A swell-egant, elegant party
Mar. 4th, 2007 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustOn Saturday Valerie Laws teamed up with a fellow cocktail enthusiast to hold a party. And since one entertainment is not enough, in addition to the cocktails, there was a quiz, and a lunar eclipse. This being the nature of cocktails, the party became a mixture of these things in various combinations, with good food and good company added.
Valerie's co-host, David, is a birder, and approaches cocktails in much the same spirit: he has a book which lists all the drinks, both the cocktails themselves and their constituent spirits, and their habitats and identifying characteristics - and as he observes them, he ticks them off his list. So we were organised, and had lists of possible cocktails, and people kept vanishing into the kitchen and reappearing with ever more exotically coloured specimens - jewelled greens, red and gold sunsets, toxic blues that glowed in the low light, pearly greens...
Beyond the kitchen was the garden, and a clear night, so it was easy to keep tabs on the progress of the moon: when the first smudged fingerprint obscured its edge, when the shadow across its face was unmistakably an arc, when the moon's light was reduced enough that the dim glow of the shadow was visible, when - and by now we were all outside, and this stage seemed to go on forever - the last sliver of silver was gradually eaten away. Finally the eclipse was declared complete, and we trooped back indoors to toast her return with a cocktail called a Blood Moon (chocolate and orange, apparently: it tasted to me of the cherry chocolate liqueurs that used to appear at Christmas).
The traditional warning is that cocktails are lethal because the fruit juices mask the strong spirits; I don't have this problem, because I enjoy them as I enjoy sweets: very much, but in limited quantities. I suspect this comparative sobriety was a handicap in the quiz. A consortium of poets settled down to answer such questions as "Sitting in the pub with friends by the sea, I imagined a cocktail to be called A Shag on a Sharp Rock; what might it be made of?" and "Name some books with cocktails in the titles", and reeled off long lists of suggestions: my best offer was The Master and the Margarita. Later, I came up with Tequila Mockingbird, which seemed altogether more appropriate.
Valerie's co-host, David, is a birder, and approaches cocktails in much the same spirit: he has a book which lists all the drinks, both the cocktails themselves and their constituent spirits, and their habitats and identifying characteristics - and as he observes them, he ticks them off his list. So we were organised, and had lists of possible cocktails, and people kept vanishing into the kitchen and reappearing with ever more exotically coloured specimens - jewelled greens, red and gold sunsets, toxic blues that glowed in the low light, pearly greens...
Beyond the kitchen was the garden, and a clear night, so it was easy to keep tabs on the progress of the moon: when the first smudged fingerprint obscured its edge, when the shadow across its face was unmistakably an arc, when the moon's light was reduced enough that the dim glow of the shadow was visible, when - and by now we were all outside, and this stage seemed to go on forever - the last sliver of silver was gradually eaten away. Finally the eclipse was declared complete, and we trooped back indoors to toast her return with a cocktail called a Blood Moon (chocolate and orange, apparently: it tasted to me of the cherry chocolate liqueurs that used to appear at Christmas).
The traditional warning is that cocktails are lethal because the fruit juices mask the strong spirits; I don't have this problem, because I enjoy them as I enjoy sweets: very much, but in limited quantities. I suspect this comparative sobriety was a handicap in the quiz. A consortium of poets settled down to answer such questions as "Sitting in the pub with friends by the sea, I imagined a cocktail to be called A Shag on a Sharp Rock; what might it be made of?" and "Name some books with cocktails in the titles", and reeled off long lists of suggestions: my best offer was The Master and the Margarita. Later, I came up with Tequila Mockingbird, which seemed altogether more appropriate.
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Date: 2007-03-04 10:43 pm (UTC)You are awesome.
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Date: 2007-03-05 10:43 am (UTC)