The Spirits #52: The Breakfast Martini
~ Great chieftain o’ the jammy race ~ It's always breakfast time somewhere ~ If you set your mind free honey, maybe you’d understand ~ Serge Gainsbourg cries ~
📚 THE SPIRITS (i.e. the book that inspired this newsletter) is available once more! You can find it at: Bookshop.org, Foyles, Blackwells, Hive, Waterstones, Amazon and even WH Smith. Makes a great Christmas present!
~ THE BREAKFAST MARTINI ~
50ml gin
1 teaspoon of marmalade
10ml orange liqueur
15ml lemon juice
~10ml water
Freeze a cocktail glass. Put all the ingredients in the shaker with half a tray of ice cubes. Give it a really excellent shake. Now fine-strain, through a tea strainer, into that frozen glass. You might like to garnish with a little strip of rind from the marmalade? Or else keep it simple. A kumqwat?
Some Breakfast Martini advice:
1) The original recipe, by Salvatore Calabrese, includes orange liqueur. In my opinion, this is kind of redundant, a bit like the coffee liqueur in the Espresso Martini, in view of the marmalade being orangey and sweet enough on its own, thank you. But by all means add 10ml orange liqueur, if you want to be all “correct” about it - Grand Marnier lends a little more depth than Cointreau in this instance.
2) In Richard Godwin’s classic book The Spirits - available in all good bookshops! - there’s a slightly zhuzhed up recipe for an English Breakfast Martini. Steep the gin in tea for ~2 minutes and add about 20ml egg white to the shaker, it being breakfast and all.
3) This works with any kind of jam you like. (Though I would definitely omit or su the orange liqueur part if you’re going for a different flavour). I daresay it would be nice with brandy or bourbon or tequila or rum, too.
🐓🐣🌞 GOOD MORNING! 🐓🐣🌞
Yes it’s always breakfast somewhere!
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I am Richard Godwin and this is my cocktail 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 here - and here is the full archive of past cocktails. Scroll to the bottom of this page to find out what to get in for next week’s cocktail.
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Please share The Spirits with anyone you reckon might be into this sort of thing. And feel free to @ me with your creations!
SO it’s come to this, huh? Drinking at breakfast. I’m not going to say I recommend it. Nor am I going to pretend I haven’t enjoyed it on the occasions when I’ve got away with it. A nice refreshing Americano is probably the most appropriate early morning drink - and not just because you can pretend that you meant to order coffee. Last week’s Brandy Milk Punch is a good choice too. Over in New Orleans, I understand, it’s what they put on their cereal at weekends. And if you really mean business, you can’t beat a Martini first thing. Back in the early 00s, my wife and I used to host an event we called ‘Drunch’ every Saturday throughout January. The idea was, invite a bunch of people over at ooh, 11am, serve Martinis and see if that got us through the most depressing month of the year. It did! It really did.
While the thought of Martinis in the morning might seem outlandish, you must remember that it was seen as perfectly normal to drink alcohol at this time for much of history. Tea only replaced beer as the English breakfast drink of choice in the 18th century. The old-school bar books are full of recipes for things like Morning Glory Fizz and Rise and Shine My Good Fellow Fix. And why do you think they’re called cocktails? There are numerous theories but the most persuasive, to my mind, is the cockadoodle-do connection. When the cocktail first gained fame, they were seen as hangover cures, to be drunk as soon as the cock croweth, primarily, on account of the medicinal bitters. The oldest reference that the drinks historian David Wondrich turned up in his book Imbibe! came from a New Hampshire newspaper of 1803: a hungover young man drinks “a glass of cocktail” and pronounces it “excellent for the head.” By the mid-19th century they were pretty much seen as health drinks. “A bourbon whiskey cocktail before breakfast is the best thing for complexion,” one Indiana newspaper advised its readers in 1874.
Wondrich later wrote a more detailed account of the origins of the word ‘cocktail’ here - and it has more to do with sticking things in horse’s bottoms than I was hitherto aware. But suffice to say that they were originally designed to put some ink in your pen first thing.
Anyway. The Breakfast Martini isn’t a Martini in the strictest sense. It’s one of those 1990s “Martinis” that are really Sours. And it wasn’t designed for breakfast-drinking exactly, either. The Italian-born London bartender Salvatore Calabrese was simply enjoying some marmalade on toast prepared by his wife one morning in 1997 when he hit upon the idea of using some of this excellent Scottish preserve in a White Lady formula. It worked. It acheived Stateside success too, after Calabrese served it at a party at Dale DeGroff’s Rainbow Room in New York. And it became Calabreses’s signature drink. There is a Marmalade Cocktail in the Savoy Cocktail Book but that’s apparently a coincidence.
I think it’s a fine drink. Marmalade is sweet, bitter and interesting, just like a rich orange liqueur at a fraction of the price. (In fact, Grand Marnier is like marmalade made from the bitter Seville orange). The better the marmalade you use, the better the drink, too. I used my mum’s lockdown marmalade and liked it very much.
And do you know what? I actually made this twice, once on Wednesday evening to be sure I had the proportions correct, and then again on Thursday morning to photograph it in the dawn light, because this is the sort of mise-en-scene you can expect from The Spirits. Once I was satisfied with the composition, I naturally took a tiny sip - and somehow it tasted much better than the night before. Unfortunately I then had to get on with my day.
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ALL THIS TALK OF BREAKFAST takes me back to the high days of the London Review of Breakfasts, the highbrow breakfast publication founded by Seb Emina, sorry, Malcolm Eggs, one hungover morning in 2005. It ran for ten years, published some of the finest writers in the country under some excellent pseudonyms, and spawned The Breakfast Bible, which is a bit like The Spirits book but for pancakes, hash browns, scrambled eggs, meditations on breakfast cereal, etc.
I wrote under the name H.P. Seuss, occasionally incurring the wrath of commenters who arrived at the site expecting actual breakfast recommendations, as opposed to idle experiments at writing in the past and present tense simultaneously; or composing a review from the point of view of an egg. (“All I need to know from this review is that if twats like you go there I need to steer well clear”).
Anyway, the whole archive is marvellous. But I would draw your special attention to Poppy Tartt’s review of Cora's in Montreal (one for Leonard Cohen fans); and to Malcolm Egg’s oeufre in general but this review of Est Est Est in Gatwick Airport in particular: “My plate resembled a page ripped from the Observer Food Monthly - and unfortunately it tasted like one too.”
You might also enjoy Global Breakfast Radio.
PLAYLIST
It’s breakfast time! Eggs can be almost bliss.
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.
WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING
I interviewed Rosamund Pike about her new series The Wheel of Time, Amazon’s answer to The Game of Thrones. Not online but you can pick up the (Radio Times)
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING
I was struck by this statistic from this (rather depression) investigation into road-building programs in the US, which cannot shake its addiction to the personal car. In the last 30 years, 200,000 Americans have been forced out of their homes so that new roads can be built; two-thirds of these families are Black and Latino. (L.A. Times)
Not unrelated: where are all the eco-terrorists? (London Review of Books)
And from the same issue: this is a coolly furious essay on Britain’s post-Imperial settlement and immigration policy. Well worth a read! (London Review of Books)
Johanna on Isabel Waidner, winner of this year’s Goldsmiths Prize for experimental fiction. (New Statesman)
And here is Serge Gainsbourg, moved to tears by a group of schoolchildren dressing up as Serge Gainsbourg and singing Je suis venu te dire que je m'en vais.
SHOPPING LIST
The Spirits is taking a week off and not just because next week is Alcohol Awareness Week. I’m going to Barbados actually(!). So I shan’t be sending a recipe. But I will send something to tide you over - and I’ll put the ingredients on there. I expect it will involve dark rum somehow.
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