Mollydookered
November 7, 2006
Mollydookered
The evening begins like many others at our home, where we regularly prepare food for guests and ourselves. We are largely European in our cooking habits, going to the store or farmers’ market in season and selecting depending on availability, freshness, and our own appetites’ leanings at the time. In this way, dinner is always an adventure, but on this particular night, the adventure takes on a life of its own.
Tonight it is Thai food, but because our friend Michael is coming to dinner, I fix an extra entrée. Scrounging the cupboards and freezer, I discover a small parcel of frozen turkey, and a jar of Thai pesto, fashioned of very hot Thai peppers, basil, garlic, and not much else. It’s potent and it’s there, so I use it to make a dish known as Drunken Spaghetti. Victor Sadsook, author of “True Thai,” tells the reader that the recipe may be so named because besotted Thai, in their efforts to get well after a serious night of drinking, often use it to chase hangovers. That should have been an omen.
Two glasses of mediocre French Chardonnay provide the pre-cooking prep refreshment, and then our guest arrives with a bottle of wine from New Zealand from the Mollydooker Vineyards. The bottle has a distinctive turn-of-the century boxer on the label, and sports a 16.5% alcohol level, which I discover the next day. The Mollydooker goes down before dinner, and we serve a very good Riesling with the Basil Chicken.
It is here that things go bad. I wake up at 3AM with a screaming headache and a mouth that feels like the corrugated side of a cardboard packing box and a tongue as big and unwieldy as a dead kangaroo. I have given myself a bed bath in a cup of herbal tea that I have apparently taken up to bed with me to help me sleep and poured all over myself, the sheets, and the pillow. A sleep aid was not necessary this particular night.
It has been many, many years since I woke up with “Wha’ happened?” as the first words out of my mouth. I creep about the house in the dark to survey the damage and reconstruct the evening. The dishes are done, so someone did them (me? My husband? Our guest? ). There is no sign of the Basil Chicken, so apparently we ate it. Happily, my prep with a large kitchen knife had all been done before the arrival of the Mollydooker, and I am not missing any digits. I vaguely recall packing up the leftover Drunken Spaghetti for Michael, who is a bachelor and lives alone, to take home.
My husband tells me I got myself to bed, although he allows as how the undressing was a rather slow, clumsy process. It’s a bit disconcerting to imagine him watching me undress in my pitiful state, but he’s probably seen me in worse condition in 14 years of marriage, whether from illness or fatigue. I was apparently a decent hostess, because our guest doesn’t call me up to tell me off the next day.
The word Mollydooker, to the Kiwi’s, means lefthanded. It first appeared in Australian lexicon in the 1920’s, and refers to a left-handed boxer. I look it up on the internet to determine the origin of the word. There are two distinct theories, both hinging on the word “dukes” as hands, as used in fist fighting. It originates in London in the early to middle part of the nineteenth century. It may have been slang for the word “fork,” an older slang term for the hand, referring to the surreptitious using of hands as tweezers to slip something out of the pocket of an unsuspecting victim. Cockney slang then converted “fork” to Duke of York, which was then abbreviated, as slang often is, to the word “duke.” The other, simpler theory is the use of “dukker,” a gypsy word for telling fortunes, presumably by palmistry. Neither theory satisfies entirely.
What of molly? My Internet source suggests that it refers to an effeminate male, as in “mollycoddle.” The suggestion is that anyone left-handed, as I am, is a bit queer in at least one respect. Well, I feel pretty queer the next day. Hence, the phrase, “Mollydookered.”
Note to self: never drink Mollydooker or any other 16.5% alcohol wine on an empty stomach. Those cookies I ate at the car dealership after swimming just don’t absorb wine like that quickly enough.
Mollydookered
The evening begins like many others at our home, where we regularly prepare food for guests and ourselves. We are largely European in our cooking habits, going to the store or farmers’ market in season and selecting depending on availability, freshness, and our own appetites’ leanings at the time. In this way, dinner is always an adventure, but on this particular night, the adventure takes on a life of its own.
Tonight it is Thai food, but because our friend Michael is coming to dinner, I fix an extra entrée. Scrounging the cupboards and freezer, I discover a small parcel of frozen turkey, and a jar of Thai pesto, fashioned of very hot Thai peppers, basil, garlic, and not much else. It’s potent and it’s there, so I use it to make a dish known as Drunken Spaghetti. Victor Sadsook, author of “True Thai,” tells the reader that the recipe may be so named because besotted Thai, in their efforts to get well after a serious night of drinking, often use it to chase hangovers. That should have been an omen.
Two glasses of mediocre French Chardonnay provide the pre-cooking prep refreshment, and then our guest arrives with a bottle of wine from New Zealand from the Mollydooker Vineyards. The bottle has a distinctive turn-of-the century boxer on the label, and sports a 16.5% alcohol level, which I discover the next day. The Mollydooker goes down before dinner, and we serve a very good Riesling with the Basil Chicken.
It is here that things go bad. I wake up at 3AM with a screaming headache and a mouth that feels like the corrugated side of a cardboard packing box and a tongue as big and unwieldy as a dead kangaroo. I have given myself a bed bath in a cup of herbal tea that I have apparently taken up to bed with me to help me sleep and poured all over myself, the sheets, and the pillow. A sleep aid was not necessary this particular night.
It has been many, many years since I woke up with “Wha’ happened?” as the first words out of my mouth. I creep about the house in the dark to survey the damage and reconstruct the evening. The dishes are done, so someone did them (me? My husband? Our guest? ). There is no sign of the Basil Chicken, so apparently we ate it. Happily, my prep with a large kitchen knife had all been done before the arrival of the Mollydooker, and I am not missing any digits. I vaguely recall packing up the leftover Drunken Spaghetti for Michael, who is a bachelor and lives alone, to take home.
My husband tells me I got myself to bed, although he allows as how the undressing was a rather slow, clumsy process. It’s a bit disconcerting to imagine him watching me undress in my pitiful state, but he’s probably seen me in worse condition in 14 years of marriage, whether from illness or fatigue. I was apparently a decent hostess, because our guest doesn’t call me up to tell me off the next day.
The word Mollydooker, to the Kiwi’s, means lefthanded. It first appeared in Australian lexicon in the 1920’s, and refers to a left-handed boxer. I look it up on the internet to determine the origin of the word. There are two distinct theories, both hinging on the word “dukes” as hands, as used in fist fighting. It originates in London in the early to middle part of the nineteenth century. It may have been slang for the word “fork,” an older slang term for the hand, referring to the surreptitious using of hands as tweezers to slip something out of the pocket of an unsuspecting victim. Cockney slang then converted “fork” to Duke of York, which was then abbreviated, as slang often is, to the word “duke.” The other, simpler theory is the use of “dukker,” a gypsy word for telling fortunes, presumably by palmistry. Neither theory satisfies entirely.
What of molly? My Internet source suggests that it refers to an effeminate male, as in “mollycoddle.” The suggestion is that anyone left-handed, as I am, is a bit queer in at least one respect. Well, I feel pretty queer the next day. Hence, the phrase, “Mollydookered.”
Note to self: never drink Mollydooker or any other 16.5% alcohol wine on an empty stomach. Those cookies I ate at the car dealership after swimming just don’t absorb wine like that quickly enough.
posted by Linda at 1:03 PM
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