The first Pimm’s day of the year
Campari, and why it gets more bitter the more you dilute it
Campari in the kitchen: blood-orange sorbet
The Venetian way to drink bitters
My favorite drink, with spring crostini
Bellini and Harry’s Bar in Venice.
White wine in shot glasses with crab: an easy way to impress
Crisp white wines: Sancerre and alternatives
How to make your own elderflower cordial
HERBS FROM THE GARDEN: CALMING DRINKS
As the days grow longer, and trees show the first green signs of unfurling leaves, we begin to leave behind the protective comforts of winter food and drink and start looking for brighter, lighter, zestier flavors. With the windows open, and the smell of new life in the air, a glass of grassy sauvignon blanc acts as a reminder that the asparagus season is on its way. The first warm weekend is always an excuse to crack into the Pimm’s. And the first white peaches always have me rushing to make a Bellini.
The first day when you can smell spring and the sun shines unexpectedly hot, despite the still-watery light, usually falls somewhere between the spring equinox and the May bank holiday. It happens when the gorse is burning yellow and the lawnmower has come out of the garage for its first few runs, but the heads of peonies haven’t yet burst and the first bluebells aren’t quite beginning.
This is the first Pimm’s day of the year, and on it nothing will seem more intoxicating than the fruity, sweet, just very slightly woody, orange-peel scent of Pimm’s No. 1 poured into a tall glass, mixed with cheap lemon-lime soda (or tonic if, like me, you find lemonade too cloying), and topped with a sprig of mint and slice of cucumber. Standing outside, feeling the sun warm on your skin, with a sparkling glass of brownish amber liquid in your hand says one thing: summer is on its way.
From now until the weather turns, Pimm’s will be poured by the river, on the patio, after a game of golf or the church raffle on weekend afternoons with the tennis spooling on the telly. … We have been drinking it since 1840, when one James Pimm, owner of an oyster bar in the City of London, put this cup—essentially a gin sling with some extras thrown in—on the menu and served it in silver tankards, diligently explaining that it would aid digestion.
The recipe was secret then, and still is now, by virtue of a somewhat irritating marketing quirk, but Pimm’s No. 1 is based on gin and flavored with various fruit extracts and herbs. At selected points in its history there have been other numbered Pimm’s: No. 1 has always been gin-based, No. 2 was whiskey, No. 3 brandy, No. 4 rum, No. 5 rye, and No. 6 vodka. The others have gradually died out, and today you will find only No. 1 and No. 3—repackaged as “Winter Pimm’s”—and No. 6 on the shelves.
A bottle of No. 1 feels a bit like a prop on the film set of the warmer months, always promising to deliver a slice of quintessentially English relaxation. Before the Great War Pimm’s was advertised by a gentleman in a pith helmet remarking, “By my gaff and ghillie—I could do with a Pimm’s No. 1.” In the 1930s its slogan depicted it as the savior of aristocrats, whose fortunes were ebbing and stately homes being sold off: “We had to let the west wing go, but thank heavens we can still afford our Pimm’s.” This century it’s a little more egalitarian, but the play on traditional Englishness is still there in “Anyone for Pimm’s?” and, “I make that Pimm’s o’clock.”
But here is the bad news. Unless you are a committed Pimm’s fan, and probably even if you are, the first time you drink Pimm’s each year is also the only day on which it will meet expectations. After that, it’s all downhill. Pimm’s for me is much more about the moment than the taste, which is perhaps why pleasure decreases exponentially until what began as a glowing glass full of promise becomes a sickly confection lacking definition and no more irresistible than an old piece of bubble gum. I only ever drink it once a year. But on that first Pimm’s day, I love it—so enjoy it while you can.
Do use ordinary lemon-lime soda; the fancy cloudy stuff doesn’t work as well. Don’t make a fruit salad: cucumber peel, mint or borage, and a slice of orange if you want to be extravagant are all that’s required. Don’t put the fruit and herb bits in a jug; they’ll get waterlogged, so put them in individual glasses as you pour.
Sometimes, even at the beginning of the year, Pimm’s seems too cloying. Instead I often drink red vermouth with tonic—you can still put all the bits in it—which has the virtue of being more bitter, and also one of the few mixed drinks pubs are unlikely to wreck. To get a bit closer to the real thing, you can mix one part gin, one part red vermouth, and half a part of Cointreau, then dilute with either lemon-lime soda or tonic in the same way that you would for Pimm’s No. 1. If you have lots of friends coming over, you could mix up the spirit element in advance, keep it chilled in the fridge, then put out jugs of it on a table alongside glasses, lemon-lime soda, tonic water, a bowl of ice, orange slices, mint sprigs, and cucumber parings. Let people make their own drinks from the buffet as they prefer—lemon-lime soda for those with a sweeter tooth, tonic for those who like it bitter, and dressed as they please.
The sense of bitterness is thought to be one of the ways our ancestors identified—and knew to avoid eating—food that was likely to be toxic. This might explain why it is an acquired taste and why those who relish the oral pinch of, say, endives, dark chocolate, radicchio, tonic water, or lemon pith very often seem to be contrary, if not bloody-minded, individuals. As for Campari, it does not just taste bitter, courtesy of the quinine and wormwood it contains; it is one of a set of drinks that are actually classified as “bitters.”
To my mind this is partly why, despite the beautiful carmine glow of the liquid in its distinctive bottle and the effortless cachet you would expect of a drink from the country that gave us Armani, Ferrari, and La Scala opera house, Campari has always stubbornly refused to catch on quite as well as it ought to outside Italy (with the exception of Brazil, when they also love it).
If I had a pound for every person who has sighed wistfully and told me how much they wished they liked it, well, I’d probably have a tenner. I’ve watched countless friends take a sip for the first time and seen their mouths pucker as if you’re trying to poison them. Of course, the idea that it’s a connoisseur’s drink is one of the draws for those of us who do like it. At university I used to buy Campari all the time simply because, even toward the end of term, when severe financial drought threatened, no one else would touch it.
Yet when it comes to explaining why a drink that has everything in its favor, from looks to an Italian heritage, is not more popular, Campari discount the idea that bitterness might have any impact. “Taste is not a barrier to anything, to my mind,” a Campari top dog once told me. A sinister concept, though when you consider some of the stuff that does sell by the truckload—I’m thinking about the likes of Red Bull and some branded wines—it does seem to hold true. So what is the problem? There’s no doubt that the infamous 1970s ad starring Lorraine Chase, a bloke in a dodgy flared white suit, and the devastatingly tacky catchphrase, “Nah, Lu’on Airpor” hasn’t helped over the decades. That aside, I’m completely foxed as to why we don’t drink it more. In both Italy and Brazil, two countries with beautiful people and ultra-hip bar cultures, Campari is ubiquitous. Lombardian in origin, it was put together by a drink maker called Gaspare Campari in Novara in 1860. Its particular flavor comes from infusing a secret list of sixty-eight herbs, roots, peels, spices, and barks in alcohol and water and then coloring it a glossy shade of red. The Italians drink it as an aperitivo—the bitter herbs are said to stimulate digestion—which is certainly the best way to enjoy it. Don’t, as they apparently do in St. Lucia, even think of mixing it with milk! The classiest way to drink it is to mix it with soda (or look for the premixed volcano-shaped bottles so cute that my cousin buys them because they cheer her up when she opens the fridge door).
If the bitterness makes you wince, there is a surprising way to reduce its impact. The mistake most people make when they’re being tentative about Campari is to overdilute it, thinking that this will give it a gentler taste. It doesn’t. Our perception of bitterness is very acute and is barely affected by increasing the dilution. What does change, though, is our perception of the sugar concentration, which you will notice decreasing with more dilution; and without the sugar to balance the bitterness, it will make you flinch even more. In other words, the less you like the bitterness, the shorter you should drink it.
I like this with ice and a slice of orange in a small glass, mixed roughly 50:50, which makes it about 12.5 percent abv (alcohol by volume), about the same strength as a table wine.
One of the most popular ways to drink Campari is with orange juice, ideally freshly squeezed. Put an inch or so of Campari into the glass, pour the orange on top, and let the colors mingle like a good sunset. Add plenty of ice. Black olives or tapenade is killer with this drink; failing that a bowl of green olives will do.
Even better than Campari and orange, because the briskness of the grapefruit is a good match for the bitter Campari. Try it with pink grapefruit too.
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons surar
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons water
5 ounces Campari
1 cup blood-orange juice
juice of ½ lemon
1 egg whie, hand-whisked until white and frothy
The combination of blood orange and Campari is almost unbeatable. A scoop or two of this is a great way to start an evening or a sophisticated way to finish off a dinner. You do need an ice-cream maker to get this to work. And beware, because alcohol has a lower freezing point than water, it is Svalbard-cold in the mouth. Makes six helpings.
Make a simple syrup by mixing the water and sugar together; stir and leave for 5 minutes until the sugar is all dissolved. Combine the syrup with the Campari, orange juice, and lemon juice, and then fold in the egg white using a metal spoon. Pour the mixture into an ice-cream maker and churn until set. Thanks to the alcohol content of the sorbet, this needs to get very cold before it will solidify, so you may need to transfer the bowl to the freezer for the last 20 minutes of freezing. Serve immediately.
Campari addicts should also see “My favorite drink” on p. 108.
There are two classic Venetian bar experiences. One is the smart Bellini at Harry’s; the other is “lo spritz” in a shabby bar with a couple of rickety plastic tables, a dirty floor, a telly high on the wall in the back room, and lots of old men shuffling in and out. The men all drink spritzes: small tumblers of murky liquid, which turns out to be a bitter of choice—sometimes Campari, more often the artichoke-based Cynar, sometimes Aperol—topped with white wine and a dash of soda, dressed, if you’re lucky, with a hunk of lemon. This seems to taste better in situ than it does at home (though best mind the canal, which often moves toward the door as you head out), but it’s good outdoors, at lunchtime, in only-just-warm-enough weather, with a bowl of green olives.
2 parts gin
1 part freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 part simple syrup
couple dashes blood-orange bitters
sparkling water
Slings were popular in the eighteenth century, and the best known is, of course, the Singapore sling, made famous by the Raffles hotel, which is flavored with cherry brandy. This version, which adds bitters to the standard combination of spirit, lemon juice, sugar syrup, and soda, has a distinctly urban feel. We drank it on a friend’s roof terrace, just behind King’s Cross, one surprisingly warm afternoon in April as we made the first barbecue of the year. You can find blood-orange bitters at many liquor stores and online—they give the drink a warmer feel than ordinary angostura.
Mix the first four ingredients together in a jug, then pour into tall, ice-filled Collins glasses until they are half full, top with sparkling water, and stir with a straw.
It’s been so long since I drank my first gimlet that I’m no longer sure whether I was introduced to them by Raymond Chandler or whether gin gimlets introduced me to Raymond Chandler. In any case, I think it is safe to say that just as everyone knows that James Bond liked his martinis “shaken and not stirred,” so any gimlet aficionado can tell you that Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe drank his with no bitters, a cigarette in his hand, and a wry observation about blondes in his back pocket. In The Long Goodbye, one of Marlowe’s clients, Terry Lennox, an Englishman, even supplies us with a recipe.
“What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters,” he complains. “Areal gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s lime juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”
I know: it doesn’t sound very appetizing, but it is strangely delicious, simultaneously sweet and sharp, provided you pour the whole lot over plenty—and I really do mean plenty—of ice.
Lennox is right on another count too: this is perhaps the only drink I know that cannot be improved on by replacing the liquor-cabinet mixer with the more chi-chi option of freshly squeezed juice. Actually, it would be unbearable with fresh lime, because it’s the bittersweet contrast of syrupy mixer with citric acid and the harsh rawness of the gin that gives it such a mean kick.
You’ll notice that Lennox specifies the use of Rose’s, which, until the recent trend in Britain for upmarket nonalcoholic fruit cordials, was easily the best around. Now if I’m buying lime cordial, it’s always Bottlegreen’s Sweet Aromatic Lime (which includes a dash of bitters), but I wouldn’t dream of using it for gimlets—that would be like putting homemade tomato relish on your burger when what you actually want is Heinz tomato ketchup.
This is too moody and too down-at-heel a drink to be terribly sociable. You’re not going to put on your dazzling host smile and hand it around at a cocktail party. You should sip it, as Marlowe does, alone or with one other at a bar, or, provided only you order it, in company after a bad day. The beauty of it is that it is almost impossible to ruin, which makes it the perfect thing for non—beer drinkers to order in a pub (though never ask for it by name; just give the barman Terry Lennox’s immaculate instructions, and don’t forget the ice). And it even tastes good from a plastic glass, shivering outside on a field or in a park at the beginning of the summer.
The reason Americans often refer to the British as “limeys” is that during the nineteenth century British ships carried supplies of citrus juice—usually lime, because it contained less sugar than lemon and so was less liable to ferment—to prevent their sailors from succumbing to scurvy. The common practice became compulsory with the passing of the Merchant Shipping Act of 1867, which suited a certain Scot called Lachlan Rose very well. His family were shipbuilders, but he chose instead to deal in grain and flour; by 1865, in the port of Leith, he had established L. Rose & Company, as a “Lime and Lemon Merchant.” All the lime juice then taken to sea contained a healthy dose of rum as a preservative. Rose saw an opportunity here: he developed a way of preserving fresh lime juice using sulphur dioxide, patented it, then sat back and watched his Lime Juice Cordial, “entirely free from alcohol,” take off.
3 ounces bourbon
½ teaspoon sugar
1 sprig mint
over ½ tray of ice cubes or lots of precrushed ice
Every year on the first Saturday in May, the crowds gather at the Churchill Downs racecourse in Louisville for the Kentucky Derby. The horses’ hooves thunder, the bookies gesticulate, and everyone downs mint julep after mint julep after mint julep. The cocktail has been the official drink of the event for almost a century, and 120,000 of these refreshing yet potent cocktails, incorporating 1,000 pounds of mint and 60,000 pounds of ice, are drunk there each year. No one can agree on when the drink first came into being, but it belongs to the Old South. The word julep comes from the Arabic julab and Persian gulab, “rose water,” and means a sweet drink, one that is sometimes used as a vehicle for medicine, which is certainly how some see their favorite spirit.
How to make it is a subject of so much discussion that to stand up in a Kentucky bar and offer an opinion would virtually qualify as a breach of the peace. There are some things most would agree on, though, notably that this is an idyllic spring afternoon drink and a blissful sundowner. As for the four ingredients of ice, bourbon, sugar, and mint, mint is the most contentious. The debate rests not only on how much of it you use but also on what exactly you do to the mint to ensure the drink is infused with its flavor. I find that minimal intervention (no bruising) but a little time (patience is never a bad thing) are the important points to note. There’s a lot of alcohol in here—at 3 ounces the measure is almost a double double—so you should be drinking it slowly and don’t want to feel, when you hit the halfway point, that it’s stewed so badly you’re downing alcoholic mint tea. As for the bourbon, I use Buffalo Trace because I like the savory rye character that feels almost like sucking on pumpernickel bread. I know many people who are attached to Woodford Reserve, but to me it’s too fruity and boisterous for the mint. You need a lot of ice—I’d say about ten large cubes per drink. At the Kentucky Derby they make this in bulk with precrushed ice, and they certainly don’t fool around like I do with the mint. This drink is traditionally served in pewter cups that have been frosted in the freezer.
You also need a tea towel and a rolling pin or a dowel. And to drink it from, a large tumbler that comfortably holds about 10 ounces of liquid.
First, deal with the mint. We’re not going to bruise the leaves. Pick off the bottom 2 leaves and, using a small knife, cut through the stem on the diagonal just beneath the point where they were attached. Make another diagonal cut just beneath the next pair of leaves. Now you should have 1 small sprig of mint, 2 separate leaves, and 2 bits of stalk. Put them all to one side for 5 minutes to allow the sap to begin leaking at the cut ends. While that’s happening, sort out the ice. Shake the ice cubes out of the tray into a tea towel, wrap them up, take them outside, and beat the living daylights out of them with a rolling pin or dowel. When the ice is coarsely crushed, transfer it to a jug or bowl. In a glass, put half the bourbon, the sugar, the mint, and a handful of crushed ice and stir a couple of times to dissolve the sugar. Add the rest of the bourbon, fill the glass up with crushed ice, and use a teaspoon to drag the mint through the ice a couple of times, trailing its flavor through the drink. Sit outside in the sunshine and sip.
The following drinks are particularly suitable for serving to groups. They are easily made, and the first three are not too strong, which means people can sip, chatter, and lose track of how much they’ve had without suffering too much, while the others involve opening bottles of fizz (two people going on to have dinner may not finish a whole bottle). Prosecco and antipasti are also better for groups because they allow you to have a greater variety of food with no waste.
These are three words that many people find hard to say in public. Secretly, they would like to. Or perhaps they don’t know deep down that they would like to, but if they did they might be surprised to find that actually it was something they rather enjoyed. Deep breath now … white-wine spritzer. Or, to put it another way, thirst-quenching, effervescent, delicate, which sounds much better but describes the same thing.
Under pressure from the wine snobs at the top and suburban-girl jokes at the bottom, this ladies-who-lunch former staple has largely died out. For me it was an accidental rediscovery. My conversion was made in a pub when I asked for a second, empty, wineglass so as to share a single, queasily large, 8-ounce measure of Chilean sauvignon blanc with a friend. I almost had second thoughts about asking for soda water on the side. “They’ll think we’re going to make white-wine spritzers,” I hissed. “Are you going to make up your own white-wine spritzers?” asked the barmaid. “No,” I denied, a little too emphatically and a little too loudly. So then, of course, we had to, and blow me if they weren’t delicious and just the thing when you want to drink but not get drunk.
There are a few rules, though. Don’t use oaked wine or chardonnay of any sort. Pinot grigio will do in extremis but is not ideal—unless you have happened upon a rare good one, it doesn’t really taste of anything, so let down with water it will be so bland as to be almost undrinkable. Sauvignon blanc, particularly from the New World, is good because the vibrant gooseberry, melon, and papaya flavors work in this context, and it has enough intensity to punch through the dilution. I tend to favor Chilean, on the grounds that New Zealand sauvignon probably does cost too much and is a little too elegant to be treated like a mixer. Even cheaper are the colombard-ugni-blanc blends from the south of France, which produce a prettily floral spritzer. A keen, green verdejo from Rueda in Spain also does the trick.
Don’t premix the white-wine spritzers if you have people coming over. A large jug of well-iced, sparkling water and a bottle with beads of condensation placed on the table so people can adjust to their own preferred strength feels better. I like this at lunchtime, when eating a bowlful of salad such as bacon and avocado with grated Emmenthal, soaked with hot mustardy dressing, or crab and papaya with spinach leaves. It muddles the head less, barely feels like “lunchtime drinking,” and if people snigger, well, you can console yourself with the idea that you know better. There really is nothing of which to be ashamed.
scant 1 pound strawberries
⅔ cup ginger beer, chilled
1¾ cups old-fashioned, cloudy lemon-lime soda, chilled
5 ounces gin
This adds up to far more than the sum of its parts. I came up with it when looking for a drink that, like Pimm’s, would suit sociable situations but taste more delicious. I’ve simply taken the gin base and lemon-lime soda mixer (cloudy this time), but added ginger beer and fruit in the form of fresh strawberries, which apart from providing natural sweetness make it feel as if it might almost be good for you. The ginger beer might sound odd but actually gives an essential kick and base note. It’s important to use the old-style Jamaican ginger beer that tastes of spicy gingerbread, which comes in cans, rather than one of the neo-old-fashioned (and more expensive) brands, which tend to be too fiery for this and lack the growl that grounds it so nicely. The result is harder to put down than I can say, and the nonalcoholic version, easily made by leaving out the gin, is good for anyone who is driving or can’t drink. Also, strawberry puree freezes very well, so if necessary you can make a batch when there is a glut and defrost it as you need it. The gin I use is Tanqueray Ten because its aromatic quality shines through, but bear in mind that at 47.3 percent abv, Tanqueray Ten is one of the stronger gins, so you may want to beef up with an extra splash if you use something else. This recipe makes just over a quart of strawberry grog, enough for about five glassfuls. Oh, and one last thing, the name. Grog to sailors is rum, but to Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons it’s ginger beer, and the idea of messing about on a lake in a boat, as in these classic British children’s books, seemed to fit in with the uplifting taste of this drink.
First, pinch the stems out of the strawberries. I don’t bother with hulling, but I do cut out any rotten or unripe bits. Use a hand blender to puree the fruit in a measuring pitcher. You should have about 1? cups of puree. If you have to throw away too many rotten or green berries or you’ve accidentally eaten so many that there’s less, then you may need to adjust the quantities of the other ingredients. The important thing when doing this is that there should be 3 parts of soda to every 1 part of ginger beer to get the right concentration of spice, so sometimes I mix the ginger beer and lemon-lime soda separately in those proportions, then add it to the strawberry mixture until I’m happy with the strength. Combine all the ingredients in a jug, then pour into glasses over ice.
1 part Plymouth gin
½ part elderflower cordial
3 parts sparkling water
1 small sprig mint for each drink (optional)
This recipe comes courtesy of Plymouth Gin; hence the name. You could use other brands, but I do prefer this one—it sits crisp and calm as the white of a distant sail on a flat sea against the aromatic elderflower, and mixing it with soda ensures that you will still be lucid after drinking a couple.
Combine the ingredients in a jug, stir, and serve in tumblers over ice. Add a sprig of mint to each glass.
1 bottle sparkling white wine
2 cups blood-orange juice
5 to 6 ounces Campari
This doesn’t have a name—in my family we call it “the Campari and blood-orange thing”—but it’s one of those discoveries that make you wonder why you ever bother with anything else. We get through more jugfuls of it than I can say: we had it when Grandma came to stay one April to visit her first great-grandchild; I often make it before dinner when people come over; and when a friend tried it as a possible offering for her son’s christening party, she declared it “the perfect spring afternoon drink.” Besides the general deliciousness, the beauty of it is that, unlike most things you make up in a jug and slosh around, it tastes more, not less, alcoholic than it actually is, thanks to the tenacious bitterness of the Campari. It’s essential to use blood-orange juice (often available at specialty groceries and health food stores, but if you make this early in the year, you should be able to get hold of fresh blood oranges and squeeze your own), not only for the color but also for the warm flavor-boost. For the sparkling wine, don’t go too expensive—champagne would be overkill in this case. Prosecco is fine. I tend to use a big brand of New World sparkling wine, such as Lindauer from New Zealand or Jacob’s Creek from Australia, which I perhaps wouldn’t buy to drink on their own but are ultra-reliable and more than good enough for this job (and relatively inexpensive). On holiday I’ve also made this with ludicrously cheap bottles of Gaillac Perlé, a sparkling white wine from the Tarn district in southwest France. As the other ingredients have quite a lot of flavor, you could put more or less anything in, apart from sparkling Riesling, as long as it was more or less dry. Get the ingredients very cold—twenty minutes in the freezer if necessary—before you mix them, because the drink is already quite diluted and the fizziness can’t afford to be stretched any further. This makes a good eight glassfuls.
Pour the ingredients into a jug. Serve in small champagne flutes or wineglasses.
I usually make mozzarella and arugula crostini and salmon and fennel toasts to go with this. The savory Italian ingredients go well with the Campari, and the salmon recipe makes an expensive ingredient go a long way. Don’t buy the small mozzarella bocconcini, as the dry skins don’t stick as well to the toast.
1 buffalo mozzarella
1 handful arugula leaves, chopped
freshly squeezed lemon juice to taste
8 small slices sourdough bread, cut in half; toasted, and drizzled with olive oil
black pepper
Break up the mozzarella with your fingers and combine with the arugula and lemon juice. Press onto the toasts, put on a plate, and season with the pepper.
about 4 ounces wild salmon fillet
½ large fennel bulb, finely chopped
3 heaped tablespoons low-fat crème fraîche or yogurt
juice of ½ lemon
2 tablespoons chopped dill
8 small slices sourdough bread, cut in half and toasted
black pepper
Poach the salmon fillet by putting it with a little milk on a plate above a pan of boiling water and covering with a dish until cooked through. Leave to cool. Break up the fish and mix with the fennel, crème fraîche, lemon juice, and half of the dill. Spread the salmon mixture on the toast, sprinkle with the remaining dill, and season with the pepper.
A tinge of pear skin and the feathery lightness of a snowflake just about to melt: this is how a glass of prosecco ought to taste. It might sparkle, and it might be wine, but it has nothing to do with the ritzy, sit-up-straight expectation of champagne. It has been damned for years as poor man’s fizz, and I can see exactly why, because if you take a mouthful anticipating blowsy warmth and brioche, and fall flat into prosecco’s lagoon coolness, it will inevitably disappoint. Yet as a pick-me-up (especially if you choose one with a hint of off-dryness—a little sugar can be very restorative; few people realize how much a tired person craves it), or as an effortlessly glamorous way to fall into the evening, it is impeccable.
Prosecco is the name of both the grape and the wine. Unlike champagne, it will not improve with age and should be drunk in its first flush of youth while its light florality and easy step are still engaging. The good stuff—which accounts for about 40 percent of the prosecco in Italy—is made in the DOC region of Prosecco di Conegliano-Valdobbiadene in the Veneto, in northeast Italy, which is why you see people swigging it in just about every bar and restaurant in Venice.
I can precisely remember the first glass that really gave me a sense of prosecco magic. It was made by Bisol, still one of my favorite producers, whose style is so airy it whispers through your mouth, and I drank it perched at a bar beside the Spanish Steps in Rome, with a plate of cured meats and bite-sized pieces of Italian cheese and a few slices of pear: perfection.
Antipasti are the thing to eat alongside prosecco. Usefully, if you are pressed for time, this requires no preparation, only shopping. Ideally you would have a few slices of proper prosciutto (not from a supermarket package), which I usually ask the delicatessen to cut more thickly than is typical to give it some chew, and lay these out on a small wooden chopping board, perhaps with a salami as well. Put a hunk of grainy Parmesan on a plate and let people cut off their own slices, and a bowl of olives won’t be amiss either. With a bit more time, you might slice some zucchini very thinly, lengthwise, and grill the strips on both sides so they are striped black, then dress with freshly squeezed lemon juice and olive oil.
My Italian reading group is keen on prosecco, and sometimes we drink it with an insalata caprese (or even a tricolore, which has avocado slices in it too)—just tear up a buffalo mozzarella, halve some cherry tomatoes or cut larger ones into wedges, arrange the lot on a plate, throw over some torn-up basil leaves, and drizzle with olive oil. We know each other well enough to mill around a kitchen with salad plates and forks or even just to eat messily with our fingers; in less casual company this is really more appropriate if you want to let the prosecco drinking bleed into dinner and sit down to eat the insalata as a starter. In that case, I’d probably follow up with a sturdy bowl of pasta, maybe penne with ragù or pasta all’arrabbiata with freshly grated pecorino, and a bottle of Tuscan red wine.
1 bottle prosecco
3 small or 2 large peaches
The birthplace of the Bellini is well known: it was first created in 1948 by Giuseppe Cipriani at Harry’s Bar, Venice, still one of the greatest bars in the world. What fewer people realize is that it was named after a Venetian Renaissance painter, Giovanni Bellini, whose work was exhibited in the city that year, as a tribute to the tender shades of skin found in his paintings (one of which, Agony in the Garden, is in the National Gallery in London if you want to examine it for yourself).
The drink is nothing less than sublime: a mixture of one-third white peach puree (made by peeling, stoning, coarsely chopping, then hand-blending fresh peaches) and two-thirds prosecco. Together these two ingredients are heaven itself, but, as with so many marriages that work, no substitutions may be accepted. Or at least almost no substitutions.
Harry’s Bar uses white peaches—for this reason the drink used to be available only from June to September. Yellow peaches are fine, though more fruity and less intoxicatingly perfumed. If you are even considering using canned, then go throw yourself in a canal. Sometimes when you ask for a Bellini in a bar, it is made using peach nectar, or even peach liqueur. I hardly need say this will not be worth drinking and should not be repeated at home; when ordering a Bellini, you should always ask how it will be made before committing. Peach puree freezes well, so you can make a stock and keep it so as to enjoy Bellinis outside the prime peach season.
Put the drink together by pouring a little prosecco into the flutes (this helps the peach not stick to the glass); carefully spoon the puree in, and then top with prosecco, which you will need to pour very slowly down the side as it froths up when it hits the peach. Stir to combine, and then drink.
Apart from using them as egg cups, it has always been hard to know what to do with the shot glasses I was given as a birthday present after leaving the university. It’s not that we didn’t drink neat vodka back then—just that a shot glass was never big enough. And when I got older I graduated to martinis instead, which was the same thing as an extra-large vodka shot, but in a more expensive glass. So the shot glasses stayed at the back of the cupboard, moving house a couple of times without being used, until I went on a wine-tasting trip to Chile. In a relaxed little restaurant in the port of Valparaiso, where brightly painted houses cling and cluster on the vertiginous sea front, we were given the most perfect of amuse-bouches—a plate of crushed ice and on it a single oyster, half a lime, and a shot glass full of shivery sauvignon blanc, whose acidity and citric shock was a brilliant knock-back for the oysters. It didn’t just taste good; it looked sensational too.
Now I borrow the template all the time, not least because it demands virtually no effort. It’s also a good way of getting around the question of white wine with a starter for those who really drink red—you know, the way it seems like such a good idea to have a glass of white to begin, which you then down practically in one so you can move on to red, and realize too late that you’ve overdone it.
I don’t eat oysters at home, but I like to serve crab with the shot glasses of sauvignon blanc—or another white grape with elbows, never anything oaked or expensive; see below for some suggestions. Just add a teaspoon or two of mayonnaise to a 4-ounce pot of crabmeat, squeeze in some lemon, chop in two spring onions, and serve in a small hillock with toast and the shot glass on the same plate. This works best with small portions; otherwise everyone wonders why you’re being stingy and not giving them a larger glass.
Sancerre—the very name glitters with promise—is so much more than just a wine. The most famous of the Loire sauvignons blancs, it comes with an aura attached, like champagne or Chablis. Ask for a glass of sibilant Sancerre and you don’t just get the liquid, alive with the smell of newly mown grass and tense with brain-rinsing acidity; you buy into the idea that you are sipping spring itself and rewarding yourself in the process. Sancerre has a flinty keenness and finesse that, it is true, is hard to find elsewhere, but perhaps a little trust in wines that have similar characteristics, as well as a willingness to experiment, is all that’s required to broaden your vinous horizons. There are many wines that, in theory at least, should please the Sancerre lover.
The most obvious, and safest, place to begin is with some of the other Loire alternatives made from the same grape: Pouilly-Fumé, Menetou Salon, Quincy, Reuilly, or even a cheaper Sauvignon de Touraine. New Zealand’s Marlborough is another source of excellent sauvignons blancs, though I never find their glowing pungency quite as satisfying. For value, South Africa is a good bet: here you find sauvignon blanc made in a style that is a halfway house between the rocky minerality of the Loire and the exuberance of New Zealand. As for Chile, for a long time I disliked the ripe, sweetly alcoholic style of sauvignon blanc so often made there, but you can now find some superb wines being made in cool-climate areas such as Leyda.
But it’s not enough, or it shouldn’t be enough, to be satisfied just with sauvignon blanc, when there are other grapes that have the same bracing appeal while offering something slightly different.
To begin at home, there is bacchus, a grape created in Germany in the 1930s that has taken hold in the vineyards of southern England. A good bacchus tastes of nettles, smells of hawthorn, tastes of crabapple and quince, is almost uncomfortably bony, and is nervy with acidity. If you were drinking bacchus, you would want to eat food from the same damp climate, with the same subtle, rain-on-fields undertones—a poached brook trout, for example, with homemade mayonnaise and a watercress salad.
Moving on to the European mainland, there’s a grape in Burgundy that is similarly austere. Aligote is a clean, sharp, virtually invisible-tasting thing that reminds me of needles and streaks down your throat so fast it barely touches the sides. I once drank aligote with the writer Polly Devlin when I went to Somerset to interview her about her wildflower meadow. We sat in her conservatory on Midsummer’s Eve, eating tomato, mozzarella and basil salad. “Isn’t this just the perfect wine for this sort of evening?” said Polly with obvious pleasure. It was.
If in Spain, the best place to look for Sancerre alternatives is Rueda, an area on the Duero River to the northwest of Madrid where they make crisp, green-tasting white wines from verdejo as well as sauvignon blanc, which are delicious with garlicky shrimp.
Cross over to the Mediterranean Sea and Liguria, the curl of Italian coast that corners from the French border into the bootleg, and you find another grape to try. Vermentino (known as “rolle” in the south of France) makes a lively, herbaceous, slightly bitter-edged white that is perfect with spaghetti and homemade pesto, a local specialty. Add a few pieces of boiled potato and some cooked green beans to the mixture for a more filling and authentic dinner.
Traveling east again, you reach the blue Aegean. Here, in the scorching heat of Santorini, in the volcanic soil around the island’s crater, they grow a grape called assyrtiko, which makes white wine that is heavily minerallic and so charged it almost feels as if it might explode in your mouth. It’s as clean and sharp as an axe-blade too; drink it with barbecued swordfish and a squeeze of lemon.
Just one more to try: grüner veltliner (pronounced “grooner felt-leaner”) from Austria. This is a relatively delicate wine, but it has a diamantine structure: precise, pure and clear, with a grapefruit undertone. The more expensive versions acquire a softer, spicier flavor too; young, cheap ones are usually leaner; both taste good with mild Thai food.
Ginger has long been prized for its medicinal properties, among them its efficiency at reducing nausea caused by seasickness, morning sickness, and chemotherapy. Poorly or not, a single paring of ginger root, sliced to the thickness of a penny (you don’t even need to peel it, provided you’re not using the end of the root), dropped in a cup, covered with boiling water, and left to stand until just cool enough to drink, is a great pep-up afternoon drink. I also like to add a squeeze of fresh lemon juice for acidity.
Citron pressé is proof that ritual vastly increases the amount of pleasure a drink gives. There are three ingredients here, and, if the fun is not to be spoiled, they must all be served separately. First, the juice of one lemon (two if they aren’t very juicy) must arrive at the table in a long, tall glass. Second, there must be a jug of cold water so the lemon can be diluted to the required strength. Third, there must be a bowl of sugar and a long metal spoon, or a carafe of homemade sugar syrup for sweetening. For some reason the separate arrival of these things, and the mixing and jangling as everyone measures out their drinks, make it taste so much better than if the same thing had been done in the kitchen. This is a drink with café connotations: it makes you think of sitting under the awnings of a French brasserie, and dawdling, and being on holiday, and these associations also increase the pleasure. Here is one odd thing, though: a friend’s pen pal claims that real French people rarely drink citron pressé. But then she also asked if it was true that British people always ate gelatin that had been set in rabbit molds and turned out on to a sheet of green gelatin grass. I was on the brink of protesting until I remembered that we had not one but two rabbit-shaped jelly molds at home. And that we always used them, which made me wonder if the French only think they don’t drink citron pressé. It’s a good thing to make when friends come over and no one quite feels like coffee or alcohol.
20 heads of elderflower juice and pared rind of 2 lemons
3 cups sugar
4¼ cups water
If you only read Richard Mabey’s entry for Sambucus nigra in his Flora Britannica, you might have second thoughts about drinking anything to do with it. “It is hard to understand,” he writes, “how this mangy, short-lived, opportunistic and foul-smelling shrub was once regarded as the most powerful of plants. … [it] is now widely regarded as little more than a jumped-up weed, a ragamuffin haunter of dung-heaps and drains.” Come, come, Richard, don’t equivocate.
It is true the elder can be pretty pungent; that is why its crushed leaves have traditionally been used as insecticides, to ward off grubs from precious plants, and as insect repellents, to perform the same task for humans. There is also an old association with the devil—traditionally elder wood was never thrown on the fire because burning it was said to conjure up Beelzebub himself. But its curative properties have been admired for centuries (it’s said to be good against a cold and even rheumatism); elder water is used as a skin cleanser; and the cordial made from its delicate, creamy flowers that grow in flat-topped heads sometimes as big as frying pans is utterly delicious.
The nonalcoholic drink, its taste reminiscent of drowsy hawthorn-hedgerows, seems to capture the very essence of idealized country life, filled with bluebell woods, church bells, and ducks swimming on the village pond. It can simply be diluted with water (still or sparkling), mixed with white wine or gin to make an alcoholic drink suitable for the backyard on a summer afternoon, or even put to work in the kitchen.
Elderflower cordial is now so popular in Britain—sales have more than tripled in the past decade or so—that it seems hard to believe it was not made on a commercial scale until the early 1980s. The availability of ready-made versions hasn’t stopped people from making their own. On the contrary, it has only inspired more springtime expeditions to gather the blossom that, depending on the year’s weather, and where you are, begins to appear in early May and is usually gone by mid-June.
The clusters of flowers are easy to spot: they grow in snowy drifts on bushes that can be up to 30 feet tall. If you are making cordial, it is necessary to be a little choosy because Mabey has a point when he calls the bush foul-smelling. “Some elderflowers can be really smelly,” says Richard Kelly, who was the first grower for Bottlegreen. “Particularly the ones that are cultivated for their berries. But some can smell lemony and really sweet. The variation from one plant to another, especially in the wild, is tremendous.”
The finished cordial will obviously bear the traits of the flowers you pick, so “Use your nose to select a bush,” advises Kelly. “And when you’ve done that, use your nose again. You don’t want to pick too early, when the flower is not quite open, or too late, when it’s begun to turn brown. The flower should look and smell creamy, and when you sniff it you should get some pollen on your nose. We always used to say that good pickers will have their face covered in pollen by the end of the day.”
It’s wise to pick from several bushes so as to build up layers of complexity from their different characteristics in the finished cordial. You should avoid harvesting on a wet day or immediately after heavy dew, when some of the flavor-carrying essential oils will have been washed away. And unless partial to the taste of traffic pollution, you should also steer away from elders growing by busy roads. I usually take a couple of trays with me rather than bags, the better to carry the flowers, undisturbed, back home.
The cordial is no more than an infusion of flowers, sweetened with sugar and given a bit of zip. Some use powdered citric acid for the zip. I prefer to get my zip from fresh lemons. If the elderflowers are small, then use more of them.
Trim the stems of the elderflowers back as far as you can—they will only make the drink taste stalky—and remove any obvious, large insects. Put the flowers in a large pan or jug with the lemon parings. Put the sugar and water in a large pan and heat gently until the sugar is dissolved. Bring to a boil and pour the syrup over the elderflowers. Allow to cool, add the lemon juice, steep for 6 hours, and then strain through a piece of cheesecloth into sterilized bottles or jars. Keep in the fridge. Depending on how well you sterilize the bottles, this will keep for around 4 weeks, or you can freeze it for later use.
Homemade elderflower cordial, which usually tastes more musky and more of hedgerows than the store-bought versions, is particularly suited to the bitterness of quinine. Use more cordial than you would if diluting with water, and serve over plenty of ice with a slice of lemon and sprig of borage from the garden. The astringency and wildness make it more of a sipper than a glugger.
When I first moved to London and lived with my cousin in a tiny attic flat in Willesden Green, we once had our grandmother and my mother to stay simultaneously. We couldn’t persuade Grandma that she wasn’t allowed to smoke anywhere on the tube (on outside platforms she would whip her mobile ashtray out of her handbag and before either of us could say “Silk Cut,” there would be a loudspeaker announcement asking her to stop), nor could we dissuade them from making pan-banging forays to the kitchen to make cups of tea at 4 A.M. I often used to find Mum in the kitchen drinking nighttime tea if I couldn’t sleep as a child. Sometimes it would be the ordinary stuff, but she also liked to pick lemon balm from the garden, bruise the wrinkled leaves in a mortar and pestle, then make a fresh tisane with boiling water. Lemon balm, or Melissa officinalis, is supposed to have soothing properties—it was used in the Middle Ages to reduce insomnia—and is also thought to ease digestion, so it makes sense to drink it at night. It’s also relaxing to have on a sunny afternoon and makes a refreshing alternative to mint.
Until recently, if mint tea was mentioned, it was Moroccan mint tea that sprang to mind—a viscous, tooth-dissolvingly sweet infusion of tea or green tea with mint, traditionally served in a silver pot with a curved spout and poured into tea glasses from a height. This is the stuff that has oiled countless carpet transactions in the souks of Moroccan medinas where, in the stinking heat, a shot of sugar is no bad thing. Over here, mint tea has come to mean something much simpler: nothing more than a few sprigs of mint put in a clean teapot with scalding water poured over and left for a couple of minutes before being poured into white china mugs. It’s what I order now when I go out for dinner and think I fancy another—inevitably fatal—glass of wine, because the truth is that by that stage in the evening I actually prefer the freshness of the mint tea to more alcohol, and it performs the same role of prolonging the night. It’s become so popular in Britain that waiters now seem to offer it with a knowing smile, almost as if they know how pleased you will be by the idea. At home I often drink it before going to bed or in the afternoon on a warm day as a means of getting more water down in a less boring manner. Some like to add a couple of teaspoons of honey to the pot, but I prefer it plain.
