Serge Abrahamovitch Voronoff was a French surgeon who became famous during the 1920s for his technique of grafting monkey testicle tissue on the testicles of men for therapeutic purposes. According to Voronoff, while the therapy was not an aphrodisiac, he suggested that the sex drive may be improved. And there were other possible effects he claimed, including better memory, the ability to work longer hours, the potential for no longer needing glasses (due to improvement of muscles around the eye), and the prolonging of life. He also speculated that the grafting surgery might be beneficial to people with dementia praecox, the mental illness known today as schizophrenia.
Also in the 1920s, one of the world’s first great bartenders, Harry MacElhone, opened Harry’s New York Bar in Paris. He capitalized on the popularity of testicle transplants and invented a cocktail called the Monkey Gland. Of course, Voronoff’s claims were debunked, but the Monkey Gland has lived on and it remains a popular and classic cocktail.
The Monkey Gland
1.5 ounces dry gin
1.5 ounces orange juice (freshly squeezed makes it unimaginably good)
1 teaspoon real pomegranate grenadine (yes, the recipe from a few issues back will work perfectly)
1 bar spoon absinthe
Some, myself included, prefer to first wash the inside of the glass with the absinthe. Most just add the absinthe into the rest of the ingredients.
Add all ingredients, except the absinthe if doing a wash, in a shaker. Fill with ice and shake for a few seconds. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
No garnish.
A Song To Enjoy With This Weekend’s Cocktail
Beck is an American musician, singer-songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist from Los Angeles, California. He has created some of the most inventive and fun music over the last thirty years as he defied genre classification and pushed boundaries. He has released fourteen studio albums, several non-album singles, and a book of sheet music. He has won 8 Grammy Awards from 22 nominations, including Album of the Year in 2015.
The song to accompany this weekend’s cocktail comes from Beck’s 2019 album Hyperspace, which was described as synth-pop with a vaporware aesthetic influence. Uneventful Days was the second single from the album. It reached #1 on Billboard’s US Adult Alternative Songs.
In a Beats 1 interview (10/17/2019), he said: The song was a bit like somebody who is a bit isolated. It’s like those moments in life at the aftermath of a period of time when you’re about to go into a new period of time. A new job in a new town. You’re standing in an empty apartment looking out a window at a palm tree. That kind of feeling. Once I found that, the song wrote itself.
Uneventful Days
Written by Beck and Pharrell Williams,
Produced by Beck, Pharrell Williams, and David Greenbaum,
Performed by Beck
Friday, finally Playlist on:
Here’s to modern medicine. We could all do with fewer Voronoffs.
Until next week…
Ff 139