It’s been a while since I’ve posted any cocktail stuff on this page. I suspect this is because I haven’t been thinking as much about my cocktails, since COVID came along. But it occurs to me I never memorialized this one.
A lot of my original cocktails begin as a dare, essentially: can I make something worthwhile with the ingredients in my pantry? Sometimes the answer is a strong yes, and sometimes it’s a qualified maybe. I think today’s cocktail is the latter: an unexpected flavor combination that is thoroughly delightful.
This cocktail started with alternatives to bourbon, which I tend to feature too often in my drinks. Fortunately I occasionally am able to find Laird’s Apple Brandy, which unlike the more easily discoverable Laird’s applejack is made 100% from apples, with no neutral spirits. The other flavors in the mix are cardamaro, an Italian amaro made with artichokes, and a smoke and salt bitters from Crude in Raleigh, NC. Together they are more than the sun of their parts, but the flavors are also evasive, which is why this cocktail remains untitled.
As always, you can import this image into Highball if you use that fine app. Enjoy!
I had the pleasure to invent a cocktail for a group of friends to drink this weekend — and not just any group of friends, but the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Our holiday party went virtual like everything else has this year, and they asked me to bartend something festive that people could make and enjoy while we had the rest of the evening’s festivities.
If you’ve been following my cocktail posts for a while, you know that making cocktails that everyone can make isn’t necessarily in my wheelhouse. I spend a lot of time finding new ingredients and leveraging all the odd stuff in my liquor cabinet. But this felt like an opportunity to do something simple and fun.
I ended up going with a principle of classic cocktail making that always makes me shake my head, but was awfully convenient for this exercise: if you take a classic cocktail and change one ingredient in it, it’s a new cocktail and you get to name it!
So with past TFC parties in mind, I started with the French 75, which once upon a time was much consumed at the late lamented Brasserie Jo after concerts. (The fact that it’s named after a French artillery piece also means it’s never far from my cocktail imagination.) The name was natural, given the year: the French 75 becomes the TFC 50.
And to get to festive, I got rid of the powdered sugar, which I always hate because it doesn’t mix well, and replaced it with something else sweet and also festive in color: grenadine. I’m not normally a big fan, but I had just ordered some nice grenadine after being disappointed by the flavor profile of the old supermarket standby and figured I’d give it a go.
A few notes about the cocktail:
The kind of gin matters. London Dry gin (e.g. Beefeaters, Tanqueray) can be substituted with some other gins, but you have to know the flavor profile. Something botanical heavy like Hendricks is going to yield a completely different drink, while something like Berkshire Greylock Gin will substitute pretty successfully. In this drink you can go a little less dry as well, but only a little: Plymouth works, but Old Tom does not.
Surprisingly, the kind of grenadine matters. Turns out that using Stirrings tastes nicer, but you need to use more of it to counterbalance the sourness from the lemon. And it doesn’t do much to the color. On the other hand, using just a little Rose’s yields just exactly the right festive color and sweetness.
And of course, the kind of bubbly matters. Since I was getting rid of the powdered sugar, I went with a less dry sparkling wine—namely prosecco.
Anyway, please enjoy! I sadly didn’t take pictures of this one but you can enjoy the recipe anyway; as always, you can import this image into Highball if you use that fine app.
I invented this cocktail a while ago to use some bitters. That doesn’t sound promising, but bear with me.
When visiting my parents and sister in Western North Carolina, I’m always reminded that Asheville has a lot going on. Last year, our favorite local bakery, Rhu, reinforced that with a display of cocktail paraphernalia that included bitters from Crude, based in Raleigh. Of course I bought the sampler.
And it sat in my pantry for a while, until one night, out of desperation and boredom with the usual, I started riffing off the weirder things on the liquor shelf. Curaçao, or Cointreau? Sure. 100 proof apple brandy? Definitely. Orange and fig bitters? Yes. And rounding it all out, that oft-overlooked wunderkind, Lillet Blanc.
I’m not sure of the thematic connection to the Smashing Pumpkins other than the name, but I think it’s a refreshing alternative to the usual nonetheless. Do make sure, though, to get Laird’s Straight Apple Brandy (100 proof) rather than their “applejack,” which is more like flavored neutral spirits.
I did a lot of traveling this summer and fall, and not a lot of writing. But I read—almost all the Nero Wolfe novels, in order. And I was struck by how much I liked the character Fritz, Wolfe’s patient cook.
I had Fritz in the back of my mind one weekend about a month ago as I was trying to balance Cardamaro and rye in a new cocktail. It was the 1/4 ounce of Maraschino liqueur that balanced everything, and it reminded me that while there is certainly a place for drinks that are equal parts and easy to make, there is also room for balancing carefully and just one more ingredient for something memorable.
Another long delayed cocktail post, this one about a creation I’ve been enjoying for years and haven’t shared yet.
The Deadly Sin is a cocktail I first came across in a now-defunct iOS cocktail app, Cocktails+. The principle is simple: take the Manhattan formula (two parts bourbon or rye to one part vermouth, add bitters and stir), and play with the vermouth portion by replacing a portion with a fruit based liqueur. In this recipe the addition is Maraschino liqueur, that delightful cherry based elixir from northern Italy—or Croatia.
Girolamo Luxardo S.p.A. is the best known producer of Maraschino that’s available in the States. The firm apparently started on the Dalmatian coast in a town now known as Zadar before moving to Torreglia after World War II. So the history of the distillery has war, exile, and murder behind it—appropriate for this drink.
Despite the classic flavor of this cocktail, the Deadly Sin is a relatively recent recipe credited to Gary Regan’s Joy of Mixology in my defunct app, though there is also a claim to the recipe by Rafael Ballestros. Enjoy!
It’s been a very long time since I’ve posted on Cocktail Friday, so to make up for it here’s a special holiday weekend cocktail post. The change in weather (however fickle) toward summer has me thinking away from my normal brown liquor based drinks and toward gin, and that’s the direction I went exploring this past weekend.
The immediate trigger for the exploration was a bottle of The Botanist, that remarkable Islay-based gin (from Bruichladdich Distillery). Far less sweet and more herbal than the Plymouth and Old Tom gins I’ve been experimenting with recently, there’s a lot going on in this bottle. I first tried it just directly with tonic and lime, but the mediocre tonic water I had in my bar just made it sweet and swamped the complexity.
Charles H. Baker Jr. to the rescue. We’ve sampled recipes from his A Gentleman’s Companion before — see the Remember the Maine — and this one does not disappoint either. The curaçao highlights the herbal flavors of the gin while the cognac and orange bitters. It’s not a mild drink, even after stirring over ice. Baker’s story says that when he and his wife, traveling in Bombay, met the good Commander of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, he noted that “We don’t prescribe this just before target practice.”
As always, if you want to try the recipe, here’s the Highball recipe card. Enjoy!
Yesterday was Easter, which around our house means that the food is a little more Southern than usual. In addition to ham and deviled eggs, I made a pimento cheese spread for the first time, an experiment I’ll be repeating. And the best beverage with all of the above is, of course, the mint julep.
But what is a mint julep? Turns out there’s a fair amount of confusion, stemming from the original recipe using brandy. The version we know and love is really the Kentucky mint julep; others used to exist, including the Maryland version (rye) and the Georgia version (peach brandy). Such heterodoxy, however, be damned: we seek the One True Mint Julep, and fortunately Virginia historian Virginius Dabney (author of the second history of the University of Virginia) has our back. In a 1946 letter to Life Magazine, he wrote:
And Life obligingly printed Dabney’s recipe:
No discussion of mint juleps could be settled so quickly, though, as the following letter from Harold Hinton showed:
While traveling in Las Vegas last week, I had an opportunity to revisit my favorite advice about Las Vegas: whenever possible, get off the Strip. In this case, we led a pilgrimage to Herbs & Rye, likely my second favorite cocktail bar in town and one of my top 10 anywhere. It was near the end of a long week so I didn’t play my usual game of “stump the bartender” and try to find something off the menu. And I didn’t need to, because smack in the middle of the first page was this classic.
The Remember the Maine, in addition to recalling one of the earliest and most notorious episodes of yellow journalism, is a delightful cocktail. What on paper appears to be a minor variation on the rye Manhattan tastes like an entirely new drink thanks to the combination of the sweetness of the cherry liqueur (Herbs & Rye and I both use Cherry Heering) and the bracing absinthe (I used Herbsaint).
And the drink has a wonderful backstory. Coming from Charles H. Baker’s 1939 book A Gentleman’s Companion is this description of the drink:
REMEMBER the MAINE, a Hazy Memory of a Night in Havana during the Unpleasantnesses of 1933, when Each Swallow Was Punctuated with Bombs Going off on the Prado, or the Sound of 3″ Shells Being Fired at the Hotel NACIONAL, then Haven for Certain Anti-Revolutionary Officers.
As always, if you want to try the recipe, here’s the Highball recipe card. Enjoy!
It’s back. This Cocktail Sunday post leaves the familiar world of whiskey and gin behind and weaves its way over to brandy. Which seems fitting given that this cocktail was designed for one of the wealthiest men in America, Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Vanderbilt wouldn’t have been drinking any cut rate brandy in his cocktail; he would have used VSOP Cognac, and I recommend (following the advice of David Wondrich) that you make the same substitution in any classic cocktail calling for brandy. Life is too short to do otherwise.
The big question in this cocktail appears to be the proportions. The first written recipe I’ve found for it, 1922’s Cocktails and How to Mix Them, calls for 1:1 brandy to cherry liqueur, which seems likely to yield something way too sweet. The Savoy’s Harry Craddock in 1930 dialed it back to a 3:1 ratio, which seems just about right.
One curious note about the name: the 1922 source says it was named for Col. Cornelius Vanderbilt, “who was drowned on the Lusitania during the War.” But the Vanderbilt on the Lusitania was Alfred Vanderbilt, and there was no “Colonel Vanderbilt” alive then. So: poetic license.
It’s grilling season, and for some reason I had extra homemade pickles that wouldn’t fit in the jar. Turns out they’re wonderful with the Vanderbilt. Who’d have guessed?
As always, if you want to try the recipe, here’s the Highball recipe card. Enjoy!
It’s that time again! This week we’re looking at a pre-Prohibition cocktail, the Astor, which uses one of my favorite cocktail bar ingredients, Swedish Punch (or Punsch).
Difford’s Guide points us toThe Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book for the origin of the recipe, which credits the old Astor House or the Astor Hotel for the original cocktail. If the first is true, the Astor is truly a pre-Prohibition cocktail, since the Astor House was in decline by the 1870s; the Hotel Astor came later, opening in 1904.
So much for the name. The only irregular ingredient in the drink is the Swedish Punsch, which is a compound of arrack, sugar and water. I’ve always thought of arrack as being roughly synonymous with rum, but that’s not quite right: Wikipedia says it may be “made from either the fermented sap of coconut flowers, sugarcane, grain (e.g. red rice) or fruit, depending upon the country of origin.” Whatever the origin of the stuff that goes into Swedish Punsch, the resulting flavor is oddly fruity in a can’t-quite-put-your-finger-on-it sort of way, and the Astor is a nice start-of-the-evening sort of drink as a result.
As always, if you want to try the recipe, here’s the Highball recipe card. Enjoy!
A few cocktail related things that have persisted in my open tabs for a while:
A Drink With My Brother: A great blog about exploring cocktails complete with cocktail origin stories, tasting notes, personal history and more.
Aviation Gin: The Aviation Cocktail. Since the proper recipe for this isn’t found in my various apps, I’ve been keeping this tab open for a while. (I make it with Plymouth or Old Tom gin, though—shhhh.)
I’m still working my way through the February 1951 Virginia Spectator, which has some interesting treasures beyond the Pogo-related content we wrote about yesterday. In particular, here’s a set of cocktail recommendations for Midwinters drinking, proving that straight bourbon and beer didn’t always prevail (though certainly “Mad Men” style sexism did).
In fact, as one might expect from the mid-century period, there’s no bourbon in any of these cocktails, or any dark liquor at all (aside from a little rum). None of these cocktails is fancy, but they’re mostly true to their models—with the possible exception of the fruit salad on the Zombie. Enjoy!
Martini
1 part French Vermouth
4 parts Dry Gin
Stir with cracked ice, strain and serve with stuffed olive.
Zombie:
3/4 oz lime juice
3/4 oz pineapple juice
1 tsp. syrup
1 oz white rum
1 oz gold rum
1 oz Jamaica rum
1/2 oz demerara rum
1/2 oz apricot liqueur
Shake violently, strain into 14 oz zombie glass, 1/4 filled with ice. Float splash of demerara on top. Spike 1 green cherry, 1 small pineapple stick, 1 red cherry on a toothpick, insert into drink, decorate with mint sprig, dust with powdered sugar.
Absinthe Drip
Pour a jigger of Absinthe into a drip glass, then place a cube of sugar over the drop hole in the upper section, pack with cracked ice, and pour cold water to fill the dripper. When all the water has dripped through you’re ready to deteriorate.
Daiquiri
Juice 1/2 lime
1 tsp sugar
2 oz rum
Shake well with cracked ice and strain.
Champagne Cocktail
1 cube sugar
champagne
1 dash angostura bitters
Place sugar in glass and saturate with bitters. Pour chilled champagne over and serve without stirring.
Welcome to Cocktail Friday! Today’s cocktail is a relic called The Chauncey.
First, a note: how do I pick the cocktails to feature on Cocktail Friday? Sometimes it’s a cocktail I’ve known for a while and just haven’t got round to featuring. Sometimes it’s something I’ve tried in my travels.
And sometimes I’ve added something to my bar and I’ve gone looking for a cocktail to feature it. That’s this week’s cocktail, The Chauncey. It’s a great example (if not a classic per se) of pre-Prohibition cocktails’ tendency to break the rules and combine liquors that we would never dream of combining today, like rye and gin. For good measure, it adds red vermouth, brandy, and orange bitters, which round out the flavor profile and add up to something unusually complex and good.
Aside: Bernard DeVoto, author of the cocktail classic The Hour, would have hated The Chauncey. In addition to adding something to gin besides dry vermouth, he hated mixed drinks made with rye or bourbon (“the Manhattan is an offence against piety”), non-Angostura bitters (“all others are condiments for a tea-shoppe cookbook”) and—even worse—orange bitters (“Orange bitters make a good astringent for the face. Never put them into anything that is to be drunk”). Very odd for a man who fondly remembered drinking at the Knickerbocker, no bastion of drink purity, in its heyday! So drink this with pride, and a certain defiance.
As always, if you want to try the recipe, here’s the Highball recipe card. Enjoy!
This week’s Cocktail Friday post is a day late, but better late than never. I want to talk about three things today: this cocktail, applejack, and recipe sources.
The Farmer’s Daughter also goes by the name of the Honeymoon, and a fine cocktail for an autumn evening it is, with the apple playing nicely against the Curaçao (not blue Curaçao) and the sweetness alloyed by the lemon. It’s what the doctor ordered and a lovely way to use applejack.
Speaking of which: what isapplejack anyway? Time was, you wouldn’t have had to ask that question. Because it was easy to make from cider, it was a hugely popular colonial beverage and was made throughout the colonies, though Laird & Company, the oldest licensed distillery in the United States, was the main source for years. Their applejack was so well known, George Washington is said to have asked Robert Laird for the recipe. (Ironically, while it was originally distilled in New Jersey, they now source the apples and make the product right in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.)
This brings us to the last point: sources. Most days you’ll see me post recipes from a variety of sources, but I often find my way to a cocktail recipe through one of a few iPhone apps. This one was indexed in Martin’s New and Improved Index of Cocktails and Mixed Drinks, a fantastic app that not only has thousands of recipes but also tells you which of them you can make with the stuff in your bar. The recipe also pointed to one of my favorite non-digital sources of cocktail lore, Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, pictured above. I won’t say it’s the most essential cocktail book you’ll ever own, but for sheer pleasure of reading and thoroughness of research it’s well worth it.
As always, if you want to try the recipe, here’s the Highball recipe card. Enjoy!
The Knickerbocker Hotel in Times Square, early 20th century and 2015, courtesy MuseumHack.org
I can’t escape cocktails, and cocktail history. Even when I’m traveling for work, they find me. So it is that I find myself staying in a hotel in New York that was once one of the epicenters of pre-Prohibition cocktail culture.
The Knickerbocker Hotel was completed by John Jacob Astor IV, after a development project on land he owned failed. Opening in 1906, it was a destination for after-theatre dining, with decor by Maxfield Parrish (whose Old King Cole mural created for the hotel bar is now at the St. Regis in the King Cole Bar). The reputation of the hotel was largely built on its food and drink, and its social connections; Astor was a bon vivant who was fleeing negative press surrounding the pregnancy of his second (18-year-old) wife when he died in the sinking of the Titanic. (He is said to have remarked, “I asked for ice in my drink, but this is ridiculous.”)
The hotel bartender, one Martini de Arma de Taggia, was said to have created the martini in 1911; mixing dry gin and vermouth, the drink was said to have caught on when it was favored by John D. Rockefeller. Unfortunately for picturesque history, that tale is almost certainly false; John D. Rockefeller was a teetotaler, and the Martini existed well before 1911.
The most likely actual origin for the Martini is in the drink called the Martinez, supposedly invented either in Martinez, California or in San Francisco for a miner who had struck it lucky; it was first documented in 1887. By 1888, the drink first called the Martinez was already being called the Martini. Though the version in Harry Johnson’s New & Improved Illustrated Bartender’s Manual uses red vermouth rather than dry, and adds Boker’s bitters (a little like modern Angostura), gum syrup and an optional dash of curaçao or absinthe, it’s still gin and vermouth at its roots. The first version using dry gin that I’ve found is the 1909 Dry Martini (II) in Applegreen’s Bar Book—still two years prior to the Knickerbocker’s claim.
Whatever the truth of its connection to the Martini, the hotel today contributes to modern cocktail culture with the St. Cloud rooftop bar. I hope to gather impressions there sometime.
I don’t claim to have anything definitive on “how to make the best martini,” but if you want to try its precursor, here’s the Highball recipe card. Enjoy!
