The Paintbrush

I got it. The name, that is.

The Paintbrush...

I became enamoured, in Cape Town, of a drink gleaned from my father's foxed, '50's cocktail book. Name to follow. It listed drinks by liquor, and I opened it at random one day in search of something new. It fell open at the recipe for the inauspiciously named Missouri Mule. Gin, cassis, lemon juice. I adore cassis, am addicted to lemons, and we had run out of vodka.

So gin was perfect, since the house was full of it. My parents have a well-stocked liquor cabinet - harking back to cocktail-mixing days, now mostly past. I air the cabinet annually. My mother had also stocked up on Grey Goose for Vince, which we drank purely out of a sense of duty, and we brought a bottle of Noilly Prat from New York, since it is no longer imported into South Africa. A sign surely, of the slippery slope towards uncivilization. Well, we drank that, too. Which was just rude. I know.

Anyway. I made the Mule, and it was delicious. We drank it in small glasses. Real martini glasses, in fact, not the birdbath-sized ones we see in bars (now...but notice what they look like in old movies). Streuth, but I cannot drink anything that size anymore. Fall off me barstool....

A few weeks later, after a hot day spent painting Selina's little flat bright pink (per her request), we were thirsty, come the golden hour of 5.30-ish or so. I liked the Mule very much but I wanted something very similar but...not. At the time I mixed the new drink, it was perfect. And we named it The Paintbrush. Then I forgot the quantities. I don't measure things when I cook and mix, see. And I reproduced a lesser version at Olifantsbos.

Tonight, after an afternoon of gardening on the little terrace and being pricked soundly by the unmerciful New Dawn whose canes I was trying to organize and prune, I got it.

So (I don't do ounces - why is it abbreviated oz when it is spelled oc?- weighing liquids is ...weird. Yes, know, I know):

For one Paintbrush:

1 measure (or part, if it's for more than One) fresh lemon juice (MUST I specify fresh? Well, yes...a certain forensic pathologist of my acquaintance, who ought to know better, puts the bottled stuff on his freshly caught lobster)

1 measure cassis

1 measure dry white vermouth, pref. Noillly Prat

2 measure gin

Y.u.m.

Shake shake shake over ice. Pour.

Dreenk.

From Evelyn Waugh's ( I had no idea he was a Catholic convert: rather casts a pall over the delicious novel) Brideshead Revisited:

"It was during this time that I began to realize that Sebastian was a drunkard in quite a different sense to myself. I got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enhance it; Sebastian drank to escape. "

Rent the impeccable BBC Brideshead series. Beautifully executed. I can hear Jeremy Irons as Charles when I read the novel. It's my second reading and I am about to watch it again as a result. I think I've seen it twice. About the only cure for the end of Mr Watson and his Shadow Country...

It is an open-door-to-the-terrace night; new daffodils in a vase beside me, ribs for dinner.