2 | Thirsty work
Sultry selfies and the best cocktail in months
Thanks for reading On Hunger, my newsletter exploring food and desire. It goes out every other Wednesday; each edition features a recipe and a conversation with someone doing something interesting in the world of food. I’d love it if you shared it with a friend. If you’ve found me through Vittles, welcome! If not, it might be right up your street. Check out this piece I wrote for it on Cambodian rice porridge – a dish for our times.
My feeds are peppered with flesh. A flash of leg here, tasteful cleavage there. Too-short shorts, doe eyes and filtered skin. Shorn hair, luxuriant beards. Biceps glistening in the sun. Inked shoulders in vest tops. The smooth, peachy curve of a bottom.
From Australia, a friend warned me about the ‘quarantine effect’ He’d been fielding more thirsty DMs and raunchy pics than usual in the weeks leading up to lockdown. Closer to home, a newer acquaintance noted his coronavirus infection came with an unexpected side effect: an extra helping of simmering longing. We called it ‘coronahorniness’ – the sorry state afflicting the single masses starved of touch and attention.
I’m not immune to the fever. I’ve been taking more selfies lately, turning my gaze inwards just as the outside world has folded in on itself. It doesn’t come naturally. I stare self-consciously at the camera. I trace the effects of the pandemic – worry, illness, loneliness – on the lines of my face, the state of my hair. I worry I’m losing my last good months, wasting the last dregs of my evaporating youth. I try on green and purple eyes; I flick through filters despondently. I get shutter-happy when the light is good: in my bedroom in the afternoon, or at dusk in the garden, when the last of the bees fly low, heavy with pollen.
“How,” I ask my young friend Hannah, “do I post a thirst trap without feeling like an absolute twat?”
art, bitch.
art.
u are artistic not thirsty
u are the creative director of a high end gallery
not someone in need of attention
Make of Hannah’s advice what you will. She identifies as ‘the Glee generation’, told to be different and not care what other people think. It doesn’t quite ring true: we’re all chasing the likes, the flattering comments, the DMS: the regular dopamine hit of being seen – and wanted – by others.
It’s thirsty work. For this edition, I put away my front camera long enough to call my friend Katka, an ex-bartender who left London for the gentler pace of Berlin. I took her expert advice, and mixed myself a cold drink for a hot day. And I remembered the dizzying promise – one day! – of dancing in a dimly lit bar somewhere, skin to skin, our souls spinning.
This week…
Read The joy of perfecting the sexy selfie
Drink Alain Milliat’s godly nectars
Watch Nuno, in Lisbon, working his magic on an Old Fashioned
Meet… Katka Orlovská
I can’t remember when or where I first met Katka. She describes a cocktail as a mix of something sweet, something sour and something strong – and I think she’s a little bit of all those things. If she were a drink, she’d come in a tiny glass and pack a mean punch. She spent some time working the hospitality and events circuit in London; though she no longer drinks much, she generously shared a few thoughts on quenching a thirst.
How did you get into bartending?
The first bar I worked in was Powderkeg Diplomacy [now Powderkeg] on St John’s Hill in Clapham. Really good cocktails, really good food, and also craft beer. It was just a bar job while I was at uni, and then it just… you know. You get paid way more than you would as an intern after a journalism degree. There was a lot to learn.
What did you like about it?
It’s just really fun. There’s a fine line between being too cheesy and pushy, but you can turn someone’s day around. The best jobs involved the staff in the creative process in some way. I had a lot of freedom, I could just make shit up as I went along. Don’t just give people a menu: ask them what they want and make something up.
And the bad bits?
There’s a lack of compassion from people in authority. I had managers who wanted us to be 100% committed to the job. When you have a job like this, it’s frowned upon to ask, for example, for a regular day off. You had to dedicate your entire life to this waiting job. It was incredibly difficult to accept that I had no rights as a worker. And it’s hard to keep friendships going with shift work. Drinking and drugs are also a problem, but there’s a growing awareness of that.
What’s your favourite drink?
I’m the worse person to ask. You’d have to give me a good half an hour to answer. I don’t know… like a good fresh daiquiri, on an easy Friday evening, getting drunk but not too drunk. A good drink is always shared with good friends. One of my favourite places when I lived in London was Happiness Forgets in Shoreditch. It was unassuming and super tiny, but it was so good. Like a tropical party hut somewhere on an island.
I’m stuck at home with no cocktail-making equipment. I’m shaking up drinks in an empty jar of pasta sauce. What kit should I invest in?
Definitely get a shaker. I really like the Japanese ones – they have a tin at the bottom and a tin at the top, and you close them together. They’re the ones you see in most fancy cocktail bars. You’ll need a strainer too. Parisian shakers have a little spout at the top, which you can strain with. It really depends on what you want to achieve; it’s really easy to make drinks from almost nothing. A cocktail is: booze, a sweet element and a bitter or sour element. That’s it.
Speaking of booze…
Get a bottle every couple of months. Go to Waitrose and buy the nice stuff; don't go to the off-licence for martini. Once you get through the essential spirits – gin, rum, whatever it is you like to drink – try making something with vermouth. I’m a big, big fan of cocktails that are light in alcohol. I could drink vermouth and soda all summer.
Sounds simple.
You really don’t need much. Jam, for example. If you have a really good blackberry jam at home, let’s say, mix it with gin and a bit of lemon juice, shake the shit out of it, top it off with soda and you’ll have an amazing cocktail. Another thing that’s super easy is infusing ingredients. Try chilli and lemongrass tequila in a margarita – it takes about a week to infuse. Or if you’re in a rush, try loose-leaf Earl Grey tea in some gin, which only takes about 10 minutes. Mix that with lemon and sugar, and top it up with Prosecco. Done.
Anything else?
You need a lot of ice. People think “Oh, just a few cubes and shake” – all that does is dilute your drink. When you’re making cocktails for real, you have to invest in a good few bags of ice. Start with one or two ideas. You can get yourself all this kit and all these recipes and then you never start because it’s too much. That’s me with everything else in my life [laughs].
Thirsty for more? A few gems from Katka’s bookshelf: The Joy of Mixology by Gary Reagan, Imbibe by David Wondrich and the classic Bartenders Guide by Jerry Thomas.
Jam do shake
… Or how to put Katka’s advice to good use. I don’t actually own a cocktail shaker, so I made do with a repurposed jar and small ice cubes. I made no such concessions with the jam: mine’s the very best, cooked in large copper pots somewhere in Alsace by Christine Ferber, the queen of confiture. Here I used raspberry and violet, though I suspect other combinations of spirits and flavour would work just as well. Play this while you sip: “Yeah, yeah, she’s got what it takes.”
50ml gin
20 ml lemon juice
20 ml simple syrup (equal quantities of water and sugar brought to the boil, then cooled)
20ml egg white
One generous teaspoon of jam
Mix all the ingredients together. Taste and adjust as necessary. Shake with lots of ice, strain into your best glass. Garnish with a sugar-frosted sprig: rosemary, say, or sweet, fragrant basil.
That’s it for today. Coming up soon: sandwiches, sticky rice and cooking with friends.