Few authors drank like Ernest Hemingway. Even fewer wrote about drinking like him. Alcohol was no mere prop to Papa or his characters; it frequently provided an additional level of insight into where they were, both geographically and emotionally. “Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares,” Hemingway once said. “If you want to know a culture, spend a night in its bars.”
To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion features meticulous scholarship. Greene ably debunks the legend of Hemingway’s supposed affection for the mojito; suggests that the Jack Rose the author drank in Paris was a far more complex drink bearing a resemblance to the Bronx cocktail; and even unearths a Hemingway original from Papa’s medical files, complete with diagram. Hemingway often comes across as more a stubborn drinker than an accomplished one, insisting on his own idiosyncratic preparation of the martini and bringing his own personal barman to parties.
Greene’s approach allows him to sketch out large swaths of biography economically. The book is arranged alphabetically by cocktail, a structure that occasionally forces Greene to be repetitive; mighty quantities of alcohol are consumed in the posthumously published Islands in the Stream, so each new drink requires a rehashing of the novel’s plot. But Greene also provides some shrewd literary analysis, as in the section on the most frequently referenced drink in the Hemingway canon, the whiskey and soda. (Greene convincingly argues it’s most likely ‘whisky’ in Hemingway’s case.) Recounting a scene in Islands, Greene notes that the protagonist “learns the painful lesson that hell isn’t necessarily as it has been described to us by Dante and other authors. Indeed, it could be a nice, comfortable stateroom on a favorite liner, taking you to a place you’d always loved.”
The White Lady
2 oz. gin
¾ oz. Cointreau
¾ oz. lemon juice
¼ oz. simple syrup
1 egg white
Shake ingredients without ice if using egg white, then with ice. Strain. No garnish.
