[x_section style=”margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px; padding: 0 0px 0 0px; “][x_row inner_container=”true” marginless_columns=”true” bg_color=”” style=”margin: 0px auto 0px auto; padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; “][x_column bg_color=”” type=”1/1″ style=”padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; “][x_custom_headline level=”h2″ looks_like=”h3″ accent=”false”]The return of the Pegu Club cocktail[/x_custom_headline][x_image type=”none” src=”http://blog.cygopinath.com/foodblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Pegu-rainbo-wide-1250×550.png” alt=”” link=”false” href=”#” title=”” target=”” info=”none” info_place=”top” info_trigger=”hover” info_content=””][x_text]I’ve never been much of a cocktails person, but I do like drama. And the show in which I first heard the funny little word pegu was a Thai musical dance opera Suriyothai, which tells the story of a heroic Thai queen of the same name, who valiantly fought — and died — defending her monastic husband’s kingdom from the war-like Pegu king of neighboring Burma.
The pegu dance was riveting, with slim agile dancers moving in rapid menacing movements, forming striking poses and tableaus that made me think of the razor sharp curlicues and serifs of Thai script. The handsome Pegu king, Tabinshwethi, was a fearsome combination of make-up and diabolical expressions, and had audience members queueing up for a selfie with him after the show.
The fearsome Pegu king who launched an invasion of neighboring Thailand would never have dreamed that his kingdom would be immortalized in a cocktail.
When I got home, I Googled pegu, and right there, along with majestic historical stories of war, palace intrigue, bloodshed and incest, was this lost cocktail. The Pegu Club Cocktail was, I read, once the signature drink of Rangoon’s exclusive Pegu Club, right at the intersection of Prome Road and Newlyn Road, served only to colonial clientele or their guests or sometimes visiting traders. In his book Sea to Sea, Rudyard Kipling described the “funny little club” that is always “full of people either on the way up or the way down”.
The cocktail seems to have been first listed in 1927 in Barflies and Cocktails by Harry McElhone of the redoubtable New York Bar in — Paris. The recipe was revealed three years later in Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book of 1930. Craddock observed that the drink had “travelled and is asked for around the world”.
This may have been a slight exaggeration. The cocktail disappeared from the planet abruptly on March 7, 1942, the day the British fled from Burma, abandoning it to the oncoming 33rd Infantry Division of the Japanese army.
In the intervening years, a new Pegu Club, inspired by the first, sprung up on New York’s Houston Street, conjured up by the redoubtable Audrey Saunders, and served its own version of the Pegu Club cocktail. But for all intents and purposes it seemed that the original cocktail recipe was lost forever in the mists of time.
Or not.
The Wikipedia entry had an intriguing line — “There is a resurgence in awareness and availability of the colonial libation. . . It is served at the Governor’s Residence Hotel and the historic Strand Hotel in Yangon, as well as the Road to Mandalay, which is an Orient Express cruise boat on the Irrawaddy River.”
And as luck would have it, I was traveling to Myanmar for the first time in my life that week. And I had a night in Yangon, formerly Rangoon.
I reached the pretty garden city of Yangon around sunset, and it was almost 8 pm by the time I had checked into my hotel. I had a fe hours of evening ahead of me, and only three words on my mind — Pegu Club cocktail. Leaving my luggage in the lobby, I quickly headed out, hailing a taxi to the grand old lady of Rangoon, the Strand Hotel. Not a thing must have changed within or outside this classic colonial hotel, with its high vaulted ceilings, capacious chesterfields and anti-macassars, cane furniture, and antique table lamps. I found my way to the bar, and asked the barkeep if he knew how to make a Pegu Club cocktail.
“No one asks for that very much,” he said, “but yes, it is one of our specials.”
I watched as he mixed gin with other liquids, squeezed a bit of lime into it, and gave the whole thing a good shake with some crushed ice. It tasted awful. This could not possibly have been the signature drink of any club. I asked him the ingredients, and he listed gin, Cointreau, Cinzano, and lemon.
“You don’t use orange bitters? Or angostura?”
“No,” he replied.
“No orange curaçao?”
The barkeep had never heard of curaçao, He struggled with the pronunciation. I finally googled up a photograph of the bottle. “That one — no, we do not have that.”
I finished my drink with disappointment. The salted peanuts were tastier.
At my next stop, the sumptuous garden resort known as the Governor’s Residence, I asked for the Pegu Club recipe they used before I ordered. It was the same as at The Strand, just Grand Marnier instead of Cointreau. I passed.
It seemed that I was doomed never to taste this 100-year-old cocktail that I had been chasing so diligently.
But I finally did. One evening, at a farewell party for a friend at the Italian restaurant Antonio’s in Bangkok, I asked the barkeep if he could make up a drink to a recipe I proposed. And that was how, under my step by step supervision, the authentic version of an ancient cocktail was recreated for the first time in the world in a soi of Bangkok.
It is a subtle drink, colored a ladylike pink thanks to the bitters. A twist of lime rind floats like a Loch Ness monster under the ice flecked surface, within which gin marries sweetish orange. It’s a refreshing summertime drink, with just enough intrigue in it to explain why it could only have been conceived in an oriental country.
The recipe is simple, and here it is —
2 oz excellent gin (Bombay sapphire or London Dry Gin)
0.75 oz orange curaao
3/4 oz lime juice
A dash of angostura bitters
A dash of orange bitters
Shake well with cracked ice (not crushed), strain into a chilled cocktail glass, and serve.
I did ask the barkeep at The Strand a question before I left. How is it, I asked him, that a grand old hotel like this one in a grand old city like Yangon did not have two standard ingredients one would have expected in any bar — orange curaçao and bitters?
He looked apologetic and contrite, as though he were somehow responsible for the absence. “We are not allowed to import them, sir. They are luxury products.”
The military rulers of Myanmar must have smiled as I left their country next day.[/x_text][/x_column][/x_row][/x_section]