Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/10/20/barretts_mixology.php
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Royal Gin Fizz
By Wilky Tomlinson
3 parts dry gin.
2 parts fresh lemon juice.
1 part gomme syrup.
5 parts soda water.
The contents of one cracked egg.
Shake all ingredients besides soda with ice, and strain into a highball. Add soda. Stir.
The hangover brings into sharp relief the really tight relationship between what one ingests and how one is. So do, perhaps even more so, the attempts to escape from that condition. Chemistry no longer seems an academic discipline but the only real means of making life worth living again. Sadly, the morning after a late evening, one’s intelligence is not normally in its prime, making sustained intellectual inquiry into the chemical sciences a kind of tragic endeavor. When I first got into the habit of waking up brained, my working policy was to drop as many liquids down the hatch as I could. But, the scriptures teach us, “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” My particular whirlwind appeared twenty minutes after I had glugged down a gallon or so of water, and this repayment took me nearly the entire afternoon to erase from the floor. After that, I fixated on quality over quantity. This was easier committed to than done well, however. I even made an effort, when totally sober, to learn from recent hangover scholarship. To my dismay, much of the prose devoted to this topic was tongue-in-cheek. This is a terrible breakdown of the imagination, for while a radioactive headache plus nausea and a sense that life is a vale of tears may be amusing after it has passed, during the ordeal it is all too real. So while our nation’s pointiest heads were applying their smarts to such pressing questions as the semiotics of goose flatulence, those of us who enjoyed a drink or two got diddly-squat, science-wise. All of this contributed to my conclusion on hangovers: there is no cure, only relief. Maybe some genius will come along with the elixir of life one of these days, but, I decided to say, don’t hold your breath. What brought you to your current predicament, I thought further, was not a desire to feel good, but an abrupt failure to provide yourself with the stuff that made you feel good in the first place. This is why I recommend this drink for when you’re finally up. Some might say the egg is a gimmick or effective only as a placebo. Well, pace those guys, I say that it actually makes it taste better. I know. A rarity in hangover cures. But this is actually progress.