Literary Eats #1: The Great Gatsby

Quaffing in the 1974 film.

For people who drink so much, the characters of The Great Gatsby seem to do very little eating. Food is on display, of course, at Gatsby’s parties – ‘on buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold’ – but this is really just a spectacle, another example of the conspicuous consumption of the Gatsby set, like Gatsby’s ‘gorgeous pink rag of a suit’. The ‘gold’ and patterns of the food let us know that they’re primarily a visual spectacle, an expression of luxury and of riches, much like Gatsby’s parties themselves, and his supposed friendships; this contrasts with the time when the young Jimmy first mets his crooked associate Meyer Wolfsheim, when ‘he ate more than four dollars’ worth of food in half an hour’, a genuine hunger reflecting both his humble origins (he hasn’t eaten in days) and his appetite to better himself. Gatsby has gone down a path of corruption and decadence since those hungry days. Various humble meals are alluded to in the book that contrast with the empty consumption of Gatsby’s set ­­­­– lonely, cheap, filling meals in restaurants eaten by workers; ‘little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee’. Carraway also eats with the Buchanans and Gatsby, but the food isn’t fuel. What matters is the social ritual, not the content of the meal.

               It’s drink, really, that Gatsby is all about – champagne, mint juleps, claret, gin rickeys. Not Martinis, though, although these are firmly fixed in the mind as the drink of the Jazz Age. The characters drink many, many ‘cocktails’, which would probably have been the traditional kind – specifically a spirit mixed with sugar, bitters and water. The word only later came to mean any mixed alcoholic drink.

               Of course, drink is a corrupting influence in the book, what with Gatsby’s shady past as a bootlegger, and the fact that Daisy has been drinking when she has the car accident. Gatsby doesn’t drink at his own party – out of a desire to keep himself pure, like his love for Daisy? – but it doesn’t matter. He can’t escape the things that he has done – or who he has been.

The classic drink of Gatsby, to my mind, is the gin rickey ‘that clicked full of ice’ which the characters memorably imbibe on the ‘broiling hot’ day of the car accident. This is a class of drink oddly out of fashion, given that it’s first cousin to the Mojito, and – even better – traditionally free of sugar. To make one, measure 60 ml of gin into a highball glass. Squeeze a lime into the glass, rub it around the edge, and throw it in. Add ice. Then top up with soda water. Delicious.