The Spirits #53: The Green Swizzle

~ Quararibea turbinata ~ Barbados, Land of Rum ~ Bertie Wooster ~The Spouge Revival ~ Funes the Memorious ~

📚 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, just saying.

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~ THE GREEN SWIZZLE ~

50ml dark rum
20ml golden sugar syrup
20ml lime juice
Dash almond extract
Dash Angostura bitters
Drop absinthe
Nutmeg
Mint

This is another of those crushed ice beveraginos, I’m afraid: wrap a tray of ice cubes in a tea towel (clean) and pummel it until the ice is in shards. Fill up a tall glass with the ice. Now, technically you’re supposed to mix all the liquids in the glass but in reality, it’s much easier to ‘whip shake’ them all first (i.e. with just one single ice-cube) in a shaker and *then* pour them into the ice-filled glass for swizzling. Now swizzle! What I mean is: enthusiastically churn the mixture and down the glass for a good 30 seconds at least until all of the ingredients are combined and beads of condensation begin to run down the exterior. Garnish with mint, lime, maybe a pineapple frond or two - and be sure to grate some fresh nutmeg over the top.

Some Green Swizzle Notes:

1) Below are some swizzle sticks. The idea is that you place the swizzling end in the glass and roll the round handle back and forth between your palms, like a Boy Scout failing to start a fire. If there is no quararibea turbinata tree to hand, use a synthetic swizzle, or a bar spoon, or just whatever works. Fo’ shizzle.

2) If you happen to have any falernum - this is the classic Barbadian alcoholic syrup flavoured with lime, ginger, cloves and almond - use that in place of the sugar and almond extract. You may need to adjust the sweetness accordingly.

3) The absinthe + Angostura here are a substitute for the “wormwood bitters” specified in the original 1908 recipe. Czech-style absinthe, which is lighter on the anise and heavier on the wormwood, is better than French, but I do mean a DROP. It’s strong in flavour as well as strength. A teaspoon of Green Chartreuse isn’t a bad shout too; this will take you in the direction of the famous Chartreuse Swizzle.

4) A lime tip! I learned this from a mixologist in Barbados. You know the end of the lime with the little nubbin of stalk still on it where it was attached to the tree? You should discard this end - it’s where all the less pleasant sourness accumulates.

HI. Yes. I am aware that it’s brown and not green. You can’t have everything.

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I am the journalist 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 an index of all cocktails featured thus far, searchable by ingredient. Scroll to the bottom of this page to find out what to get in for next week’s special.

Please consider hitting the SUBSCRIBE button to become a member of the ✨THE CABINET✨. This way you will learn about exciting things like Maraschino and Green Chartreuse and Apricot Brandy. Oh and if you opt for the priciest ‘Founding Member’ option, I’ll send you a signed copy of my book with your very own bespoke recipe in it.

Please share The Spirits with anyone you reckon might be into this sort of thing. And feel free to @ me with your creations!

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I AM just back from a week in Barbados with the Whisky Exchange and - who knew? It’s a delightful island. A carefree week in the sun turns out to be just what the doctor ordered. But don’t think I spent the entire time dancing to Rihanna on catamarans and snorkelling with turtles. No! This was, technically, work. I have returned with opinions on dosage and terroir in spirits - and, more importantly, a tangible sense of where these liquids actually come from.

I had always thought of spirits in general and rum in particular as a form of magic, untethered, somehow from the Earth. And yet to see the sugar cane growing and the columns bubbling, to smell the rich funk of molasses and the livid pools of yeast, to taste the spirit straight from the still and the barrel, to meet the human beings who make all this happen - well, I learned a lot. Including the not-quite-known-enough fact that Barbados is where rum began.

I will write more on the theme in due course, but some little highlights first from the four distilleries we visited: Above, clockwise from top left, you can see sugar cane growing at Mount Gay; the cane mill at the historic St Nicholas Abbey; the funky yeast pit at the West Indies Distillery; and the copper pot stills at Mount Gay. Below are barrels of rum ageing in the salty tropical air at the open warehouses at Foursquare, probably my favourite of the four.

As for the drinks, well! Neat rum, Rum Punch, Corn’n’Oil, Jungle Birds (which we introduced to the bartenders!) and - as is the Bajan Rum Shop custom - rum with Coke, ginger ale and grapefruit soda. Grapefruits, like rum, falernum, Rihanna and spouge, also hail from Barbados. You can see why I like the place.

Still, it was only on the last day that I learned of the existence of the 1908 Green Swizzle, once on of the island’s most popular cocktails - sadly not found so easily these days. According to Richard Seale, formidable master distiller at Foursquare (responsible for Foursquare, Doorly’s, R.L. Seale, John D. Taylor’s Velvet Falernum, etc), the Green Swizzle was the Bajan take on the Swizzle, which enjoyed great fame in the late 19th century, soon after ice made its way to the Caribbean. Indeed, it was the thing to drink, before the Daiquiri came along but then (much like spouge… see below), it fell from the collective memory.

OK, not entirely. There is a Green Swizzle in the aptly named Jeeves and Wooster story, The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy (1924). “I have never been in the West Indies, but I am in a position to state that in certain of the fundamentals of life they are streets ahead of our European civilization,” says Bertie, correctly, I feel, before going on to describe the performance of the “bloke” behind the counter.

“A planter, apparently, does not consider he has had a drink unless it contains at least seven ingredients, and I’m not saying, mind you, that he isn’t right. The man behind the bar told us the things were called Green Swizzles; and, if ever I marry and have a son, Green Swizzle Wooster is the name that will go down on the register, in memory of the day his father’s life was saved at Wembley.”

What was in this Green Swizzle? P.G. Wodehouse doesn’t say! Subsequent attempts to reverse engineer the drink have alighted alarming on creme de menthe. However, a recently unearthed New York Herald recipe from 1908 lists the ingredients for the Green Swizzle as 1 1/2 ounces rum, 1 ounce falernum, and one barspoon of wormwood bitters (which is the thing that made it green, presumably?) swizzled over frappéd ice. That’s three ingredients. And this makes it a swizzled version of the extremely traditional Barbadian drink, Corn’n’Oil (rum + falernum) which, I learned from Seale, is actually an 18th century proto-cocktail. (Cabinet subscribers can look forward to a geeky post on falernum before long.) So: the Green Swizzle is a missing link cocktail, I guess, a icy tropical midpoint between an old punch and a tiki drink.

Anyway! The above recipe is a de-falernumised version, for those who don’t have this excellent ingredient to hand, loosely adapted from the excellent geeky blog Art of Drink by the chemist Darcy O’Neil. I found it worked pretty well. But then again, so do most combinations of rum, lime, sugar and spice, as long as you balance them correctly.

What’s that? It’s November? It’s freezing! Not everywhere it isn’t.

🍹

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PLAYLIST

You can imagine my delight, one afternoon in a rum shop, when I asked our Barbadian host Marc what kind of music scene there was in the island. I mean, was there a Bajan equivalent of, say, Jamaican ska… or Trinidadian calypso?

“Well…” he said. “There was this thing called spouge.”

Spouge - pronounced ‘spooj’ - was a distinctly Bajan hybrid of soul, calypso and ska that was immensely popular in the late 60s and early 70s. It was pioneered by the singer Jackie Opel (b. Dalton Sinclair Bishop) after he spent some time recording with Bob Marley in Jamaica. On his return home, he decided that Barbados needed its own rhythm, so he and his band the Troubadours came up with spouge. It’s a wonderful sound, organised chaos, characterised by a forward-pushing guitar (ba-duh-bum, ba-duh-bum, etc) and galloping beat (chika dom, chika dom, chika dom) and, ideally, lots and lots of horns. Opel’s single, You Got to Pay, became an island sensation and soon there were spouge acts springing up all over. Other bands took a still funkier approach, often covering US soul songs in a frenetic spouge style. There’s a fabulous spouge mix here (the song at 56:19 is a particular banger!). It sounds a bit like someone put a Northern Soul night through a strange filter, fed it too many Green Swizzles, then played it a 2x speed:

“What a perfect idea for a Spirits playlist!” I thought.

Only, imagine my disappointment to discover that very little of this music exists on Spotify or Apple Music or really anywhere on the internet. I’ve just found a handful of YouTube mixes. Apparently this was all on the verge of going global, but Opel died in a car crash in 1970 and the scene never quite recovered. These days the Bajan kids aren’t interested in their parents’ music and hardly outside the island knows what they’re missing.

Anyway: I have painstakingly assembled what little spouge I could find on Spotify here along with a few other choice tunes by Bajan artists (Opel is only represented for his ska alas; You Got to Pay is not on the platform). BUT MARK MY WORDS. The spouge revival has begun.

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 WRITING

I wrote about what our houses will look like in 2050 (The Observer)

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize winning novel, The Promise. It’s magnificent!

James Marriott on the internet memory curse. (The Times)

Jill Lepore on the tyranny of the Seven-Day Week (New Yorker)

David Runciman on why we should give six year olds the right to vote (Guardian)

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SHOPPING LIST

Gin, Italian vermouth, Campari, elderberry tea (any red tea will do… hibiscus, cranberry etc).

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WHAT I’M READING