This evening’s featured cocktail is the Stinger, a cool refreshing drink for a balmy Bon Temps night that makes an excellent dessert cocktail and pairs nicely with rich chocolate desserts. Jane Bodehouse* considers it the ideal drink to end a drunken binge at Merlotte’s before Tara calls her son to come pick her up.
Ingredients
3/4 oz brandy3/4 oz white creme de menthePreparation
Pour the ingredients into an old-fashioned glass with crushed ice, and stir well.orShake the ingredients with ice cubes and strained into a chilled cocktail glass.
In their heyday, Stingers were the drink to end a night on the town in New York, and they even made it to the big screen in The Apartment, a movie about loneliness, sex, and booze, among other things.
Here’s the big True Blood connection. (You knew it was coming, right?) The director of American Beauty (written by Alan Ball) used it for inspiration, and Kevin Spacey dedicated his Oscar to Jack Lemmon’s performance. The Apartment hits all of Alan Ball’s favorite themes: reality vs. illusion, empty consumerism, loneliness, self-destruction, addiction, and hypocrisy. It’s been described as a dirty fairytale. Is that great, or what? I’m going to have to remember to use that line for True Blood. Don’t you think AB would like that?
Any way, Stingers are of interest to us for another reason. They are the drink of choice in the Cary Grant comedy, Kiss Them for Me, a movie Grant fought the studios to make because it deals with PTSD. In the film, Grant’s character is a Navy procurer. While on leave, he procures a luxury hotel suite for his buddies and fills it with women and booze. To get his mind off the war, he flirts with the fiancée of one of his friends, which results in her throwing her engagement ring in the face of her husband-to-be and Grant declaring his love by the end of the movie.
I know I don’t have to draw y’all the parallels at this point, so I’ll just end by saying, ‘I’ll have what Jane Bodehouse is having…and make it a double.’
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