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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.
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