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About Booze
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 FIRST OF ALL, you can't make chicken whisky (three drinks and you lay) taste like Grand-dad or Old Taylor, and that goes for gin, scotch, brandy, or any liqueur. If you're going to serve drinks, make them out of the best ingredients you can find -- and you won't find them at chiseling cut-rate liquor stores.
It kills me to write this, yet I love it because chiselers are such knuckleheads. I'll never forget a cocktail party I attended some years ago. The hostess was making the drinks and I was having a stinking time so I asked her if I could tend bar while she mingled with the guests. Noo, noo, noo, she'd make the drinks, but between the phone, the kitchen, and the doorbell, nobody was getting any drinks. So I asked a second time if I might make the drinks. I even asked it pretty-like. Noo, noo, noo, she'd make the drinks. Finally, while she was out of the room, I started to give the customers a break and wham! Do I get complaints!
Now I'm an old saloonkeeper, and I know a bottle of scotch from a bottle of bourbon any day, but I'm getting complaints! The bourbon was scotch, the scotch was bourbon, and the hostess was dancing first on one leg and then on the other. Well, it took me about five minutes to get it straight. She had one botle of straight Ballantine's and several bottles of Black and White which were refilled from a gallon of cheap booze that was also being poured into Grand-dad bottles, brandy bottles, and what have you.
If the hostess thought that you knew your liquor you got the real McCoy;
if she thought you didn't you got the refills. She must have saved all of
$7.89 on the whole damned deal, but what a reputation she reaped for just
plain cheap chiseling. When your bak roll deflates to the point where seven
or eight bucks looks that important, forget cocktails and roll out the barrel.
Far better to have good beer and pretzels aplenty than to fourflush with
quantities of cheap liquor.
But to get back to good ingredients. A great deal of care should be taken
in selecting a small cellar of choice liqueurs, whiskies, rums and brandies.
These should be bought with particular regard to brands. As you thumb through
recipe books you'll find that most of the cocktails are just a blend of
certain various liquors, and you can build your cellar around the most popular
items used in cocktail making, along with your own pretty bottles on which
everyone prides himself.
I say a small cellar because what if you get yourself a cellarful of stuff?
The main reason for having a lot of liquor is to show off and when you show
off the first thing you know you're laying yourself wide open for that after-hours
visitor with half a can on who just drops in for a nightcap; that Sunday
morning visitor and the guy who comes over to borrow or return something
and is good for half a bottle before he leaves. It's pretty easy to acquire
a museum of junkeroo too -- bottle after bottle of stuff that nobody cares
for and is never used in any known cocktail.
As for equipment, I get the pip when I see some of the junk my friends have to fight in making drinks. Of course I know how Christmas is and how corny some of the crap is that you have to put out on your bar in deference to kind but misguided friends. The best way is to catalogue the Christmas junk and bring out the right item when the donor comes over to hoist a few with you. Bear in mind that it's the technique and the liquor -- not the equipment -- that makes good drinks. |
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All text taken from
Trader Vic's Book of Food and Drink
by Trader Vic
Drawings by William F. M. Kay
(originally published 1946 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.)
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