BOOK/A TABLE - Sherry and Brandy Cobbler

                         

“Dazzling” isn’t a word I really throw around too often, but I have certainly applied it to some of my favorite authors or a particular work that left me breathless. You know, the kind of moments where you sit back in your cozy chair and pause to simply marvel at the writer’s staggering craft. 

Authors such as Maggie O’Farrell (Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait) and John Banville (Venetian Vespers and everything else) fit the bill, and so does Lolita. John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman now joins my ranks. I had seen the movie with Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons somewhere in the 80’s, but until my writer friend mentioned it, I had never even considered reading the book. In another word, wow! 

Set in Victorian England, Fowles’s mysterious novel is a love story, but it is also a beautifully detailed, exquisitely woven tale where the author ingeniously steps into his own pages from time to time with an assured wink; a reminder that it is he who is controlling the plot. I find the following paragraph and cocktail mentioned in it incredibly seductive:

“He strode back into his sitting room and pulled the little chain that hung from the gasolier, turning the pale-green flame into a white incandescence, and then sharply tugged the bellcord by the door. And when the old waiter came, Charles sent him peremptorily off for a gill of the White Lion’s best cobbler, a velvety concoction of sherry and brandy that caused many a Victorian unloosing of the stays.”

Delicious!              

              

From Food52.com, I’ve taken their recipe for a Sherry Cobbler (basically a slushie with wine) and gussied it up for the holiday season with some brandy and festive garnishes. I think of sherry and brandy as wintry drinks, so find yourself a fireplace and start sippin’.

Sherry and Brandy Cobbler
Ingredients
3 ounce medium dry sherry such as Amontillado 
1 ounce brandy (at your discretion)
2 to 3 orange slices 
Crushed or shaved ice

Cranberries or dried cherries, an orange wedge studded with cloves perhaps, and a sprig of rosemary 

Directions
Combine the sherry and brandy in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. Add the orange slices and some ice cubes (not the crushed ice), close the shaker, and shake vigorously until the shaker is frosty and the orange slices inside are muddled up by the ice.

Strain the drink into a tall glass filled with crushed ice, and garnish with your fruit and rosemary. Serve with a straw.