The Cocktail for the Absolute Worst Day of Your Life
Need I Say More?
“Susie,” you ask, “How do I know today, of all days, is the day, the penultimate worst day of my life?”
You don’t have to be certain. It’s impossible to know the bottom. It’s an adventure.
You only require one crie de couer to set you in a tailspin. Betrayal, rejection, nausea. Contempt. Any day’s shocker is a potential candidate.
Got it?
There will be more than one wrecking day in the citizen’s life. We will shake our fist at the dark heavens. One’s self-care crumples like a paper bag.
What is the cure?
Some old-timers (okay, me) advise the short-lived yet pungent solution of a cocktail.
Which one?
Let me describe a legacy gin brew, employed by hapless British navy seaman in the mid-19th century. They could tell you a thing or two about a bad day.
“Worst day” concoctions are inevitably strong. But c’mon, we aren’t talking about rubbing alcohol. A “End Times” cocktail must taste incredible and, it needs to be BITTER. Insolent, even.
Welcome to “The Pink Gin,” if you are not already acquainted.
The Pink Gin remedy is a cocktail, not a brand. It’s a recipe you make yourself: 2 ingredients. You can do it while you weep.
Intriguingly, one of Pink Gin’s first proponents was author Charles Dickens. Dickens had a string remarkable descendants, and one of them, great-grandson Cedric Dickens, wrote about the old man’s original recipe.
In his 1980 biography/pub crawl, Drinking with Dickens, Cedric describes his recipe for ‘Burnt Pink Gin’.
Pour the gin into a wine glass and burn the Angostura in a teaspoon by heating over flame.
When well burning, let it fall into the gin.
Add cold water to taste.
Another one of my favorite Dickens’ descendants is actor Harold Lloyd, Charles’ great-great-great-grandson.
You know him, I venture! He played the villainous brother Viserys in The Game of Thrones, whom you’ll remember had a VERY VERY BAD DAY.
Maybe even worse than yours.
You shall have a golden crown
That men shall tremble to behold
To hear Lloyd’s range, listen to him narrate Great Expectations, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, in audio. What a treat.
The Pink Gin Recipe - Strictness Counts
Here are the ratios and rules of The Pink Gin beverage:
Into a shaker with ice:
3 oz. Plymouth or Old Tom gin— cold from the freezer is best
6 very healthy dashes of Angostura bitters
Shake hard— muscle the dilution.
The chemistry of this simple blend is amazing. As Ted Haigh pointed out, people who neither like gin nor bitters, fall in love with THIS.
Pour neatly in a martini glass.
On a bad day, I have not lit my bitters over the fire as Dickens suggested— I’ve poured the whole thing cold and fast. It was delicious.
The gin, however, does make a difference — the two I listed are “sweeter” Victorian gins.
You won’t go wrong if you stick with the British gins, who sometimes called this same drink the Gin Pajit, a nickname from the Raj era. It signals an Imperial dissolution.
From The Book of Gin, by Richard Barnett:
Peychaud’s bitters were sold around the world, but British drinkers tended to prefer the bitters developed by a German doctor, Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert.
In the early 182os Siegert went to South America to serve in Simón Bolívar’s revolutionary army, and settled in the Venezuelan river-port of Angostura (now Ciu-dad Bolívar).
. . . he devised a new recipe for bitters, and marketed it as a treatment for seasickness amongst the crowds of foreign sailors in the city.
By 1830, he had made enough money to set up a factory, and the officers of Royal Navy ships visiting Angostura took up Siegert’s tonic with great enthusiasm.
The Pink Gin was originally served at room temperature, though most bars now serve it shaken over ice.
For abstainers there is a long version, The Campbell, made with lemonade standing in for the gin.
Officials in the Indian Civil Service spiced the drink up by adding onions pickled with chili—a “Gin Piaj”— and in colonial Malaya, where stomachs seem to have required more soothing, the “Gin Pahit” upped the quantity of bitters from a dash to one part in three.
The Pahit appears in the early short stories of W. Somerset Maugham, where it becomes one of the fixtures of colonial life . . .”
Somerset Maugham
“The P.&O.”
Maugham writes prolifically about Pink Gin in Southeast Asia. Here, he refers to a “gin sling”— one of his synonyms for the Pink.
Ian Fleming
The Man With the Golden Gun
Fleming was quite the gastronome. In addition to creating the Vesper martini, (shaken not stirred) he included a fudge recipe in his children’s book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
John Le Carré
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
No one imbued a character with a cocktail’s legend as Le Carré wrote with his newspaperman Jerry Westerby, whom George Smiley seduces into admitting a shameful secret.
Patrick Hamilton
Slaves of Solitude
Here, the drink is referred to as a “gin and french.”
Graham Greene
The Heart of the Matter
Greene has drinks named after him, much like Ernest Hemingway. A gin man of the dying Empire. Here, we have two lovers quarreling over the cocktail cart:
“‘What about you, darling?’
He turned quickly away from her and began to fix two more Pink Gins.
There was a tacit understanding between them that “liquor helped;”growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.
“You don’t really want to know about me.”
“Of course I do, darling. What sort of a day have you had?”
“‘Ticki, why are you such a coward? Why don’t you tell me it’s all off?”
He grinned miserably at his glass, twisting it round and round to let the Angostura cling along the curve.
Raise the Titanic
Alec Guiness orders “Two pink gins, full measure and don’t skimp on the Angostura.”
That’s what the Titanic will do to you.
Agatha Christie
In Agatha Christie‘s television show Poirot, the episode Triangle at Rhodes, our characters drink multiple Pink Gin’s, one of which contains a deadly poison.
Would that it were so simple!
“What About Me?— I’m Sober.”
Get thee to a creamery.
Order a Foster Freeze half-and-half soft-serve ice cream cone dipped in chocolate. The first one’s on me!
BTW, any kind of sudden temperature change will inevitably change your frame of bad mind. I’ve been known to stick my head under a faucet.
Hold Up; I’m California Sober!
When you find yourself laughing, that’s the first bend in the road.
Books and Music
When I was a young mom, I enjoyed reading a book aloud to kindergartners called Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
Our antihero Alexander wakes up with gum in his hair and the following hours go downhill from there. It’s very cheering!
I want to run away with Alexander. I don’t have to corrupt him with Pink Gin— I just need a comrade with his quick wit, and I think we could turn a corner. That, and an apropos song!
Here’s to blue skies . . .
Jean Rhys used to drink hers with sweet vermouth. I make it and add a lemon twist and call it a Jean Rhys.
It was the best of drinks. It was the worst of drinks.