Loretta Lynn's 2004 disc, "Van Lear Rose," was a remarkably modern-sounding record for the country-music veteran, thanks to the production and guitar-work of the White Stripes' Jack White. But for all the fashionably zitherish keening of the guitars, the CD's most popular song starts off with a paean to an anachronistic drink. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info"Well, Portland Oregon and Sloe Gin Fizz," sings the coal miner's daughter, "if that ain't love then tell me what is."
The Sloe Gin Fizz is that strange drink that few have actually tasted but whose name almost everyone has heard. This works for a lyricist because it taps into a deep reservoir of linguistic recognition while remaining rather mysterious. And it doesn't hurt that the drink's name also allows for the employment of a stock joke that turns on the fact that most people hear "slow" rather than "sloe" -- the purplish-red berry of the blackthorn bush that gives the liqueur its flavor. "Well, sloe gin fizz works mighty fast," Loretta Lynn sings, "when you drink it by the pitcher and not by the glass." In Dickens's England, a glass of sloe gin mixed with gin was known as a "Slow and Quick." More recently, in "Jitterbug Perfume," Tom Robbins lists a litany of drinks that includes "Two sloe-gin fizzes, two fast gin fizzes; three martinis dry, no starch."
Tennessee Williams uses the old joke in his play "A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur," reveling at the speedy moves a young man could make with a young lady when aided by sloe gin and a fancy car: "The gin was slow, maybe, but that man was a fast one, seducing a girl with adjustable seats and a flask of liquor in that Flying Cloud."
Sweetishly easy to drink, the Sloe Gin Fizz was famous for undoing co-ed inhibitions. Historian and Kennedy-crony Arthur Schlesinger Jr., recalling his days as a Harvard undergrad in the 1930s, noted that the cocktail was "supposed to reduce the most obdurate female to acquiescence." http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
But sometimes it worked the other way around. Belle, the commercial floozy in Eugene O'Neill's play "Ah, Wilderness!" is too tough a cookie to mess with Sloe Gin Fizzes -- Gin Rickeys are her poison. "Remember," she needles a bartender, "a rickey is supposed to have gin in it." But when she aims to move along her transaction with underage Richard Miller, she plies the boy with Sloe Gin Fizzes. O'Neill knew that the drink was relatively tame (sloe gin is usually about 50 proof, as opposed to the 80 or 90 proof of regular dry gin), so he has Belle insist with a nudge that the bartender "make it a real one." It takes only a couple of spiked Fizzes to get Richard drunk. After the bartender learns that the boy's father is the editor of the town newspaper, he gives Belle the heave-ho, furious that she "told me to hand him dynamite in that fizz." When the play was improbably made into a Hollywood musical (starring 27-year-old Mickey Rooney as the wet-nosed teen) the name was changed to "Summer Holiday," but the Sloe Gin Fizzes remained.
The absence of dynamite in the average Sloe Gin Fizz is one reason it makes such an excellent summertime cooler. In 1956, the Amy Vanderbilt etiquette column recommended them as a low-test way for partygoers to have a drink without ending up too far in their cups. Back then, there were many well-advertised brands of sloe gin. But by the '80s the liqueur survived only for its role in sexually suggestive quaffs.
First there was a Screwdriver made with sloe gin instead of vodka, a Sloe Screw. Such bawdy hilarity soon inspired the addition of Southern Comfort to the mix, creating the Sloe Comfortable Screw. Later, Galliano -- of Harvey Wallbanger fame -- was added to exploit even more elaborately lewd naming opportunities. The whole bunch were taste-impaired, figuratively and literally. It is an immutable law that the naughtier a drink's name, the worse that drink tastes.
Sloe gin might well have disappeared, slinking off in shamefaced embarrassment, had the folks at England's Plymouth Gin distillery not come to the rescue. Just now arriving in the States are bottles of their liqueur made by steeping honest-to-goodness sloe berries in Plymouth's dry gin. They have used a sparing hand with the sugar, letting the cranberry-tartness of the fruit come through. It makes for a fine Sloe Gin Fizz, a drink of lemon juice, sloe gin, sugar and soda water, on ice in a highball glass.
Plymouth's sloe gin is also good enough to drink in a straight-up cocktail. In the 1930s there were variations on a drink called a Sloe Gin Cocktail using the spirit as a base and adding bits of this and that. I played around with this basic idea until, on the seventh try, I hit upon a delicious drink of two parts sloe gin to one part dry vermouth, with one dash each of lemon juice and curaçao. Let's call it a Sloe Gin No. 7.
And please, no jokes about how fast it works.
