Cocktail 8: A Predicament

But now a new horror presented itself, and one indeed sufficient to startle the strongest nerves. My eyes, from the cruel pressure of the machine, were absolutely starting from their sockets. While I was thinking how I should possibly manage without them, one actually tumbled out of my head, and, rolling down the steep side of the steeple, lodged in the rain gutter which ran along the eaves of the main building. The loss of the eye was not so much as the insolent air of independence and contempt with which it regarded me after it was out. There it lay in the gutter just under my nose, and the airs it gave itself would have been ridiculous had they not been disgusting. Such a winking and blinking were never before seen.

The overwrought prose huffs and puffs melodramatically over trifles. “If! Distressing monosyllable! what a world of mystery, and meaning, and doubt, and uncertainty is there involved in thy two letters!”

But of course Poe is satirizing a form of writing popular at the time–a style Wikipedia calls the “Gothic Sensation Tale.” 

At the climax of the story the narrator (an ostentatiously dressed woman named Signora Psyche Zenobia, or perhaps Suky Snobbs) loses her eyeballs (!) in an absurdly improbable accident involving the minute hand of a huge clock in a church belfry. First one eyeball pops out and falls into the roof’s rain gutter. And then the other. And then they stare back at her.

And of course it is these two ocular orbs that we’re going to evoke with our cocktail.

The full story is here.

So, having been defeated in the lychee department, I naturally turned to radishes. These have the advantage of roughly sharing the size and shape of an eyeball, plus their root resembles an optic nerve, and on top of all this the red skin can be peeled to reveal a bloody-white eyeball. It’s as if the humble radish was born to stand in for an eyeball. I mean, what else is it going to do??

For the drink itself, I wanted something garish and colorful like Signora Psyche Zenobia, who informs us that she has a “commanding” appearance. Quoth she:  “On the memorable occasion of which I speak I was habited in a crimson satin dress, with a sky-blue Arabian mantelet. And the dress had trimmings of green agraffas, and seven graceful flounces of the orange-colored auricula.” I zeroed in on her sky-blue Arabian mantelet which, I am told, is a “woman’s short, loose sleeveless cloak or shawl.” And it seemed to me that blue curacao would evoke “sky-bue” admirably. So, we’re going to make what amounts to a Blue Hawaii, with a double-eyeball garnish.

First, prepare your eyes! Use a potato peeler or some similar contraption to peel off most of the red skin from two radishes. Leave just enough red skin behind so as to resemble bloody veins and such. Then use a small melon baller or similar Inquisition-worthy torture device to hollow out the front of each radish. Put a dab of jam into each radish hole, followed by a blueberry. Congratulations–you’ve just made two eyes. Stick them on a long toothpick.

Now, mix the vodka, blue curacao, and pineapple juice with ice in a mixing glass, and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with eyeballs. If you’ve done this right, they will regard you with an “insolent air of independence and contempt.”