One year my mother and I made cordials out of everything imaginable. We slaved away at that all summer.
That Thanksgiving I had one of two bizarre feed-the world-type Thanksgivings my then-boyfriend and I put on. We invited everyone who'd asked us to dinner at their house during that year and everyone we owed entertaining to attend an an "in-training" dinner the Sunday before Thanksgiving. We called it an "in-training" dinner because the idea was to stretch one's gut for overeating the following weekend.
We did four 20 pound birds that year, 2 hams all the fixings, including 5 different dessert options. We even made coffee and tea.. All people had to bring was a plate, their own cutlery and drink receptacle and whatever beverage other than coffee or tea they wanted, including their own wine or beer. Over 70 people showed up. Folks were eating in shifts, in every room in our 2 bedroom apartment, the balcony, even on a couple of tables set up outside our front door. People were milling around, there was a lot of hilarity instead of any awkwardness that can occur among those who hadn't met before. The neighbors were also invited and they brought extra folding chairs, etc. One HELL of a party. I had more fun at the second than the first, because I finally blew off trying to get all the food "just right" and took time to have fun instead of hovering over the table replenishing items the second they ran out.
People discovered my cordials after the pig rumps and birds had been decimated. That began a cordial-tasting which decimated what should have been many years' supply of the stuff for one household. We ended up pouring 25 or so folks into cabs after confiscating keys. No one drove home drunk, but there was at least one inebriated person in every car leaving our place.
That summer I'd made cherry, apricot, lemon, almond, peppermint, coffee, chocolate, chocolate-cherry, raspberry, blueberry, cherry-vanilla, orange, lime, ginger-lemon, mango, anise, cardamom-cinnamon, vanilla-honey, vanilla-cinnamon, basil and tomato (YES, with simple syrup.. .haven't you ever had candied tomatoes?); a wierd herbal thing from a recipe of my great grandmother (which we originally used as a base for home made cough syrup along with other healing herbs, honey, and raw lemon juice with cayenne). hat doozy which has in it thyme, basil, marjoram and summer savory (yes, it's sweetened also, and it's delicious with cheese and crackers).
No one got sick drunk, but you should have had to take the "no thanks for the hangover" calls we got for the next few days. Apparently some people had headaches and felt weird clear up to Thanksgiving.
This all began because Mom loved to make her own brandied cherries. Ever the kitchen chemist, I got involved in my 20s when I had my own place. As things were wont to do when Mom and I got a burr under our saddles or a wild hare up our snoots, things just got out of hand the summer before this dinner. We not only brandied over 12 gallons of cherries (I had stained hands for 2 weeks pitting all those bloody cherries), but I took it into my head to make cherry liqueur. At that point is where we both went pretty close to ga-ga. Things went from obsessed to silly.
I spent weekday evenings, and entire weekends either in her kitchen or mine, stirring pots, washing out bottles, begging bottles from everyone I knew, making trips to the liquor stores and buying a case at a time of "high test". One liquor store manager called me asking me if I wanted to buy four cases of a particular brand of vodka because the distributor's rep was in there and offered him a deal. He wanted to know how much extra he should order and offered me a price break. What a pip.
We went through a whole pile of cheesecloth, stained our hands, turned both kitchens into laboratories and had the closets in both dwellings full of bottles from back to door, on the floors. Relatives and friends that year accused us of trying to kill them off.
It's no wonder that completely slipped my mind for 30 plus years.
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