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SINGAPORE SLING IS SPOKEN HERE

SINGAPORE SLING IS SPOKEN HERE
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December 12, 1982, Section 10, Page 6Buy Reprints
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It would be satisfying if you could slide down sweatily into one of the bamboo chairs at the Long Bar of Singapore's old Raffles Hotel, where the first Singapore sling is supposed to have been mixed in 1915, and know for a certainty that the cold, pink, frothy mixture in front of you was the only authentic Singapore sling in the world.

It may be. Your dour bartender is likely to be a member of the same family, the Ngiams, whose forebear, Ngiam Tong Boon, is still honored as the drink's inventor. And if you're leisured or dissolute enough to find yourself under the spacious bar's ceiling fans at an unfrequented time of day - late in the morning, say, before busloads of tourists have hit the place, downed their gallons of slings at about $2.50 a glass and hurtled off alarmingly into the equatorial technopolis -you're likely to discover on looking around that the three or four other people in the room are almost impossible to place. Stir these mysteries with the ''delicious, slow-acting, insidious thing'' that is the Singapore sling, as a prewar epicure named Charles H. Baker Jr. once described it, and the whole scene is apt to wobble off into gorgeously seedy tropical fantasies.

Not everyone loves the Raffles. Some find it dowdy. But it's the place, after all, that was not only named after a relative genius among British imperialists - Sir Stamford Raffles - but that also housed and soothed (or was the sort of place that might have housed and soothed) Kipling and Conrad, Maugham and Coward, and constellations of other moody travelers, pleasure-seeking adventurers, romantics, lords, salesmen, fops.

The hotel, moreover, is expected soon to get its most thorough refurbishment and re-authentication ever. A new high-rise hotel tower is to be built next door, to take advantage of the Raffles name and to house more guests, while most of the clumsy architectural accretions of the decades are to be stripped away from the fine old 1887 French Renaissance building.

According to the hotel's energetic manager, Roberto Pregarz, the ballroom, for instance, and the present Long Bar, which were stuck on in the 1920's, cluttering the grand entrance, are to vanish. And for all Mr. Pregarz knows, the original Long Bar where Mr. Ngiam worked, which twisted among the lobby's columns, may be restored. The airconditioned Writers Bar - known until recently as the Tudor Bar and still indistinguishable from Tudor Bars at motels across America - may also disappear. The Raffles today is said to be in much better shape, and it handles a lot more guests, than a decade or so ago, but to take full advantage of its wide marble floors, porticoed verandas and still-magical Palm Court it needs a ruthless architectural and decorative sweep.

The best spot, in any case, to have a drink at the Raffles is the Palm Court, where at lunch under the awning, or out on the lawn, you can hear the twitter and crawk of tropical birds in the palms, and where at night you can listen to a pretty good piano player. The wicker screens on the sidelines are white, the chairs are white, the stucco's white, the piano's white. Unabashedly colonial, it's still a nice place to sit.

(The grilled white pomfret - a flat silvery fish of the Indian and Pacific Oceans that is known here as ikan bawal - is one of the best things a human being can eat. No offense to the ''maitre d'hotel butter'' the Raffles serves it with, but it's even better simply grilled, with plenty of fresh limes to squeeze over it, and forget the butter. The chef was happy to oblige.)

At a table beside the piano a young American dressed in a bloodorange tropical shirt was telling a young woman with her chin on her hand and an orchid behind her ear, ''I was looking at this black yawn of death, dangling over the side.'' He had recently been to sea.

Drinks called ''slings'' have been mixed for a century and a half (the word is apparently American) and it's possible that even Kipling and Conrad tried some sort of gin sling at the Raffles. Of course, it's easier to imagine Conrad drinking stengas, from the Malay for ''half,'' the measure of whiskey tossed into the glass with water or soda. A bit later, the British rubber-planters who frequented the Raffles drank innumerable such halves.

The hotels that catered to Europeans around the Orient all had their own special slings after a while, but the ''Singapore Raffles gin sling,'' as Baker called it, was already famous in the 1920's - or after the local good life's Goanese orchestras had given way to White Russian cellists and jazz bands from England and America.

The Raffles version, at least by Baker's account, was topped off with club soda and a spiral of lime peel, whereas the modern and allegedly original version contains no club soda and is garnished with pineapple. This discrepancy is only one reason it may be doubted that the modern version re-enacts the moment in 1915 when Mr. Ngiam poured the model of gin slings from his shaker. Today's Singapore sling at the Long Bar, for instance, is sweeter than at the Writers Bar - and there are at least three radically different recipes floating around the Raffles that all purport to be authentic.

Soda and lime peel sound cool, no doubt - but then the Singapore sling is something more than a coolant. It's a tour de force, a specimen of wit.

If you're simply hot there's always beer, and the bars and tables of the Raffles are haunted by the memory of at least one terrifying beer-swiller. He was a Dutch archeologist, a gigantic man named Pieter van Stein Callenfels, and during the 20's and 30's he liked to pad around the Raffles in curry-stained pajamas. ''When five of Callenfels' friends failed to show up for their curry tiffin,'' Ilsa Sharp, a recent historian of the Raffles, has written, ''he ate for six,'' and always washed down such light midday meals (which is what a tiffin is in Anglo-Indian) with a dozen quarts of beer.

During the Raffles' quietest time of day, when everybody seems to be taking an afternoon nap, the Palm Court is a good place for reading, and I'm sorry I never found Victor Purcell's ''Memoirs of a Malayan Official,'' from which the Callenfels stuff is said to come. Purcell, later a lecturer at Cambridge, is best known for his erudite ''The Chinese in Southeast Asia,'' and I'd love to know what he and Callenfels talked about.

Maugham found the Raffles good for writing as well - though how he could sit out in the Palm Court, in the sun, morning after sweltering morning, and knock off even a Malayan short story about the usual desperate planters and secretly impassioned wives, much less ''Of Human Bondage,'' is hard to imagine.

One sultry afternoon, I was sitting in the court reading Patrick Anderson's ''Snake Wine: A Singapore Episode,'' a memoir by a young Englishman who came here to teach in the early 1950's, when the energetic Mr. Pregarz zoomed up and suggested that Derrick Lee, head barman of both the court and the Writers Bar, would now show me how to make a perfect Singapore sling.

After a couple of samples, and a delightful lesson in why you must use pineapples from Sarawak, I padded off down the veranda to the hotel's cavernous barber shop. There, under a slow fan, an old Singaporean had the miraculous good sense, having snipped away gently for what seemed like hours, to clap his hand down smartly on the crown of my head.

Mystifyingly, he did it several times, with a loud clapping sound. It felt as bracing as the rainstorm just breaking outside the window, and seemed somehow very Raffles. A primer for the purist Derrick Lee has been at the Raffles for only 12 years, but he's a splendid teacher, and this is how he makes a single Singapore sling: Into a shaker containing four ice cubes, mix:

* 1 ounce, or jigger, of gin.

* 3/4 ounce cherry brandy.

* ''a few drops'' of Cointreau.

* truly a few drops of Benedictine.

* juice of half a medium-size lemon.

* 2 ounces fresh pineapple juice.

* 1 to two drops of bitters.

* 1 dash of grenadine, for color. Cover the shaker and shake it hard for about 10 seconds. Pour the result, which should foam, into a 10-ounce glass with two ice cubes. Garnish with a wedge of pineapple and a maraschino cherry. For a drier sling, Mr. Lee uses less cherry brandy; for a more powerful one, more gin. As for the pineapple juice, the pineapples should be sweet, pale and not quite ripe: A really ripe, soft pineapple makes the sling too sweet. If the pineapple is too tart, on the other hand, the sling may ''hurt the throat,'' according to Mr. Lee, who also advises against pineapples that are ''crunchy.''C.C.

COLIN CAMPBELL is the Bangkok bureau chief of The New York Times.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 10, Page 6 of the National edition with the headline: SINGAPORE SLING IS SPOKEN HERE. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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