1939 The Gentleman's Companion volume II Beeing an Exotic Drinking Book

/I

THE EXOTIC DRINKING BOOK

also because she had lost one of her pet jewel jade earrings she'd bar– gained half a day to get up in Canton or somewhere. We never found the earring, and had to make the other into a necklace pendant too-– and as for the tub of freesias, we toted the whole seventy pounds of them along the Bund at Kowloon-and the sight of your humble servant, thus burdened, was too much for the coolie roustabouts just scratching themselves awake for the day's labour, and they howled and giggled at the mad white man who would thus lose face aping the porter's trade when he could hire it done. And as we came finally up the spidery forward gangway the first fingers of a Rosy Dawn searched up and over the stark mountains surrounding Hongkong's superb harbour, and painted the hull of the MARIPOSA a maiden blush tint where she lay just to the eastward of our own berth. Here is the original receipt. Take 1 liqueur glass each of the following: dry gin, orange curas;ao, and cherry brandy. Add 1 tsp Rose's lime juice, or soda fountain lime syrup. Put in a big champagne glass filled with crac~ed ice, stir, and fill with a touch of seltzer.... We later have found that by cutting down the cherry brandy and curas;ao to I liqueur glass total for both, and tossing in 1 pony of cognac, we have a drier mix, and not quite so sweet, yet still maintaining authority enough for any man. THE SO-CALLED RUSSIAN COCKTAIL, a MEMORY of PEKING ' in 1926 In that year, which seems so very long ago now, Peking was a place of sheer delight. Trade was better after the war, the memory of the Revolution and ~assacre of White Russians was a vague and tragic business to Russians who were young enough to forget what had been. There w_as a l~vely girl ':ho _mainta~ed a shop selling jades and Imperial tnbute silks, carved ivones and kmgfisher feather screens at the Grande Hotel de Pe~in. And after a while we came to go abou~ to odd parts of the vast city together, and one evening at the small jewel-like house on Pa-Pao Hutung where we had gone for some decent sukiyaki-the only place in Peking where we could see what • II9 •