Category: Mason & Dixon
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Peach Brandy
Mason & Dixon has a few drinks that stuck out to me as defining when I first read it. White corn whisky and madeira top the pile, as I wrote about the day I finished the book. Peach brandy doesn’t get anything like the airtime those two command, but it has nevertheless always sung to […]
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Stale Ale
Early in their American period, after an afternoon with an unexpectedly scatty Benjamin Franklin, Messrs Mason and Dixon head on Mason’s suggestion to a tavern by the name of the Fair Anchor. It’s a bit of a dive, just how Mason likes it: And withal, when they show up at The Fair Anchor that Night, […]
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Cloudberry Flip
Finally got round to the Cloudberry Flip! I’ve had this Finnish cloudberry liqueur sitting around for years, making its mysterious presence felt through an improvisational dash in a thrown together cocktail here and there. Mostly though, it’s been slumbering, awaiting this day. What a wonderful whimsical name is Cloudberry Flip: light, buoyant, dreamy… Lovely as […]
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Constantia wine
Despite above appearances, this wine did not sprout one afternoon alongside my tomato plants. It grew further afield, in the Constantia vineyard of South Africa, and I imagine hitched a ride on a ship or two on its way to me. Messrs Mason and Dixon let the wine stay put and did the seafaring themselves. […]
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Conoloways White
I recently spent a week in Kentucky with ten children in my care. This provided an ideal opportunity for some moonshining. Chapter 59 of Mason & Dixon finds our charismatic surveyors at Captain Shelby’s home in Virginia, where they hear told a saga (more of that trademark M&D nested narration) of rioting and baby-snatching that […]
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Cheap Claret
Claret first enters the etymological record as a British nickname for Bordeaux red in 1700, not too long before Mason & Dixon gets started. The slang would then have been sixty-some years in use when first appears in M&D on page 192, with Mason in an English pub called the George distracting himself from the death of former Astronomer Royal Bradley with […]
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Coconut Ale
In Chapter Three of Mason & Dixon, the Reverend Cherrycoke narrates the first excursion of our title characters in London. As Mason (“coming the Old London Hand”) inducts Dixon into the cheerful violence and mystery of the city, they encounter a group of sailors in charge of the vessel the pair are to sail on. Under the enthusiastic captaincy of […]
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Small Beer
Among the many pieces of historical, gustatory, and alcoholic miscellanea we can gather from the pages of Mason & Dixon, the early birth and long-life of the mutual incomprehension customary between British and American beer drinkers is one I particularly enjoy. Yanks find British beer dank and warm, Poms find the US stuff fizzy and insipid, and […]
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Spruce Beer
Long time no post! I’ve well and truly finished Against the Day (gaze upon the list and tremble), but this one’s actually from Mason & Dixon. It’s just been sitting in my fridge too long. Spruce beer is a not-always-alcoholic beverage brewed with buds or needles from spruce trees. Wikipedia reckons it was first drank by Indigenous groups […]
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Cock Ale
Don’t get too excited—Pynchon clearly has his saucier moments, but I haven’t gone all NSFW on you here. A cock’s a chicken, you dirty bastards. And what could be a more natural beer ingredient than a chicken. The Cock Ale appears in Mason & Dixon, brewed regularly at “The Moon,” a St Helena “punch house” […]
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 