April 2007

When the Lord gives you Lemons...

My Great-Aunt Pollyanna used to say: If all you have is lemons, make lemonade.
My Uncle, Col. 'Catheter' Jack, would counter: If all you have is a Hammer, the whole World looks like a nail.
Which is the brand of family wisdom that I was relying on when I came to woke up on Thursday to find the sky spitting out yet more April snow at me. I was in such a lousy humor that I could have spit nails at whoever walked by, hoping at the very least to knock a few hats off.
Call me Despondent
And right about then, Joe Walsh came over the radio:

And we don't need the ladies
Crying 'cuz the story's sad
'Cuz the Rocky Mountain Way
Is better than the way we had

And that's when I told that impish bastard upstairs (I may be an Atheist, but I know He's up there) that He should send me all the snow He wanted to.
I wanted it to snow all day.
I wanted to leave work empty handed with nary a ducat in hand.
I wanted to laugh in the face of Global Warming with a quiver full of "Maine has 8 months of Winter and 4 months of bad sledding" jokes.
I was gonna drink Rocky Mountain Sneezers!
In April, Godammit!

The Rocky Mountain Sneezer is truly an obscure drink. It's a "one off", and I only came across it the other day while rooting around looking for shrubs. [If you're wondering if spring in Maine is parsimonious to the point that one must actually go a-hunting vegetation, you'd be just wide of the mark. It is, and you must, but I was up to something else. Shrub is simply an old colonial-era drink, sweetened with all sorts of things and then soured up with (usually) vinegar.] I was flipping through Cedric Dickens' (Charles Dickens' great-great-grandson), Drinking with Dickens whence I happened upon the aforementioned tipple. It seems that while Old Man Dickens was here in the States, he couldn't shake a rather stubborn cold and cough combination. It became one of those intransigent maladies that we all get from time-to-time, the ones that become so familiar and a part of ourselves that the impulse to at least give it a nickname is overwhelming. He dubbed his "The American Catarrh" and his landlord often suggested a mixture he called the Rocky Mountain Sneezer in the hopes of alleviating some of Dickens' suffering, and we presume, some of his own. It's a simple little decoction, built along the lines of the earliest of cocktail templates--spirits, sugar, water, bitters--with a little bit of the Cobbler tossed in for good measure.
And, of course, snow.

Shake together 2 oz. each of Brandy and Rum with sugar and the juice of 1 lemon and a handful of snow--preferably from the Rocky Mountains.
Add 2 dashes Angostura.

It's a tasty pile of drink, I must say, particularly the 3rd when taken in succession. But is it efficacious? Does it do the trick? Here's Dickens:

"My cold refuses to stir an inch. It distresses me greatly at times, though it is always good enough to leave me for the needful two hours [during his scheduled public readings]. I have tried allopathy, homeopathy, cold things, warm things, sweet things, bitter things, stimulants, narcotics, all with the same result."

My results weren't much different, and I mostly concur with Dickens: while my catarrh is about the same, my Bahrain couldn't be more at ease.

When the Lord closes a door, he opens a little window

Yep, you're right. I'm a Bad Blogger! Lazy, even. And you know it's bad when Miss Bumptious says so.
G'won, sue me.
No takers? Then I'll get on with it.

Well, it looks like the Hoary Hand of Time finally dragged Progress's lazy bones outta bed to begin the ugly work of turning the neighborhood down the street into Condo-World. The first victim? That venerable old haven for the lonely toper, The Breakaway Tavern. Now truth be told, I rarely went to "the Break", but spiritually it was one of my favorite watering holes. When the Nico-Nazis finally got their way, myself and a fellow investigator poked our collective head into a couple of saloons where we hoped would-be rebels could still take the "pause that refreshes". A week into the ban, we found the Breakaway's bar still equipped with ashtrays and the smell of a freshly stabbed out butt still lingering in the air. None of the three old guys sitting around the bar would cop to being the smoker, but they insisted that we light up, so we did. Nothing happened and "the Break" became one of my favorite Portland places, even if I never went there.
She's been closed since sometime late last year and the boys over at The Bollard wrote her a great, if premature, eulogy. (scroll down to The Breakaway Tavern, July 4th, 2006)

I happened to be walking by as the wrecking ball took it's first bites.

But when the Lord closes a door, He sometimes opens a little window. And this particular window opened just to the left and down the street from the Breakaway's gaping maw, over on Middle Street and right next door to Hugo's.
Rabelais Books opened for business today, specializing in new, used, rare and antiquarian books focusing on the prandial arts. That's right: cooking books, eating books, drinking books, feasting books, fasting books and everything-in-between books. Metro racks and stainless steel prep tables are a tip-off that we're in the comestibles department and the place has a light and airy feel for a book shop. This might be partially due to the many as yet unpacked boxes (and the promise of still more stock to come). Or maybe it's just the big store-front windows.
Proprietors Don and Samantha, currently living in far away Alfred, couldn't have been nicer. They even flagged me down an hour later as I walked passed to return one of my errant cufflinks.
So what's in store for the reader that heads into the store? If you're a foodie, give yourself some time for a nice long browse. You'll find some newly published stuff you didn't know you wanted, some recently published things you meant to buy a while ago, and some well maintained old favorites that you'd all but forgotten about. And happily this seems to be a Rachael Ray-free-zone, and I didn't see any other Food Network shwag junking up the place either.
If you're a collector, tell Don where your interests lie and he'll lead you around to where he's got the choice bits squirreled away. Man! Has he got some stuff! A 3rd edition Omar Kayyam, comes to mind as does a pristine copy of The Full and By. Not to mention a 1st (American) edition of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. Ditto the Savoy Cocktail Book. A couple of copies of the Stork Club Bar Book were in the same cabinet as a boxed set of Charles Baker's South American Gentleman's Companion. (I jokingly asked Don how much he wanted for just the box and without missing a beat he said that I could have it for $250 and he'd throw the books in for nothing.)
A 1928 edition of Jerry Thomas' Bon Vivant's Companion, did you say, the Herbert Asbury edition?
Yeah. He's got that too.

And if you're looking for the street address, it's 86 Middle Street.
Yes, that's right, as in the restaurant shorthand for stuff we ran out of.

So there you have it, a city's Karmic balance at work. So long Breakaway, Welcome Rabelais.