Tim Federle likes his cocktails, but he also likes books and movies – hence his two books ‘Tequila Mockingbird – Cocktails with a Literary Twist’ and ‘Gone with the Gin – Cocktails with a Hollywood Twist’.
These two hardback volumes, beautifully illustrated by Lauren Mortimer, are great fun and perfect as a gift for the book worms and film buffs in your life who also like word play, and more importantly, a tipple. At only £9.99 each I recommend you to buy two of each book, give one set as a gift and keep the other one for yourself.
“Too much of anything is bad,
but too much Champagne is just right”
Mark Twain
Tequila Mockingbird, the first of the two books, features 65 cocktail recipes complete with a wry plot description of the book its name is based on. A fun way to decide which book to read next! Or which drink to mix!
Chapters include Drinks for Dames ( including Gin Eyre, The Cooler Purple, Romeo and Julep, A Rum of One’s Own), Gulps for Guys (Huckleberry Sin, The Last of the Mojitos, One Hundred Beers of Solitude, Vermouth the Bell Tools and many more), Bevvies for Book Clubs like The Adventures of Sherbet Holmes or Gone with the Wine, Refreshments for Recovering Readers like Pear The Wild Things Are and Cherry Poppins and even Bar Bites for Book Hounds, so you can line your stomach with Prawn Quixote and Alice’s Adventures in Wonder Bread. And there is a bonus of drinking games you can play on your own or with your friends and a guide to tools, techniques and a guide to cocktail terminology.
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,
she walks into mine”
Humphrey Bogard (as Rick Blain) in Casablanca
Gone with the Gin, the second volume, has 50 cocktail recipes to keep silver-screen aficionados shaking and stirring, all with a short, witty synopsis of the movie they take their name from.
Pick a genre and then a cocktail from Dramas (Tequila Sunrise Boulevard, Raging Red Bull, Ti-tonic to name a few), Comedies (why not try a Some Spike it Hot, The Big Le-Brewski or Mrs. Stout-Fire?), Thrillers (No Country for Old Fashioneds, Dirty Harry Martini etc.), Musicals (The Rocky Horror Picsco Show, Bloody Mary Poppins, The Wizard of Shiraz sound good to me) and Sci-Fi and Fantasy (Star Wars: The Empire Likes Jack, Indiana Jones and the Shirley Temple of Doom and Long Island ET caught my eye). In case you get the Movie Munchies have The Silence of the Lambs Burger or some Grillers in the Mist.
And, as in the first book, there are drinking games and more.
The recipes use imperial measures but there is a metric conversion guide.
Tim Federle is a Broadway actor, word nerd, cocktail enthusiast, author of the YA comic novel Better Nate than Ever and former lifestyle columnist for Apartment Therapy. He lives (and drinks) in New York City.
TimFederle.com
@TimFederle
Cocktails in the picture (from left to right): Rye and Prejudice (bourbon, grapefruit), A Cocktail of Two Cities (gin, champagne, lemon), The Sound & The Slurry (gin, creme de cassis, lemon), Bourbon Cowboy (bourbon, Angostura bitters, basil, ice tea, lemon)
Tequila Mockingbird and Gone with the Gin are both published by The Running Press.
London-Olios 