DRINK UP! - THE PIMM'S CUP
The Pimm's Cup is the established tipple of posh summer sport everywhere treasure rhymes with leisure. Originated in the mid-1800s as an afternoon refreshment for London money men, the drink now epitomizes "seasonal events featuring irritating rich people" as the Guardian put it last year. Its existence is inextricably tied up with ad campaigns celebrating polo and ironically twitting twits, and its name is guaranteed to pop up whenever people publish things like The Official Filthy Rich Handbook and The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook. On the blog Luxist, Jared Paul Stern conjures the image of "British officers quietly having one too many in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, and tipsy toffs doing likewise at the Henley Royal Regatta."
But maybe you're a Pimm's tippler who cannot get yourself to the finals of the All England Lawn Tennis Championships this weekend (more than 200,000 glasses served!) or to the Henley (where they insist on garnishing with strawberry, cucumber, and orange). Maybe you're instead heading down to the Cape for a long weekend or crashing indefinitely at your in-laws' in the 'burbs. Or, maybe you'll be watching posh sport on the "telly" in your apartment. The purpose of these notes is to help any bartender anywhere keep up the Pimm's Cup spirit with élan. We ask only that you approach the task with a slight case of Anglophilia and a keen thirst for day-drinking.
EQUIPMENT
Our hardware guidelines are arranged to serve both a veteran drinker with a tricked-out mixological workshop and a neophyte tinkering in a rude bachelor laboratory. Mindful of the reader who is fixing drinks on a stranger's tailgate, in a Spartan country cottage, at a pay-by-the-hour motel, or aboard a half-completed Death Star, we stress flexibility.
Required:
one sharp paring knife
Recommended
churchkey
spare paring knife
cutting board
fire extinguisher
Optional
barspoons
measuring spoons
shaker
strainer
jigger
mortar
citrus reamer
two pint glasses
two ice buckets
oars, racquets, cricket bats, bridle bits, etc.
Wild Cards
grapefruit spoon
pool table
ice pick
blender
Relevant piece of Kingsley Amis wisdom (1 of 2), regarding the electric blender: "Unnecessary, though by all means use one if you are quite confident of not having to clean it afterwards."
Our approach, which promises to yield at least one perfect Pimm's Cup, involves a lot of trial and a little error, and it expects you to join with other good fellows and ladies in subjecting one another's experiments to intensive peer review. The literature of the Pimm's Cup is lousy with dogma, but we come not to curse any particular recipes, no matter how disgusting, except those involving Rose's Lime Juice. Rather, we hope to light a thousand flames and that each of these gets five or more friends lit.
Edit according to fiscal, temporal, and spatial restraints. Adjust volumes and ratios according to taste or lack thereof.
Ice
Thirty pounds of party ice is not too much. Some will melt. Some will be used with the excess of mixers listed below to concoct nonalcoholic drinks for children, designated drivers, and persons treating chlamydia with antibiotics. Some will be placed in sandwich bags and applied to areas of injury.
Liquor
Required
Six 750 ML bottles of Pimm's No. 1, a mysterious potion of dry gin, fruit, herbs, botanicals, spices, and artificial caramel coloring.
Pimm's originated as the house digestif at an oyster bar founded by James Pimm. The 1882 edition of Dickens's Dictionary of London lists its location in the Poultry, meaning that it stood within a short stumbling distance of the Bank of England. The matter of whether Mr. Pimm himself invented the concoction is as murky as its flavor, but it is clear that a subsequent owner—Lt. Col. Sir Horatio Davies, later the Lord Mayor of the City of London—expanded the restaurant into a chain, bottled the booze for broad consumption, and authored its modern identity.
New bottles are 50 proof. Some refer to Pimm's as "a cocktail in a bottle," a phrase that may deceive you into trying it unmixed, which produces a peculiar taste sensation. It is as if a quantity of fresh mulch has doused an insurance fire at a candied-orange factory—inside your mouth. You sit there scrunching your face at the baroque bittersweetness, wondering why you're not having a Campari or an Aperol instead. But to balance the earthy zest of Pimm's No. 1 with other liquid zings and refreshing things is to reveal a unique richness.
If your neighborhood liquor monger does not carry Pimm's, then kindly ask him to do so. If he refuses, then move to a better neighborhood. Buy four bottles of Gatorade for the moving guys.
The instructions on the label are straightforward, deceptively so, telling you to pour Pimm's over ice and add ginger ale or lemon-lime soda.
Recommended
More gin. Serious cocktail people will want to pick up a fifth of Hendrick's so as to play its notes of rose and cucumber off of the fragrant base. Unserious cocktail people are probably picking up a handle of Gordon's anyway.
PLANT LIFE
Required:
No fewer than six pounds of cucumber and 72 lemons.
Relevant piece of Kingsley Amis wisdom (2 of 2), regarding lemons and cucumber: "Few such things are more worth the trouble than adding a little cucumber juice and lemon juice to each portion of Pimm's."
Recommended
Herbs
Mint brings a shine to the affair. In The Joy of Mixology, Jon Regen suggests basil. Parsley is possible. You've got tarragon left over from roasting a chicken? Put that shit in play. It would be most traditional to use borage, with its cucumbersome scent, and the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., goes the extra step of saying that garnishing your Cup with a borage flower adds a "touch of class."
More citrus
Limes work especially well with ginger-dominant drinks. Oranges add color, so buy six, more if you intend on engineering something that might be socially acceptable to have at breakfast.
Optional
Berries
Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries can be playful as garnishes and ravishing in decadent excess. This option begins to seem more desirable if the minors around are sufficiently minor to be conned into going out berrypicking.
SERVINGWARE
Required
however many Collins glasses the movers didn't break
more pint glasses
two juice glasses
six mason jars
Of the many Pimm's Cup recipes available at Epicurious.com, our favorite is the one prefaced with the statement that "mason jars are a down-home way to serve the drinks." It is our duty as Americans to colonize the Pimm's Cup, to democratize it, to strip away its snootiness. "Anyone for Pimm's?" is their slogan; "Pimm's for everyone" is our motto. Also, you can use the lids to guard against being roofied.
Pitchers
If you are SINGLE, then invest in two plastic beer pitchers.
If you are MARRIED, then you will have more pitchers than you know what to do with.
If you are SEPARATED OR DIVORCED, then muster the will to rinse out a plastic soup container from your most recent order of greasy Chinese take-out.
If you are WIDOWED, then there might be an urn around.
Optional
flexi-straws
swizzle sticks
gazebo
Wild cards
oyster forks
three or more silver trays
uneasy commingling of nostalgia and dread
In her essential book How to Drink, Victoria Moore writes of the melancholy problem of the first sip of summer: "Pimm's for me is much more about the moment than the taste, which is perhaps why pleasure decreases exponentially until what began as a glowing glass full of promise becomes a sickly confection. … I only ever drink it once a year. But on that first Pimm's day, I love it—so enjoy it while you can."
INSTRUCTIONS
Invite people over. Mix.
thanks to www.slate.com for the article
