Shooting From The Hip

For centuries, the sporting bond has been sealed by a sip or a slugfrom a shared hip flask. Flora Watkins salutes this most convivial of traditions and recommends three spirit-lifting concoctions

ORANGES at half-time may be the norm for football matches, but the original winter game demands something a little stronger. When the days are short and cold, the pheasants are flying high and the breath of horses and riders hangs on the air, nothing quite revives the toes—and the spirits—like a nip of something delicious from a neighbour’s hip flask.

It might be a traditional Whisky Mac, a fresh, fruity rhubarb vodka or the classic sloe gin. It’ll defrost your fingers and put fire in your belly, with ‘a cutting edge… flamed like Betelgeuse’, as Seamus Heaney described so lyrically in his poem Sloe Gin. However, a shared swig goes so much further than that.

For Nick Radclyffe of Foxdenton Gin Liqueurs, it’s all about ‘the camaraderie of shooting’. A hip flask containing a homemade concoction is something to ‘warm you gently and share with your fellow guns’, something to pass round in the Land Rover and say: ‘Right chaps, what do you think of this?’

‘It’s the shared experience,’ confirms Sophie Caruth, a subscriber to both the South Dorset and South and West Wilts. ‘To me, that’s what hunting is really about. You’re with a group of people diverse in every way, other than that they’re completely obsessed with hunting. It’s one of the ties that you come together and link hands—and then there’s the discussion about what’s in each flask.’

Miss Caruth has raspberry vodka for the start of the season and has just finished making batches of plum gin and vodka (see box for recipe), which will be ready for the New Year. Once bottled, they’re stamped with one of the pretty labels she had made up for her jam, with ‘Reddish Tracklements’ beneath a picture of her home, Reddish House, which once belonged to Cecil Beaton.