the Secret of High Eldersham with a 'Bloodhound'

'The Secret of High Eldersham' is a terrifically melodramatic book full of murder, mayhem. Devil worship, kidnap, and smuggling. There's also a glamorous heroine to get in and out of trouble. It's a little bit silly, overblown, and tremendous fun, but even so Miles Burton (one of Cecil Street's pseudonyms) manages to get a genuine sense of menace into proceedings when he wants to.

In crime fiction terms you can't really go wrong with a bit of devil worship as a dramatic device. It gives you ample opportunity for flaming torches, shadowy figures, sharp knives, and unspeakable practices (all the better for being left at least partly to the imagination). There's also the underlying suspicion that something sinister is almost always going on in the countryside. When Burton was writing this between the wars (The Secret of High Eldersham was published in 1930) remote villages could still be genuinely isolated and relatively primitive places. Plenty of houses would have been without phones, electricity, running water, or cars - who knows what old beliefs and superstitious practices could linger on in places like that where almost everyone would be related to each other, and strangers a rare occurrence...

I felt I had to make a Bloodhound for this series as soon as I saw it (in the Savoy cocktail book) because with a name like that how could I not? The suggestion of blood in its red colouring, and name, as well as it essentially being a riff on a martini made it a good match both for the devil worshipping denizens of High Eldersham and for Mavis Owerton, the heroine from the big house with a love of fast cars and speed boats.

It did however raise the vexed question of vermouth. Vermouth is a handy thing to have about a kitchen, it's useful for plenty of recipes, and neccesary for a good martini, but it doesn't keep well. A Bloodhound calls for 1 part French vermouth, 1 part Italian, 2 parts Gin, and 2 or 3 crushed strawberries (shaken with ice, and strained into a cocktail glass). I don't want 2 bottles of vermouth open at the same time if I can help it, and Italian vermouth is a bit vague. The Italians make lots of things that could answer that description in a whole range of colours and levels of relative sweet to dryness.

A bit of research suggested that something sweeter and red was probably intended, so with slight reluctance I opened a bottle of Spanish vermouth (made by the sherry people, Lustau) that I had. I really didn't want to buy another bottle despite the number of cocktail options that it would open up, because I'm not that serious about making cocktails as a regular thing. I can't answer for how authentic the result was but it certainly tasted like something I imagine Bertie Wooster would have drunk with enthusiasm.

Crushing the strawberries was a slightly messy exercise, and whilst I quite liked this one, I didn't love it. I'd make it again, but only if I particularly wanted a 1920's/30's theme for an occasion