“Hush, sir!” — “I’ll oblige you for once. You shall have my consent — and the plum, we mus’nt forget the plum — let me see! when shall it be? To-day’s Sunday — is’nt it? Well, then, you shall be married precisely — precisely, now mind! — when three Sundays come together in a week! Do you hear me, sir! What are you gaping at? I say, you shall have Kate and her plum when three Sundays come together in a week — but not till then — you young scapegrace — not till then, if I die for it. You know me — I’m a man of my word — now be off!” Here he swallowed his bumper of port, while I rushed from the room in despair.
The Tale
This is another of Poe’s lesser-known humorous tales. The story goes thus: the narrator seeks his uncle’s permission to marry his daughter Kate. But this uncle, who never makes things easy, decrees the marriage shall happen only “when three Sundays come together in a week.” This surely is intended as a “Twelfth of Never” kind of construction. And yet, it so happens that, three weeks later, two sea captains known to the uncle happen to arrive at his house. One has just finished sailing around the globe eastward, and one has just finished sailing around the globe westward. Since this happened before the invention of the International Date Line, the westward-traveling captain “lost” a day, and the eastern-traveling captain “gained” a day. (This is much in the same way that you and I lose or gain hours while traveling across time zones.) As a result, one captain believes that yesterday was Sunday, the other believes that tomorrow is Sunday, and the uncle believes that today is Sunday. Thus, three Sundays come together in one week, and the narrator can be wed.
The full story is available here.
The Drink
This is all well and good, but, more importantly, it provides us a capital opportunity to make a Sundae Cocktail. Now, there are many rich, indulgent versions which involve ice cream and chocolate sauce and all the usual fixings for a sundae, and they almost all call themselves “decadent,” which is a dead giveaway that they are aimed at posers. More to the point, the alcohol in these typical sundae cocktails is limited to a sprinkling of liqueur over the top of the ice cream. This is cheating; anything that you eat with a spoon is not a cocktail.
No, we are going to be more imaginative. And when I say “we,” I mean some random guy I found on the Internet who came up with something he says “tastes just like an ice cream sundae,” and it only has two ingredients: a “whipped cream whiskey” and some A&W soda. In his video he describes the taste as “gawd damm!” I was intrigued. I made and drank the drink, and it was tasty enough, but it fell a bit short in terms of invoking a sundae (let alone three sundaes in a week). So I added some creme de cacao and I rimmed the glass with some chopped nuts. Now we’re talking!
Ingredients:
2 oz Whiplash Whiskey
2 oz A&W cream soda
1 oz creme de cacao
1 tbs finely chopped peanuts (for rimming the glass)
1 maraschino cherry
Prepare a coupe glass (which, to my mind, look like something you might use to serve a scoop of ice cream) by moistening the rim with a little chocolate syrup and then coating the rim with chopped peanuts. Stir together the liquid ingredients in a mixing glass with ice, and strain into your prepared coupe glass. (I had added crushed ice to my coupe glass, because I thought it makes it look more like a sundae. You can forego this if you’re a purist, though.) Garnish with a maraschino cherry, of course! The result is a cocktail that even your crusty old Uncle Rumgudgeon would like.
Poe-Script
I find the concept of the international date line to be simultaneously fascinating and mind-bending. It was established in 1884, pretty much to solve the very issue that Poe identifies in his story. That is, if you keep adjusting your clock as you go around the world (adding or subtracting an hour every 15 degrees of latitude), you’ll eventually find yourself on a different calendar day than that recognized by the local population. To correct this problem, the IDL convention has you add or subtract a full 24 hours whenever you cross that (imaginary) line. If you find this concept intriguing, I highly recommend Umberto Eco’s novel The Island of the Day Before.
Chasing Phantoms 
Totally down to try this one out! Yummers!
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