I’m taking a break today from the  “best of“ lists to highlight a cute little book.

I got Gatsby’s Speakeasy for a gift at Christmas and I laughed out loud because it reminded me of a children’s board book. It’s been on display on my kitchen shelf since then. It’s a cute little book but I literally just popped it open to actually read it. I then realized that the book is actually a take-apart book; the recipes remain intact as the opposite pages can be removed for coasters. Hence, the thickness of the book.

About the book:

Raise a glass to a very Gatsby affair!

Bring a little of East Egg to your next party. Gatsby’s Speakeasy is a book of ten pop-out coasters and cocktail recipes inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. Each beautiful coaster showcases one of the book’s most memorable quotes and is accompanied by the very cocktail to drink while using it.

Fit for literati and roaring ’20s lovers alike, this gorgeously designed book of coasters and libations will elevate any gathering.

(From the MacMillan website)

What I thought…

As mentioned in the blurb, each coaster has an iconic quote from the book:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

“Life start all over again when it gets crips in the fall.”

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

“I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”

“Can’t repeat the past? Why, or course you can!”

“Those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant…”

“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”

The only quote I would have included would have been the famous: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”

The drinks are pretty basic but given “Gatsby-esque” names:

• Green Light Gin Rickey
• Old Sport Old-Fashioned
• East Egg Clover Club
• Tom Buchanan Tom Collins
• Seaside Sidecar
• Gin Daisy Buchanan
• Bootlegger’s Martinez
• Reverie Bee’s Knees
• High Society Sazerac
• New Money Claret Cup

Keeping with the time period (Prohibition), gin figures in to a lot of these recipes. I did learn from the headnotes that a Gin Daisy was a precursor to a Cosmopolitan and that the original Clover Club was invented in Chicago (which ties in with Tom and his roots).

I decided to try that Gin Daisy.

Gin Daisy

Based on Gin Daisy Buchanan from Gatsby’s Speakeasy

As the headnote says, this drink “might just have you feeling like a ‘beautiful little fool.’”

Ingredients

• 1 ½ oz. gin (I used a homemade ginger-infused gin.)
• ½ oz. Triple Sec
• 1 oz. fresh lemon juice
• 1 T. grenadine
• 4 oz. club soda
• 1 sprig of mint
• lemon wedge to garnish

Instructions

1. Fill a cocktail shaker half full of ice. Add the gin, Triple Sec, lemon juice and grenadine. Shake and strain into a cocktail glass over more ice. (Crushed or shaved ice if you have it.)
2. Top with club soda and garnish with mint.

Yield: 1

I used the ginger gin because that’s what was in the cupboard. I liked the bite of it. This was a delicious cocktail!

Gatsby’s Speakeasy is a good gift book for the cocktail lover or the Fitzgerald lover in your life. It absolutely would be a fun basis for a cocktail party. I will probably not remove the coasters but will put this next to all of my other Fitzgerald books in the library.

The Great Gatsby is one of my all time favorite books. I still have my original paperback from college that I then used for seven years when teaching high school juniors. It is barely holding together but is dog-eared and full of notes. Maybe I should get it back out, reread it and try the rest of the cocktails with each chapter. (There are nine chapters in GG so that works out perfectly!)

I’m linking up with Foodies Read.

My sister got me the candle for my birthday. It’s hilarious. It’s supposed to smell like champagne but actually has the aroma of pine (to me). Gatsby’s mansion and dock on depicted in wax. Around the outside are these gems:

• There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired. Which are you? Here is the green light for you to start at.
• How to throw a Gatsby-themed party?
  • Get drunk.
  • Lie on couch.
  • Argue about where to go.
• You, too, can call people “old sport,” as long as you don’t mind annoying everyone with your affectations.
• Here’s a tip! Don’t take people to your closet and make them look at your shirts.