Flaming Sambuca

Lately we've been enjoying Sambuca after dinner, in the traditional Italian manner with three roasted coffee beans floating in it (for health, happiness and prosperity). Sambuca is an Italian liqueur flavored with green anise, star anise and elder. Romana Sambuca is similar in flavor to anisette, but at 42 proof, more alcoholic and less sweet. Like absinthe, pastis, ouzo and other anise-flavored spirits, it turns milky white when water or ice is added to it. (The cloudy appearance is the result of all those essential oils emulsifying.)

A less-traditional manner of serving Sambuca is flaming. Cinnamon or nutmeg sprinkled on top before ignition will create sparks--a "comet tail." In certain company, it's cool to place your hand over the glass until the flame inside creates a vacuum, then inhale the fumes. But not in our crowd.

International Wow Factor

Smith College Reunion bartending again today, this time for the class of 1967 at Cutter-Ziskind. The weather was fine, so we set up in the courtyard. 1967 is one of those gin-and-tonic classes....if I'd let my partner make everything else, and I had just handled the g-&-ts, the labor would've been about equally divided.

Cutter and Ziskind, built in the late 1950s in the international style, are the most modern residential houses on campus. Together they form a U shape, with a shared dining area in the middle section. Each house has its own living room and "beau parlor" on the first floor, and individual rooms on the second and third floors. (A beau parlor was a quiet room in which you could entertain your date, back in the days of parietals. Nowadays they're just study rooms. If you don't know what parietals are, well, never mind.)

The complex may be architecturally significant--the buildings are the only residence houses to be studied in Smith's art survey course--but they are the least popular houses to live in. One reason is that the rooms are so small, not to mention boxy and characterless. My own room in Gardiner House was a large and lovely corner room, with two windows and a window seat, a wood floor and a walk-in closet...pretty kneehole desk, Windsor chair, tall dresser...and plenty of room for a vintage rocking chair, handmade bookcase, coffee table, steamer trunk, and so on.

I never thought much about Cutter or Ziskind while I lived on campus. A few years ago, however, I was wowed by a visit to the complex. As cramped as the upstairs rooms are, that's how spacious the public space is. Suspended from the ceiling at various heights, fluttering in a slight breeze from the open doors, were a thousand origami cranes in beautiful bright colors. I never forgot the sight. That was the inspiration for the cranes I have fluttering from my own high-ceilinged kitchen today.

A Room Without a View

One of the nice things about bartending at Smith is having an excuse to wander around the campus which has been my second home since 1965. The entire 125-acre Smith College campus is a registered botanical garden, one of the oldest in the country, and beautiful in any season. But perhaps most beautiful of all just when the students have left for the year. Taking part in reunion activities means being able to be there just at the height of all that beauty.

The campus was designed by the landscape architecture firm of Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1880s. Olmsted also designed Central Park, Boston's Emerald Necklace, and Springfield's own 735-acre Forest Park. Before the redesign (Smith was founded in 1875), the college grounds were a combination of gardens, orchard, hayfields, and pastures.

The Botanical Garden's entire collection consists of over 10,000 plants. This Weeping Beech, Fagus sylvatica ‘Pendula’ is one of the most dramatic specimens. It's next to Hopkins House on Elm Street, the main drag of the campus, a.k.a. route 9. Thousands of people can admire it every day on their way to Florence, Williamsburg, Goshen, Conway, Ashfield, etc., etc. What they may not realize is that the weeping branches form a room in which several people can stand. Or sit. Or lie down. Or do almost any other thing you can think of, totally hidden from the rest of the world.

The age and provenance of this tree are unrecorded. Someone at the College can probably make a very educated stab as to how old it is, but I don't know. I would guess, though, that the tree is older than most of the returning alums. I notice lots of women of varying ages slipping under its branches when they revisit the campus. I wonder what memories the weeping beech is evoking?

Potential to Glow

I had so much fun tending bar at last year's Smith College reunion, I decided to do it again. I contacted Pat Mahar, Area Manager of Dining Services, who was happy to take me on for 2007. I had just one special request: to be assigned to the class of '67 if possible. Those women were two years ahead of me at Smith, and I hoped I'd see someone I knew.

Last night was my first assignment. Thursday night there are no activities organized by class, just services for the earlybird arrivals. I manned a cash bar at the Smith College Club, set up on a leafy deck overlooking Paradise Pond. Although I saw noone I knew, I enjoyed the delectable setting, had the fun of mixing drinks, and got to observe the various classes mingled together.

The younger classes mostly drink wine--white wine. Generally speaking, the older the woman, the stronger the drink. Martinis, which are nothing but spirits (without even an ice cube!) lead the pack for the senior crowd. The favorite of my middle-aged generation is gin and tonic, hands down. I'm partial to g & t myself.

I started drinking gin and tonic in the 70s--the discotheque era. It was the drink that glowed in the dark. Under black light, which was a feature of virtually every discotheque, at any rate. It was years before I understood why.

It's the tonic water that glows in a gin and tonic; specifically, the quinine which gives tonic water its distinctive bitter taste. Because of the relative constancy of its quantum yield, quinine is a common fluorescence standard in photochemistry.

Fluorescence occurs when a molecule which has absorbed light energy releases the remainder of the energy by emitting light. Fluorescence differs from phosphorescence in that a continual source of light must be present for it to occur. Why certain absorbent substances fluoresce while others do not is still not perfectly understood.

So there they were, all the gin and tonics on the terrace, being swallowed as fast as I could mix them. Not fluorescing, of course, as no UV light was present to excite their molecules. But I knew they all had the potential to glow.