Surreal Sipper

A peek into the creation of a literary libation

Page 124 of Katie Blandin’s creased copy of Cannery Row sequel Sweet Thursday comes decorated with a lot of her underlining and lopsided star symbols.

Her scribbles help reveal where she found inspiration for a house specialty.

A paraphrase appears here.

“How about a cocktail?” Steinbeck’s quasi-fictional character Sonny Boy asks Doc RIcketts, who’s out on a date. “The wine’s cooling.”

Then Sonny remembers a Doc favorite: The Webster F. Street Layaway Plan, a martini made with chartreuse instead of vermouth.

“Very effective, as I remember it,” Doc replies, ordering two doubles.

Blandin’s bar, which recently debuted its own backyard Pearl Diver satellite bar space, next to Pearl Hour’s lush Bohemian garden, takes its name from a line in Cannery Row, “It is the hour of pearl—the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.”

So it made poetic sense she would share her Steinbeck-spiritual recipe for a Webster F. Street Layaway Plan remix. Plus she just loved the idea of building a 2:1 martini on her favorite chartreuse substitute.

The resulting tonic enjoys the same sort of balance between simplicity and complexity as do Steinbeck’s characters, and prose.

Substitutions for her preferred ingredients are Steinbeck- and Blandin-approved. Simple utilitarian thinking remains a theme. “Whatever you can get your hands on will taste great,” she says, channeling the attitude of Cannery Row’s Mack and the Boys.

The final tasting notes here come from Ricketts and his date, Suzy, pulled from Blandin’s annotated page 125:

“I should have warned you,” said Doc. “There’s a rumor that this drink is made of rattlesnake venom and raw opium.”

Suzy got her breath. “It’s good,” she said. “But I was watching its right hand and walked into a left hook!”

The name for the off-menu elixir also draws from the same pages, and a Suzy zinger: “When in doubt move slowly— slowness, it gave meaning to everything, it made everything royal.”