Gaelic Coffee and A Step So Grave

Gaelic Coffee and A Step So Grave

Our guest today on Drinks with Reads is Catriona McPherson, the national best-selling and multi-award-winning author of the Dandy Gilver series of preposterous detective stories, set in her native Scotland in the 1930s. She also writes darker contemporary suspense novels, of which STRANGERS AT THE GATE is the latest. Also, eight years after immigrating to the US and settling in California, Catriona began the Last Ditch series, written about a completely fictional Scottish woman who moves to a completely fictional west-coast college town. 

Catriona is a member of MWA, CWA and SoA, and a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters In Crime, committed to advancing equity and inclusion for women, writers of colour, LGBTQ+ writers and writers with disability in the mystery community.

Here is my personal recipe for a drink that will warm you to the marrow – even if you’ve come on the coal boat to a draughty mansion in the remote West Highlands of Scotland, because your beloved son is threatening to marry a girl ten years too old for him and you’ve got to stop it, while pretending not to because you are a guest in his father’s house. For instance. It can also serve as a soother and stiffener if a member of the household ends up lying the garden with a peat cutter through the rib cage. Truly, country life is not nearly as restful as it is cracked up to be. 

Ingredients

• A good glug of any whisky (= US single malt Scotch)
• Another good glug of Drambuie
• Some brown sugar. How much depends on whether you actually like whisky. I hate it so I’d use about a cane plantation’s worth
• Strong hot black coffee
• Cream. Traditionally it’s single (= US light) cream, poured over the back of a spoon so it doesn’t sink. I say: life’s short – whip the cream.

Method

In a glass that will be okay with hot liquid (it doesn’t have to be a curling trophy, but why not if you can?) mix the whisky, Drambuie and sugar. The sugar might not all dissolve at this stage. Fill the glass with hot coffee, leaving an inch at the top. Stir again. The sugar should dissolve now. Carefully add whipped (and sweetened, if you like) cream until the glass is full. You could use aerosol cream, but don’t tell me. Enjoy!

A Step So Grave comes out in the US on the 5^th of November and is available from your favourite bricks and mortar bookshop as well as all the usual places online.