The Venn diagram of food and drink is beginning to look more and more circular. When I was in New York last month, and looking for recommendations, everyone I know that likes a drink suggested Double Chicken Please, on the Lower East Side. Impossibly popular and obsessively accoladed, their drinks menu is literally split into Appetisers, Mains and Desserts, and features cocktails with names like Waldorf Salad, Thai Curry and Cold Pizza, which incorporate all of the ingredients you’d relate to those dishes. (As well as tequila, the cocktail Cold Pizza involves burnt toast, basil, tomato and parmigiano reggiano.) Drink is food now! Or perhaps... food is drink?
Obviously, all drinks ingredients are derived from some kind of foodstuff: potatoes, herbs, berries. But I’m talking here about more obvious and intentional crossover, using ingredients themselves instead of simply clarifying a liquid and calling it a day.
Obviously, all drinks ingredients are derived from some kind of foodstuff: potatoes, herbs, berries
It’s a welcome trend, particularly for a very low-effort home mixologist like myself. It means I don’t have to go out and spend money on fancy ingredients or equipment, and I can just use everything that’s been leftover in my fridge in the post-Christmas fallow period, when all I’ve got to offer a clear spirit is pickles and other non-perishables. A grim scene for a cold January? Only if you lack imagination.
I’ve recently been very deeply inspired by the brand Garner’s, which makes exceptional pickled onions, doing a residency at London’s Bar Swift, which has outposts in Soho and Shoreditch. A fridge-door food staple has edged its way into a trendy London cocktail bar – next stop, the world.
All of this is to say I’ve been thinking rather intensely about Gibsons, a mixed drink made with gin and dry vermouth and as many pickled onions as you like. The finest versions of this particular cocktail – like the one they serve at the Drapers Arms in Islington – should look as if they were carved from a complete block of ice. To make it, a splash of vermouth is added to 60ml gin and served with a pickled onion garnish. Like all icons, the origin story of the Gibson is clouded and disputed. Supposed originators include the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson and the bartender Charley Connolly of Players Club.
Tim Hayward, the veritable food writer and broadcaster, often shares pictures of his own homemade, laptop-side Gibsons, which glow spectre-like in front of his laptop screen. I asked him about his onions recently, in order to begin to make my own version of his Gibson, and in a response that won’t be at all surprising to anyone who knows Tim or enjoys his writing, I learned that he has recently taken to peeling and pickling his own.
“To a 400g jar I add half a teaspoon of honey to stop the vinegar being choking, no more than 10 caraway seeds, crushed with a spoon,” he told me, “and chilli flakes to taste. Chuck it in the fridge for a week. Stir the drink 100 turns, with at least twice the amount of ice you think you might need.” His preferred glassware is a vintage Libbey 8876 king-sized cocktail glass. Frozen, naturally.