The Spirits #57: Les Fleurs du Mal

~ Roses Are Red ~ Baudelaire's Carcass ~ Typhoid and Swans ~ Dirty Love ~ Wordle ~

~ LES FLEURS DU MAL ~

50ml rose-infused gin (see below)
20ml lemon juice
10ml golden sugar syrup
~20ml egg white
Drop absinthe

Place a cocktail glass in the freezer, so it’s cold when the time comes. Now, place the spirit, juice, sugar, egg and absinthe in the shaker with lots of ice. Shake hard until you can’t bear to hold the shaker any longer! (And then a bit more.) Fine-strain the cocktail into a spare vessel through a tea-strainer or similar, discard the ice, then quickly shake up the cocktail with no ice - just to get the egg white nice and fluffy. Now pour into your ice-cold glass. You might wish to get fancy with some rose petals by way of garnish.

Some Fleurs du Mal Notes:

1) To make the rose-gin, leave a heaped dessertspoonful of dried (edible) rose petals in 100ml gin for 10 minutes or so. Alternatively, you could simply make the cocktail with regular gin, but add a dash of rosewater - which you can find in posh supermarkets (try the baking section) or Middle Eastern grocers.

2) The rose-gin is actually - in Tony Conigliaro’s original recipe for this - rose-vodka. Both work. The vodka, being neutral, just leaves a bit more space for the rose flavour to bloom through. Or experiment with rum, pisco, grappa, etc.

3) The recipe above comes out a sort of dull white-wine colour. I can’t remember which chef it was (possibly Jan Ostle at Wilson’s?) who said that you should try to make a dish look an appropriate colour even if that isn’t the natural colour. In this spirit (“Roses are red…”), I added a few dashes of Peychaud’s bitters, just to ‘pink’ this up a little bit. I fancy it acually helped mesh the flavours together too. But scant use of similar blushing agents might work: grenadine? Campari? Food colouring?

Ooooh come here. Mmmmmmwa! 💋

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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 and you can also come to my party. 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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LES Fleurs du Mal is named, as I’m sure none of you will need reminding, after the famous volume of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, published in 1840. One of the tasks that my wife and I managed to accomplish during our Isolation January was finally to sort our books into some semblance of order, alphabetical and chronological - and so, I knew precisely where to locate my undergraduate edition of this excellent volume. Naturally, I turned first to the famous poem ‘Une Charogne’ (A Carcass), which Baudelaire addressed to his lover, Jeanne Duval. Here she is, as painted by Éduoard Manet, who also very kindly came up with my new banner image, above. (Thanks mate, I’ll get you a drink next time we see each other).

A Carcass is a wonderful poem, much more arresting than I remember it - possibly because I really didn’t see eye-to-eye with our French tutor, possibly because I couldn’t really speak French at the time. Though with the benefit of hindsight, these two things might have been linked. Anyway: in the poem, Baudelaire implores his mistresses to remember the time that they were walking in the woods and came upon a rotting carcass, with its legs in the air, like a “femme lubrique” (a prostitute). He finds this dead animal beautiful and moving in its state of putrefaction, like a flower blooming: it is rendering back unto nature 100-fold that which nature gave it. And so he lavishes on this “carcass superbe” the sort of florid, tender detail that a lesser poet might have accorded a daffodil or a sunset:

Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride,
D'où sortaient de noirs bataillons
De larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide
Le long de ces vivants haillons.

Or, in James McGowan’s translation:

The flies buzzed and droned on these bowels of filth
Where an army of maggots arose,
Which flowed with a liquid and thickening stream
On the animate rags of her clothes.

Lovely stuff! (And if you like that, you’ll adore Sam Byers’s recent novel, Come Join Our Disease).

I shan’t try your patience by reproducing the poem in full, or indeed providing an undergraduate exegisis upon it. But you can find it in French here (note the lovely rhyme (s’epanouir (to blossom) and s’evanouir (to faint)) and in English here (McGowan’s translation - the best imo). It would be a lovely thing to reproduce, say, in a Valentine’s Day card to a loved one. Baudelaire goes on to compare his lover to this heavenly carcass - “And you, in your turn, will be rotten as this: / Horrible, filthy, undone…” - and to praise her as the keeper of the divine essence of sex and death, beauty and squalor. All are part of creation. Or as Hannibal Lecter put it: “Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place”.

The cocktail Les Fleurs du Mal is, happily, a more sanitary affair. It was invented by Tony Conigliaro, proprietor of 69 Colebrooke Row and Bar Termini and one of the first of the London bartenders of the recent wave to take drink-making seriously. I mean really seriously. He is one of those molecular people. His book, Drinks, is all “5.6 grams of tartaric acid” this and “seven microns of essence of agar-agar” that. You basically need a laboratory to make most of the oh-so-humbly entitled ‘drinks’. But Les Fleurs du Mal stands out as one of the more do-able recipes - as well as the one that encapsulates Conigliaro’s quite interesting interest in perfume.

The only thing my adaptation of his recipe doesn’t include that his does is a few microns of his proprietary tuberose hydrosol. Tuberose is one of my favourite scents, as it happens. It has such a soft, pink, girlish allure but then, at its centre, something faintly dangerous, bordering on putrid. Next time you’re in a posh perfume concession, give Fracas by Robert Piguet a sniff and you’ll see what I mean. Or Carnal Flower by Dominique Ropion. Sexy! (Expensive). And highly Baudelaire-appropriate.

But even without this embellishment, the sinister threat of the absinthe wrapped in the bloom of rose is, I think, utterly delectable. 🥀

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📚 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 nice Valentine’s present📚

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PLAYLIST

This week’s playlist follows the Baudelairian theme… Here are some songs about perfumes, scents and aromas… but also, filth, decay and debasement. I include, with no apology, Tori Amos’s cover of the most famous song ever inspired by an anti-perspirant.

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 playlists.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING

I had tremendous fun writing about that word game… and also, about word games in general, which, “like chord sequences, like chess, like translating a Russian sonnet into English while retaining the same metrical form – lie in the sweetspot between maths and art, logic and creativity, left brain and right”. (Observer)

I wrote about the under-appreciated fact that British male life-expectancy has recently slowed, stalled and now gone into reverse. It’s not online I’m afraid, so you’ll have to pick up a copy of (Men’s Health)

WHAT' I’VE BEEN READING

Oh lots of political gossip.

For the Russia-Ukraine situation, incidentally, I highly recommend Meduza, which gathers together all the most truthful and incisive reporting on that part of the world. (Meduza)

Johanna Thomas-Corr on Sheila Heti (New Statesman)

The case against the trauma plot… from a few weeks’ back (New Yorker)

And this is interesting, on the Ted talk, and ‘inspiresting’ (The Drift)

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SHOPPING LIST

Bourbon, grenadine, Angostura, a lemon, an orange and some pineapple juice. Demerara sugar is good too.

🍍🍋🍊