Vodka — not just a breakfast drink

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

Eating properly in the Great Gatsby is difficult. On the one hand there’s the vertigo from all the social climbing, and on the other hand the anxiety of waiting five years for the love of your life to notice you. It plays havoc with your appetite.

I can empathise with the Gatsby characters. I once went out for whole day and night on an empty stomach. I drank champagne cocktails, in a mock castle, wearing a silky £600 dress with pearls in my hair. But it was a wedding, so if was forgivable. Now imagine that kind of behaviour every day. But then stir in some inherited wealth, contemptuous expressions, and extra marital affairs, then you have the Great Gatsby.

Vodka isn’t just a breakfast drink, they say. Definitely not in the Buchanan household, where you can drink any time, ratcheting up the malicious words and stares with each drink. As you lean against your cold, marble mantelpiece why not forget to say please and thank you to your servants, as they look after your children and serve you soft, triangle sandwiches? In fact forget they’re even there. They should be thanking YOU! After all you’re rich and successful, just as person of your racial and class profile should be. It’s not your fault you were born superior. They’re lucky to be in your house. Same with all these other pretenders, drinking your whisky and rudely falling in love with your wife.

In revenge, maybe go to Gatsby’s mock Normandy mansion for a party and outstay your welcome. Swim in the green, marble pool and choose from an “array of gins and cordials, so forgotten that most of the female guests have never heard of them.” Be vaguely aware of the jazz musicians whose talents are beyond your understanding, and showgirls whose dancing skills are mere displays of meat, part of the untouched, unappreciated backdrop behind the “glistening hors d’ourves, spiced hams and harlequin salads.”

The most interesting dining experience in the The Great Gatsby is when Jay Gatsby strews his mahogany dining table with his shirts — a silky, colourful serving to Daisy Buchanan, who sobs her mascara into them, moved to shallow, breathless tears by their beauty and style.

As someone who merely binge drinks at weekends, daytime whisky drinking seems vulgar — exclusively an ill mannered upper class activity. I did once drink a flagon of scrumpy during the daytime. (I am from the west country) It was at Cardiff Punx Picnic when I was 17. (They were a thing we did back in those days.) My fuzzy memory is that it tasted a lot like vinegar. I don’t have many other memories of that day except the hangover, sunburn, tinnitus and travelling home on the train the next day, eating greasy chips. The Great Gatsby it definitely wasn’t.

The Great Gatsby Diet

Breakfast: A Cigarette, gold tipped. Handed to you ready lit, by the waiter as you sit at the french polished table, gazing across the lawn through the arched windows, wondering just how much more awfully sad your life might become as you reach 30.

Lunch: Some highballs and a succulent hash ordered in a jazz cellar on forty second street. Pick at the hash and knock back several of the highballs.

Dinner: Drive, whilst drunk, to a hotel with a group of shallow friends and hire a parlour, from which to drink whisky with crushed ice and mint. Start a fight. Try not to run over a poor person as you angrily drive home.

Originally published at cookingethebooks.tumblr.com.