Mamatas Nick - Mixed up: cocktail recipes (and flash fiction) for the discerning drinker (and reader)

Copyright 2017 by Nick Mamatas and Molly Tanzer

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Jenny Zemanek

Cover images courtesy of iStockphoto

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1803-6

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1804-3

Printed in China

Contents

Cheap Dates:
Booze You Can Use!

Hey Bartender:
Neat, But Not Straight Up!

Around the World in a Daze:
Drinking Everywhere

Day Drinking:
The Editors Inspiration

Nightcaps:
Recipes and Fiction for After Dark

Introduction

by Molly Tanzer

Nothing Gold

H OW DOES ONE PROPERLY DRINK a cocktail? The answer seems obviousthrough the teeth, past the gums, and all thatbut youd be surprised. People do it wrong literally all the time. Go to any bar or party and youll see people idling over their drinks, unaware that as they dawdle the botanicals are withering, the oils are settling, the glass and its contents are warming unpleasantly.

The temptation to linger over a drink is understandable. A well-crafted cocktail seems like something to savor. Additionally, company is most pleasant when people are just lubricated enough, and hastily pounding cocktails can prematurely end a fun evening. Pragmatically speaking, when one spends money in the liquor store on an esoteric ingredient, or forks over fifteen dollars in a bar for one drink, it feels rash to just gulp down ones classic Fin de Sicle or modern take on an Old Fashioned.

And yet, that is exactly what you should do. Youll enjoy your drink more, and you wont insult your bartender or host if you knock back their creations. In fact, they will appreciate your appreciation of the necessarily ephemeral nature of their work. Neither should you worry that you wont get the full experience of the drink by sipping lively. In doing so, you will taste more, appreciate more. Nothing gold can stay, and that applies to leaves, Eden, the dawn and cocktails .

Unfortunately, the slow sipping of a cocktail is too often a fossilized error. Were trained to go slow, to pace ourselves. And that is exactly why, as an enthusiastic home bartender, Im proud to present you with Mixed Up . Part mixology guide, part anthology, Mixed Up is a sophisticated mlange of the coldest drinks and the hottest voices writing today. It pairs sensual stories with bewitching recipes, demonstrating time and again that quick delights need not be hurried; that luxuriating doesnt necessarily mean languishing. I believe these brief stories will satisfy your senses as richly as any longer taleand if you accompany each with its associated cocktail, youll come around to the fine art of briskly consuming the beautiful.

Every cocktail has a story. Sometimes its literally literary, like the appearance of the Vesper in a James Bond novel. Sometimes its the sort of story you can casually relate to your party guests while you serve them, such as explaining who invented the Josie Russell, and why the original is so sour. Well, in this book, every story has a cocktail. Sweet or bitter, pleasant or shocking, you wont soon forget them. And really, if theres anything more suitable to cocktail party talk than the new author you just discovered, Im not sure what it might be!

Molly Tanzer,

Longmont, Colorado

January 2017

________________

Pacing yourself is, naturally, an excellent idea while drinking, but we recommend a glass of water in between drinks, rather than letting them go warm.

Introduction

by Nick Mamatas

Have You Heard the One About

R EAD ANY GOOD SHORT STORIES lately? Probably not. Maybe theres a well-worn copy of Nine Stories on your shelves. Perhaps you flip through the New Yorker every week and sometimes, sometimes , your eyes idle on a page full of well-observed description and telling details. Theres a possibility that you have downloaded a short fiction app onto your smartphone, and when the subway is stuck in a tunnel between stations for an hour and Facebook has exhausted itself, your thumb finds it.

Heard any good short stories lately? Of course you have. The world is made of them. The scripts of your favorite TV show episodes are twenty-two or forty-eight pages long. Every joke is a little story; so is every mouthful of juicy, acid gossip; so is every viral meme. So, your online date says from across the table at a bar close to your apartmentthe location chosen in case things go very poorly, or very wellIve read your profile, but tell me about yourself. And you do, and now youre the storyteller.

Some of the best short stories ever told were shared over cocktails. Social lubricant plus sensory stimulation plus company is the formula for a tale worth remembering. And then came a terrible interregnum and both the short story and the cocktail all but vanished. The slick magazines replaced their monthly fiction features with more ads, and a generation decided to consume sugary concoctions and novelty shots instead of real drinks. The 1990s were terrible, and the 2000s were worse, for everything.

The cocktail has finally emerged from the darkness, thanks partially to quality bitters becoming widely available again, and partially to leading bars and restaurants making a cocktail menu a focus. But whither short fiction?

Ive always loved short stories, and there are a handful of classics we all knowAraby, The Lottery, The Tell-Tale Heartbut what about new stories, from writers who are alive, and who like a drink now and again (but I repeat myself). The same requirements are necessary: new ingredients, and new advocates.

Theres something perverse about wanting to work with short fiction. While there are plenty of stories being writtenmostly by students, as tudesand a determined if not exactly vibrant small press in which to publish some of them, short fiction hasnt made its comeback yet. Literary journals nobody reads, run by editors publishing their friends and colleagues, primarily showcase tales of infidelity in the faculty lounge and epiphanies over teacups, just as they did a century ago. Genre fiction is in better shape, but those magazines are still chock-full of the usual tropeslonely spacemen slowly going mad aboard malfunctioning starships, alcoholic cops fretting over the corpse of a dead girl. And as it turns out, the narrator was the corpse all along.

So why not put excellent short stories in a book of cocktail recipes, to be nonchalantly discovered in the Food/Beverage section of your local enormous chain store instead of the Fiction sectionjust as fiction routinely took its place alongside nonfiction in newspapers and magazines? Why not mix up literary fiction, fantasy, crime, romance, and absurdist literaturelike in the all-story periodicals of the golden age? Most cocktails are meant to be swigged, so let us clutch our glasses and quickly upend their contents down our very throats, because the time has come and we mean fucking business.