Tropical Bar Book: Drinks & Stories
Aficionados of rum drinks will relish this book, an unusual blend of historical sketches about rum, recommended basic necessities for the tropical bar, alcohol-inspired short stories and 152 recipes. Most of the last are based on rum, but a sprinkling of drinks using tequila, mescal or cachaca is included. Everyone will recognize a few of the 152 (all of which sound worth testing at least once)--but more are novel, collected from tiny, tin-roofed, palm-shaded tabernas on the Caribbean islands or invented by the author. The stories by Ernest Hemingway ("Daiquiris"), Jane Bowles ("Punch and Profit"), Malcolm Lowry and others, set in the tropics and peppered with bars and bordellos, are not necessarily these writers' best work; some are grim, rather at odds with a book implying the joys of a fruit-filled rum drink. But Mattei's full-color illustrations are provocatively lush, delicately mythic and pleasantly unsettling.Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.