Exciting times! Shadow Ticket galleys are appearing in a few smiled-upon hands, and the rest of us only have forty-something days to wait before it’s in our preterite mitts too. In the meantime, PTA’s Vineland riff One Battle After Another is out in a month. Wildly for me, if less crucially for the rest of Pynchondom, my first child is due out even sooner than that. And to top it all off, we are here now bringing you the 150th drink recorded on this venerable weblog, Tom Pynchon’s Liquor Cabinet. It’s that anarchist classic you’ve all been waiting for, the Crocodile.

We return to Against the Day‘s anarchist mountain spa at Yz-les-Bains, previously visited for a glass of Jurançon White. They have a house specialty prized among the revolutionary clientele:

Yz-les-Bains was in fact one of the few places on the continent of Europe where a sober Anarchist could find a decent Crocodile—equal amounts of rum, absinthe, and the grape spirits known as trois-six—a traditional Anarchist favorite, which Loïc the bartender, a veteran of the Paris Commune, claimed to have been present at the invention of.

Against the Day, p. 941.

The Paris Commune was a short-lived anarcho-communist utopian moment in France in 1871: a fitting birthplace for this revolutionary beverage. The ingredients tell a story in that context.

Absinthe was cheaper than wine at the time due to the Phylloxera crisis that had been blighting vines across Europe since the 1860s, and it was enjoyed by proletariat and bourgeois alike. It was the quintessential drink of 19th century French cafe culture. In the decades following, its reputation would turn more decidedly downmarket, and associations with the working class Communard revolutionaries would strengthen.

Rum, on the other hand, evokes not France itself but the French colonies in the Caribbean. The colonial system that brought rum from these occupied outposts to Paris was arguably a blind spot in the anticapitalist critiques put forward by the Communards; it seems they were to some extent happy to entertain the vision of a communist French empire. The Crocodile perhaps encompasses contradictions political as much as gustatory. If rum and absinthe seem like a difficult mix, how about anarchy and empire? At the same time, we could read the rum as emissary from anarchist struggle for freedom and independence elsewhere, a nod to comrades in more tropical climes and the shared struggle across latitudes.

How about the last leg of our tripedal cocktail, the more mysterious trois-six? This one hasn’t made it through into the 21st century quite as intact; even information on the stuff seems pretty scarce. I am taking as my primary source a 2006 post on a French blog linked by the incomparable Biblioklept in a post they made about the Crocodile back in 2013. (Biblioklept has the good sense to more or less just quote the passage, rather than feeling obliged to ramble on about it). From what I can gather from our French insider through an imperfect Google translation, trois-six was a grape spirit diluted three parts raw spirit to three parts water (for trois out of seis parts alcohol). If the original spirit were something like 96% ethanol, the trois-six would have been around 48%—a fairly standard brandy strength. In essence, I think trois-six was an unaged brandy or eau de vie de vin, a sort of wine-based moonshine. Where absinthe is bohemian and artistic, and rum is the colonial connection, trois-six hews closer to the working class core of the Commune.

For my trois-six stand-in, I have a bottle of an eau de vie de vin from a French absinthe distillery called Le Coeur de Jade. It’s the base spirit they use for their absinthes, just sans botanicals. Supposedly it is “made according to traditional 19th century methods.” My rum is the Santiago bottle from our last post here, and the absinthe is Pernod. I added one shot of each to a mixing glass with ice, stirred, then strained into a coupe glass.

Need we be trepidatious here? Equal parts absinthe, rum, and trois-six isn’t quite Quimporto level nasty, but it does sound a touch, well, anarchic. In fact, it is surprisingly coherent. Tasty even! I do have a weakness for a straight-booze cocktail, but I really think this works. It has a minty aniseed absinthe foreground against a brown sugar rum warmth and a subtle grapey-sweet impression. In the glass, it’s a beguiling yellow-green, flecked with little glittering oily sparkles throughout—vaguely crocodilian I suppose. Like anarchy itself, it seems like perhaps it shouldn’t work but actually hangs together better than anyone could have imagined.

Another trademark Thomas Pynchon triumph of political mixology! And cheers to 150 drinks down. Thanks for sticking around!