Grown-Up Orange Squash - Something To Cool You Down

Hello and thank you so much to all subscribers, free and paid. I hope you’ve been having a relaxing weekend. Maybe it’s the absence of rain or maybe it’s the never-ending sadness of the news but a lot of people seem on edge right now and I hope you are ok.

I’m in full-on cookbook-writing and recipe-testing mode this week while my younger son is away. I have so many recipes which are nearly ready to share with you. But most of them didn’t seem quite right for this parched late-summer week. I thought you were probably not in the mood for switching the oven on for this experimental chiffon cake which is cooling as I type.

So instead, this is a quick one to share with you my favourite very-very-nearly non-alcoholic drink which I make for myself when I want something that isn’t wine but also isn’t water to mark the end of the working day. It’s extremely cooling and I hope you’ll like it as much as I do. xx

I find this drink incredibly refreshing and despite the lurid orange colour of the version above, it isn’t at all sweet. I call it grown-up orange squash because it reminds me of the vast mugs of squash I would make for myself as a child the moment I got back from school.

Back then, I don’t think anyone ever spoke of ‘hydration’ in schools. I hardly remember ever drinking water during the day except for an occasional sip from a grimy water fountain. What I do remember is being ravenously thirsty when I got home. And there was always squash in the house, just as there seemed to be in every British household back then: lemon barley water, lime cordial, Ribena and above all, orange squash. It was just what children were expected to drink. You could judge the mood of a household by the degree to which they diluted their squash. In some of my friends’ houses, it was hopelessly watered down; but even worse were the houses where the squash was served so sickly and strong it hardly quenched your thirst at all. Then there were the parents who insisted that children would be fine with just water from the tap. Annoyingly, those people were right, though I didn’t think so at the time.

I never buy squash now, partly because the brands I remember from childhood are now made with artificial sweeteners (though thankfully, most of the bright synthetic dyes have done). Now that I am a boring grownup, there is genuinely no part of me that wishes I could drink a glass of squash.

But sometimes, when I am getting ready to cook dinner, I wish I could have a drink by my side that feels like a bit of a ritual without it being something alcoholic.

Watching my mother radically change her relationship with alcohol during the middle to late phase of her dementia made me question the default advice that so often appears in recipes (maybe even in my own) to ‘pour yourself a glass of wine and relax’ while cooking. Before the dementia, my mother had been moderate in her drinking and would often refuse a glass of wine on the grounds that she would sleep better without it. So it was a shock to see her turn to wine more and more, perhaps to hide from herself the awfulness of what was happening to her brain. She had always been such a sweet and gentle person and it was horrible to see how belligerent she could become when she felt anyone might be going to deny her access to the drinks she came to refer to as ‘red liquid’ and ‘white liquid’ after she had forgotten the word for ‘wine’.

When I remember those days, the thought of no-alcohol nights becomes very appealing. I’m not saying it isn’t lovely sometimes to have a glass of wine while you are cooking. I’m just saying that there are other drinks too and it’s no bad thing to normalise the idea that it is possible to relax without alcohol.

Much as I love wine and the occasional cocktail (and indeed soon hope to share with you the greatest alcoholic cocktail I’ve ever tasted, the joyous ‘Labunza’, as made by my friend Anne), I also love waking up with a clear head. None of these thoughts are remotely original, judging from the colossal rise of low- and no-alcohol drinks over the past few years.

My friend Chris introduced me to No Worries, which is a surprisingly excellent low alcohol pale ale from Norway. When Chris messaged me recently to ask if I wanted to meet for ‘a pint of No Worries’ after work, I thought she was making a witty comment (she is from Australia) and didn’t realise there was an actual beer called No Worries. I know that Guinness Zero also has many fans. I have other friends who swear by Botivo and say that it has helped them to cut down significantly on their drinking.

Yet, although I think it’s great that these new alcohol-free spirits exist, I can’t quite bring myself to spend more than £20 on a bottle of not-gin. So what I do instead for those wanting-an-aperitivo-without-the-alcohol moments is to make myself this refreshing and slightly bitter orangey drink, from ingredients I have in the house anyway. It smells uncannily like the orange squash of the 1980s but tastes far nicer. You might find it a nice thing to sip while reading a book on the sofa.