The Gaudier The Patter

Eric Felten looks at cognac-based cocktails and the relationship between the suggestive nature of the name of a drink and its quality in today's Wall Street Journal (sub req):

I think a better prospect for reviving cognac's fortunes is the sort of drink made when brandy was in its cocktail prime, of which one of the best is the Between the Sheets. A variation on the Sidecar, the drink combines cognac, rum, Cointreau and lemon juice, together with a suggestive title.

One might be inclined to pass up the Between the Sheets cocktail on basic principle. As a rule, the naughtier the name, the worse the cocktail. Happily, for the sake of taste (in both senses of the word) we are past the heyday of such embarrassments as the Sex on the Beach, Slippery Nipple and Screaming Orgasm. Such drinks are almost always cloyingly sweet, reflecting a certain lack of maturity in the taste buds that matches a sensibility amused by cartoon sexuality. Sex on the Beach is made with vodka, peach schnapps and Chambord, together with cranberry-juice cocktail and pineapple juice -- in other words, one sugary ingredient after another, spiked with bland vodka, and without anything sour, astringent, or bitter to balance the sweetness.

The most obnoxious of these drinks all seem to involve Baileys Irish Cream. Loaded with sugar and dairy, Baileys is a favorite of neophyte drinkers eager to ingest alcohol without tasting it. In particular, the drinks with naughty names tend to be what are called shooters -- shot-glass-sized concoctions meant to be tossed back in a gulp. Thus the Slippery Nipple is Baileys and Sambuca in a shot glass; the Screaming Orgasm is Baileys, Kahlúa, Amaretto and vodka. And that's just the drinks that can actually be named (if just barely) in a respectable newspaper. Popular in Australia, it seems, is a shooter made of Baileys and butterscotch liqueur. The drink's elaborate and unprintable title vividly describes a "cowboy" engaged in an activity the Supreme Court adjudicated in Bowers v. Hardwick. Frankly, I can't decide which is more distasteful -- the lewd logo, or a drink of Baileys and butterscotch liqueur.

And that drink is hardly the worst of the nadir-scraping lot. I suspect that the vulgar and scatological names serve a dual purpose. There is the supposed humor -- yucking it up, if you will. But they also provide a cheap and easy way to indulge in an action-movie aesthetic: Belly up to the bar and call out a string of pseudo-tough expletives, and you get rewarded with a sweet, creamy trifle. One could say of cocktails what Humphrey Bogart says of Elisha Cook Jr.'s gunsel in "The Maltese Falcon": "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter."

While I have been known to enjoy a Baileys or two in my day (or even better, creme Tequila), I share Felten's general distrust of any drink that's overly sweet, especially when there's any hint of sexual innuendo in the name. Truly good cocktails don't require a gimmicky title to make the sale.