Slippery Tipples: A Guide to Weird and Wonderful Spirits & Liqueurs

48 Pages·2010·0.75 MB·English

by  Piercy

For Joanna and Polly First published 2010
The History Press
The Mill, Brimscombe Port
Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG
www.thehistorypress.co.uk
This ebook edition first published in 2013
All rights reserved
© Joseph Piercy, 2010, 2013
Illustrations on pp. 31, 46, 50, 90, 101, 170 © Aubrey C. Smith The right of Joseph Piercy to be identified
as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
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EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9685 6
Original typesetting by The History Press
CONTENTS
Foreword
Austria
The Balkans
Brazil
The Caribbean
Chile
China
Czech Republic
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hungary
India
Israel
Italy
Japan
Lithuania
Mongolia
The Netherlands
Norway
South Africa
Spain
United Kingdom
United States
Appendix: Recipes
FOREWORD
Slippery Tipples first started to ferment some years ago in a restaurant in
Barcelona. The Catalan capital has a burgeoning reputation as a place of culinary
excellence and innovation. New restaurants and designer tapas bars spring up
every month and keeping abreast with the latest food fashions is an exhausting,
expensive and near-impossible pursuit. The queue to get a seat at the city’s
hottest table fluctuates on a daily basis and it is easy to be seduced by the hype
only to be disappointed by the substance.
As a result of this, one of my favourite places to eat in Barcelona is an
unpretentious family-run restaurant in the Born area of the city called Passadis
del Pep. A discouraging doorway next to a cash point machine leads into a
gloomy corridor with a narrow staircase at the end. The staircase leads down to a
large, brightly-lit dining hall, tastefully decorated with abstract paintings
adorning the pale walls. However, the feature that caught my eye the first time I
dined there was not the decor, pleasant and welcoming though it was, but a large
stone inlet lining the back of the room. There, gleaming in the ambient light, was
an extraordinary display of hundreds of liqueur and spirit bottles in a myriad of
shapes and colours. Assuming it to be the owner’s private collection put there for
decorative purposes, I sat down and was treated to a parade of courses of
excellent locally-caught seafood.
But the reason for this treasure trove of bottles became apparent at the end of
the meal. The waiter served coffee and then marched to the back of the room,
quickly surveyed the collection and plucked out half a dozen bottles which he
brought to the table with shot glasses and invited me to try at my leisure. The
contrast between the different drinks was marked and inspiring: sweet fruit
liqueurs, herbal digestives and fortified wines, all from different parts of the
globe. It transpired that this was a tradition at Passadis del Pep and one which
was repeated on every subsequent visit, although I have never been offered the
same bottle twice.
It was the experience of dining at Passadis del Pep that first fired my interest
in unusual drinks, and on future trips abroad I made it a habit to seek out and
sample the local ‘hooch’. City breaks to Budapest and Prague yielded the two
heavyweights of Eastern Europe, Unicum and Becherovka. My honeymoon on
the Amalfi coast in Italy naturally included a visit to a local limoncello factory.
A stag weekend in Amsterdam was not spent trawling round the red light district
and coffee shops, as might be expected on such unseemly occasions, but on a
pilgrimage to the Lucas Bols Genever Museum. Friends and family assisted on
my quest and would endeavour to bring back samples from their travels:
fearsome Feni from India, sickly sweet Sabra from Israel and a bright blue bottle
of ‘Hip Hop’ Hpnotiq from New York. A chance conversation in the pub led
Paul James to raid his father’s drinks cabinet for some prizes. The former mayor
of Harlow Town, Alex James had been amassing an exquisite and alarming
collection of ‘Slippery Tipples’. I was duly furnished with some samples of
beautifully aged Kruskovac and something mysterious which was, frankly,
barely fit for human consumption.
What had started as a hobby, a distraction when travelling or on holiday, was
rapidly becoming an obsession. Gradually my interest shifted from a desire to
simply taste these weird and wonderful drinks towards exploring and
understanding their historical origins and the cultures that they derived from. It
was at this point that Slippery Tipples began to take shape. Although there were
plenty of brightly illustrated guides to spirits and liqueurs available, few seem to
explore the historical context and development of the drinks they featured in any
depth.
In the course of researching and compiling this guide I developed a theory
about the history of modern civilisation. I discovered fascinating areas of history
that I had hitherto been entirely ignorant of and realised that in a strange way, I
was able to place certain drinks on a timeline against key moments in history.
From the golden age of the Tang Dynasty in ancient China and the tragic tale of
the concubine Yang Yuhuan, to the Hispanic colonisation of South America, on
through the era of the Renaissance to the Ottoman Empire, the spice trade and
Industrial Revolution and up to the Second World War; all these key moments in
history have a drink attached to them. It may seem trivial to view history through
the prism of peculiar alcoholic drinks but at the very least it is a captivating
coincidence.
So what, in essence, is a Slippery Tipple and what attributes provide the
criteria for inclusion in this guide? Overall there is bias towards fruit-and herb-
based liqueurs over spirits (although grain alcohol provides a base for many of
the drinks). Many traditional artisanal liqueurs derive from pastoral peasant
culture and used ingredients that were easy to forage for and readily to hand.
Another key element in what is largely a miscellaneous approach was to select
entries that had an interesting historical or cultural background. Lastly, there was
some consideration given to how the different entries fared when mixed with
other drinks in cocktails or used in food recipes.
One key factor of a Slippery Tipple is that it often tastes much better in situ.