Roger Scruton on the necessary and sufficient conditions for the perfect cocktail

Beside our house in Virginia stands a small wooden building, under which is a deep well. Ice would be shovelled into this well in the winter months, and during the summer the cold vapours would circulate around the interior of the building, preserving the food that was stored there. Thanks to this invention, the builders of our house were able to enjoy that distinctive summer drink of old Rappahannock, the mint julep.

This concoction of whiskey, mint and sugar, served at freezing point, did much to encourage the slow drawl and laid-back gestures of rural Virginia. And it was the first example of the cocktail, a habit that has since spread around the world, its march as inexorable and its etymology as inexplicable as those of the expression "OK".

The cocktail is not just a drink. Like wine, it is a culture. And its modern versions are downstream from the old mint julep, as modern jazz is downstream from the Negro spiritual. The principal characteristics are three: it is taken early, in the heat of the sun; it is strong and aromatic; and it is entirely without respect for national boundaries, mixing vermouth with gin, whiskey with coconut, and vodka with peach. The essential feature, however, is the one discovered in our ice house: they are as cold as possible, and poured into the stomach while the day is hot.

The effect of this is not so much physical as moral. People learn to divide themselves in two. There is the pre-cocktail person, who rises early, works industriously and thinks constantly and kindly of the folks at home; and there is the post-cocktail person who, once the first dagger has been stabbed down the throat, falls into a stunned abstraction. The speech that eventually emerges is slow and deliberate, and although the folks at home are frequently referred to, it is with a distant and slightly mournful affection, as though remembering people long since dead. The cocktail drinker is carried home to dinner at some unconscionably early hour, and with a fixed smile on the face, divested of all the habits of the workplace.

It is hard to learn to drink cocktails in moderation. Like chocolates, they are designed to tempt you, with every stop pulled out. Nevertheless, the cocktail culture has overcome the demon alcohol in a way that the whiskey culture of the hill-billies has not. Murders in rural Virginia occur between consenting adults in private; and rye is almost always the catalyst. Cocktails, by contrast, belong to the world of people who have to get up in the morning - people who slice their day in two, so as to be alone with themselves for the better part of it. When unable to bear the chatter of their intimates, such people do not shoot them, but approach them with an eerie smile and silence them with an irresistible drink.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website