If you like cocktails (hell yes) and word play (it’s a pundamental part of life), Tequila Mockingbird is a novel idea that’s worth seeking out. Clever-pants author Tim Federle has taken a bunch of cocktail recipes and given them a literary twist, so that you end up with such drinks as ‘A Midsummer Night’s Beam’ and ‘The Rye in the Catcher’. As a bonus, there’s a synopsis of the literary work in question, so that if you’re drinking, say, a ‘Pitcher of Dorian Grey Goose’ but you haven’t read Oscar Wilde’s classic Picture of Dorian Gray, at least you can pretend you have. Which is pretty handy if you decide to make a drink named after William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, smug in the knowledge that you read it as a teenager, and then realise it’s been a long time between then and now and you can’t remember anything about it. Not that such a thing would happen around here, of course. Ahem.
I’m pretty sure this tart, bracing cocktail is supposed to be pronounced ‘The Sound and the Slur-ry’ (not ‘slurry’), because (a) it’s quite pretty, and not slurry-like at all, and (b) you’ll definitely be slurring after you’ve had a few. There’s a good chance, for example, that you’ll be slur-ily analysing the deliberate lack of punctuation and the, er, the…thing… in the Faulkner novel about…about…
INGREDIENTS
60ml gin
15ml creme de cassis
15ml lemon juice
GLASS
Coupe or cocktail
METHOD
Shake everything together with ice and strain into the glass. Alternatively, you can serve this in a tumbler on the rocks.
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY
So much easier to make than it is to make head or tail of The Sound and the Fury.
RECIPE BY
Tequila Mockingbird by Tim Federle (Running Press, 2013) contains this and many other fun recipes.
