I’m still swooning.

New Orleans, New Orleans, your hot, steamy mornings, washed away by afternoon lighting, thunder and pouring rain. Your avenues lined with sprawling live oaks and tall Victorian houses iced with curls of white and pink and purple paint. Your summery libations inside dusky, cool old bars with peeling paint walls, elegant gray-haired waiters wearing bow ties, Luciano Pavarotti wailing over the sound system, and $5 cocktails. Your parked bikes and street musicians and tarot card readers on every other corner. Your beignets and cafe au lait whisked to a table by a tiny Asian man wearing a paper hat. Your free ferries. Your haunted, affordable hotels. Your streetcars. Your meaty, medium-rare hamburgers! And, yes, your Katrina-ed neighborhoods and your questionable government and your complicated, tangled problems. You’re bewitching and fascinating, old and mysterious and like no other place on earth.

For a cook and a writer, and an urban planner-to-be and a photographer, this was the perfect place to be. Kelly and I ate and we gawked at old houses and buildings, walked until the blisters came, took a cocktail break, then ate and walked and gawked some more.

We got to New Orleans late on a Tuesday afternoon, weary from a long drive off the interstate winding through the Louisiana swamps that we hoped would be more scenic, but was probably just more, well, long. After we checked into our hotel (”There’s sherry every afternoon form 3 to 6, but longer if I’m here,” the receptionist drawled charmingly), we stumbled around the French Quarter, half-heartedly looking for a bar that wasn’t full of screaming co-eds hoisting daiquiris. We rounded a corner, and walked into Napoleon House, and discovered Pimm’s Cup.

The foundation of Pimm’s Cup is Pimm’s No. 1, a gin-based liquor flavored with citrus and spices from England. The color of claret and slightly syrupy, its origins were in the name of health, but its evolved to become a popular tipple with the cricket, regatta and garden party set. God knows how it arrived in New Orleans. But I pity the weary, hot traveler who didn’t have access to it around 6 p.m. on a May afternoon. There are other drinks in New Orleans - we had some hefty hurricanes as a prelude to our hamburgers one night, rum mixed with rum they were - but nothing in my mind goes down as refreshingly. Sipping a Pimm’s Cup is like sitting in a glider on a front porch, watching a July thunderstorm pass by.

I found Pimm’s No. 1 easily in New Orleans, $19.95 at a crowded, dusty liquor store in the upper French Quarter manned by a woman eating popcorn off a paper plate. I haven’t had the heart to seek it out more locally - yet. I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed, and then I’ll have to slog through the rest of summer, hot and sticky. However, if you can’t find it, there’s hope. According to Wikipedia, “a close approximation to Pimm’s No. 1 can be prepared by mixing one measure of gin with one Orange Curacao and one red vermouth.” Good to know. Hope I don’t have to try. And hope that you don’t, either.

Pimm’s Cup adapted from Napoleon House

Take a tall glass (about 12 oz) and fill with ice. Add 1 1/4 oz. Pimm’s No. 1 and 3 oz. lemonade. Finish with a generous splash of 7-up or Sprite. Garnish with a slice of cucumber. The British prefer to add borage leaves, strawberries, lemon and orange slices. Take out onto a porch or in the backyard. Sit, stir and sip.