The Stinger

On mixing your father his favorite drink. "Gin rummy matches until sunrise; unspeakable weekends in places like the Bahamas. Epic times have been related to me in which these men would mix Stingers by the pitcher.”

MAISONNEUVE / JAN 2004

On an operating table, is mind anesthetized blank, his rib cage butterflied, his harvested arteries set atop a stainless steel tray like ghastly hors d’oeuvres, my father not long ago had quadruple bypass surgery. He was sixty years old. The night before the operation, he and my mother went to a restaurant in downtown Cleveland (he was a patient at the Cleveland Clinic), where he dined lightly on steamed mussels and linguini. He indulged in two glasses of Valpolicella table wine and, after supper, a few sips of a snifter of Cognac. This represented a deviation from custom. As he was paying his check he cadged from the waitress a cigarette, of a make and a model—white from filter to tip, possibly Menthol, possibly Ultra—no doubt less fulfilling than his traditional Marlboro Red. Fifteen days prior he had quit smoking, forty-eight years after taking his first drag—two packs a day, essentially, ever since. The smoke he snuck (my mother, in the loo at the time, would never have let this occur) was a small indulgence, a last nod to a decadent past perhaps no longer to be tasted. But in no way did it satisfactorily replace the two most important items of a post-supper ritual he first developed as a twenty-five-year-old insurance salesman in Erie, Pennsylvania. In no particular order those items were (a) a cigar, if possible a Montecristo, and (b) a stinger on the rocks. It is unclear which was the more significant. “If I couldn’t have a cigar,” my father said recently, recalling that last supper in Cleveland, “then I wasn’t going to have a stinger.”

I’m certain that most of you have never even heard of the stinger, and you should not feel ashamed. An obscure after-dinner drink, eighty years past the prime of its popularity, it is enjoyed now, when enjoyed at all, not really as a digestive but almost as a kind of liquor dessert. As such, the stinger is sometimes not even considered a “cocktail,” which implies a libation to be consumed in quantity during pre-sit-down hours set aside for affected, if well-oiled, conversation. But a cocktail it certainly is, and, like all classic cocktails, the stinger has its singular pleasures. The martini, for example, piercing and astringent, is primarily consumed at bars after work, at parties made up of the insufferable, at ill-timed wedding receptions during frantic summer holiday weekends; that is, the martini serves to burn the anxiety of adult life quickly and decisively from the lower spinal cord. The stinger, however, decadent and ameliorative, is preferably sipped following a meal of sizable dimension—large and fine enough to cause a person to feel satisfied beyond want yet desirous nonetheless of one thing more. The stinger is thus consumed to prolong and heighten that experience, to keep those fine times gunning along, to delay the inevitable anticlimax of getting into the cab and heading home to bed. The medicine of the stinger doesn’t kill the germ; it prevents it.

According to the best cocktail-recipe books of today, a stinger is built of three parts brandy to one part white crème de menthe. Shake, strain, pour over crushed ice into a brandy, cocktail or old-fashioned glass. Golden brown, distinguished in appearance, a well-made stinger looks, somehow, like liquid marzipan. Sip, however, and you will not detect the faint essence of almond, but a quivering of mint over the cask-wood wine-depth of brandy. Some bartenders, and some volumes of drink recipes, including the 1971 Playboy’s Host & Bar Book, counsel an equal ratio of ingredients. But this inevitably results in a drink that tastes, as the uninitiated often complain, like mouthwash. Recently, at the bar of the Drake Hotel in Chicago, the barkeep, a fellow in his mid-fifties with a large capillary-burst nose, passed over a stinger proportioned equally between brandy and menthe. Straightaway I could tell, from its weak Lipton’s shade, that he’d produced a sickly sweet confection, its value as a dental hygienic somewhat in question. I asked for a little help. He drained some Korbel into my glass, burnishing the drink like wood stain….

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