The Aperitif Guy

About twice a year, my dining friends and I come together for a gala dinner. Each dinner is themed, usually around a time or place that has significantly shaped the way we eat. I'm currently exploring cuisines of the Americas, and the most recent dinner took us to the southern United States. The images in this post were taken at that dinner, and the content derives from my preparatory research. Southerners and Yankies alike will tell you the South is “different,” and it’s not just down to slavery, nostalgia or the accent. The French Crown established a port at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1718, a river that is navigable almost as far as modern Canada. Calling the port Nouvelle Orléans and their colony Acadie, they set about claiming land either side of the great river. At one point, French rule stretched in a huge crescent from the Gulf of Mexico to Quebec. That was not to last, though. The English colonists pushed them back, splitting the colony into its Louisiana and Quebec po...

I'd like to sup with my baby tonight, Refill the cup with my baby tonight, But I ain't up to my baby tonight 'Cause it's too darn hot! My phone tells me the current temperature is 29℃ outside. Like Cole Porter's chorus in Kiss Me Kate, I've no interest in cooking, dining or much else in this weather. In the summer months, I rely quite heavily on salads for my evening meals. An interesting salad can be thrown together with little thought and served cold as the day starts to cool, but there's no reason it shouldn't be part of an hospitable dinner, either. American hospitality is generous and welcoming. Virtually every dinner begins with a dish of salad, and their variety seems to know no bounds. Europeans may be surprised by the Southern and Mid-West delight in jello (fruit jelly) salads, but we still have much to learn from the inventiveness of our friends across the Atlantic and their ability to deliver freshness, punchy flavours and lively colours time ...

The Beloved and I sat up watching the BAFTAs last evening, and next weekend we can look forward to the glamour and excitement of the Oscar award ceremony. It got me thinking about drinks to celebrate films and film actors. One of my oldest and dearest friends, Kath, is an avid film fan. Avid, as in obsessed and indiscriminate. She seems to know everything there is to know about every obscure film and has an encyclopedic knowledge of Oscar statistics. She’s also a cocktail fan. Over the years, we’ve tried old cocktails together, invented new ones, compared variations and generally done untold damage to a pair of no-longer-young livers. A conversation with Kath gave rise to the following ideas. It's too easy to name the vodka martini as the film cocktail. However, Bond ordered a variation on the martini in Fleming’s original James Bond novel, Casino Royale, something he would never do on film until Daniel Craig took the role. In his variant, Bond calls for a mixture of vodka wit...

We often think of the 1920s as the heyday of cocktail drinking. This is partly because the prohibition of the manufacture, sale and possession of alcohol in the USA, from 1917 to 1933, drove many wealthy Americans to seek refreshment in the hotels and restaurants of the European capitals. The strength of mixed drinks, and their endless variations of flavour and colour, seemed to fit with the mood of cities rediscovering joy after the horrors of the Great War. The leisured classes relished the fun and frivolity of cocktails and could afford to patronise bars that employed expert cocktail waiters, who were starting to be feted as celebrities.  That's not where cocktails began, though. The earliest known evidence of the word being used to refer to alcohol comes from the Balance and Columbian Repository , a New York newspaper, when the editor answered the question "What is a cocktail?" thus:      "Cock-tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any...

This week marked 243 years since the English-speaking colonists on the American continent declared themselves independent of the British crown and organised themselves into a new nation. Whichever side of the Atlantic we live (or the Pacific, for that matter), whatever our tastes in cinema or music, whatever we think of this or that figure in American politics, culture or history, we still have much to admire in the USA, with its high, founding ideals of individual liberty, just government and responsible citizenship. For those of us with a taste for mixed drinks, July is a time to raise a toast to the United States for the gift of the cocktail. There is evidence from as far back as 1806 of mixed drinks being called "cocktails," and an answer in a newspaper column to a request for a definition of the word gives a recipe for a spirit mixed with sugar, water and Angostura bitters. That seems to have fallen out of favour for a while, and by the 1860s, bars were selling Dut...