Drinking advice for the undead

First let me say it again.  I love absinthe.  The real stuff.

This cocktail comes from a whole family that dates back to the late 19th century.  Credit for this particular version, according to Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, is given to the #2 Savoy barman, Harry Craddock.

This is one of those great classic era drinks that highlights the alchemy of a truly great cocktail.

The Corpse Reviver #2

• 1 oz. Gin
• 1 oz. Cointreau
• 1 oz. Lillet Blanc
• 1 oz. Fresh Lemon Juice.
• 1-3 drops absinthe (I went with 3-see line 1)

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Drop a stemless cherry in the bottom.

Both Brenda and I really liked this cocktail. I with the good Docotor that it is now one of our favorites.

I think I will close with the admonition of the great Harry Craddock,
“Four taken in swift succession will unrevive the corpse again.”

Happy Halloween

 

The Aviation Cocktail

I’ve been thinking about his one for a while. It started out as something to do with a recently acquired bottle of creme de violette, which in turn was the result of my endless quest for arcane booze. In many ways this cocktail is the embodiment of this quest, having not only creme de violette but also Maraschino liqueur. The recipe I used is from David Wondrich’s Imbibe, his take on Jerry Thomas’s original Bartender’s Guide. Even though the cocktail gained prominence with Harry Cradocks Savoy Cocktail Book from 1930, the cocktail predates prohibition-the earliest mention Wondrich finds was a passing mention in the New York Times in 1911. The first recipe (and the one Wondrich presents) was in a 1916 volume called Recipes for Mixed drink by the head bartender, Hugo Ensslin, at the Wallick House Hotel in Times Square.

Aviation Cocktail

• 1 1/2 oz. Lemon Juice
• 3oz. Gin
• 1 Tbsp. Maraschino Liqueur
• 1 Tbsp. Creme de Violette

The Creme de Violette I found was Rothman & Winter. I doubled Wondrich’s recipe, which would have called for 2 tsp, but I like the extra teaspoon’s worth.

Apparently by the time the Aviation was all the rage at Harry Craddock’s Savoy in London, the creme de violette had been omitted. Personally, while it’s certainly good both ways, I actually think that it adds more than just color. There is a really nice floral note that really adds a pleasant complexity to the drink.

So, while this drink started out as a way to soak up another of my arcane liquor acquisitions, it really has grown on me. I think it’s now one of my summer favorites.

Cin Cin

The Pink Lady

Haigh also points out that you can go into any bar and, if you dare, order one, and you will never get the right thing (he argues that this is the original version of the drink).  Cocktaildb.com has no less that seven versions of the drink, containing varying ingredients including cream.  Yikes.  So, unless you are on pretty intimate negotiating terms with your bartender, this is one probably best enjoyed at home.

The Pink Lady

• 1 1/2 oz gin
• 1/2 oz applejack
• Juice of half a lemon
• 1 egg white
• 2 dashes real pomegranate grenadine

Shake vigorously and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Garnish with something (lemon twist would seem like a good idea, though the picture in Vintage Cocktails has a cherry).

Note… you really do need to give it a good shake with the egg white.

Pip pip.

The Blackthorn Cocktail

I was in the mood for something I hadn’t heard of before.  Not new, just new to me.  B was also thinking some thing with Dubonnet Rouge.  According to the good Doctor’s Vintage Cocktails and Forgotten Spirits (now in a new edition that lays flat on the counter), versions of this cocktial have been around since the nineteenth century with his version being a later edition.  The Blackthorn is named after the plum-bearing shrub  that produces the sloe berry (from which we get sloe gin)  This version, interestingly, has no sloe gin.  Haigh claims that the the cocktail has a “plummy flavor” if your taste buds are imaginative–personally, I thought it might take more one to get to that level of imagination, but I can his point.

The Blackthorn Cocktail

• 2 oz. gin
• 3/4 Oz Dubonette Rouge
• 3/4 oz kirschwasser

Stir on ice,  strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a twist of lemon and a cherry.

At first this seemed a bit thin and a little sweet, but a couple of sips in it started to grown on me.  It’s a little sneaky that way.  I can see that you could get in trouble if you don’t keep an eye on this one.

As an aside, Dubonette Rouge is a fortified wine that’s billed as an apartif. Apparently it’s been around since 1846 and is a mix of fortified wine with mushed up herbs and quinine, so next time you need to colonize a malarial-endemic part of the world, this is the stuff.  The companies website seemed to be full of lore about the French foreign legion and what not.

Cin-Cin

The Stinger

If last week’s post was an afternoon’s light hearted frivolity, then this would be pretty much be the opposite. The is one of B’s standards for polishing off an evening or the otherwise somnolent task of digesting a heavy meal. As with a good number of cocktails (drinkers make lousy historians) the origins of the Stinger are obscure. David Wondrich talks about it in both his Esquire Drinks and in Imbibe (his rendition of Jerry Thomas’s Bon Vivant’s Companion).  It’s clearly a pre-prohibition ditty that was almost exclusively consumed as an after dinner drink until some time in the 20’s when Reginald Vanderbilt started using them as a lubricant before the meal.  Social trendetter that he was, I still can’t see it.  The Stinger just has the feel of a nightcap or a digestif.

The Stinger

• 2 oz. Brandy
• 1/2 oz. Creme de Menthe (white)

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

It pretty straight forward affair, but I’ll throw out a couple of notes:

1. The ratio of Brandy:Creme de Menthe varies.  May recipes call for 3:1.  Personally we think this is a bit sweet and minty (a la drinking Scope).  5:1 is pretty much a brandy on the rocks (fine, but don’t call it a Stinger), so we have settled on 4:1.
2. Creme de Menthe comes in two varieties, green and white. The green is mostly for Pousse cafes and the like; my mother also claims it to be a popular topping for ice crjueam in the late 60’s at women’s luncheons (she used to teach home ec and would know).  White is the clear stuff and what you need for this drink unless you want a really ugly brown/green sludge.
3. Creme de Menthe and Peppermint Schnapps are very different beasts.  Even though they are generally made in much the same way, the mint flavor is quite different.  The Peppermint Schnapps tends to have a much harsher overpowering mint flavor, so the stinger is pretty much undrinkable when made with Peppermint Schnapps.

Pip pip.

Beachcomber Cocktail

I was in the mood for something new and frivolous.  Plan 1)  that new Porsche Boxter S.  B did point out, however, that it was $56K, would screw up our carpool parking and I would still need to find something for a blog post.   Well, one must be true to the carpool.  So, plan 2)  hunt around for something with rum.  Enter the Beachcomber Cocktail.  I found it in that venerable classic of the bartending world, The Joy of Mixology.  Gary Regan claim that this version is a reformulation of Trader Vic’s 1948 recipe.

So, what is it?
Beachcomber Cocktail

• 2 oz light rum (Flor de Cana is what I am currenlty using)
• 1 oz triple sec (Patron Citronge is my current favorite)
• 1/2 oz fresh lime juice
• 1/4 oz Maraschino Liqueur

Shake with ice and stain into a chilled cocktail glass–tiki is nice if you have it.
“So, what about it?” you ask.  Well.  Frivolous is a pretty good word.  I like it.  It’s light; it’s refreshing-ish, but it is a bit sweet.  That much triple sec and Maraschino compared with lime juice will do that.    Regan invites reformulation so let’s have at it. I would first lose the Maraschino. It’s already too sweet. I would then cut the triple sec back to 1/2 oz.   This is still going to be sweet.  The problem is you could just leave out the triple sec but then you have a daiquiri-a legendary cocktail in its own right.  So for this to be its own cocktail, I think we have to have enough triple sec to essentially leave this in the sour drink category.  I am still debating the Maraschino though; I vacillate.   May have to try it both ways next time and see.  The other option is to double the amount of lime juice, but then the rum starts to get lost.  We’ll next time thought of Porsche start dancing in my head, I guess I’ll tinker.

The Emerson

I was looking back through the cocktails that I wanted to write about and four this one from back in May, 2007.  Okay, curious. Why hadn’t I written about this one yet?  I looked back at the cocktail hazed notes that we jotted down at the time and they seemed favorable.  Well, today’s the day.   Step one, head to bookshelf and find the recipe. Hmmm. this is becoming clearer.  I think that I made it just after I got a bottle of Maraschino and found this recipe that used it, because the only version of this recipe that I can find is in my increasingly vintage copy of Mr. Boston (63rd ed., ca. 1989).  Curious.  I don’t normally use Mr. Boston, because, while containing many recipes, they are genernally neither 1)authoratitive, 2) popular nor 3) good.   Enough of a rant about the good people who publish Mr. Boston’s Official Bartenders Guide.  The recipe it gives is:

1 1/2 oz. Gin

1 oz. Sweet Vermouth

Juice of 1/2 lime (1/2 oz.)

1 tsp. Maraschino Liqueur

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

It’s actually kind of an enjoyable refreshing cocktail, if a little sweet.

I did a little searching for some background, history, etc.  Nada.  I mentioned none of the books in my modestly extensive collection seemed to even mention this cocktail.  I even have Ted Saucier’s Bottoms Up! on loan from the university library. It is in CocktailDB.com and I found a reference on Liquor is Quicker.  Both mention that the recipe should contian Old Tom gin rather than London Dry  and the ratios are  slightly different.  DrinkSnob (author of Liquor is Quicker) also mentions that he found the recipe in David Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks.  I think I might have to look into getting a copy of this one.  Original copies (either from 1948 or 1958, seem to be going for hundreds of dollars, but recently Mud Puddle Books has reissued it with what appear to be introductions by Robert Hess and Audrey Saunders (of Pegu Club fame).

Delmonico’s No. 1

Well, this is just quick one. First the recipe from David Wondrich’s Esquire Drinks:

• 3/4 oz. gin
• 1/2 oz. brandy
• 1/2 oz. Sweet Vermouth
• 1/2 oz. Dry Vermouth
• 2 dashes Angostura Bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Part of what makes this post short is the cocktail.  It’s good.  Just not great.  It’s very drinkable and has something of an edge, but it just doesn’t have that magical harmony that makes a cocktail great.

David Wondrich claims the Delmonico’s No. 1 is a pre-prohibition cocktail from the Delmonico restaurant in New York.  He also has a pretty hilarious rant about most house modern house cocktails.  He describes this one as “…, a mellow, wood-paneled little number without anything in particular to distinguish it beyond good taste and tasting good.”  Way better said than my version, but I guess that’s why he gets paid to drink and write for Esquire and I’m writing a free blog.  Oh well, at least I don’t have to deal with hoards of trendy celebrities and  worry about what I’m wearing.

The Last Word…

Apparently this is going to be another blog post with a rambling backstore before I get to the drinking….

This story begins back in February.  My delightful wife, B-, having given me a bottle of Green Chartreuse for Valentine’s day, emailed me with several websites about a cocktail that used it. Enter the Last Word.  Being easily distracted (perhaps by just drinking the stuff straight with an ice cube) I hadn’t gotten around to making it until this weekend.  In looking into it, this seems to be a pretty obscure cocktail—only one of my cocktail books even had the recipe in it (Robert Hess’s The Essential Bartender’s Guide).  For those who haven’t experienced the stuff, Green Chartreuse is a 110 proof elixir concocted by Carthusian monks from 130 different botanical extracts, originally as a long life elixir.  The monks have been making the current version of green chartreuse since 1764 from a secret formula so complex and carefully guarded that no more than three monks ever know the entire recipe. In 1838, the monks came up with a sweeter 80 proof yellow version., but based on only one tasting, it really didn’t do that much form me.

The Last Word cocktail appears on only a few websites (including Drinkboy.com a la Robert Hess), all with the same recipe. The recipe seems to come from an out-of-print 1951 cocktail book called Bottoms Up by Ted Saucier.  Saucier gives the Detroit Athletic Club credit for the cocktail, saying “This cocktail was introduced around here about thirty years ago by Frank Fogarty, who was very well known in vaudeville. He was called the ‘Dublin Minstrel,’ and was a very fine monologue artist.”  Based on this, the cocktail would date from Prohibition or slightly before.

Bottoms Up is cool cocktail book, combining a 270 pages of drink recipes interspersed with vintage pinup art from famous illustrators of the time–so it’s probably not the best cocktail book for children.  As a testament of just how cool it is, used copies of the book are currently going for around $200 a copy, but fortunately for me the university library had a copy that hadn’t been check out since 1999.  As I was perusing this entertaining tome, I got to wondering who Ted Saucier was and ran across a comment on ADashofBitters blog from a woman name Beverly Scheinberg who worked for him at his PR firm.  She describes him (paraphrasing a bit) as a large imposing man who like to eat, “…lived in the past and missed his days at the Waldorf.”  Seems like just the kind of chap who should be writing a cocktail book.

The recipe is easy enough, just equal parts, gin, Green Chartreuse, Maraschino liqueur, and lime juice.  I made one just this way and it’s a great cocktail.  But being me, I am going to do  something impossibly hubristic (no, I am not going to cover the Rolling Stones); I am going to offer an alternate riff on a 90 year old cocktail. What self respecting cocktail doesn’t need at least a few different versions floating around on the internet?  I thought the cocktail was a bit too sweet and the gin was lost.   So, instead of the the 1:1:1:1 formual, I would suggest a 4:3:2:2 formula…

The Last Word

• 2 oz. London Dry Gin
• 1.5 oz. Green Chartreuse
• 1 oz. Maraschino Liqueur
• 1 oz. Fresh Lime Juice

Give it all a good shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

It may just be that modern tastes in cocktails run considerably drier than they used to, but I think this a considerably better version.  The sweet and sour from the Maraschino and lime are a little more in check and some hints for juniper from the gin sneak through while still leaving the Chartreuse as the strongest flavor in the cocktail.  In fact, one could probably even cut the Maraschino back to 1/2 oz, but then its character would likely be lost and you might as well go to simple syrup.

Finally, I would like to thank Alchemist George for his recommendation of Flor de Cana (literally Flower of the Sugarcane), a 4 year old Nicaraguan light rum with significantly more character than some of the other mainstream light rums.  He claims it was recommendation of Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, who’s opinion on all matter rum, I’m willing to take.  Thanks for the suggestion.  I made a regular daiquiri this weekend to try it out and I think we have a new standard light rum.

The Essence of Simplicity

To quote a recent New York Times article by Pete Wells,  “If it’s purple and looks like it came from Mr. Softee, it’s not a daiquiri, no matter what the bartender says.”

David  Wondrich, in his regrettably out-of-print book Esquire Drinks, has the daiquiri as one of his four pillars of the cocktail world.  It is a little odd to write about the daiquiri, the essence of simplicity, a couple of years after writing about the more complicated Hemmingway Daiquiri, which contains two citrus juices and an extra screwball liquor.

The magic of the daiquiri (and what makes it a respectable cocktail, unlike those “blenderific” cloying concoctions from the 70s) is the balance between just four ingredients: rum, lime juice, sugar and ice.  Unfortunately most of the recipes I ran accross are a bit vague for my taste, specifying juice from 1/2 lime or 1 lime.  I just bought limes today.  They were 8/$1, really nice looking, but small.  For this reason I would prefer a volume.  So here’s what I have come up with…

The Daiquiri

• 3 oz. rum
• 1 oz. fresh lime juice
• 1/2 oz. simple syrup

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Garnish with a wheel of lime.

I did deviate a little from the light rum used in daiquiris, which makes a fine drink.  Instead I used an aged rum from the Dominican, and a very pleasant substitution it was.   Must remember to thank the inlaws again for that nice little stocking stuffer.