Cooking with Booze: The Blog

I told him that I had had a late night, drinking after the ball with some charming Norwegians, and felt a little shaken. He then made me this drink, which I commend to anyone in need of a wholesome and easily accessibly pick-me-up. he took a large tablet of beet sugar (an equivalent quantity of ordinary lump sugar does equally well) and soaked it in Angostura Bitters and then rolled it in Cayenne pepper. This he put into a large glass which he filled up with champagne. The excellences of this drink defy description. The sugar and Angostura enrich the wine and take away that slight acidity which renders even the best champagne slightly repugnant in the early morning. Each bubble as it rises to the surface carries with it a red grain of pepper, so that as one drinks one’s appetite is at once stimulated and gratified, heat and cold, fire and liquid, contending on one’s palate and alternating in the mastery of one’s sensations. I sipped this almost unendurably desirable drink and played with the artificial birds and musical boxes until Alastair was ready to come out.

According to the author of this blog, this drink, from Waugh’s collected travel writings When the Going was Good, is better in the reading than the drinking. Nevertheless, I think it has inspired me to keep an eye out for other tonics and suggested cures - always an excellent source for folk recipes and Grandmothers’ specials.

You should read the rest of the post for a reminder of Jeeves’ famous bracer, and another Waugh-related tip from Kingsley Amis.

I’m a day late for St Paddy’s Day, when I should have been recommending such delights as Stout and Spicy Pasta and Irish Whiskey Soda Bread to toast the old snake-charmer, but instead I’m going to advise you to soothe your battered liver with these tasty-looking Guinness Cupcakes. Omnomnom! (Ta, Cookie!)

Fanny Hill’s Cook Book (Odyssey, 1970) by Lionel H. Braun and William Adams, with illustrations by the peerless Brian Forbes, is a little treasure trove of fun recipes and deeply dubious double-entendres. I picked it up recently on a hunt for alternative cookbooks - I got another along similar lines as well, which I’ll post shortly.

Highlights include ‘Whores d’Oeuvres’, ‘Hot Bitch in a Blanket’ (with suitably Marianne Faithfull-esque illustration), ‘Fellatio Mignon’, and such gems of the cookery writer’s art as “Remove your balls as soon as they begin to puff up and turn brown. Drain your balls and pop them in the mouth of a deserving guest.”

I am, I must say, somewhat dubious of the quality of the recipes, and the tenuous links with the deservedly famous Ms Hill herself, but this is entirely secondary to the quality of the copy and the illustrations. I’m a sucker for sensuous cookery. I might have to scan the whole thing.

If anyone has any recommendations for cookbooks in a similar vein, I’d love to hear them. I think this might be the start of a new obsession.