Food History

Continuing from the last post….

These are not the carefully annotated thoughts on balances of flavour and etc: they’re the funny stuff. They would have been even funnier if I had worked through the papers immediately I came home, but that was round dinner time, so I’m very sorry if this is not as amusing as the earlier tests. You have a sober scribe who is working through the test sheets in strictly rational order. Sorry about that.

One of my victims wrote at the top of his page “Obviously I needed a few drinks before I could come up with comments” – he must have noticed that the comments started halfway down. Of those comments, my favourite must be “floor cleaner complete with mint” and no, we won’t be serving this cocktail. All his other comments concern the balance of flavours and who might like them.

The next page has very few comments, but two of them are important. One concerns the cocktail everyone hated and she said simply “yuck!!!!” and the other was a request for a port free or alcohol free version of everyone’s top cocktail. I’ll do some thinking and see if I can come up with a non-alcoholic version, because that would give children and no-drinkers a bit more excitement. Only I won’t do it tonight.

Tester three was Nicole, who chaired Conflux last year. I have to identify her because she needs to be made to admit that she was the one who wrote “Apart from the fact that Gillian was already drunk and didn’t strain the ice so it was actually an alcoholic slurpee, it was nice.” She also drew very pretty pictures in the margins when she caught up with me, alcohol-wise.

Sheet four is in my handwriting. This doesn’t mean I can read it. I noted about one of the cocktails (that we won’t be serving, again) that you could light your breath from it. I noted against the universal favourite “We had seconds.” That’s a lie, though, because there had just been an exodus of child-picking-up committee members so we actually had thirds. They were fabulous, too.

Sheet five is obviously by a New Zealander, because the first comment reads “Goes well with chocolate fish (but then, doesn’t everything?).” This is a really good place to thank Ross for bringing us the chocolate fish last time he was in town. Everyone loved them. Mind you, this committee member didn’t love every cocktail. “Too granular to serve as effective flying-car fuel, but not bad.” Ought I ask him when he started drinking flying-car fuel?

There are a couple of sheets full of useful stuff (which I’ve duly made use of) but nothing funny. This leaves us with the notes of the conversation we made about the cocktails but which we forgot to write down because we were just a tad tiddly. Twelve cocktails in an afternoon will get you that way, even if you have them in tiny Chinese teacups. Most of them were again, seriously useful comments, but there was just one cocktail that merited the note “Killing me softly at the Speakeasy.” We all drank it as if it were fruit juice and then we asked about the alcohol content and then we tried to stand up.

I meant to do an analysis of whether SF or fantasy writers, short story writers or novelist had better tolerance of alcohol, but it entirely slipped my mind. It was a very worthwhile end to a committee meeting, though. The non-drinkers found it as much fun as the rest of us.

Next post – help me choose the names of our drinks!!