Covid-19 has changed so many things, even simple rituals
The weekend nights are ours, but what lights anticipation’s fires? Those weekdays leading up. Maybe it’s denial, or restriction, or absence that sparks love’s thirst. But leave all that psychology or philosophy behind — think instead of fervid yearning, and think after that of yearning fulfilled.
And then think further: I’m not talking about my mad craving for my wife, or my girlfriend, or a fiery crush.
I’m talking about cocktails during the pandemic, a love so, so modern. Even in the Before Times, my girlfriend — I’m a polyamorist, I share cocktail love with sweet Alice — and I designated Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings at five our cocktail hour. But amid Covid-19, those moments of the besotted pledge have become all the more precious, all the more a thing to cherish, to protect. Perhaps to reinvent.
“Have you put the glasses in?” is the Friday afternoon refrain, where one of us ensures the other sets up the ritual stemware chill. You can’t comfortably cozy up in many bars these days, so you must prepare the hearth (and chill the glasses) at home. And yes, the anticipation is a delight, but the full preparatory process — glass selection, booze selection, the mix, the pour — is both responsibility and art, even if the twain is never thought to meet. But handling a high-proof hootch must be both ritual and fresh incantation.
Because we’re not going out or traveling, we can afford to buy pricier spirits and more esoteric ones. They make the cocktail chessboard open to more moves. We sit and sip in our Santa Cruz County home, and wonder about the world outside. The last time I walked up Haight (where I lived, upper and lower, years ago), the great bars where I lifted happy glasses were still closed.
But the Alembic, where I had my first great Sazerac, has risen again. As has Zam Zam, where I was one of the lucky ones not to be kicked out by the late, great Bruno Mooshei, whose scrutiny over your martini-ordering practices was precise, and judgment swift. And the Gold Cane, striding again, one of those dives that wears a top hat, if a frayed one.
Maybe you saw that drone footage sweeping down Market Street some months back, where nary a Muni, car, or pedestrian stirred. That would have been great for the days when I rode my bike downtown, but man, it was unsettling to view.
For now, the home bar’s cups runneth over. We’ve tried wonderful — and sometimes neck-snappingly bracing — amaros. We’ve learned that tiny splashes of bitters can add depth and balance to the sweet, the sour, the high-horsepower spirited. You can’t just make a lowly screwdriver and say you’re done, or pop one of those bro-backslaps of an infused seltzer. Those aren’t cocktails — those are alcohol-laden tedium.
Making and mixing is alchemy, though the goal is not gold, but a wash of heady bliss. I did enjoy playing with a chemistry set as a child, making smelly plastic-like substances out of molten sulfur. But getting out the jigger, the mixing glass, the strainer, the bar spoon and plying them in the production of a tasty tipple: that’s an improvement on stinky sulfur anytime.
And then there are the aesthetics of cocktail beauty: the shape of a nice coupe or martini glass, the beads of condensation on the bowl, the inner glimmer of the spirits in tango. There’s something lovely in the light shining through a classic cocktail, like the tawny glow through one of the old New Orleans stalwarts, a Sazerac or a Vieux Carré. Beautiful.
There’s more for the senses, of course. Take a sharp, spicy inhale of good rye on the rocks, smell the forest botanicals in a stiff gin and tonic, snake out the fragrance in a complex tot that whirls spirits in a weave. Your palate encourages your nose and mouth to taste the forward pass of the drink, its middle-ground motion, and its often-lingering goal-line finish. If it isn’t love, it’s at least infatuation.
Yes, extend these encounters and they can leave you woozy. But the staunch civility of the weekend cocktail doesn’t encourage frat-house frenzy. Nay, Alice and I always clink the glasses, toast to each other’s health, and sip away, less a carousing than slipping into a snug cocoon. These are Goldilocks moments, not too strong, not too weak, not too bitter, not too sweet.
Occasionally one of these genial quaffs can make one tilt a bit because I often tamper with recipes by adding double-dosage of the main spirit (I do like to make it clear to my tongue what I’m drinking), but after all, nobody’s driving here. Oftentimes I’m dizzier with delight at the finesse of the drink, more than the ethanol.
Although sometimes I congratulate myself on making something with depth and balance — and then I notice that my feet are doing an angled, involuntary two-step shuffle when I go back to the kitchen.
A while back Stanley Tucci created a stir by making a video of himself mixing a Negroni at home during these virus times. He made what looked like a lively tipple, but I think people were appreciating his tight black t-shirt as much as his double-shot of gin. But that Negroni vid prompted James Corden to request Stanley to make martinis with him by video simultaneously, and though their spritely conversation was engaging, they made their martinis with vodka, which as any sane person knows, is not a martini.
Gin wins, my friends.
(Speaking of Zooming, just seeing the cocktail shaker in PBS’s Lisa Desjardins’ home cabinet while she does at-home news-hour broadcasts made me swoon. Lisa, you are one of us. Never would you foul a martini with vodka. What are you pouring?)
Weekend cocktails are all-weather lovers. During the sunny months, Alice and I venture to the deck, glasses in tow. We drink with the hummingbirds, who seek their own nectars in the twining passionflowers on the trellis above. In the cool, low-light months, it’s the whiskey that warms our personal hearths. But now that the virus has remained like a foul old neighbor who won’t go away, our quarantinis seem to have less of their inner glow.
Over the past seven or eight years, Alice and I have spent one or two months house-sitting in interesting places. The Bahamas, Panama, the Caribbean, Mexico, Hawaii times two. At our last housesit, which seems a generation ago, we lived for six weeks in Cotacachi, a small town at 8,000 feet in Ecuador’s Andes. We brought plastic chairs up from the yard to the rooftop deck at cocktail hour, where if we looked up in one direction, we’d see Mt. Imbabura, an old volcano, whose fertile slopes are tilled halfway up the mountain. Looking up the other direction we could see Mt. Cotacachi, its venerable volcanic neighbor.
The weather on the mountains was wonderfully dynamic: sometimes snow-capped, sometimes host to whirling clouds, sometimes bright with sun. Someone in town told us the mountains were ancient lovers, that Imbabura had fought another nearby mountain for Cotacachi’s hand, later taking her as his wife. We always toasted those mountains; they had a sympathetic presence.
Mountains seem to be comfortable with time. Time, which has always confused me, is more slippery yet. Our Ecuador, and all our travels to such striking places, are now relegated to “remember when” reminiscing.
We do remember, but yet not because memory is spotty and even our photographs don’t carry the direct taste of place. This past year is an accordion of time’s compression and languor.
In all those housesits, we had our weekend evening cocktails (and sometimes, with the laxity that travel affords, those wandered into the weekdays as well) and our toasts to our good fortunes. No matter the clime, Alice often toasts me with a “To our love,” often said in a comical voice, the “love” coming out as “luff,” as though Madeline Kahn might have been raising the glass. In all those times, we’ve toasted to things happy and sad.
But those travel days seem both literally and psychologically so far away, stopped by virus barriers, virus fences, virus mountains. We go miles in our minds, but the plane never lands. This is a plane that has no entrance or exit. There are bitters that balance and bitters that are just bitters.
I’m wistful that pandemic cocktail weekends seem to have blended into a blur; I worry that Alice and I are repeating ourselves with our toasts, and our tastes. (Though she loves Brussels sprouts and beets too, so I can’t fully defend her tastes.) I miss setting up the bar for parties of four and six, miss the casualness of a cheery cocktail and a hug from friends at the drink’s end.
Over the past summer, I made a few Summer’s End cocktails. You can find variant recipes in every drinker’s desk drawer, but the one I favor (and that I altered because I’m that way) has Irish whiskey rather than Scotch, with equal parts rum, rather than the suggested half-measure of that genial spirit. I was first attracted to the cocktail because of its fetching name, which has a mood.
Henry James said, “Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me, those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” A fine argument, and thus shouldn’t “Summer’s End” be the most poignant words?
Virus days have stretched endlessly on, and too many days have felt like summer’s end. So many losses.
I still eagerly — sometimes embarrassingly so — await our weekend cocktails. But I fear they have taken on a kind of medicinal or corrective tack, losing some of their light-heartedness to a defensive raising of the palms, and the glasses. Saints — and spirits — protect us.
Raising a glass to days without masks and nights where the clink of glasses is free and easy. Summer’s coming.
To our love. To our luff. To our love.
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