Continuing the countdown of Hemingway cocktails in Philip Greene's To Have and Have Another, this week's featured drink is whiskey and soda, which may not seem too exciting but was a staple for the writer and a good everyday drink for yours truly.
As whiskey aficionados seek to outdo each other in finding obscure single malts and Johnny Walker continues to add new colored labels, workaday blended Scotches appear old-fashioned, especially mixed with ice and soda. But it still works and for this countdown I retrieved the bottle of Dewar's White Label, mentioned by Greene as one of Hemingway's favorites, from the back of my cupboard and had one, then another.
When I first turned of drinking age (a youthful 18 in those days), I was told that if you drink Scotch, you should drink a good one, and if you drink a good Scotch, you shouldn't sully it with anything other than a splash of water. So I was surprised sitting on one of my early transatlantic flights when a young Scot sitting next me ordered some ginger ale with his Scotch. "Surprised?" he said, shaking his head. "Americans think you should never mix anything with Scotch but we think it tastes good with ginger ale." I tried it, and it did taste good, but I can't say it changed my thinking or my drinking habits (in fact I rarely drink ginger ale at all).
The short story mentioned in this chapter is "Night Before Battle," set again in Chicote's bar in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, when the narrator meets a tank commander who's convinced he will die in the next day's battle. It's an interesting story, and has this great line about drinking (NOT quoted by Greene), as the narrator mulls over his day's effort to film a battle: "When things are all right and it is you that is feeling low a drink can make you feel better. But when things are really bad and you are all right, a drink just makes it clearer." Needless to say, he concluded that the latter applied to this particular day.
No comments:
Post a Comment