Thursday, July 19, 2007

My legacy

I decided that jam and club soda is now my drink, since it doesn't seem that anyone else thought of it before I did -- or at least, I came up with the idea independently. I set about giving the drink -- my drink -- a name.

Initially I wanted to give it a name that included "Dickolas" so that it would forever be mine. I had been thinking of "Dickola" or "Dr. Dickolas", but the first one was a little bit awkward and the second one isn't evocative enough of Dr. Pepper to be a very good pop name. Théa implored me not to call it Dick Juice, which I hadn't thought of, but considered a wise suggestion nonetheless.

The only jam-related name I could think of was "Jam Session", which was a little corny and didn't include my name at all. However, the more I used it the more I felt that it was the right name. I thought of trying "Dickolas' Jam Session", but that's a little wordy, especially since I imagine one would already have to prefix the name with the flavour of the jam, so that you would drink a Strawberry Dickolas' Jam Session or a Blueberry Dickolas' Jam Session. As hesitant as I was to cede the glory of my rightful place in history as the inventor of the drink, it just felt like the drink itself wanted to be called the Jam Session, so I swallowed my pride and resigned myself to it.

This raises the question of what one would call a mixture of marmalade and club soda. According to my sister, marmalade differs fundamentally from jam: when making jam, you first mash fruit and then sweeten it, whereas with marmalade, you cook the fruit in sugar and then mash it. Rather than go with "[fruit] Marmalade Session", I'm going to go with "Orange Marmalade Jam Session". Controversial? Maybe. But hey, it's my drink, so deal with it.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

As I understand it, the difference between marmalade and jam is that marmalade contains the fruit's peel/skin and jam doesn't. Both must be cooked since you're canning and preserving them.

Dickolas Wang said...

Oh right, I meant that jam fruit is mashed and cooked and sweetened during cooking, while marmalade fruit is brined in a sugar solution prior to cooking. At least that's what my sister told me, but that's not what Wikipedia says.

thea said...

Is there any way I can convince you not to mix marmalade into club soda?

G said...

How about trying stuff like... gravy and club soda? Or other meat-flavoured concoctions. Yuuummmmm.

Goes along with my meat-flavoured ice-cream idea from way back.