Stylish Irish
Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone. What follows is a tale of fiction — any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
Stylish Irish
* 2 oz. Tullamore Dew (any Irish whiskey will suffice, but “the Dew” is best)
* 1-2 ice cubes (Not too much. The Irish spent many months getting the last wee bit of water out of the whiskey, so don’t spoil it by diluting it with ice)
* 1 pinch style and grace
Sitting in a history-steeped tavern in the nation’s capital early one March 17 of a not-too-distant year, I chanced upon the singular character of Rusty Clark. Rusty was a wiry man a hair’s breadth shorter than my own five feet and nine inches. He sat at a corner table and leaned his chair back lazily against the side wall. His left foot pushed gently on the table’s edge.
With a wave of his hand and the words, “Si’ d’n, mate,” Rusty motioned me to join him. In typical Australian fashion, he stood me to a beer before he asked my name.
By the end of the first glass, we were chatting amicably about his travels from Australia to the States. He had been a surveyor in Burma, an engineer in Oman, and a soldier in one or more African nations between the Red Sea and the Cape. Now he was back to surveying for a large developer in Florida who was building condos.
As the morning wore on, we compared philosophies, traded stories, and discussed my fledgling legal career. After I paid the check at lunch, Rusty shifted in his chair, looked at his once-again empty beer glass, and remarked, “Stone the perishin’ crows, mate, after a while, this can get old. A bloke shouldn’t spend his day sloshing bilge water and foam down his gullet…”
“You want something with a little more style and grace,” I suggested. Rusty nodded sheepishly as I waved to the waitress.
“Two glasses of the Dew,” I told her in my most steady, address-the-jury voice.
She returned soon with that whose formula is preserved in this volume. Rusty examined the glass of glistening Dew warily. He rotated it slowly from side to side. Then he put the glass to his lips and sipped.
An endless pause followed. Rusty’s mouth formed its now-familiar smile as he said, “This, mate, is good stuff.”
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By Hal Hail
Hal Hail, the HG’s resident swashbuckler of culinary fiction, is a graduate of Bowdoin College, where he read the weather and news on WBOR. He writes under the pseudonym of … “Hal Hail.”
About The Humble Gourmand
The Humble Gourmand is published the first Friday of each month, edited by Alison L. McConnell, a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and writer. It is designed to offer straightforward lessons and advice to aspiring cooks, oenophiles, and all other eaters and drinkers.
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