Don't Try This At Home edited by Kimberley Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman

A little bit of Bank Holiday fun: Don’t Try This At Home is a collection of anecdotes from some of the biggest names in professional cooking, detailing what the blurb calls ‘culinary catastrophes’ from setting fire the kitchen to accidentally destroying the food. Naturally, there is at least one disaster involving alcohol, hence its inclusion in 120 Units.


New York chef Jimmy Bradley’s contribution to the book tells of a drunken debacle that occurred while he was working as a sous chef in a seaside restaurant on Rhode Island:

This story would never happen today. It probably could only have taken place in the 1980s, when drug and alcohol abuse in the restaurant industry were at their zenith.

Having spent four months setting up a new restaurant for their owner, Bradley and his chef Fernando (names have apparently been changed...) were looking forward to the opening night, only to find that they weren’t invited. Back at the other restaurant, resentment boiled over and Fernando decided that action had to be taken:

He began barking orders to the kitchen staff: ‘You, go get me a bucket. You, go get me three bottles of vodka and two bottles of triple sec... I’m gonna stand here and make five gallons worth of shots.’ Shots? So he was going to get hammered? Big deal. If only that were the case.

Bradley admits that ‘much of that evening is a blur to me’ after Fernando makes the entire staff knock back shot after shot. The finale occurrs when the theme tune to Hawaii Five-O comes onto the radio:

Fernando came over to my station and turned the radio up full blast. He took the wand out of my hand and started paddling an imaginary canoe... One by one, the entire staff joined in, grabbing paddles, and when those ran out, tongs, spatulas, wooden spoons...

Like a drunken conga line, the entire restaurant staff are paddling an invisible boat across the kitchen floor when the owner makes an unexpected appearance. Oddly enough Bradley and Fernando were looking for a new job the next day.

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

I quickly became hooked on Patricia Highsmith’s books last year and read three in rapid succession. Strangers on a Train was the third one I picked up; filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, it is probably her most famous after the series of Ripley novels.


Guy Haines meets Charles Bruno on a train and lets slip in conversation that he is going to Metcalfe, Texas to sort out a divorce with his estranged wife, who is pregnant by another man. The dissolute Bruno, clearly smitten by Guy, decides to help him out and travels down to Texas after him and kills the unfortunate woman. When the innocent Guy is finally out of police suspicion, Bruno makes a reappearance in his life, blackmailing him into murdering his father.

Of the two protagonists, Bruno is the more interesting; clearly unhinged, he is dangerously alcoholic as well as allowing his intense feelings for Guy to destroy the poor man’s life. His relationship with his mother is straight out of Freud, (I almost expected him to blind himself at the end, but that would simply have confirmed Anouilh’s theory that Oedipus was a melodramatic...) but his relationship with the bottle is just as messy.

Bruno, sharing a hotel suite with his mother, slopes off to the bathroom for an early morning sharpener:

He turned the water on harder, leaned on the basin, and concentrated on the bright nickel-plated drainstop. After a moment, he reached for the Scotch bottle he kept under towels in the clothes hamper. He felt less shaky with the glass of Scotch and water in his hand... In the mirror, the portrait of a young man of leisure, of reckless and mysterious adventure, a young man of humour and depth, power and gentleness (witness the glass held delicately between thumb and forefinger with the air of an imperial toast) – a young man with two lives. He drank to himself.

And all before breakfast... Small wonder that by the end of the book, Bruno has met a watery end and Guy has been driven insane.

Pulp by Charles Bukowski

When I decided to feature Charles Bukowski in 120 Units, I thought I’d reread Post Office, his booze soaked memoir of working as a postman in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, my copy seems to have been left in the pub, so it was back to the library where I found this, and having covered Raymond Chandler the other week, I couldn’t resist it.


Essentially a pastiche of hard boiled ‘pulp’ fiction, (the private investigator protagonist is even called Nicky Belane), Pulp’s absurd plot involves searching for the French author Celine, an elusive Red Sparrow, extraterrestrials and death itself, in the form of a fabulously beautiful woman. Naturally, there’s a lot of alcohol as well, hence it’s inclusion here.

This is fairly typical:

So there I was, depressed again. I drove back to my place, got in and opened a bottle of scotch. I was back with my old friend, scotch and water. Scotch is a drink you don’t take to right off. But after you work with it a while it kind of works its magic on you. I find a special touch of warmth to it that whiskey doesn’t have. Anyhow, I had the glooms and I sat in a chair with the 5th at my side... There wasn’t much to turn to for me, except the scotch.

That said, Bukowski is capable of bon mot (“Definition of a nice neighbourhood: a place you couldn’t afford to live in.”) and even a little hard hitting philosophy, especially when it comes to drinking:

Why was the windshield rolling in front of me like a big wave? Must be the hangover. Vodka with beer chaser. You had to pay... Sometimes I thought about my liver but my liver never spoke up, it never said, ‘Stop it, you’re killing me and I’m going to kill you!’ If we had talking livers we wouldn’t need the A.A.

So there you have it. The world would be an easier place if only the liver had learned to speak.

Wine and War by Don & Petie Kladstrup

Subtitled ‘The French, the Nazis and the battle for France’s Greatest Treasure’, Wine & War chronicles the story of the France’s most famous vineyards while the country was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. The book was another recommendation, this time from my friend Liam who works in the wine industry and lent me his copy.


After invading France in 1940, the Nazi’s set about systematically looting the country. Many millions of bottles were taken back to Germany at the behest of Göring, and at the end of the war the French liberated what was left from an immense cache at Berchtesgaden.

The authors make the point that wine and viticulture are very much part of the French soul and that the crime of its theft was particularly hard to bear, especially when it was eventually rationed for the ordinary French in the latter years of the war. In a particularly moving episode, winemaker Gaston Huet, then a prisoner of war in Germany, manages to persuade the camp commandant to allow the men to have a fête, complete with wine, although when the wine is shared out, there is little more than a tiny glass each.

Huet did not remember precisely what wine he drank or the vintage. “It was nothing special and there was only a thimbleful,” he said, “but it was glorious, and the best wine I ever drank.”

I shall leave the final word to the writer Georges Duhamel, who after a dinner to celebrate the end of the war and the return of the vineyards to French control said:

“Wine was one of the first signs of civilisation to appear in the life of human beings. It is in the Bible, it is in Homer, it shines through all the pages of history, participating in the destiny of ingenious men. It gives spirit to those who know how to taste it, but it punishes those who drink it without restraint.”

The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson

My friend Rory reminded me of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary which I recall reading not long after it came out in 1998, although it was actually written in 1958 but was left unpublished for four decades before Thompson finally released it.


It was worth the reappraisal of a re-read. Thompson’s prose hadn’t sharpened up to the Gonzo craziness of his Fear And Loathing period, but it’s still brilliantly written. The story is narrated by Paul Kemp, a thirty year old ‘vagrant journalist’ who has taken a job on at a failing English language paper in Puerto Rico. He falls in with the unpredictable and violent Yeamon and his beguiling girlfriend, Chenault, who leaves him stewing in his own lust.

As the title suggests, alcohol plays a big part in the novel and it courses through the pages, each drunken outrage soaked up the next day with beer at breakfast and then bottle after bottle of rum. When Sala, the staff photographer on the paper, claims he feels like he’s one hundred years old at thirty, I could feel the three day hangover.

The frustration of an aimless life spent in the sapping heat is palpable:

The only way to whip it was to hang on until dusk and banish the ghosts with rum. Often it was easier not to wait, so the drinking would begin at noon. It didn’t help much, as I recall, except that sometimes it made the day go a little faster.

It’s a sozzled minor masterpiece that comes down to earth in the end with a hell of a bump, as always happens with rum...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

It was my father who discovered The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy listening to Radio4 back in the 70s and it would be fair enough to say that I grew up with the books, TV series and of course the original radio series. It is a cult phenomenon now, and one that is still immensely popular today, despite the fact that Douglas Adams himself sadly died in 2001.


Appropriately enough for a book that was allegedly conceived while its author was lying drunk in a field in Austria, there are several mentions of the sauce, however the best one by a country mile is the description of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, a drink mixed with one ingredient that must be properly iced or the benzene is lost. Don’t panic...

Imagine, if you can, the following excerpt narrated by the late Peter Jones.

Here’s what The Encyclopaedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colourless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.

He goes on to point out that the Hitchhiker’s Guide sells rather better than The Encyclopaedia Galactica...

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

The wonderful thing about this blog is that I have been lent several books with suggestions for posting; today’s excerpt is from The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, a man who knew a few things about alcohol.

I cold quote large parts of the book; there are copious references to drinking, all in Chandler’s deadpan prose which is a thrill to read. I’ll kick off with a cocktail recipe. My friend Rich who passed the book on to me, reported that the description of gimlets is so vivid, you can almost taste the lime.

A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.

The doomed Terry Lennox, who introduces Chandler’s PI, Phillip Marlowe, to gimlets expands on the theme of alcohol:

“Alcohol is like love,” he said. “The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”

There are obviously only so many gimlets you can drink...

Staying On by Paul Scott

A sort of coda to the more famous Raj Quartet, Staying On describes the demise of Colonel ‘Tusker’ Smalley, who has remained in India with his wife Lucy after the end of British Rule. Narrated variously through the eyes of Lucy, Mr Bhoolabhoy – owner of the hotel where the Smalleys live – and Ibrahim, the Smalley’s manservant, it describes the final chapter in the story of a particular class and their way of life.


I’ve read the book twice now and it had the rare effect of making me laugh aloud several times while on the train, as well as making me distinctly misty eyed between Clapham Junction and Vauxhall. I also saw a stage version, which despite the best efforts of a cast including Prunella Scales and Saeed Jaffrey, I felt was not a roaring success.

Scott makes no attempt to disguise the British reputation in India for putting away a formidable amount of alcohol and there are many references to it in the book, from the Monday night drinks that Tusker enjoys with Mr Bhoolabhoy, where he often persuades ‘Billy-Boy to “Have another peg” to Ibrahim cleaning Lucy’s jewellery in gin. Then drinking the gin. “The Shadow of the disapproving Prophet fell on him. ‘Waste not want not,’ he said aloud.”

My favourite boozy vignette, however, comes from Ibrahim recollecting what his father told him about his previous employer, Colonel Moxon-Greife, and how he got drunk at Mess dinners:

“First, my son,” his father told him, “Colonel Sahib speaking with much vitality, but in a very discreet way, understand? Then towards end of dinner he stops speaking at random, and sits at attention. Speaking only when spoken to, but always speaking to the point. Hand always on glass. Glass always being refilled... After that immovable. We take him out in his chair. It is special chair with iron circular attachments, through which poles are passed so that it becomes like dooli. Some fellows come in with poles. The poles are passed through the rings. We carry him out and across the road to his bungalow. I put him to bed. At six o’clock next morning he is on parade. A real Burra Sahib.”

Apparently on Ladies’ nights at the Mess, the Colonel would only imbibe to the point where he could still escort the Memsahib back to the bungalow himself...

The Bridge Over The Drina by Ivo Andrić

In some ways the genesis of this blog was several years ago when I read Andrić’s magical novel, The Bridge Over The Drina, set in his native Bosnia. I was so impressed by the passage on the perils of addiction to plum brandy, also known as slivovitz, that I copied it out and sent it to a friend.


I became acquainted with slivovitz during my time at the School of Slavonic & East European Studies and can vouch for the fact that it needs to be treated with some caution. The best stuff is home made and usually makes its way over to this country in recycled lemonade bottles...

The book itself covers five hundred years of history in the town of Višegrad and is centred around the great Ottoman bridge over the river, a silent, central character in the novel. A worthy insight into the bloody tangle of Balkan history, its author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. The story takes the form of various episodes around the town and the bridge; in this one, someone appears at the caravanserai with the expressed intent of drowning his sorrows:

Withdrawn into the farthest corners the notorious addicts of plum brandy sat silent. They were lovers of shadow and silence, sitting over their plum brandy as if it were something sacred, hating movement and commotion. With burnt-out stomachs, inflamed livers and disordered nerves, unshaven and uncared for, indifferent to everything else in the world and a burden even to themselves, they sat there and drank, and while drinking, waited until that magical light which shines for those completely given over to drink should at last burst upon them, that joy for which it is sweet to suffer, to decay and finally to die, but which unfortunately appears more and more rarely and shines more and more weakly.

A description of hell, it’s nonetheless sheer poetry.