We asked our writers to write about their favourite cocktails, from aperitifs to nightcaps, all the way through to the hangover cures. Here’s what they said.
Matthew Parris
The Iron Lady
For years in the 1980s I tried to develop a cocktail to be called the Iron Lady. There were problems: the signifier for iron is really red, while she was clearly blue; and the only blue liqueur I could find was Blue Curaçao. My final prototype consisted in vodka and Blue Curaçao, with a cube of ice impaled by a steel nail (freeze with nail in place, or heat the nail and push it through). It was OK — but the Curaçao was so sweet that you could only use a little, and the whole thing lacked the kick or bite that I think she would have wanted. I feel this is still work-in-progress and would welcome readers’ own proposals. The other way forward is, I suppose, a Bloody Margaret, but she wasn’t a tomato-juice or Tabasco person, and — outside the territories of the Masai — real cattle blood for drinking is hard to procure.
Sam Leith
Martini
I started drinking gin martinis as an affectation. I was stationed in New York as a reporter in 2002 and, intoxicated with the city, wanted to become intoxicated with the city’s drink. I was thinking lunch at the Algonquin.
What began as an affectation became a love affair. ‘Up. Twist.’ Never olives, whose greasy salinity — to my palate — ruins the whole thing. I drank them at Madame X on Houston, Angel’s Share on St Mark’s Place and — especially — Grace on Franklin Street between West Broadway and Church, where they emerged from the gloaming by the long mahogany bar in brimming glasses with tiny ice-crystals bobbing on the surface like the aftermath of a climate-change catastrophe.
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