The Spirits #60: The Shirley Temple

~ Mocktail ~ Smart-as-paint ~ Servant of the People ~ Jackie Opel's Legacy ~

~ THE SHIRLEY TEMPLE ~

15ml grenadine
15ml ginger syrup
20ml lemon (or lime) juice
Fizzy water

Stir together the grenadine, ginger syrup, citrus and mere splash of fizzy water at the bottom of a tall glass until combined. Add ice cubes and then top up with (~120ml) fizzy water. Garnish with orange and/or lemon wheels and a cocktail cherry, if you have one.

Some Shirley Temple Notes:

1) The original demands ginger beer. I used the excellent Belvoir ginger cordial + fizzy water, which I find a more economical solution. You can also make homemade ginger syrup with fresh ginger, if you like. You’ll need fresh ginger juice, which you can extract either with a juicing machine, or by grating ginger root and then wringing out the liquid in a fresh teatowel over a bowl. Use this to make a 2:1 sugar syrup in the time-honoured fashion. Zingy!

2) Or just use ginger beer. Ginger kombucha worth a try too.

3) No your eyes don’t deceive you. I have given you the recipe for a non-alcoholic cocktail. If this offends you, may I recommend the simple solution of neat spirit, maybe over ice, chased down with the above? Now that wasn’t too painful was it.

Привіт, ласкаво просимо, будь ласка, сідайте…

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The Ukrainian distiller Dima - he makes Dima’s Vodka - is doing some heroic fundraising work at the moment. If you buy four bottles from his Ukrainian cocktail range, 100% of the proceeds (i.e. not just the profit) will go to Ukrainian charities. I have a bottle of his excellent vodka on order too. The Ukrainian Institute has a good list of ways to help here.

🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine etc are here.
🧑‍🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full recipe archive is here. 
➡️ Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.

…and if you like The Spirits, do please forward this to all of your friends. That way, when you visit them, they will feel obliged to make you delicious drinks.

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“A NON-ALCOHOLIC cocktail? At a time like this?”

Well, yes! We must all look after ourselves and our loved ones. There is nothing stopping you from pouring yourself a nice glass of neat spirit, too, as I said up there. This is about all I’ve been able to manage this week. Ideally with some Olia Hercules pickles.

But it has also come to my attention that this newsletter has quite a few non-drinkers among its subscribers - here for a pure hit of prose as opposed to merely alcohol. No doubt, there are many more non-drinkers among the wider Spirits diaspora as well. And the conscientious cocktail maker, I have always maintained, must never neglect the non-drinkers. There are many good reasons for not drinking: health, age, religion, soul, body, mind, etc. And the non-drinkers are more likely to remember your efforts than the drinkers. Children, I find, particularly remember your efforts, especially when you make them a special children’s cocktail, which is precisely what the Shirley Temple is.

Shirley Temple (IQ: 155, apparently) was the most celebrated child star of the Golden Age of Hollywood and America’s darling during the Depression - credited with single-handedly saving the 20th Century Fox studio in the 1930s, with movies like Heidi (1937) and The Little Colonel (1935). She was also, seemingly, one of the few only child actors to escape from this totalising star-system with something like her sanity in tact. But then, she was, apparently “smart as paint, tough-minded, and highly professional, with the devilish charm of a cunning Lucifer-child asking to stay up till nine,” as one contemporary put it. Oh to be described one day as “smart-as-paint”.

Moreover, like the great Volodymir Zelensky (whose sitcom I highly recommend by the way), Temple managed to transition from screen to the political stage - becoming the US Ambassador to Ghana (1974-76) and later to Czechoslovakia (1989-1992). And she was also witness to Russian aggression. She was ambassador during the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia but also present for the Prague Spring of 1968, the popular uprising against Soviet rule, as she happened to be in Prague doing charity work at the time. She watched events, terrified, from her hotel room:

“From my high perch—and careful not to be seen—I managed to look out through a slit in the railing. A woman on the street was unmercifully gunned down as she ran for shelter—an image I have never rid myself of.”

You can’t escape history.

Still, celebrity is a curious thing. It’s fair to say that few of us are pulling out Temple’s greatest hits, like Dimples (1936) or Wee Willy Winkie (1937) for repeat streams these days. Shirley Temple Movie Star is one of those time-limited, had-to-be-there phenomena whose appeal is hard to fathom for subsequent generations. Like, I don’t know, Tulip Fever, or Lisztomania, or Britpop. And yet Shirley Temple-the-Drink endures still. The 1930s abounded with movie star cocktails: The Mary Pickford, The Douglas Fairbanks, The Charlie Chaplin (the latter two covered in this comprehensive Apricot Brandy post). The Shirley Temple is thought to have been invented at Chasen’s, a once-iconic Hollywood haunt, now a supermarket. Perhaps for a cunning Lucifer-child who had succeeded in staying up till nine? And it has, arguably, transcended its inspiration to become the most famous of the mocktails. Indeed, it might be the only truly famous mocktail.

Anyway, I rather like the Shirley Temple. Taste-wise, it has a certain drugstore soda-fountain charm; I can imagine it being served to delighted children amid Cherry Phosphates and Boston Coolers in some 1950s American idyll. (In fact: why not drop in a scoop of ice-cream?) It has a slight Honeymoon-era Lana Del Rey-ish quality too. If you make a really good homemade grenadine and add in decent spritz of citrus, it actually becomes rather sophisticated. And please note: syrup, citrus, fizz. This is a good general purpose formula for all manner of long drinks.

And furthermore, as much as I try to make this newsletter an escape from the world, I am not immune from the urge towards pointless gestures. Why look:

It’s a 50-50 mix of blue curacao and vodka sitting atop yellow Chartreuse. Stay safe, look after each other, and tell the truth.

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PLAYLIST

Here, in time for Award Season, are some songs about the movies: film stars, matinées, drive-ins, the whole dream factory.

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 a short Ukraine reading-watching-listening list (Sunday Times)

And also, praise be, here is my long-promised article on spouge, the Barbadian answer to ska, created by Jackie Opel (below) in 1968. This was a real delight to do and I’m so happy it’s finally out there (Guardian)

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

The War (passim). I’m sure much the same stuff as everyone, but here are a few specific places I’ve found particularly insightful.

Kamil Galeev is a Russian academic based in Washington DC who has published a PhD’s worth of material on Russia and its near-abroad with his hugely insightful and never-quite-predictable Twitter threads. He covers everything from Russian prison hierarchies to military strategy to the specific cultures of all the semi-autonomous Russian republics. (Twitter)

…He also recently joined the newsletter fraternity (How Did Russia Get So Big/Substack)

Timothy Snyder is one of the best Ukraine/Russia analysts and wrote the book Bloodlands. He too is on this platform. (Thinking About…/Substack)

And I’ve found Lawrence Freedman to be a good summariser too. (Comment Is Freed/Substack)

Aris Roussinos on the dangers of a no-fly zone (Unherd)

Here is a rather chilling analysis of Russia’s looming economic collapse. (A particularly good one to send anyone who complains that the West is “doing nothing” because we’re not shooting down Russian planes). (Atlantic)

And here is a piece on the Ukrainians seizing Russian military vehicles (The Drive)

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SHOPPING LIST

Tequila, Campari, lime, grapefruit, sugar syrup.

🛏️