The Spirits #47: The Sidecar

~ Pre-phylloxera Cognac ~ Endorsements ~ Horseless Carriages ~ The Magnificent Ambersons ~ Leader of the Pack ~

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~ THE SIDECAR ~

50ml brandy
15ml lemon juice
15ml orange liqueur
5-10ml golden sugar syrup (2:1)

Freeze a cocktail glass to begin. Place all the aforementioned in a cocktail shaker, fill it about halfway to the top with ice and then shake it about a bit, until your fingers go numb. Now fine-strain - i.e., through a tea-strainer - into your frozen glass. No garnish required… though a lemon twist is acceptable.

Bienvenue. Ça fait longtemps, hein? Assis-toi. Paraît que t'as besoin d’un boisson.

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🎺EXCITING SPIRITS NEWS🎺

Lots of people have asked me, this last 18 months or so, where they can purchase a copy of my book, the Spirits, every last copy of which seems to have been snapped up during the first lockdown. In fact I’ve seen second-hand copies on sale online for £75+! HOWEVER: as of next week, you can find it in all good bookshops (and even some evil ones) as it has just gone through a brand new print run. The new Spirits is really just a light refreshing of the original 2015 edition - it’s a bit shinier, the recipe for Rum Punch has been corrected, and it now has a page of praise from some people I really admire, which is pleasing. Anyway: it’s available as of Thursday 30th September at Foyles, Blackwells, Hive, Waterstones, Amazon - and if you ask at your local bookshop, I’m sure they’ll get it in for you too. It makes an excellent present. Not least because whoever you buy it for will then make you really good cocktails when you go to visit them.

By amazing coincidence, next week also marks the ONE-YEAR-ANNIVERSARY of the Spirits newsletter. Yes, it is a year since I penned this little paean to the bars, so: double-celebration. I am actually away next week (in Lisbon; tips welcome) so I will send out the next newsletter proper on Friday 8th October. But expect some ad hoc posts before then. And on my return from Portugal, I might - might - even do a few Stanley Tucci-style videos of some of this newsletter’s greatest hits.

Thank you, as ever, for reading, shaking, sharing and saying nice things - it’s always a lovely thing to hear that my words have improved someone’s day.

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THE SIDECAR is a bracingly old-school Parisian classic, and reputedly the most expensive cocktail served in the 1920s - at least when made with pre-phylloxera cognac by Frank Meier at the Ritz. It’s probably the most venerable of the great brandy cocktails and, as such, I thought it would be a good introduction to the latest member of our collective cabinet: brandy. (Our virtual shelf now contains a dozen bottles, incidentally: gin, bourbon, Italian and French vermouth, Angostura bitters, Campari, white rum, dark rum, orange liqueur, tequila, absinthe - plus brandy). You don’t have to serve it with real cognac, though it certainly helps - though you should probably style the word Sidecar “Side-Car”, with hyphen, for full vintage effect. It always makes me think of the late art critic Brian Sewell, whose filthy reviews I had the fortune to (very lightly) edit for some years at the Evening Standard. Sometimes, a piece of his would call for a “sidebar” - the term for the supplementary column of text the sometimes runs alongside a main feature. “I suppose you’ll be wanting a Side-Car’” he would always say.

The drink made its earliest print appearances in two books, both written by British bartenders in France: Harry’s ABC of Mixing Cocktails (c.1920) by Harry MacElhone, proprietor of Harry’s New York Bar at 5 rue Daunou in Paris; and Cocktails: How to Mix Them (1922) by Robert “Robert” Vermeire of the American Bar at the Casino in Nice. I found a nice old copy of the “Robert” for £3 in Kensington… always worth a rummage in the Food & Drink section of a charity shop, especially if you’re in a cocktail-y sort of area.

Both the MacElhone and Vermeire recipes are exactly the same: equal parts lemon juice, cognac and Cointreau, and both mention this fellow MacGarry:

Did McGarry invent the cocktail? This is a source of some dispute. One story has it that a World War One captain drove up to Harry’s Bar in a motorcycle sidecar and demanded a drink made to these specification. Only in French-Moderne, a very well-researched history of the Parisian cocktails of the 1920s and 30s, the French bartender Franck Audoux says the drink is from London. Americans tend to see it as an evolution of a fiddly old New Orleans drink called the Brandy Crusta. But the drinks writer, Dale DeGroff, maintains that a sidecar actually has a secondary meaning to bartenders: if you make a bit too much of a cocktail and have some left over in the shaker, pour it into a shot glass and that’s a sidecar. Nothing to do with motorbikes.

Still, I prefer to believe that it was the invention of the American gentleman novelist, Booth Tarkington. In her memoir, My Amiable Uncle, Tarkington’s niece Suzannah Mayberry claimed that Tarkington came up with the drink “during a creative moment in Paris” with the playwright Harry Leon Wilson around 1907 - a time when “Uncle Booth” was living near the Luxembourg Gardens. She offers no supporting evidence for this claim but so what? It would be nice to chalk this one up to the world of letters.

For much of the first half of the 20th century, Tarkington was seen as the great American novelist, charming and prolific, and one of only a handful to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice. (The feat was recently acheived by Colson Whitehead). But time has not been kind to the amiable uncle. These days Tarkington is best remembered as the author of the book that Orson Welles adapted into his classic film The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) - the follow-up to Citizen Kane. I haven’t read the book but the movie plays out a bit like an American Cherry Orchard with just a shade of Succession, if Succession were set in the early-20th century, complete with steam-powered cars and sleigh crashes. Welles plays George Minafer, the fabulously dysfunctional son of a fabulously wealthy midwestern family - and I’m pretty sure he was the inspiration for Montgomery C. Burns in the Simpsons. The Magnificent Ambersons is on BBC iPlayer for free, by the way, it’s less than 90 minutes long, and it is indeed, magnificent - despite a foolishly upbeat ending enforced by the studio.

But even this masterpiece, which used to appear prominently on Greatest Films of All-Time Lists, is slipping down the collective esteem. The same might be said for Tarkington’s cocktail, which is dutifully nodded to on menus but rarely accorded star billing. Why once, this was the most expensive cocktail served in Paris!

My advice is to treat it as something properly luxey. Use your best XO cognac. Go easy on the lemon and Cointreau - you certainly don’t need equal parts of each - but do add a dash of sugar to help things along. The Sidecar used to be served in a glass with a sugared rim to counter its sourness but this is fiddly and annoying and it’s much simpler to add a splash of sugar syrup. I made mine with Cointreau (which is faithful to the original) and Rémy Martin 1738, adjusting those old ratios in the direction of my favoured sour formula. Remember, not all progress is good progress, as the start-up internal combustion entrepreneur Eugene Morgan (played by dreamy Joseph Cotten, below) counsels in The Magnificent Ambersons when George pours scorn on him his new-fangled machines:

“I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles. With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization - that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls.”

And yet we do have the Sidecar.

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PLAYLIST

You may have heard of jalopies
You've heard the noise they make
But let me introduce you
To my Rocket '88

- Ike Turner, Rocket ‘88

With a nod both to name of the cocktail and the auto theme of the Magnificent Ambersons, here are some songs about motorcycles, motorcars, buses, bicycles and road vehicles in general. Including Missy Elliot, because that particular song includes the best couplet about a car yet recorded. Beep beep.

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.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

The New Left Review has a very interesting section of reportage called Sidecar. This tale of the modern Nigeria is quite something (Sidecar)

RIP Jimmy Greaves (The Times)

Dancing! (NYT)

“What we call “public discourse” occurs almost entirely on social media, which in the end is really just a public-discourse-themed video game…” From Covid is boring by Justin E. H. Smith, who writes a good Substack. (Hinternet)

AND I went to the River Café to interview Ruth Rogers. Sweet gig. (The Times)

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SHOPPING LIST

OK, so this is for the 8th October: White rum, lime, passion fruit, vanilla extract (or vanilla pods, if you really want to push the boat out), sugar syrup… And what they hey, champagne. (Prosecco will do).

🥂🍾