Sam Bompas' diary

Madeira should rarely be served at breakfast. One exception is at funerals, as I learned last week in Melbourne when Nelson Bros, Australia's oldest family-owned funeral business (est. 1858) opened its coffin room for a panel on death and dining. The egg is particularly significant in Judaism. It's the first thing eaten after the funeral by mourners. It has no mouth so represents the mourner in shock. And sweetness is said to take away the bitter taste of death. A Greek Orthodox sermoniser told us about Commandaria, the oldest wine still in production, first made by Knights Templar. It is drunk at Greek Orthodox funerals as it is the first thing that the Virgin Mary is said to have taken after the Crucifixion.

Back in London we turned our attention to more modern intoxicants. We'd been asked to create cocktails for visitors to the Museum of London's pirate exhibition late opening. The MoL's Docklands site has a full-size reconstruction of the dark, winding streets of Victorian Wapping, complete with a wild animal emporium, ale house, sailor's lodgings and a corner that smells of piss. We were taking over the ale house for the night and wanted to make cocktails that explored the gustatory and moral implications of piracy, combining the preferred drugs of historical pirates - booze - with those of modern Somali pirates - khat. Khat is an East African plant that stimulates like amphetamines. It's not illegal in the UK but it is jolly hard to find. With only a day to track it down we tore through Somali shops across the capital taking in Brixton, Peckham, Harlesden and Paddington. Asking for khat we were mainly directed to pet shops but we finally ran it to ground in Finsbury Park. It is airlifted here to be consumed fresh and comes delicately wrapped in banana leaves. It has a punchy flavour, like eating a freshly plucked bay leaf. We turned it into a home-made bitters to finish our gin cocktails. It's not often you have to warn people with heart conditions to stay away from the refreshments.

We were up ridiculously early the next day to buy half a tonne of cucumbers from Borough Market's fruit and veg salesmen. One of the pleasures of going to Borough Market this early is that the local pub has a licence - as many of the traders work all night it's allowed to serve alcohol from 6 to 8.30am - but since the day was to be spent making cucumber and quinine jam for the cocktails being shaken at the outstanding bar ECC in Chinatown, we steered clear. Over the past year there's been a cocktail renaissance across London. Drinks being served include ever more exotic ingredients and are made to increasingly complex formulas. It is now possible to buy cocktails aged in oak casks, chilled with hand-carved ice and fixed with spirits sourced from shipwrecks. Our cucumber and quinine jam is destined for a turbo-charged G&T with lightness, power and complexity.

Our weekend was spent at the London Library in St James's tracking down the exact locations of London's Puss and Mews, perhaps the earliest vending machines in history, selling fiery spirits. Each Puss and Mew was little more than a person sitting inside a locked box pouring gin down a pipe and straight into customers' mouths. In the early 18th century, gin became the drink of choice for Londoners and a worry for parliament. The problems and rhetoric around the gin craze closely mirrored today's binge drinking concerns. Numerous parliamentary acts were intended to curb the perceived excess, but the Gin Acts did little to stop the backstreet entrepreneurs who evaded mandatory gin licences by inventing this cunning way to sell spirits licence-free on the street. Reputed to be marked by the sign of a cat, customers would insert coins into a draw, whisper 'Puss! Give me two penny-worth of gin,' hold their cup (or mouth) to the spout and await the murmur of 'Mew!' and a fiery measure of spirits. As soon as we can track down the locations we plan to reinstate London's Puss and Mews. We may need to try harder than a booze spout and box in order to avoid the licensing officers, but that's part of the adventure.
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