Grove Koger
It’s spring where Maggie and I live, although the weather (as it so often does) has been lagging behind the calendar. But now the temperatures have swung from cool to hot, and, with summer on the way, it’s time for a Negroni.
If you aren’t familiar with the Negroni, here’s the story. It seems that the cocktail (which you see above in a photograph by tom-harrison93 at pixabay.com) is a variant of the Americano, which is a mixture of Campari and sweet vermouth topped with sparkling water. It first saw the light of day in the 1860s in Milan, Italy, in Gaspare Campari’s bar, and in turn is a variation on the more basic Milano-Torino, which lacks the water.
According to one story, Count Camillo Negroni, who was born in 1868, visited the Caffè Casoni in Florence sometime in 1919 or 1920 and asked the bartender, one Fosco Scarselli, to make him an Americano with gin instead of water. And thus the Negroni was born. Some accounts add that the Count (above) was known to down some 40 Negronis a day, but foodlore is notoriously slippery, and this part of the story may not be entirely accurate.
Other stories insist that the Negroni in question was General Pascal Olivier de Negroni de Cardi, who was born on Corsica in 1829. According to this account, the General (below) concocted the cocktail around the middle of the nineteenth century in Saint Louis, Senegal, then a West African colony of France and today an independent nation. However, Senegal is a long way from Turin, Italy, where Signor Campari introduced his famous liqueur in 1860.
Whatever the case, Maggie and I joined our good friend Bob for a round of Negronis last week on the patio of Boise’s lively Bardenay Restaurant & Distillery.
Actually, Negronis have been on my mind not only because of the weather but also because the journal Paris Lit Up has just published a story of mine named, not so coincidentally, “That Bittersweet Taste,” in which the drink plays a small role.
I leave a lot unsaid in the story, a lot unexplained. There are feints—the names “Paul” and “Jane” and the initials “J.G.” are meant to remind the attentive reader of real people, real writers, who, again not so coincidentally, described a world gone askew. That’s the world I hoped to evoke without having to go into too many specifics. There are those things in the sky, of course, but there’s no telling what they are, and I don’t know myself. Officials are about to reveal the truth to a frightened world, and, given the situation, my protagonist has decided … Well, you’ll just have to read the story.
Cheers.
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