At the Filling Station

...But one day he tired of the blandness of campari, vermouth, and a swoosh of soda, and asked the barman at the Caff...

...Well, everything had been going fi ne for me up until that point...

...vodka, ? oz...

...His long section on the subject is taut and muscular and matterof-fact...

...I think the invention must have something to do with the distinctly American passion for plentiful ice: a commodity that was until fairly recently in niggardly supply in overseas bars and pubs...

...Eric Felten doesn’t write as well as Kingsley Amis, which is no disgrace (he is a jazz musician, an occupation for which Amis had a high regard) but he does have a feel for literature as it relates to booze, and he has been out there on our behalf and done an awful lot of homework...

...cucumber juice: Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass...

...Float a slice of unpeeled cucumber on the top...

...Interest declared: All these will soon be reissued in a handy single volume by Bloomsbury, with an introduction by your humble servant...

...His remark about one or two but never three has been, I hope, lifted from my own axiom about the relationship between martinis and female breasts...

...He reviews the work of the no-or-nearly-no vermouth school, uncharacteristically missing the chance to cite Luis Bu?uel’s advice to merely let a ray of sunshine through the vermouth bottle into the gin, but comes down in favor of a decent dollop and gives cogent reasons for his verdict as well as a very good selection of recipes and some hard thinking on the subject lifted (with attribution) from Bernard De Voto...

...Cocktails, Culture, and the Art of Drinking Well by Eric Felten Agate Surrey, 200 pp., $20 “How’s your drink...

...As often as not, the cocktail bar in a decent European hotel will be called ‘The American Bar.’ The word cocktail itself is of American provenance, though rather vague in origin...

...I had always been authoritatively told that this cryptically effective cocktail— gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth— was so named because a certain Count Negroni once found himself with unexpected guests and with only those three ingredients at hand...

...That book was actually a quiz book, in which you could be asked “From what does Scotch receive its color...

...When all is said, isn’t there something very slightly fussy about all this mixing and shaking and measuring: something, perhaps, fractionally light in the loafers...

...was, apparently, the cordial question asked of his guests by Frank Sinatra, who didn’t like to think of anyone going short...

...It’s always a good plan to see how an author handles a topic with which you are yourself familiar...

...His second observation, about the girlie factor, is something that greatly preoccupies Felten...

...or “What happens to a vintage port before and after bottling...

...A bit herbivorous when compared to its namesake, but there you have it...

...There is a sense in which the whole concept of the cocktail is an American one...

...Occasionally his writing falls into a slight archness (I have always found the term “mixologist” for “bartender” to be wince-making) and he overuses terms like “so the story goes” and “legend has it,” but in general this book is a superb guide to the world of the cocktail, and a handsome tribute to the bold society that produced it...

...It seems that Count Camillo Negroni was a drinker of Americanos—the cocktail, you may remember, that James Bond actually asks for in Casino Royale...

...Stone, where it acts the part of accomplice to a gigolo, and in the novel version of Christopher Buckley’s movie Thank You For Smoking, where in its vodka incarnation it acts as a prop and stay to the villainous lobbyist Nick Naylor...

...So I began by looking up “Negroni”: a favorite tipple of mine either on sunny days or in Mediterranean countries (it won’t work in cold or gray conditions...

...His book, which is a distillation, if I may put it like that, of his celebrated Wall Street Journal column of the same name, is by far the wittiest and the most comprehensive study of the subject since the author of Lucky Jim laid down his pen...

...The answers were helpfully included at the end, often with a cheery wealth of extra detail, so the volume doubled as a guide and general adviser as well...

...Thanks to Felten, I now know a good deal better...

...And somehow, one can’t picture the martini being evolved in any other culture...

...Negronis to one side, and Americanos being as un-American as could be, there is still a sense in which the whole concept of the cocktail is an American one...

...Buckley is quoted as saying that he himself has “been known to drink a [vodka] Negroni or two (but never three)” because “it signals a certain, shall we say, suavity, refi nement, je ne sais quoi, sophistication, to say nothing of startling good looks and abundant masculinity...

...Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair...

...Unlike those girlie-men who drink Gin Negronis...

...The word cocktail itself is of American provenance, though rather vague in origin...

...Borrowing from an old Esquire distinction, he suggests that masculine cocktails involve whiskey whereas feminine ones “lean heavily on cream, fruit juices and cr?me de this-andthat...

...Casoni in Florence—a man named Fosco Scarselli—to put a spike of gin in it...

...Two seems somehow superbly right...

...This is the fraught question of cocktails and sex or, if you like, cocktails and gender...

...Felten then goes on to elucidate the role played by the Negroni in the fi lm version of Tennessee Williams’s novel The Roman Spring of Mrs...

...By the way, a “Lucky Jim,” according to Felten, is “3 oz...

...was the equivalent question (and, later, book title) in the case of Kingsley Amis, whose domestic strategy later boiled down to telling his more favored friends that if they didn’t have a full drink in their hands, it was their own bloody fault for not refi lling without waiting to be asked...

...How’s your glass...

...One is too few...

...dry vermouth, ? oz...

...That seems fair enough, except that both he and Kingsley Amis (about whom there was nothing limp-wristed) demonstrate a high degree of affection for the “Irish Coffee” cocktail and the exquisitely careful means of making it...

...Of course whiskey, which Felten calls “that least feminine-seeming of spirits,” is involved, so the honors here can be reckoned as about even...

...Like so many improvisations of genius, this was simple and easily emulated...

...And somehow, one can’t picture the martini being evolved in any other culture...

...Three is too many...

...But, secure enough in my own huskiness, I shall pardon young Buckley because he provides a segue—actually two segues— to an important subtext...

...For any fooling around with the said and beloved martini—especially the sickly new tendency to put the “tini” suffi x onto something insipid (like “appletini”)—Felten has zero tolerance...

...Though I should leave out the soda if I were you...

...As often as not, the cocktail bar in a decent European hotel will be called “The American Bar...

...But Amis also wrote two other drinkerscompanion efforts, entitled Every Day Drinking and On Drink...