Toast To The Troops

Eric Felten comes up with the perfect drink (of course) for Veterans Day in today's Wall Street Journal (sub req):

Of all the world's armies, the American army gets the best equipment," wrote GI cartoonist Bill Mauldin in 1945. "But we missed the boat on one thing. Every other army gets a liquor ration."

Mauldin was part of the otherwise well-equipped amphibious landing on the Italian coast at Anzio in January 1944. The assault caught the Germans by surprise, and the troops might well have charged deep into the Italian countryside. But the timid general in charge hunkered down on the beachhead instead, much to Winston Churchill's dismay: "I had hoped that we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we had got was a stranded whale."

Pinned down along a broad stretch of coast for months, the American troops "were fixing up their own distilleries with barrels of dug-up vino, gasoline cans, and copper tubing from wrecked airplanes," Mauldin recalled in his memoir "Up Front." The result was a rough approximation of grappa. "The doggies called it 'Kickapoo Joy Juice,' " named after the fierce moonshine in the "Li'l Abner" comic. "It wasn't bad stuff when you cut it with canned grapefruit juice."

The grappa-grapefruit combination is not something I would have come up with on my own. But if you use some decent, professionally made grappa, the drink is downright tasty and a good way to toast America's veterans this weekend.

Felten suggests a mix of two parts grapefruit juice to one part grappa. Cheers!