Gorgeously slumming it with cream liqueur  1March 2005

I am mature (or  old) enough to proudly admit my weaknesses, confident in my strengths. No, that’s not it, I fear. I am simply forced by the remnants of basic honesty that a rotten society still permits, to admit that I am just an old tart (as my beloved husband, rot his soul, would sometimes bitterly claim).

What prompts this confession (admittedly somewhat drunken, for reasons which will become only too apparent, if you are kind enough to bear with me)? What prompts it? Nothing more or less than a cunning – no doubt cynical – combination of cheap spirits, lots of sugar, some more-or-less honestly derived fruit flavour and a shot of more-ish acidity, and, oh! a good deal of cream.

There’s a new cream liqueur out, you see, and I wangled my way into getting a freebie of it (along with a rather handsome leather wine carrying bag and, somewhat extraordinarily, a pair of black nylon boxer shorts (running shorts?), marked on the outside with a rubbery advertisement for the maker of the cream liqueur, and on the inside with a rather insulting ‘XL’ (did they know it was me, precisely me, receiving this strange gift?).

I am a sucker for cream liqueurs – disgusting, vulgar, fattening drinks as they are. I once before in this column mentioned this weakness, in relation to Amarula Cream (the concoction that, by all accounts, keeps Distell in the black in the midst of a wine glut). And I instanced a dear friend who claimed that she wouldn’t even drink the stuff if it was poured all over Brad Pitt. I, on the other hand, would probably be on my knees lapping it up if it was poured all over a scaly anteater, or, in times past, the dear departed one.

A third of the seductive bottle gone already. I now understand the message of the Extra Large undies. If you were Medium before, drink enough of this stuff and you’ll soon be undeniably L, with an X or two as prefix.

This new drink is obviously designed to eat into the vast profitability of Amarula. It plays on the same Africanising theme, and is essentially similar, as far as I can recall. It’s called Ilala Cream – the name presumably designed to be just similar enough, probably, to confuse a few suckers as undiscriminating as I am, while just different enough to enable Pernod Ricard lawyers to confront with innocent sneers the injured honesty of Distell’s contingent.

Whereas Amarula features elephants on the label (they munch the berries, apparently), Ilala has a lion (fond memories of a Disneyesque Lion King would not be unwelcome). How do they get to a lion – given that the ‘King of Beasts’ (marketers love capital letters) would hardly be supping on the ‘sap of the Ilala Palm’? With admirable chutzpah, the PR company makes the connection for the admiring reader of the back label. The African plains, you see, have been ‘for centuries’ ruled by the lion. (We’re not told what ruled the plains more than a few hundred years back.) Now, what could be better than Illala Cream – sorry, Ilala palm sap – for ‘imbuing warriors with the courage to challenge these majestic animals’?

Better believe it, because this horribly gorgeous liquid celebrates the heart of Africa’. Of course it does, darlings!