THE FIRST RULE OF ISLAND DRINKING ? THERE ARE NO RULE S
“I USED SEVEN KINDS OF FRENCH VERMOUTH IN AN effort to make palatable dry martinis,” wrote Kenneth Roberts. “They were without exception execrable, although some were more execrable than others.”
Roberts, a best-selling historical novelist (Northwest Passage, Arundel), was spending the winter in the Bahamas in the late 1940s. Whereupon he found himself gravely inconvenienced by a shortage of his favorite French vermouth, Noilly Prat.
I read Roberts’s lament not in a newspaper or magazine, but in a copy of , a popular guide to exotic things to consume published in 1946. The author, called “one of the country’s most successful luxury restaurant empires.” And Roberts’s comment was printed not in neat type, but scrawled in thick pencil across two mostly blank pages (130 and 131). I know this because some years ago I turned up and bought the very book Roberts once owned—as attested by his elaborate bookplate, complete with name, tree, globe, rifle, and sailing ship.
