Last week, we celebrated ten years of Tom Pynchon’s Liquor Cabinet. Believe it or not, an entire decade of literary boozing has passed since that first bottle of Chivas Regal (V., p. 124). I threw a party for the occasion, and what centrepiece could have been more fitting than a fondue with Too Much Kirsch?

You will need no reminding what passage we draw the fondue from. But here we are anyway:

One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.

The Crying of Lot 49, p. 1.

My party guests were more or less entirely ignorant of Oedipa’s trials (and of the good works of Mr Pynchon in general for that matter), but they endured my reading aloud the above passage, among others, with great good humour. And the fondue! It was delicious! Too much kirsch notwithstanding. (The photos here, I should note, are of our leftovers; I didn’t make everyone pause mid-party while I hunted for the perfect angle).

We followed the NYT recipe and doubled the quantities of everything—except the kirsch, which we tripled. Perhaps too much kirsch! The original recipe only called for one or two tablespoons though. We ended up with 5 or 6 tablespoons in ~1.5 kg of cheese. I hadn’t really appreciated before that the suggestion Oedipa is drunk off the fondue carries a note of irony. I guess it makes sense that a couple of sentences on Oedipa tries “to feel as drunk as possible” but finds that it isn’t happening. I could barely even taste the kirsch to be honest. At least one guest did find it too much though, telling me it tasted like hot alcohol. So I think we straddled the line of “perhaps too much” just right.

Thank you all for reading these ridiculous little posts the past ten years! I’m having a great time, and it’s great to have you with me. Since the very first Drunk Pynchon days, the kirsch fondue has loomed as a great landmark on the forward horizon. Only the banana breakfast struck me as more iconic. Now, we’re ten years in, and the two great peaks of Pynchonian booze-food lie behind us, surmounted. What ascents are still ahead? Where will decade two take us? I think I can almost make out another mountain chain ahead, shimmering in the fog…