The Hemingway Cookbook (32 page)

Izzarra

In Bayonne, France, after the madness of the Fiesta, Jake Barnes enjoys the pleasure of eating and drinking alone. Afterward, “the waiter recommended a Basque liqueur called Izzarra. He brought in the bottle and poured a liqueur-glass full. He said Izzarra was made of the flowers of the Pyrenees … It looked like hair-oil and smelled like Italian strega. I told him to take the flowers of the Pyrenees away.”
³⁰

It is interesting that the French waiter should offer Jake Izzarra, the Basque version of Chartreuse, which is made right there in Bayonne. Perhaps it is an indication of how persistent the specter of Spain will be for Jake. He shakes it off, though, rejecting the Izzarra in favor of the veritable French marc (see page
189
). There are two types of Izzarra, green and yellow. We could presume that Jake (and Ernest) sampled the green, as it is the more highly alcoholic of the two.

Jack Rose

At five o’ clock I was in the Hotel Crillon, waiting for Brett. She was not there, so I sat down and wrote some letters. They were not very good letters but I hoped their being on Crillon stationary would help them. Brett did not turn up, so about quarter to six I went down to the bar and had a Jack Rose with George the barman.
³¹

The Hotel Crillon in Paris is one of the great and grand hotels. In the early days, Hemingway could scarcely afford to drink there. He would, no doubt, employ the free stationary to keep up appearances.

1
SERVING

1½ ounces applejack brandy

Juice of ½ lime

½ ounce grenadine

Combine the brandy, lime juice, and grenadine in a shaker filled with ice. Shake, and strain into a cock-tail glass.

Kirsch

Kirsch is a brandy distilled from cherries, including the stones, which impart an almond flavor. This was a favorite of Hemingway’s, which he drank frequently during the Paris years. He kept a bottle in his rented writing room in Paris, drinking it to keep warm during damp Parisian winters. When the Hemingways escaped from Paris to Austria in the wintertime, Ernest’s taste for kirsch followed. As he immersed himself in the rugged mountain environs and let his black beard thicken, he delighted in hearing the residents refer to him as the “black, kirsch-drinking Christ.”
³²

Kümmel

Kümmel was on the roll call of Hemingway’s “army of dead men,” the empty liquor bottles that littered his bedside armoire at the hospital in Milan. In
A Farewell to Arms
, the little bear-shaped bottle stands out amongst its fallen brethren:

One day while I was in bed with jaundice Miss Van Campen came in the room, opened the door into the armoire and saw the empty bottles there. . . . The bear-shaped bottle enraged her particularly. She held it up, the bear was sitting up on his haunches with his paws up, there was a cork in his glass head and a few sticky crystals at the bottom. I laughed.

“It is kümmel,” I said. “The best kümmel comes in those bear shaped bottles. It comes from Russia.
³³

Kümmel is a sweet, clear liqueur distilled from grain alcohol. Its flavor comes from caraway seeds. As in Frederic Henry’s case, sugar is some
times allowed to crystallize in the bottle. This type of kümmel is known as Kümmel Crystallize. Although invented in either Germany or Holland, the best kümmel does, in fact, come from Russia. (See Zabaglione, page
22
.)

In Austria, the “black kirsch-drinking Christ” gives his son John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, affectionately called Bumby, a skiing lesson.

Marc

Marc is a powerful brandy distilled from grape pomace, essentially the French counterpart of grappa. With the help of Krebs Friend, with whom Ernest worked in Chicago and who eventually married an heiress and became benefactor to Ford Madox Ford’s
transatlantic review
in Paris, we may understand the dubious allure of marc. In 1923, Hemingway wrote of Friend’s boar-hunting trip in a little town in the Côte d’Or:

Krebs was wakened before daylight. The boar hunters were assembled at the café. They were waiting for him. He arrived half asleep. Inside the café were about twenty men. Bicycles were stacked outside. Hunting the boar was nothing to be undertaken on an empty stomach. They must have a small drink of some sort. Something to warm the stomach.

Krebs suggested coffee. What a joke. What a supreme and delightful joker the American. Coffee. Imagine it. Coffee before going off to hunt the sanglier. What a thing. Drôle enough, eh?

Marc. Marc was the stuff. No one ever started after the wild boar without first a little marc. Patron, the marc. The marc was produced. Now marc, pronounced mar as in marvelous, is one of the three most powerful drinks known. As an early morning potion it can give vodka, douzico, absinthe, grappa, and other famous stomach destroyers two furlongs and beat them as far as Zev beat Papyrus. It is the great specialty of Burgundy and the Côte d’Or and three drops of it on the tongue of a canary will send him out in a grim, deadly, silent search for eagles.
³⁴

The Montgomery (Hemingway’s Martini)

HARRY’S RAR, VENICE

“Waiter,” the Colonel called; then asked, “Do you want a dry Martini, too?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’d love one.”

“Two very dry Martinis,” the Colonel said. “Montgomerys. Fifteen to one.”
³⁵

Like James Bond with his Vesper, Hemingway, too, had his special martini called the Montgomery. Named after the World War II British General, Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, General of the British Eighth Army, who would not attack unless he outnumbered the enemy 15 to 1, Hemingway’s martini contains that same proportion
of gin to vermouth. The Montgomery is a house special at Harry’s Bar in Venice, where they make their Montgomerys 10 to 1. For this recipe, we’ll use Hemingway’s favorite ingredients: Gordon’s gin and Noilly Prat vermouth.
³⁶

1
SERVING

3 ounces Gordon’s gin

1 teaspoon plus a few drops Noilly Prat vermouth

1 olive

Pour the gin and vermouth into an ice-filled shaker. Shake, then strain into a martini glass. Place the filled glass in the freezer until ready to serve. Garnish with the olive.

Option #1: To make a Super Montgomery, garnish with a garlic olive (see page
95
).

Option #2: Multiply the recipe by 73, as Hemingway did after liberating the Ritz Hotel in Paris from the Nazis with a thirsty band of FFI
(Forces Françaises l’Intérieur)
on August 25, 1944.

Rum Punch

In
The Sun Also Rises
, Jake and Bill spend a cold, blustery night in the Hostal Burguete in the Spanish Pyrenees before trout fishing. While Jake negotiates with the woman who owns the inn, Bill plays the piano to keep warm:

“How about a hot rum punch?” he said. “This isn’t going to keep me warm permanently.”

I went and told the woman what a rum punch was and how to make it. In a few minutes a girl brought a stone pitcher, steaming, into the room. Bill came over from the piano and we drank the hot punch and listened to the wind.

“There isn’t too much rum in that.”

I went over to the cupboard and brought the rum bottle and poured a half-tumblerful into the pitcher.

“Direct action,” said Bill. “It beats legislation.”
³⁷

1
SERVING

1¾ cups dark rum

¾ cup sugar

1½ teaspoons ground cloves

6 teaspoons lemon juice

2 tablespoons butter

3 cups boiling water

Combine all ingredients except ½ cup rum in a medium saucepan and heat over medium-high heat until hot. Transfer the punch to a ceramic pitcher. Taste to verify insufficient volume of rum. Add remaining rum. Serve immediately.

Tomini or Green Isaak’s Special

Hemingway’s passion for romantic descriptions of the Daiquiri in
Islands in the Stream
overflowed Constante’s blender to include other favorites as well. Several times throughout the novel, Thomas Hudson truly enjoys a sort of embellished Tom Collins, made with coconut water and bitters:

Thomas Hudson took a sip of the ice-cold drink that tasted of the fresh green lime juice mixed with the tasteless coconut water that was still so much more full-bodied than any charged water, strong with the real Gordon’s gin that made it alive to his tongue and rewarding to swallow, and all of it tautened by the bitters that gave it color. It tastes as good as a drawing sail feels, he thought. It is a hell of a good drink.
³⁸

1
SERVING

2 ounces Gordon’s gin

Dash of Angostura bitters (“just enough Angostura bitters to give it a rusty, rose color,”)
³⁹

Juice of 1 lime

Coconut water

In a tall cocktail glass filled with ice, combine the gin, bitters, and lime juice. Add coconut water to fill. Stir and serve.

Note:
Coconut water is not the same as coconut milk. The water is simply the juice found in fresh coconut, while the milk is produced by pouring boiling water over the coconut flesh.

Vermouth and Bitters

Drinks made with vermouth, the fortified wine blended with a secret combination of herbs and spices, appear throughout Hemingway’s life and fiction. He was usually quite specific with his choice of vermouths, employing Noilly Prat for his best martini, providing Frederic Henry with a bottle of Cinzano for his bedside stash and keeping one for himself in the living room bar at home in Cuba, creating fictional Negronis in Mestre outside Venice made with two sweet vermouths, and twice specifying that the drink be made with 2 parts French to 1 part Italian vermouth. These last specifications refer more to the dryness of the vermouths than to their countries of origin. Italian
vermouth was originally red and sweet, while French was white and dry. Today, the distinctions are no longer set.

In the fall of 1935, while drifting for marlin four miles east of Havana and an onshore gunnery range, the crew aboard the
Pilar
were suddenly startled away from their drinks when a loud blast was heard well to the east of the boat. Only such a blast, in actuality the breaching of a whale, could take their attention from their manly talk and freshly mixed drinks:

We had the tall glasses with of Italian vermouth (two parts of French to one of Italian, with a dash of bitters and a lemon peel, fill glass with ice, stir and serve) in our hands and I was just raising mine when Carlos shouted

“Que canonazo!” Oh, what a cannon shot!

“Where?”

“Way out there. To the eastward. Like the spout from a twelve inch shell.”
⁴⁰

Before the frantic pursuit of the whale becomes all-consuming, let’s not forget those drinks:

1
SERVING

2 ounces dry vermouth

1 ounce sweet vermouth

Dash of bitters

Lemon peel for garnish

Ice

Pour the vermouths over ice into a tall glass. Add the bitters and lemon peel. Stir and serve.

Whiskey

I went back to the papers and the war in the papers and poured the soda slowly over the ice into the whiskey. I would have to tell them not to put the ice in the whiskey. Let them bring the ice separately. That way you could tell how much whiskey there was and it would not suddenly be too thin from the soda. I would get a bottle of whiskey and have them bring ice and soda. That was the sensible way. Good whiskey was very pleasant. It was one of the pleasant parts of life.

“What are you thinking, darling?”