No. 57: Pimm’s Cup (July 30, 2012)
We’re home! We’re home! We’re home!
I was gone for four weeks and six days, my husband was gone for three weeks and five days (although he worked a bunch on the trip, poor fella, so he was physically away from home and the office, but not mentally), and our son was gone for five weeks and six days. Our trip was incredible, awesome, unforgettable, and often flat-out spectacular, but walking back into our house was a magically wonderful thing.
Our friends the Harvard professors had agreed to come over to celebrate our return, and had even offered to bring dinner, which was so, so great. (Tacos! They were delicous!) The London Olympics had just started, and one of the professors had spent much of her childhood in England, and it was a warm summer’s day, so I picked a Pimm’s Cup for our evening’s libation.
Straight Up doesn’t have a Pimm’s recipe and the Ultimate Bar Book has some club-soda-filled nonsense as its recipe. So I used the proportion of Pimm’s No. 1-to-soda from the Ultimate book, but I IGNORED the club soda baloney because it is bullshit.
3 oz Pimm’s No. 1
3 to 4 oz FIZZY LEMONADE, not, NOT, NOT club soda
cucumber spear
lemon slice
Okay, so lots of people (misguided people! very misguided people!) think that you can use ginger ale or, God forbid, 7-Up in a Pimm’s Cup, but they are wrong. Sparkling lemonade is what you add to Pimm’s No. 1 to get a Pimm’s Cup. Period. Add something else, and you get something else. Whatever that thing is, do not call it a Pimm’s Cup. There really isn’t room for discussion on this topic, and I’ll thank you for never bringing it up again. I am getting upset.
So, Pimm’s Cups are one of my absolute most favorite drinks ever, and this one was no exception. We played croquet with the Harvard professors, our son reunited with their son and the two of them happily talked Pokemon for many, many hours, and I reveled in being back with my dear friends and back in my home. I forgot to ask a single other person what they thought of the Pimm’s Cups. I assume they liked them since we drank almost an entire bottle of Pimm’s No. 1.
Pimm’s Cups get an A