I need famous drinks from famous books.

July 14, 2009 10:16 AM

I need famous drinks from famous books. Kind of like how Holden Caulfield always drank Tom Collinses in Catcher in the Rye. Or how the Famous Five always had Tea with their scones. Thanks!
posted by Sully to food & drink (46 comments total)

James Bond's cocktails
posted by mayhap at 10:20 AM on July 14

Ignatius J. Reilly's mother in A Confederacy of Dunces was always leaving white wine in the oven.
posted by oinopaponton at 10:21 AM on July 14

Mint juleps in The Great Gatsby.
posted by olinerd at 10:30 AM on July 14

The Gimlet from Chandler's The Long Goodbye. In the book, the recipe given is half gin and half Rose's lime juice. Keep in mind, Chandler was an alcoholic.
posted by dortmunder at 10:32 AM on July 14 [3 favorites]

I don't know about tea with their scones, but the Famous Five always had ginger beer when out caravanning.
posted by dance at 10:36 AM on July 14 [1 favorite]

The Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster from the Hitchhiker books.
posted by bondcliff at 10:37 AM on July 14 [1 favorite]

Harry Potter and schoolmates are alwys drinking Pumpkin Juice.
posted by pointystick at 10:45 AM on July 14

Humbert Humbert drank pineapple juice and gin (pet-naming naming it "my pim") in Lolita.
posted by cadastral at 10:47 AM on July 14

Mordecai Richler's characters Moses Berger and Barney Panofsky were both partial to Macallan.

Originally Berger drank Glenlivet, but Richler infamously went through Solomon Gursky Was Here's manuscript replacing any mention of Glenlivet with Macallan after an acquaintance who'd written an article about the stuff received a gift from the distillery.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:47 AM on July 14 [1 favorite]

(that should read "my pin", not "my pim"...)
posted by cadastral at 10:53 AM on July 14

Precious Ramotswe from The Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency always drinks red bush tea.
posted by kimdog at 10:54 AM on July 14

Harry Potter and Co. also drink Butterbeer.
posted by Midnight Rambler at 10:59 AM on July 14 [1 favorite]

It wasn't only Holden Caufield who drank Tom Collinses, I think all the characters in all of the Salinger books drank them. The Glass family certainly did. Also, Hercule Poirot was always drinking tisanes (and hot chocolates), much to the disdain of Hastings.
posted by bluefly at 11:02 AM on July 14

Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot always drank Tisane (which is basically herbal tea) and Belgian hot chocolate.
posted by pixlboi at 11:05 AM on July 14

Harriet the Spy drank nothing but egg creams.
posted by OolooKitty at 11:07 AM on July 14

Also, Hercule Poirot was always drinking tisanes (and hot chocolates), much to the disdain of Hastings.
Poirot also drank creme de menthe (mint liqueur) and creme de cassis (blackcurrant).
posted by peacheater at 11:07 AM on July 14

Just finished rereading Islands in the Stream, and Thomas Hudson sure put down a lot of frozen daiquiris without sugar and gin-and-coconut-water with a couple of drops of Bitters.

In various Hunter Thompson books, he and/or his stand-ins are often found driving with a glass of iced Wild Turkey, or having a Bloody Mary for breakfast.
posted by COBRA! at 11:19 AM on July 14

Pippi Longstocking was always drinking coffee.
posted by goo at 11:25 AM on July 14

Irish Coffee figures heavily in a couple of Spider Robinson's Callahans' Saloon books, if memory serves...
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:32 AM on July 14

Hobbits are partial to ale.
posted by angiep at 11:34 AM on July 14 [1 favorite]

In Erich Maria Remarque's Arc de Triomphe, everyone seems to be drinking Calvados.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy claims that all races on all planets have invented a drink with a name phonetically identical to gin and tonic.
posted by daniel_charms at 11:37 AM on July 14

Stinger in The Beautiful and the Damned. See also this NPR story.
posted by plinth at 11:48 AM on July 14

In Cities of the Plain, Billy Parham repeatedly orders "Old Grand Dad and water back."
posted by Bizurke at 11:59 AM on July 14

Asterix and his magic potion!
posted by dowcrag at 12:05 PM on July 14

White Russians in the Big Lebowski? (Yes, I know Sully said book - but this is a pretty iconic use of a cocktail. Both the movie and white russians are excellent.)
posted by LakesideOrion at 12:12 PM on July 14

Colin Dexter’s Morse and 'real ale'.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:14 PM on July 14

Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster!
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 12:16 PM on July 14

Alex's droogs from A Clockwork Orange drink drugged milk in their Milkbar before beating people up.

Every Russian novel after World War I will involve vodka (probably rationed) in one way or another.
posted by spamguy at 12:24 PM on July 14

In a couple of Michael Chabon books I've read recently, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policeman's Union, slivovitz features prominently.

For a recovering boozer (and recovering druggie), Stephen King doesn't seem to have a particular drink that he used in his books, although by his own admission he seemed to have been an anything-he-could-swallow type of drinker. The Dark Tower books occasionally feature something called graf, an "apple beer" that seems to have been somewhere between hard cider and applejack in potency.

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld universe, Jimkin Bearhugger is a distiller of note, but Nanny Ogg makes a mean scumble; many other fine beverages are also featured.

This is stretching the definition of "books" somewhat (although there are original novels as well as novelizations), but Star Trek has always had a variety of drinks; Saurian brandy was introduced in the original series as part of Bones McCoy's sickbay formulary, Romulan ale in the second movie (not to be served at state dinners or on the eve of interstellar political plots), kanar for Cardassians, and Quark's bar on Deep Space Nine had an ever-changing selection of beverages, including root beer and a drink called a Warp Core Breach.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:26 PM on July 14

Well, if we're doing Star Trek, Captain Picard from ST:TNG drinks tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 12:45 PM on July 14 [1 favorite]

They drink a lot of stuff in the Aubrey/Maturin books, among them barley water, grog, and shrub.
posted by oneirodynia at 1:10 PM on July 14

Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius tends to drink Pernod but I think this is a deliberate affectation, and he doesn't actually like it much. He's a fictional character trying to have a signature drink like a fictional character.

Robert Rankin's characters frequently require a 'pint of Large' from Neville the part-time barman at The Flying Swan. You will have trouble finding books with more pub-worship than Rankin's.
posted by BinaryApe at 1:15 PM on July 14

Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado features...um, amontillado.
posted by castlebravo at 1:43 PM on July 14

Kurt Vonnegut talks about lots of different drinks throughout his work, but a sweet rob roy on the rocks always stood out specifically in my memory. I believe it's Hocus Pocus, though I might be mistaken, in which the main character repeatedly speaks of drinking Sweet Rob Roys on the rocks.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 1:46 PM on July 14

No one mentioned Hemingway and absinthe yet? From For Whom The Bell Tolls:

"It was a milky yellow now with the water and he hoped the gypsy would not take more than a swallow. One cap of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafes, of all chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of
the outer boulevards, of book shops, of kiosks, and of galleries, of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo, and of the Butte Chaumont, of the Guaranty Trust Company and the Ille de la Cite, of Foyot’s old hotel, and of being able to read and relax in the evening; of all the
things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea changing liquid alchemy.”

Though what I most remember is 2/3rd of Garden of Eden being entirely about sitting in a cafe drinking absinthe.
posted by danny the boy at 2:03 PM on July 14

Wine in the Bible.

Tea (and madeleines) in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

"My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water." -- Mark Twain
posted by kirkaracha at 2:39 PM on July 14

If you're talking Vonnegut, I think it's worth pointing out that the title of Breakfast of Champions is referring to the martini, though the book talks more about serving them than drinking them.
posted by aubilenon at 3:03 PM on July 14

Hemingway drank Mojitos in Cuba,
posted by pianomover at 3:07 PM on July 14

Raoul Duke/Hunter S. drinks Singapore Slings in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas!

sidenote: singapore slings are also delicious
posted by thatelsagirl at 3:56 PM on July 14

No one mentioned Hemingway and absinthe yet?

Or Strindberg and absinthe, or Wilde, or Baudelaire?
posted by spitefulcrow at 4:23 PM on July 14

The American and Jig drink Anis del Toro in Ernest Hemingway's short Hills Like White Elephants.

Winston Smith drinks Victory Gin in 1984.
posted by ThaBombShelterSmith at 5:37 PM on July 14

Wu Song, one of the heroes of the Water Margin, like many a 好汉, liked a drink; his most famous exploit was killing a tiger with his bare hands on Jingyang Ridge having sampled the rice wine of a hostelry at the foot of the hill. This the inn-keeper advertised as especially strong, such that "if you drink three bowls, you won't make it over the ridge" (三碗不过岗 - now a set phrase), but it didn't get you at first and he called it "出门倒" - "you make it out the door then fall over."
Wu Song drinks eighteen bowls of the stuff, then staggers up Jingyang Ridge for his immortal mortal meeting with the man-killing tiger.
In terms of your question, this is emblematic of the role of drink in Chinese hero-novels, for which see p. 81 of the Google books link above - where you can also see the dark side of a drunken hard man like Wu Song and traditional formulations of masculinity.
posted by Abiezer at 5:48 PM on July 14 [1 favorite]

I think he may drink other single malts, but Inspector John Rebus (author = Ian Rankin) often drinks Laphroaig.
posted by angiep at 7:16 PM on July 14

Anne of Green Gables. Raspberry cordial or currant wine.
posted by kjs4 at 7:52 PM on July 14

Banana mead, from Gravity's Rainbow
posted by Hogshead at 3:44 AM on July 15

A bit generic, but...

Blood Meridian = whiskey
(Bukowski's) Henry Chinaski = anything
Dolphus Raymond from To Kill a Mockinbird pretends to drink alcohol but is actually drinking coke (IIRC).
posted by slimepuppy at 10:53 AM on July 15