14 September Wednesday

Having discovered the recently late QE2 was not a foodie per se, we ask the next most reasonable question- did she drink? If no, we are lost. Of course she did, she the Queen. It turns out, I am way late to this game. When I Googled Queen´s favorite drink, not only did it bring three hundred recipes for Dubonnet and Gin, more popularly known(?!??!) as a Zaza here in the USA, but it also linked to several articles about a run on Dubonnet because everyone and their uncle Tim looked up the queen´s favorite drink and are swilling them in her honor.

I have never had Dubonnet, and I imagine it will be a while before I do. I like to drink wine, but I´ve cooled to cocktails over the last few years. Harry Craddock, sometime Cleveland bartender and author of 1930´s Savoy Cocktail Book wrote that a cocktail must be drunk quick ¨while it´s still laughing at you¨. I never thought that anyone could drink a cocktail that quickly, and one of my big complaints about cocktails is that they get warm before they´re finished. They must be ice ¨cracking cold¨ as James Beard would say. This led me to the obvious conclusion that cocktail glasses have grown over the years, and my research based on this hunch seems to have validity.

The standard bar cocktail glass back when Harry was shaken´em was 3-4 US fl.oz. Now, cocktail glasses (by which I mean martini glasses) can hold up to 10 US fl. oz. They still make small ones, but people at the bar like everything big, so bars generally stock larger glasses. Because of this, I always found the second half of a cocktail to be a warm, water-logged (if it was on the rocks), mess. So, I stick to wine. It´s too bad we can´t request cocktail glass sizes the way we can control every other aspect of the drink ordering process. Anyway, Bess, here´s mud in your eye.