Tag: cocktails

Mozart Requiem, and the Promisistini

Last night, my friends in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and I wrapped up a series of performances of the Mozart Requiem with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Dima Slobodeniouk conducting—we had previously sung Grieg’s Peer Gynt with him; Erin Morley, soprano; Avery Amereau, mezzo; Jack Swanson, tenor, substituting for Simon Bode who couldn’t get a visa; and the redoubtable bass Morris Robinson returning after performing it with the BSO in 2017). I had last sung the Requiem with Michael Tilson Thomas at Tanglewood in 2010 and in Symphony Hall in 2009 (with Shi-Yeon Sung substituting for an ailing James Levine), and before that in 2006 at Tanglewood with Levine; before that, I performed it in Bellevue, Washington, with the Cascadian Chorale in 2002 as part of a commemoration of the first anniversary of 9/11.

Which is to say, the piece and I have history.

What was distinctive this time (as my colleague Jeff Foley notes) was the amount of time we were able to spend refining our approach to the music and making effortless parts that often end up barked or belted in other performances. The work appears to have paid off, as the Globe specifically cited the sound of the tenors as a highlight of the performance: “With the ‘Requiem,’ the Tanglewood Festival Chorus gave a stunning and profound display of unity. Their quality of performance has been on a distinct upswing lately, and the fruits of their work showed in the precise intonation in the ‘Kyrie,’ explosive dynamic variation in the ‘Dies Irae,’ and elegant phrasing in the ‘Lacrimosa’ — staples of the choral repertoire where rough patches tend to make themselves visible. The tenor parts of the ‘Requiem’ choral book can be especially punishing, and the TFC tenors deftly shouldered the demands, letting their high notes bloom.”

Which is to say, that calls for a cocktail! This one borrows its title from the “Quam olim Abrahæ” fugue, which appears at the end of both the “Domine Jesu” and the “Hostias,” and I couldn’t resist a Martini variant. This is based on Louis Muckensturm’s “Dry Martini” from 1906, one of the only ones I know that uses curaçao.

The Promisistini can be as dry as you like, depending on the ratio of vermouth to Curaçao.

As always, you can import the recipe card photo into Highball. Enjoy!

Cocktail: Veni Creator Spiritous

Photo courtesy Boston Globe

We’re doing Mahler’s 8th Symphony this weekend. It’s the first time for me since 2015 and only the second since I joined the Tanglewood Festival Chorus 19 years ago. (I wrote about that experience performing with James Levine, the late great Johan Botha, Deborah Voigt, and Heidi Grant Murphy (the soprano in the rafters) among others, at the time.)

The work remains galactic in its scope and stentorian in its volume. (We have a little grassroots decibel reading practice among the choristers; last night reached “only” 106 from my position on the fifth bench, and we’ve hit as high as 108 in rehearsal.) But it feels different. For one thing, years of in-rehearsal vocal coaching from the TFC’s music director James Burton have made it much easier to sing properly, and “bloomin’ loud” as he’s said on at least one occasion, without screaming. Which is a skill you need if you’re going to be hitting those decibels.

For another, I’m an experienced hand now. While I won’t have a special marking next to my name in the program book until I complete this year plus five more, there are far fewer in the chorus who have a double digit tenure than when I started.

And so, it felt appropriate to mark this weekend’s performances, again, with a special cocktail. As I did for Mahler’s Second, I took inspiration from the text. While it was tempting to just go with the memorable text from Part II’s opening (“Waldung, sie schwankt heran/Felsen, sie lasten dran/Wurzeln, sie klammern an/Stamm dicht an Stamm hinan/Woge nach Woge spritzt…”) and make a “spritzt,” that didn’t feel sufficiently … impactful for a piece that featured two full choirs and boys’ choir, offstage brass, eight soloists, four harps, a harmonium, a pipe organ, and two mandolins. (There were around 300 of us on stage last night.)

So I went with the opening text instead, and made a “Veni Creator Spiritous.” (Groan.) The jumping off point was a Sazerac, but I switched everything up while keeping the overall slightly boozy affect… and, as with the Aufersteh’n, made sure to include herbal liqueurs in honor of Mahler’s vegetarianism.

As always, you can import the recipe card photo into Highball. Enjoy!

Holiday Cocktails: Sugar Rum Cherry Nos. 1 & 2

In December 2021, during the first Holiday Pops after a COVID-induced hiatus, the Pops brought out the Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn version of the “Nutcracker Suite.” In addition to brilliant jazz orchestration, the work also retitled all the movements—so “Dance of the Reed Pipes” becomes “Toot Toot Tootie-Toot,” “Arabian Dance” becomes “Arabesque Cookie,” and “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” becomes “Sugar Rum Cherry.”

Our director suggested from the podium that “Sugar Rum Cherry” sounded like it should be a cocktail, and basically dared me to create that cocktail. So I created not one, but two variations on a theme.

The first (Sugar Rum Cherry No. 1) is boozy and fruity, with a hint of smoke and other flavors rounding out the flavor profile (and, as a chorus colleague said last night, answers the question “What else can you make with cherry Heering besides a Blood and Sand?”). It also uses the lovely smoke and salt bitters (uneuphoniously named “Pooter”!) from Raleigh-based Crude.

The second (Sugar Rum Cherry No. 2) takes loose inspiration from Corpse Reviver No. 2, and pairs Demerara rum with Lillet Blanc and some Maraschino liqueur to provide the “cherry” part.

As always, recipe images can be used with the Highball app.

Suggestion: try one (or both) out while listening to Ellington and Strayhorn swing the Nutcracker. And Merry Christmas!

Chartreuse alternatives

New York Times: An Alternative to Increasingly Elusive Bottles of Chartreuse. The decision to concentrate on meditation and prayer at the expense of increasing Chartreuse production to meet demand is one of those classic points that puts one’s faith to the test. Looks like Brucato Amaro’s Chaparral might be worth checking out, and might give me an excuse to finally try ordering from WoodenCork.

Cocktail Saturday: Aufersteh’n

He dared me.

When I made a signature cocktail for Holiday Pops one year, I shared some at the end of the run with our long-suffering interim chorus manager, and since then we’ve talked cocktails between performances. I saw Daniel at Symphony Hall while I was there to rehearse a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony with the Boston University Symphonic Orchestra and Chorus, and he dared me to craft a cocktail for the performance run.

Of course, there was no question about what to call the cocktail. And once we had the name, the inspiration for the recipe was equally obvious.

In the last movement of this Resurrection Symphony, we sing “Aufersteh’n wirst du, mein Staub” (rise again you will, my dust). The utterance is so legendary, coming completely unaccompanied after over an hour of galactically bombastic music, that you just have to mention the word to most singers and they’ll respond with their finest pianissimo: “ja, aufersteh’n!” I had just finished a run of this work the year my daughter was born, and I quietly sang these lines to her the first time I held her in my arms.

Once I had the name, the base recipe was inevitable. It clearly had to be a Corpse Reviver. (Pause for groans.) But what base spirit? Given that Mahler noisily flirted with vegetarianism in his early years, and preferred spinach and apples to meat, I used 100 proof apple brandy instead of gin, and replaced some of the orange spirit (I used dry curaçao — not blue! — instead of Cointreau) with artichoke based Cardamaro for a little more herbal flavor, and extra plants.

As always, here’s the recipe card for use in Highball. Enjoy!

Cocktail Saturday: Untitled No. 1

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!

Cocktail Monday: the TFC 50

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. 

Cocktail Weekend: Appels + Oranjes

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.

As always, here’s the recipe. Enjoy!

Cocktail Friday: The Fritz

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.

Enjoy!

Cocktail Weekend: the Deadly Sin

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.

So why Maraschino in this cocktail? Maraschino (along with dry Curaçao) were among a very few liqueurs available to Gilded Age bartenders like Jerry Thomas, who famously defined “fancy” cocktails to contain a splash of Curaçao and “improved” cocktails to contain both Maraschino and absinthe. (The imported liqueurs were thought to display the higher class of the drinker.) In this spirit, the Deadly Sin may benefit from a substitution of Curaçao for Maraschino.

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!

Cocktail Weekend: Commander Livesey’s Gin-Blind

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!

Virginius Dabney on mint juleps

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:

Cocktail Friday: Remember the Maine

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!

Cocktail Sunday: The Vanderbilt

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!

Cocktail Friday: The Astor

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 to The 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!