Dave went shopping the other day for a Mother’s Day feast. There’ll be no restaurant brunch for us this year, or most years. We rarely plan far enough ahead to get a reservation. This holiday is one where, ahead of time, I feel the pressure to conform to the typical moms-who-brunch mode: a lengthy gathering featuring midmorning cocktails, fancy breads, decorative fruits, and thinly sliced meats and cheese. Fancy and vaguely cosmopolitan. I suggested that Dave forage for croissants, chocolate-covered strawberries, macarons, deli meat, and Mimosas.
He came back with Lay’s chips, salsa, razorblades, chocolate chip cookies, frozen hamburgers, orange juice, and vodka. “Aargh,” he said, when I pointed out that OJ plus vodka equals screwdriver, not mimosa. Nothing’s wrong with a Screwdriver, though, we agreed.
I woke up this morning to a down-market reality, having slept the wrong way on my neck and with my ankle still not wanting to bend so that I could walk down stairs like a normal person. I felt much more in the mood for chips and a Screwdriver than croissants and a Mimosa.
Both Mimosas and Screwdrivers were born in the twentieth century. Ad men had successfully promoted orange juice as an essential breakfast item. A kind of vitamin-packed, cold version of coffee. And with the addition of OJ to the first meal of the day, day-drinking seems to have become more popular. Coincidence? Who knows? At any rate, common brunch drinks such as Mimosas, Bloody Marys, and Screwdrivers date to the 1920s and 30s and were quite the hit with the leisured and middle classes. In the early 1920s Malachy McGarry, the bartender at the London club Buck’s, invented a drink composed of two parts champagne to one part orange juice and called it a Buck’s Fizz. In 1925 a bartender at the Paris Ritz Hotel, Frank Meier, rejiggered the proportions of those ingredients to 50/50 and had his own hit. At some point, Meier’s drink was named after the similarly colored mimosa plant.
There are conflicting stories about the Screwdriver’s origins. No champagne for the U.S. Marines, stuck at sea for months on end, or the Americans working oil rigs in the Persian Gulf. The stories imply a more working-class beverage, no bartender required. Just tip a little vodka into the morning orange juice and stir it with the tools on hand (as legend has it, an actual screwdriver) and voila! a cocktail that energizes and relaxes in equal measure which can be consumed right under the boss’s nose! As someone who’s occasionally stirred a drink with a handy but inappropriate tool—in my case, a ballpoint pen—I can relate. Even the stories associating Screwdrivers with hotels have a déclassé feel. A 1949 article in Time Magazine depicts seedy diplomats enjoying these cocktails in the bar of the Istanbul Park Hotel. Far removed from Buck’s or the Ritz.
Dave’s haul also reflected some serendipitous screwups of the past. In 1930, innkeeper Ruth Graves Wakefield added semisweet chocolate shavings to her chocolate cookie dough after running out of baker’s chocolate. The result: the chocolate chip cookie. In 1853, after a finicky customer sent back his fried potatoes, saying they needed to be crispier, chef George Crum erupted. I’ll show him crispy! He cut a potato into thin paper-thin slices, fried them hard, then over-salted them. Aiming for inedible, he produced the incredible: the first potato chips.
Over the years I’ve come almost to prefer it when things don’t go exactly to plan. My plans are the size of my imagination; adding an obstacle stretches them in interesting ways. I’ve achieved nothing as globally significant as the accidents of penicillin, the microwave oven, X-rays, vulcanized rubber, the Margarita (a Manhattan bartender misremembered a cocktail recipe and using tequila instead of whiskey), or the ice cream cone (a waffle-seller helping out an ice cream vendor who’d run out of serving bowls at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair). On the other hand, my accidents haven’t been as terrible as tofu, either. Hooray for Screwdrivers, burgers, Lays’, chocolate chip cookies and other happy screw-ups.
the jeanSpace 