I WAS 12 WHEN I FIRST HEARD THE WORD ‘aperitif’, at a chintzy country house hotel that reeked of uptight gentility and suppressed emotions. I was there to celebrate my great aunt Margaret’s eightieth birthday. My parents, my older sister and I were ushered into the drawing room before dinner, Margaret gamely leading the way on her walking sticks, with her ill-fitting wig set at a jaunty angle. We perched on the over-stuffed sofas overloaded with cushions as leather-bound menus were flourished by the white-jacketed maitre d’, sleek of hair and oleaginous of demeanour. Our host then uttered the immortal words, ‘Would you care to commence with an aperitif?’
My sister issued a snort and my shoulders started shaking, but we managed to summon the good manners to wait until the poor man left the room before collapsing in hysterical giggles at this preposterous pomposity. When my father, who dined here occasionally with his clients, leaned towards us and whispered conspiratorially, ‘His name is Mr Snodgrass,’ we totally lost the plot, spluttering dry-roasted peanuts across the velvet pile carpet and crossing our legs tightly so we wouldn’t wet our pants.
Our mother frowned and handed us the tissues she always carried in her handbag; we wiped the snot from our noses and regained a semblance of composure just as Mr Snodgrass returned with our drinks held aloft on a silver salver. Aunt Margaret said simply, ‘Well, isn’t this nice?’
It was bitter lemon for my sister and me – the go-to treat drink whenever it was on offer – while the ladies had champagne and my father, a Campari Soda. The drinks arrived in immaculate crystal glassware, a ramrod-stiff linen coaster deftly placed beneath each one by the fawning Mr S. He produced his pen and notebook with a flourish. ‘And may I take your order for dinner?’ At that moment a passion in my heart was born for the aperitif – the very word, the sense of occasion, and my-oh-my, the drinks.
Campari Soda is my absolute favourite aperitif; from time to time I replace the soda with bitter lemon and drink in homage to dear Mr Snodgrass.
The word ‘aperitif’ comes from the Latin aperire, meaning ‘to open’. It is something to open the appetite, to stimulate the taste buds, to mark the start of a meal that’s to come. It could be a perfect gin and tonic before a long and louche lunch that ends the wrong side of midnight, a Martini to flex the digestive muscles at the start of a dinner out with friends, or perhaps a glass of something lovely at a bar on your way home for supper.
More usually for most of us, an aperitif is what properly announces the opening of the evening at home at the end of a long day when we turn our attention to the important things in life – perhaps cooking, eating, drinking and talking with the one or ones we love, or just slugging something into a glass, making cheese on toast and snuggling up solo with friends on social media. Some cocktails can be considered aperitifs, and champagne certainly counts; a glass of wine can’t put a foot wrong if it has a crispy pizazz to get your juices flowing and a snifter of sherry will always suit, but apéros, as the French fondly call them, can be so much more.
Many of the classic aperitifs date back centuries and have their roots in medicinal compounds that all manner of chemists, alchemists, quacks and clergy concocted using whatever nearby nature offered. Such drinks were usually devised to aid digestion; water was often contaminated and food hygiene standards were slack, so the digestive health of populations needed all the help it could get. Where there’s medicine, there’s money, particularly if the tincture tasted good, so making snifters to be taken before eating became big business.
The histories of many of these drinks are lost in the mists and alcoholic daze of yore; others are newer to the aperitif party, the result of the vogue in the drinking business to resurrect and revive forgotten recipes as well as to use them as inspiration for new drinks for the modern age.
Aperitifs occupy a particular niche in drinking land. Cocktails are all well and good in the drinker’s repertoire, but the aperitif suggests something rather lighter, something to tickle one’s fancy without wrestling one’s taste buds and sobriety into submission. There is a trend towards drinking lighter alcohol and less of it, and the aperitif vibe fits this bill perfectly. Also, they don’t need the hand of a skilled bartender so are easy to knock up at home.
Sharpeners, snifters, aperitivos or noggins (my granny’s word, and perhaps my favourite): we all know what we mean. Let us raise a glass to the aperitif, that most civilised and cheering of drinking habits.