We're not sure exactly how a church best known for its dour, Calvinist-Puritan rigor got its name attached to so pleasant a drink. It is, of course, the national church of Scotland.



Ingredients

2 ounces whiskey -- Scotch

2 to 4 ounces ginger ale

Collins glass

Instructions:

Pour Scotch into a Collins glass, add 2 or 3 ice cubes, and top up with ginger ale, or half ginger ale and half club soda.

With half a lime, this becomes a Mamie Taylor. Mamie who? Dunno. According to Albert Stevens Crockett's Old Waldorf Bar Days, the recipe appeared in the New York Herald some time around 1900. But either Crockett didn't know who Ms. Taylor was, or he assumed that everybody did.

The Wondrich Take:

"Scotch whisky and what? Nah. That's just plain weird, man. Not for me -- you go ahead. Oh, all right. Just a sip. Hmmm. Ya know, that's not half bad. Kinda blurs the edge of the Scotch, without killing it. Huh. We got enough ginger ale?"

We're not sure exactly how a church best known for its dour, Calvinist-Puritan rigor got its name attached to so pleasant a drink. It is, of course, the national church of Scotland. That explains the whisky. But the ginger ale? The history of mixology, murky though it is, tells us that as early as 1895, you would've found this particular product of the chemist's art -- even then, it was artificially flavored -- associating with brandy and ice. It would've been but a small step to substitute whisky. Small, but necessary: The end of the nineteenth century saw the almost total disappearance of genuine French brandy. Phylloxera vastrix, Prohibition in insect form, had eaten up the roots of just about all the grapevines in Europe.

That still doesn't explain the name. No matter. However it got attached, it's an apt one. The history of the Presbyterian church, both in Scotland and over here, is to a large extent one long struggle between fundamentalists and moderates, idealists and realists. Whisky, in short, and ginger ale.

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