daiquiri. (For more Daiquiri variations… just click HERE). I’m assuming that tamarind must have been fairly avant-garde in NYC 1958. But it was the “conversation piece” flaming garnish that safeguarded the drink for posterity.

Well, I say posterity. The recipe was printed in Newsweek at the time and more recently included in Jeff Berry’s Potions of the Caribbean. But I feel it deserves a little more recognition than its current minor cult status. I can imagine itsettling rather nicely onto the cocktail menu at some modish pan-Indian restaurant like Dishoom. Tamarind is a common Mexican ingredient too. At any rate, its savoury tartness makes this nice aperitif if you’re about to tuck into something spicy. If some magical felines happen to turn up at your door and you’re unsure what to serve them, I daresay this would hit the spot.

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PLAYLIST

As the God of hellfire, here is a playlist of songs on a fire theme.
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

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 HERE in the ongoing archive of 2021 playlists.

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PNIN’S PUNCH!

I was delighted to find, in the recent Food & Drink Archival Issue of the New Yorker, the punchbowl scene from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957) - reprinted as ‘Pnin Gives a Party’. I am a huge fan of Nabokov. One of my low-key proudest acheivements was managing to smuggle a short essay about Lolita (1955) into my book the Spirits under the guise of a recipe for gin and pineapple juice - aka ‘Pin’, which Humbert Humbert drinks incessantly throughout the book. But it had been a while since I had read Pnin and I hadn’t quite appreciated how significant a symbolic role alcohol plays here too.

The party scene is the most memorable section of the entire novel and it centres around a punch. Pnin, eccentric, hapless, loveable Russian professor at Waindell College in upstate New York, hosts a drinks party for a few colleagues at his new home. The party is a rare triumph for Pnin. He proves an amiable host. Everyone remarks that he has never seemed so happy. And this might have something to do with the drinks he serves: rowanberry liqueur, American whiskey, “brandy-and-grendadine cocktails” and a little concoction called ‘Pnin’s Punch’…

“…a heady mixture of chilled Château Yquem, grapefruit juice, and maraschino, which the solemn host had already started to stir in a large bowl of brilliant aquamarine glass with a decorative design of swirled ribbing and lily pads.

“My, what a lovely thing!” cried Betty.

The aquamarine punchbowl plays a key role in the scene that follows. I shan’t spoil it if you haven’t read it - and if you have, the literary critic James Wood wrote a whole chapter about it in his book How Fiction Works, which I highly recommend. But let’s just inhale the punch itself for a while. Château d’Yquem is the finest expression of Sauternes dessert wine (“Intensely opulent when young, Yquem develops an extraordinary complexity and exotic richness when fully mature, with the best vintages lasting for over 50 years…” says Berry Bros & Rudd). But to pair it with maraschino and grapefruit!? I cannot imagine what that tastes like. But I imagine that this peculiar Nabokovian mixture of old-world luxe and sweet Americana is heavenly. And the mixture seems to have a magical effect on the party. As Pnin’s boss, Dr Hagen says:

“You are a wonderful host, Timofey. This is a very delightful moment. My grandfather used to say that a glass of good wine should be always sipped and savored as if it were the last one before the execution. I wonder what you put into this punch.”

Suffice to say that I will be making this at the first available opportunity.

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WHAT ELSE I’VE BEEN READING

Johanna Thomas-Corr naturally gave the definitive review of the new Sally Rooney (Sunday Times)

“All my life I’m this cream puff, and next thing I know everyone sees me as some kind of gangster,” said the actor Michael K. Williams in 2017. I’m struggling to think of a better screen performance in my lifetime than his Omar in The Wire. And Williams’s too-short life was just as astonishing. (New York Times)

I thought this essay by Dorian Lynskey on why we need critics to tell the truth - and why the internet can’t handle it! - was excellent and timely. (Unherd)

Move over umami, a new taste has been discovered: an enjoyable read on kokumi (and the history of monosodium glutamate) (LRB)

In the same New Yorker edition where you will find Pnin’s Punch is the best poem about maraschino cherries you could hope to read. It’s by Thomas Lux. Curiously enough it recollects the year 1957, i.e. the same year that Pnin was published and the same year that Enchanted Catnip was invented. This is the kind of synchronicity the Spirits adores. A small taste:

…just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart-red, sexual-red, wet neon-red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. 

(New Yorker)

🍒

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SHOPPING LIST

Bourbon, sugar, bitters. And a FIG LEAF. Find a well-established tree with plenty of leaves and pull one off please.