I love how online conversations send me off on journeys...
Hold on. I feel I should read that in a ‘radio’ voice...
EXT. DAY. TIM - “Hi. I’m Tim Hayward, and I’m on A Journey, to discover...Why does every commissioning editor want a bloody journey. Why do they want us to leave? Discover what? That my brain dissolved three pitches ago?
What I mean is those afternoon trips through old books and the backpassages of the web, tailing, in this case, James Salter.
He was, by all accounts, God’s Own American. Cartoon handsome, West Point educated, then a fighter ace in the Korean war and then... well basically becoming the Writer’s Writer, moving to Colorado. Skiing, climbing, hanging out in what appears to have been a 30 yr long Ralph Lauren ad, shot by Slim Aarons.
In his one book about food, co-written with his predictably superb wife, it becomes apparent that he led an enviable life, that included drinking, apparently, 8700 martinis.
More controversial is his recipe. Initially conventional…
“First, use a good English gin—Beefeater or Tanqueray both ninety-four proof, are preferred. The dry vermouth should be Noilly Prat or Martini & Rossi…In a pitcher or shaker put about six or eight cubes of hard ice cracked by hand (Place the cube in the palm of your hand and hit it smartly with a heavy spoon). It is important that the ice be cracked so as to present the maximum cold surface to the gin and vermouth—a martini is and should be a slightly diluted drink. Pour one or one and a half small capfuls of vermouth over the ice. And enough gin to fill, or nearly fill the martini glass…Stir or shake until the contents are very cold. A martini that is not absolutely icy is a failure...”
… it runs suddenly and brilliantly off piste. Like a high-G diving turn, throwing us off his tail…
“…Shake a Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce bottle, then quickly remove the cap and with it, dash a faint smudge of the contents—far less than a drop—into the bottom of the shaker before beginning. It adds the faint, unidentifiable touch of greatness.”
My own ‘writer’s life’ is less perfect. But it does allow me to spend a quiet afternoon thinking about savouriness in martinis, going back over notes, chasing references, making martinis and testing them, while pretending to take photographs.
Which is why you’re seeing this.
There is no record that Salter was even vaguely anglophile. Why the hell would he be? Having avoided being shot down, he had done even better out of his country than it had out of him and I don’t begrudge him a second of it.
But I bet he never had a bag of scampi fries.
This is where I indisputably win. I couldn’t walk into a pilot’s bar, boast about my Boom-and-zoom, demonstrate my Flat scissor with waving hands and mime out-turning a MIG-15 in my F86. In later years, it turned out, I couldn’t climb a mountain, hold my own at Hollywood parties or look good in trunks. But what I can do is walk into the pub round the corner, with my head held high and ask the barman in a loud, clear voice for a foil scrotum of packing chips that smell like a fishing smack.
I once mentioned my predilection for them online and received a strange and secretive message via a back-channel. It turned out to be my own Deep Throat. A man who’d worked at whatever gigantic food processing monolith then manufactured Scampi Fries.
“They were the most expensive thing we produced. A total Loss-Leader,”
“..all the prestige snacks were made with loads of MSG and a few micrograms of artificial flavouring, he whispered through a handkerchief over the receiver, but for Scampi Fries we were importing tonnes of Nam Pla and lemon grass”.
I’d feel vindicated, but weirdly I’d rather not be.
For years I’ve enjoyed the frisson of knowing that I could whip up the finest martini in the known world and that nothing could go better with it than a snack you could only buy in the worst pubs and that would, reliably make 65% of my readers combust in a combination of hauteur and disgust. Only I knew this. It was my secret.
I don’t blame Salter. Poor bastard. He couldn’t have known. And I wish him nothing but good, but there is no better snack with a Lea & Perrin’s tinctured martini, than a pack of Scampi Fries and I will fight any man who disagrees.
Particularly Salter.
Though I might ask him to take his shirt off and oil up.