I’ll have what F. Scott Fitzgerald was having, if it involved copious amounts of champagne
If life were fiction, I’d want it to be F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, if only because in it there’s always a reason to throw a party “with glistening hors d’oervre… spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.” I suppose there would be lemon-garnished deviled eggs and canapés topped with caviar, anchovy paste, cheese, olives, and jelly, which were all the rage in the 1920s.
In The Great Gatsby, champagne, as the narrator Nick Carraway observes, “was served in glasses bigger than fingerbowls.” But Jay Gatsby hardly drinks champagne. It brings bad memories. As a young man, he worked on a yacht, where drunken women would rub champagne into his hair. Still, Gastby has a healthy respect for the bubbly and makes sure that at his party everyone has his fill. Other than champagne, there is no shortage of mind-altering drinks.
There’s the gin rickey that, made of gin, lime juice, and club soda, “clicked full of ice” on a particularly hot summer afternoon. And then there’s whiskey that I believe is spelled with an e, which may mean it’s Irish or American whiskey, rather than whisky as in Scotch, Canadian, or Japanese. There’s claret or red wine from Bordeaux and there are highballs and Sauternes and the mint julep.
But did you know that F. Scott Fitzgerald had low tolerance for alcohol? A drop of drink and he would get completely hammered.
Once, while he was with Ernest Hemingway in Paris, Fitzgerald went bat-crazy after downing a couple of glasses of red wine. Delirious that he was dying from a “congestion of the lungs,” he was already mourning his death and having to leave his wife Zelda and his daughter Scottie alone in this world.
Alarmed, Hemingway calmed his nerves by ordering him a lemonade, also a popular drink, like orange juice, in The Great Gatsby, where Jay Gatsby had a machine in the kitchen “which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour.” The purpose of the lemonade was to soothe Fitzgerald’s fears of catching a deathly cold, but then Hemingway mixed in a whisky to make him go to sleep. And this was how the whisky sour made it to Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast!
There’s no mention of whisky sour in The Great Gatsby, but maybe because it was originally not to the manor born. It was a sailors’ drink, first mentioned in Jerry Thomas’s 1862 book How to Mix Drinks, but already around way before that.
Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was a drink of survival on those days sea voyages and ocean cruises were a probable date with death, thanks to the difficulty of finding clean, fresh, drinkable water on long voyages, which necessitated the whisky and the bourbon on board, and the prevalence of scurvy due to the lack of vitamin C, which was the reason the sailors stocked up on lemons, limes, and oranges where they could find them on ports of call—and that was, under circumstances of deprivation and danger, how the whisky sour might have been born.
I believe Jay Gatsby would have no problem serving me a whisky sour at his mansion in West Egg on Long Island. It’s a simple drink that even the most amateurish bartender should be able to whip up, just whisky, lemon or lime, some sugars, and—for me—egg whites. I want mine extra-frothy, so the bartender must remember to give it a dry shake, meaning without ice, and then another shake with the ice in.