I’m guessing this is the week when it hit everybody that summer is almost over. Here’s a little creation to soothe your melancholy. I realized that I had never named a drink in honor of Francis Poulenc, so I’ll borrow the title of one of my favorite of his songs, a bittersweet Apollinaire recollection of the perfect summer hang-out, now closed, never again to be graced by frivolity, abandon, or pretty girls dumb as cabbages.
La Grenouillère
Equal parts:
Dry gin
Apple eau de vie
Rose’s Sweetened Lime Juice
Shake with cracked ice and strain into a martini glass.
While you imbibe: here’s Poulenc himself, along with Jacques Février, performing the second movement of his 1932 Concerto for two pianos.
The cool thing about this drink is that you can also fool goth kiddies into thinking it’s absinthe.
I had no idea that there was a film of this performance. My hero the Princess de Polignac commissioned this piece so that Poulenc and Février would play together again. The highly technical quality of the filming (boy do I love that split screen thing) is probably due to megabucks very well spent.
Elaine: I think the recording is from the 60s—at one point I knew exactly when, but I couldn’t find the reference again (and a couple of pours didn’t exactly make me inclined to look very hard). The dashing young conductor is Georges Prêtre.>>Ben: great evil minds think alike—I was considering trying to fool clueless arrivistes into thinking it was Sauternes.