The Maiden’s Blush

I recently read about a cocktail created by Toulouse-Lautrec, named the Maiden’s Blush. It involved mandarin, champagne, bitters, absinthe and red wine, all combined with the aim of creating “the sensation of a peacock’s tail, in the mouth”. Details of the amounts of each weren’t included, so I checked a couple of books, and google, and couldn’t find anything except for adaptations and rather more genteel versions (and they lacked both champagne and mandarin):

12 Bottle Bar’s reinterpretation is this:
1.5 oz Leopold’s Gin
0.75 oz Lemon Juice
0.5 oz Simple Syrup
0.25 oz Kübler Absinthe
4 Fresh Raspberries

Another version, ascribed to the Café Royal Cocktail Book, is:
1/2 Dry Gin
1/4 Lemon Juice
1/8 Absinthe
Teaspoonful powdered Sugar
3 dashes Raspberry Syrup

Trying to find the exact recipe myself by trial and error would definitely be madness, and I can’t even count on the original version having a taste palatable enough to be recognisable as ‘the cocktail’ even if I eventually stumble across it. I guess I’ll just have to continue to savour its taste with my imagination…

Picon Biere

We’d just been to Shakespeare and Co bookstore and were at a café nearby, across the road from Notre Dame cathedral. On the menu was picon biere which I’d never come across before so I decided to try it. At first I thought it was a type of beer but it turned out to be a sort of bitters made from orange, which is then added to blonde beers. It’s very very tasty (and I’m a big fan of dark beers).
The other surprise of the bar was that when I went to find a toilet I headed down a flight of stairs and then right in front of me was a little cubicle with a urinal and two saloon style swinging doors that reached from knee to shoulder. It was an odd experience standing there while other patrons looking for a bathroom came down the stairs. I was the first thing they’d see and dead ahead to boot, and there was no uncertainty about what I was doing. Should I feel … exultant? Indifferent? Semi-apologetic? I went with indifferent. There are no ‘shy bladders’ in Paris?

I liked the picon so much that I thought I’d see if I could find a bottle of it. It turns out that there are a few challenges in acquiring it when you have no french. I checked the local stores but had no luck so I wandered further afield. I tried a specialty wine store, whose owner also spoke english, but he didn’t have any although he did direct me to a particular supermarket. Once I got there I could see that they did have it, but it along with the other spirits and liqueurs were kept locked away in display cases. I did my other shopping and then was waiting in a queue for the checkouts when one of the tellers approached me from behind addressing me in french. I had no idea what she was saying, and she didn’t speak english so she didn’t understand me either. After a little bit of hand moving from her I worked out that she was saying that there was no one in the queue for her till (at the boulanger counter). So after she scanned my items I tried most of my small store of french phrases (please, one picon beer, thank you) but she seemed puzzled, which is fair enough since a 5 year parisian would have more french and better pronunciation than me. So it was back to more hand movements and pointing but this time from me. Once she saw that I was pointing to the locked cases she recognised picon, and then from there it was easy. Turns out that a litre of picon costs 11 euros which like all other alcohol here is amazingly cheap compared to back home. Picon + hoegaarden = tasty!