Tell me what you drink and I’ll tell you what kind of person you are, or at least that is the mythology in popular culture. Never trust a teetotaler, and few people are more annoying than a former alcoholic who is now newly sober.
Last night I went out for cocktails with my two Martins (one is my husband, the other is our Chilean friend) to one of our favorite bar cafes in the Montorgueil area of Paris. Located in the shadow of the now renovated old Post Office, Cafe Etienne Marcel has a few interesting cocktails listed for their happy hour specials. I don’t really like anything too citrus-y or too grain-y, opting more often than not for sugary and sweet cocktails. My new go-to at the Cafe Etienne Marcel is “the Porn Star” which features rum, a chunk of passion fruit with its nectar accompanied by a splash of champagne. The name didn’t deter me in the least (I don’t know what that says about me), and after the second round we all felt the blissful effect as we eased into the night.
Now I know a thing or two about cocktails, as part-owner of a very successful cafe bar in Paris. So when I was trying to come up with what my protagonist, Carter Ridge, would drink in my novel “The Last Good Republican,” I decided that he was a bourbon / scotch whiskey drinker. I picked “old fashioned” as his drink of choice, because it reflected back onto him the fact that he is a traditionalist. A classicist. Few cocktails are as elegantly simple as an old fashioned, using just a few ingredients: some sugar, a splash of bitters, and a generous dose of bourbon or whiskey, rounded off with a twist of orange and a rub of the peel along the rim of the tumbler.
Personally I don’t love the drink, even with the offset of the sugar, its graininess comes through. But it does warm one up and calms one down. To that end, I think Carter could enjoy the quiet solace the drink might afford him when talking politics with others.
Which is a perfect accoutrement for the aptly named podcast I recently discovered: Bourbon In The Back Room. Hosted by two Democratic state senators in South Carolina’s State Senate, it is an entertaining look at South Carolina’s politics from two insiders, and as they chat with their guests on each episode you get the feeling that you’re sitting in the shade of a back porch, sipping your bourbon together and getting the full story on what’s going on in the Palmetto state.
Check it out wherever you get your podcasts, oh, and what are you drinkin’?
#BITBR, #BourbonInTheBackRoomPodcast, #oldfashioned #bourbon