SHAKEN, NOT STIRRED. THE RISE OF LE COCTEL.

           According to the largest on-line site for bibliophiles, "one of the fastest growing areas of the rare book world is vintage cocktail books," with the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book "considered to be the quintessential cocktail book from this era. Its art deco cover design is to die for."

           I have a first edition, though I don’t consult it much, my taste in mixed drinks ending with the venerable gin and tonic. Occasionally I grit my teeth and order a Margarita, but French versions of this sunny potion would freeze the blood of any Havana barman.

Before Prohibition, the French knew nothing of mixed drinks. A tourist demanding a Martini and expecting gin with a dash of vermouth and an olive received instead something sweet and red, smelling of sage,  garnished with a slice of orange - and innocent, naturally,  of ice.

           Not only were cocktails unknown: cafes lacked the ingredients to make them.  The use of wine for sacramental purposes made the church a major consumer, so abbeys devoted themselves to viticulture. It was left to foreign distillers to ferment the grains and sugar-cane that produced whisky, gin and rum.

            Once cocktails caught on, of course,  there was no stopping them. In Tender is the Night, Dick Diver contemplates a typical  bar “that held the humbler poisons of France — bottles of Otard, Rhum St. James, Marie Brizzard, Punch Orangeade, André Fernet Branca, Cherry Rochet, and Armagnac."

           Bars Americains appeared all over Paris, offering the highballs, toddies, fizzes, sours, juleps and coolers tourists demanded.  In addition to the classic Martini, Cosmopolitan, Stinger and Manhattan, you could have a Corpse Reviver (Gin, Cointreau and Absinthe), Satan's Whiskers (Italian and French vermouth, gin, orange juice and Grand Marnier) and a coffee-colored Josephine Baker (Cognac, apricot brandy, port, lemon zest and an egg yolk.) "Our epoch," announced Dutch painter Kees van Dongen in 1928, "is the cocktail epoch. Cocktails! They are of all colours. They contain something of everything. The modern society woman is a cocktail. Society itself is a bright mixture. You can blend people of all tastes and classes."

Expatriates unused to the European winter took refuge in the Toddy or Punch.  Combining rum, hot water, sugar and lemon, it protected against the insidious infection known as la grippe, and was a favourite of Ernest Hemingway. "And we sit outside the Dôme Café," he wrote to Sherwood Anderson, "warmed up against one of those charcoal braziers and it’s so damned cold outside and the brazier makes it so warm and we drink rum punch, hot, and the rum enters into us like the Holy Spirit."

This week hasn’t been one for rum punch. Unseasonably warm, it hinted that the wet and drizzling spring might actually be at an end. In this spirit, I spent some very agreeable times strolling the sunny streets of Montmartre. Dinner on rue des Abbesses with two old friends from Australia began, naturally, with something tall and cool; in my case a My Tai. (Our knowledge of mixology so impressed the owner that he insisted on being included in the photograph.)

 A few days later, it was lunch at Le Bimbo on rue des Trois Frères, where the menu included a cocktail I’d never encountered before, the Porn Star Martini.

Among the significant cultural events of 2024 – well, significant to me anyway – will be the publication after more than thirty years of a book I wrote in the Eighties.  Living in Los Angeles, I explored some of Hollywood’s seedier corners, and met some of the men and women who made and performed in “X-rated” or “Adult…” films.  Their stories and the history of the genre inspired me to write Secret Cinema, the manuscript of which I brought with me when I moved to France.  My agent, however, urged me to put it aside for the moment and write something less contentious. It stayed on the shelf until earlier this year, when a new publisher asked for a look. What was scandalous then has apparently mellowed into scholarship, and Secret Cinema will now see the light of day some time in the fall.

So of course the appearance on the Bimbo’s drinks menu of the Porn Star Martini was too great a temptation. And it did not disappont. Who could not be charmed by the floating half-passionfruit with a fresh raspberry, and the shot of champagne on the side?  As for the colour, recalling the fleshy rose of suntanned flesh, it brought back memories of the “golden lads and girls” of another era, less censorious, more Dionysian. Waiter? I believe I’ll have another. Salut!