“Going somewhere for dinner? Oh yes. It’s quite good there. Have to wait a while for your drink though.”
Parched guests have resorted to ask kitchen staff for a glass of water to wet the waiting whistle. Far better then, to be handed a drink – even one perhaps not precisely to your taste – when first entering someone’s home, rather than remain thirsty, while the busy host meets and greets. For who can be hospitable and never sidetracked? Multiple distractions divert the kindly host; he waves arms to direct better parking, he pauses to remember children’s names, he waits politely for an elderly guest’s decision on whether to hang the stick and carry the cardigan, or vice versa…
A delicious answer to this dilemma is to have drinks ready for the first footfall; imagine how welcome the sight of a jug of classic Pimm’s, complete with strawberries cucumber and mint garnish, dewy with condensation, clinking temptingly on a summer’s day? Or how pleasant a reception and genial a home would seem as cups are handed out, full of hot spiced punch, served with a smile, garnished with a twist of fragrant orange rind, as guests come in from the cold?
During the USA prohibition years in the 1920’s, illegal and hastily made raw spirits were so appalling that the taste had to be disguised with fruit, herbs, egg whites, spices, cream and often well laced with sugar syrup to render them more palatable.
Hence the birth of the cocktail – a clever concoction combining various fruit, spirits, sugar, spices; the list goes on and on.
And isn’t it part of the fun, when requesting a cocktail with a ridiculous name, to hear the bartender solemnly repeat it ?
“A Rusty Nail? Certainly. Coming up! ”
