The Lost Art Of Looking At Your Goddamn Bookshelf

Another deep dive into the bookshelf. I didn’t know we had some of this stuff. Tonight, David A. Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, which I only started to skim through. It’s not a paint-by-numbers recipe book, I’ll tell you that much. It seems awesome (in the true Grand Canyon sense of the word) and complete and not unlike the opener to Kung Fu, where pebble-snatching David Carradine is getting hipped to karate or whatnot. There are recipes in it, but they’re rough and told in “parts,” as in one part gin to one part chocolate sauce to two parts rubbing alcohol. It seems brilliant. And not just because it’s not shy about saying, “substitute this for that and you get these” — in other words, where some of the newer cocktail books like to pimp “[name brand] bitter” and “[specific expensive] small-batch bourbon” this one just says “1 part Italian vermouth.”

I found the Sweet and Lovely (page 274), which was .5 part maraschino, .5 part grenadine, 2 parts lime juice, 3 parts gin and 5 parts Applejack. It was balanced and, er, lovely, and completely hidden on the 274th page of this crazy book. More later.