I couldn't sleep. There's a lot going on in my life right now that's put me into a contemplative mood lately. News that
was retiring got me thinking about my days as a graduate student in history at Northern Illinois University, where I studied trans-national cultural and policy connections of the late colonial period of the Netherlands East Indies, the modern nation of Indonesia. Combined with my love of exploring the world of cocktails, this naturally made me consider ways to "continue my studies", so to speak, on a pleasant spring evening. A little research, a trip to our incredible local liquor store, and the discovery of a gamelan orchestra station on my Roku later, and I was ready to explore a lost world of imagined, cross-cultural concoctions inspired by my earlier academic experiences.
I think the main reason why vintage and "vintage-style" cocktails have been so appealing to me, in a way that modern highballs and the "flavored vodka and juice" drinks can never really do, was the manners in which, by their design, they appeal on an intellectual level to my desire to learn about the historical peoples which created or inspired them. The study, research of, development of and consumption of vintage cocktails transports me, through the senses, viscerally, to another time, another place, another world that exists only on paper or in the mind -- like the ways in which the academic pursuit used to do and still may, but in a way that academia has only begun, if at all, to explore. The particular journey invoked by this 'blog post is particularly inspirational in that it is a sojourn into colonial worlds of exchange, understanding, misunderstanding, negotiation, translation, expropriation, conquest and independence -- worlds that not only no longer exist, but existed, if the ever existed at all, purely in the imagination -- either the imagination of those historical actors, or in my own.
The Holland House
I ordered this cocktail first off a truly incredible cocktail menu at a local steakhouse during our Fantasy Football awards banquet. My buddy Arnie, who knows me all too well, called its taste "colonialism in a glass". He's not wrong.
2 oz. jenever
1 oz. dry vermouth
1/2 oz. maraschino liqueur
1/2 oz. freshly squeezed lemon juice
Shaken over ice and garnished with a twist of lemon peel
I was under the impression that jenever was "Dutch gin", but I had no idea what that meant until now. While it's reminiscent of gin, a spirit that gets the lion's share of its flavor from the addition of juniper berries prior to the final distillation, giving it a distinctly piney taste, the Peket de Houyeu Jenever I bought is quite substantially lighter than any other gin I've had, and, in fact, has a gently complex flavor and appearance that belies its having been aged briefly in oak.
This is an impressive take on a typical martini, adding layers of nuance to a familiar cocktail. The sweetness of the maraschino helps balance the addition of a (for a typical martini) gargantuan quantity of vermouth, tempered by the addition of the lemon. This is a well-balanced, more approachable and eminently less-imposing recipe. I wouldn't mind trying the jenever in a traditional martini, either.
The Daisy
This was billed as the Dutch East Indies Daisy, which I find cumbersome and unnecessary. (To a scholar of Dutch colonial history, the translation of Nederlands-Indie into English is ever-problematic.) In any event, my Google search for "Cocktails from the Dutch East Indies" led me to this recipe.
3 oz. Batavia Arrack
1/2 oz. freshly squeezed lime juice
1/2 oz. Creme de Cacao
2 tbsps. fennel seeds
Two shakes of Angostura bitters
Shaken over ice and double-strained into a cocktail glass.
Arrack is an Indoneisan spirit, not dissimilar to rum. It lacks the sophistication of that mass-produced, mass-marketed Caribbean distillate bound for the United States and to be inevitably united with Coca-Cola, though. It's hotter, drier, and slightly rougher than rum, but the obvious underlying character that belies its common heritage as a sugar cane distillate. I remember distinctly a disturbing, graduate school screening of Moeder Dao, de Schildpadgelikende ("Mother Dao, the Turtle-Like", a fanciful name for the Indonesian islands as an unchanging womb of wealth for the Dutch state and exoticism for the Dutch people) a modern producer's re-cut of early twentieth-century propaganda footage of the Dutch East Indies, seeing sugar cane being cultivated, by Javanese peasant workers in stupefyingly wretched conditions, and transformed into salable product for transport to Europe. At that time I realized that the same forces present in the Caribbean labor->raw material->finished good economy must have also been present in the spice islands of Indonesia. But tonight, in this cocktail, was the first time I was ever conscious of ever having tried the end product. Even though arrack lacks the outward taste sensibilities of a culture familiar and comfortable with alcoholic consumption, with a bit of imagination, arrack is not an unpalatable mixer on its own. Combined with lime and a bit of chocolate and the earthy tones of fennel, it's similar to a Cuba Libre -- a cocktail itself borne of the imperial project. Combining spices, citrus, and spirits present in the colonial context, it's not difficult to imagine this to be the drink du jure of a plantation owner or a Batavian bureaucratic functionary in the pre-World War II era.
The Dangerous Life
This cocktail was my creation, inspired by the "Saigon Correspondent", itself a modern take on an imagined, Vietnam War-era styled British colonial cocktail, the gin and tonic.
3 thick slices of cucumber, quartered, muddled with 1/2 oz. of freshly squeezed lime juice.
This, dry shaken with 3 oz. Plymouth gin and 1 oz. Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur, one bar-spoon of Sambal Oelek, fifteen drops of homemade lime bitters, and a tablespoon of whole cloves, and allowed to rest briefly, before being poured over ice, shaken, and served up with a wheel of cucumber and a wheel of lime.
The original recipe called for Plymouth gin and Domaine de Canton, a ginger liqueur based in cognac which is simply wonderful. I kept these, along with the lime juice, muddled with cucumber. I substituted the Sriracha with Sambal Oelek, a hot and flavorful Javanese-style pepper paste, and, since I wanted an "up" cocktail, swapped out the Q Tonic, which I detest, with a tablespoon of whole cloves, along with my own homemade lime bitters, to provide the herbal complexity missing with the loss of the tonic water.
When coming up with this recipe, I imagined the kinds of cocktails that the fictional Australian war correspondent in The Year of Living Dangerously, sent to Indonesia on the eve of the chaos and pervasive, unimaginable brutality of the euphemistically-termed "September 30th Movement", would have been gulping at the expat colony in Djakarta alongside his foreign counterparts with the BBC and the CIA. In that, I wasn't disappointed. It combines some uniquely Southeast Asian ingredients with some almost stereotypical "exotic" tropes, into a seamless taste experience -- both within, and without, the imperial "other". It's a graduate thesis in a glass.
Much like my own academic studies into the history of the Netherlands East Indies, what I enjoyed most about all of these cocktails is how ethereal and disturbing they are. The Holland House is undoubtedly the most conventional of the three, grounded in tradition but with a carefree air, reminiscent of what I imagine of the academic, optimistic and decidedly metropolitan tastes of late Empire. The Daisy, of course, combines the flavors present in the decidedly rough spirit with some familiar and exotic flavors into a fantastic cocktail which, like the Aviation and the Twentieth Century conjure romantic and exotic images of movement in the Art Deco period, invokes the best intentions and sentimentality of the late Dutch imperial project in "Their Indies" -- with tastes both well-known and completely alien. And, of course, what I've termed The Dangerous Life, the evil stepsister of these drinks, witness to the dark side of the Imperial project, the hot and almost seething flavors of unfulfilled promise ever-present behind the facade of a friendly and disarming smile of familiarity. I'm almost shocked at how delicious these cocktails were; with some imagination, how intriguing the vision of the world they presented. These cocktails are an intoxicating sensory glimpse at a complex world of Empire that is both, at once, stagnant, much deservedly gone forever, dynamic, and perpetually at work changing the world in which we live.
