Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com 
Photo by alleksana on Pexels.com
Searching as ever, gentle readers to give you a theme for your Friday night cocktails, we lit upon an inspired idea. Why not consult our old friend and erstwhile collaborator Mrs Margaret Foster of Dorset? There’s little enough she doesn’t know about the food and the drink that wasn’t worth knowing afore, as they used to say along the Grand Union Canal of yesteryear. And, after favouring the matter she came up with this: Elvis Aaron Presley.
Elvis Presley (1935-1977) [1] was a cultural and musical item of enormous magnitude. Confession: we at LSS always thought that Chuck Berry was a better musician, and Bill Haley the original pioneer. But no one stands over his decade and his genre with quite such power as the Man from Memphis. Alright, maybe his contribution to music wasn’t quite in the same league as JS Bach, nor his contribution to cinema quite up there with Martin Scorsese. Nevertheless his string of hummable hits were the introduction to Rock and Roll for the many. As John Lennon once remarked “without Elvis, there would be no Beatles”. So, to pay tribute to this remarkable artist we present three delicious recipes directly inspired by Elvis’ oeuvre. Thank you very much!
Blue Hawaii: we link here to the fantastic website called The Spuce Eats, plus they also have some fantastic pictures! [2] This was a 1961 film. But the drink is a delicious mix of rum, blue curacao, pineapple juice and coconut cream, and garnished with enough tropical fruits to make Carmen Miranda’s head sag. Perfect for the warm nights of that exotic island paradise!
Blue Suede Shoes Not wishing to overdo the blue theme, even if Elvis did, we offer our homage to a sassily-named site called Recipezazz.[3] Basically we are talking rum, pineapple juice and curacao again, but presented in a different way. as for the song, Carl Perkins wrote and first released it, and Elvis followed up in 1956. One for the money, two for the show-and down it goes!
All Shook up Actually a bit of a cheat-because you can do this with so many cocktails. James Bond preferred his cocktails stirred but not shaken (like his women) but we can’t to better than recommend the classic Martini, because if you’re an Elvis fan you can have it the other way round. This is the BBC[4] As for the song, Elvis topped the Billboard charts for eight weeks for this, back in 1957. A long, long time ago!
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_Presley
[2] https://www.thespruceeats.com/blue-hawaiian-recipe-759284
[3] https://www.recipezazz.com/recipe/blue-suede-shoes-16275#:~:text
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