When last we
left our fearful columnist, he was attempting to transliterate his wretched
Harry Beaton imitation into print. Harry, of course, is the character from the
musical Brigadoon who threatens to leave the quaint, out-of-time village in
Scotland and therefore bring ruin to all who inhabit it. The subject, perhaps
needless to say, was Scotch – the whiskey, not the people of Scotland – and its
ability to be enjoyed without that critical electricity-dependent product known
as ice. The scars left by Hurricane Sandy include billions of dollars in
reconstruction costs and this writer’s inability to get beyond cocktails best
served neat. I was traumatized, dammit! Cut me some slack!
Scotch served my
husband, Dan, and me well for the second and third nights of Sandy-induced
powerlessness. But by Evening Four, we’d both grown a little tired of even my
favorite single malt, Talisker. I’d been careful to stock the bar in the days
before Sandy swept in, and in retrospect, I think I’d been steered to the
Scotch department unconsciously by the name “Sandy”: “Now
all of ye come to Sandy here/ Come over to Sandy's booth!/ I'm sellin' the
sweetest candy here/ That ever shook loose a tooth!” (Guess that musical! I’m
sorry. I can’t help it.) So
we turned westward to the Emerald Isle.
No, I don’t mean
the National Rental Car desk at our nearest airport. I mean Ireland, people!
Leprechauns! The Stone of Scone! Joyce, Yeats, and Peter O’Toole! (As the great
John Waters once observed: Peter O’Toole? That’s as bad as Muffy O’Clit.)
Moving right along
… Dan grunted unpleasantly when I suggested another Talisker at cocktail hour
on the fourth evening of our forced confinement. We were down to eating
unheated canned soup and tuna salad without the celery or mayonnaise. (OK, call
it what it was: tuna straight from the can.) Our meal was grim, but cocktail
hour was saved by the bottle of Jameson just waiting for an occasion to be
opened. How I love the Irish!
Scotch, Canadian
and Irish whiskey are all distilled from fermented grain mash; grains include
barley, rye, wheat and corn, some of which are malted. (Malting involves
halting the germination process by drying the grain with hot air.) Each
nation’s whiskey has its own particular taste, though, not only because the
grain tastes different depending on the soil and climate of the country, but
also because of differences in each liquor’s aging as well as the type of grain
itself. Typically (though not necessarily), Scottish whiskey crafters use peat
smoke to dry the malt; characteristically – though again not necessarily –
Canadian whiskey is brewed from corn. Irish whiskey, of which Jameson is the
exemplar, is generally distilled from unpeated malt and has a faintly sweet
aroma and taste. It’s not as sweet as bourbon, but it’s distinctly sweeter than
Scotch.
Jameson, like
any good whiskey, can be enjoyed on the rocks or neat. Dan and I had ours neat
by necessity, there being no ice. There being no running water either, I might
add, the two of us had begun to – how shall I put it? – stink. Given alcohol’s
marvelous ability to kill germs, perhaps we should have swabbed ourselves with
Jameson, but that would have been reckless. So we each gave ourselves a “French
whore’s bath,” meaning a quick wipe-down with a washcloth dipped in the bathtub
we’d filled with water as a precaution before the storm hit. Later, we got into
a little – um, well – rank piggy action under the influence of the whiskey. My,
my, my! Who said smelly old dogs couldn’t learn new tricks?