COCKTAILS| Green-Eye Daiquiri is hardly a monster
The Green-Eye Daiquiri, a very nice rum refresher.
Last night, rooting around the liquor cabinet, I came across two bottles I don’t rely on all that often: Light rum and Chartreuse. With luck, Mrs. F. and I found a recipe that accommodated them in Kathy Casey’s recent “Sips and Apps.”
I’m not to big on daiquiris — they conjured images of slushie machines at faux tiki nightmares on the gulf coast — but this drink is sophisticated. Relying on the herbal complexities of Chartreuse, lime juice and thyme, the Green-Eye was a pleasant and refreshing surprise. It almost tasted like a gimlet that had been based on herb-infused gin. We thought it could be very nice served with some soda and also, despite my aforementioned disinclination, frozen.
Ingredients
2 sprigs fresh thyme
2 ounces white rum
1/8 ounce green Chartreuse
3/4 ounce fresh lime juice
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
Fresh thyme sprig
Instructions
Bend 2 thyme sprigs and drop into a cocktail shaker. Press the thyme with a muddler to release the flavor. Fill the shaker with ice. Measure in the rum, Chartreuse, lime juice and sugar. Shake vigorously. Strain into a martini glass. Garnish with the remaining thyme.
COCKTAILS| There’s more than Roses for Applejack
The Applejack Cocktail, made from a Pegu Club recipe.
The signature cocktail for Applejack is the Jack Rose, a favorite of my grandmother’s that’s enjoyed a nice revival in the last few years. But there are certainly other ways to use Applejack.
One we found was the Applejack Cocktail from the Pegu Club. Another Audrey Saunders miracle, the Applejack Cocktail gets right to the point: it’s all about tasting New Jersey’s finest contribution to the cocktail world. Smelling faintly of apple juice, this drink tasted a lot more like a whiskey cocktail than I’d expected. If you’ve got a bottle of Laird’s lying around for those occasional Roses, give this recipe a whirl.
Ingredients
2 ounces Applejack
1/4 ounce simple syrup
Dashes Angostura bitters
Lemon twist
Directions
Combine the Applejack, syrup and bitters in a shaker and stir briskly for about 30 seconds to chill. Serve over a lemon twist in a cocktail glass. Enjoy.
COCKTAILS| High West makes a case for quality Rye
High West Whiskey’s very excellent Rendezvous Rye.
We spent the holiday weekend in Lake Placid, where we visited with our very good friend and sometime ejforbes.com correspondent Jamie Welsh. Welsh, an avid athlete and outdoorsman, has a wide range of interests that include American antiques and fishing. He also has good taste in booze. When we arrived at his lair for cocktails Sunday night, he offered me a glass of High West Whiskey’s Rendezvous Rye. As attentive readers know, I’m more of a Scotch man when it comes to whiskey, but I gladly accepted Jamie’s offer. He’d received the bottle as a gift from another of our friends who spends part of his year in Park City, Utah, the surprising origin for this very fine spirit.
Swell neat or on the rocks, Rendezvous Rye is remarkable in its complexity. Not your average, somewhat bland rye, it packs a powerful palate. The critically-acclaimed whiskey is the deeply complex child of a happy marriage of 16-year-old and 6-year-old ryes. According to High West, “Both contain higher rye content in their mashbills than almost any other rye whiskey you can buy today. While most of today’s rye whiskeys are ‘barely legal,’ with 51-53 percent rye in the mashbill, our 16-year old whiskey contains 80 percent rye, and our 6-year-old boasts an uncommonly high 95 percent rye.” Rendezvous
High West is based in what its owners claim is the only ski-in distillery and gastropub in the world in Park City. Founded by David Perkins, a whiskey aficionado who has a background in biochemistry, High West is definitely on my itinerary for a theoretical trip to Park City.
I strongly recommend Rendezvous, though it’s too complex to be tainted by any mixing. It appears to be widely available in the New York metro area.
See if it’s available near you.
COCKTAILS| Avoid target practice on the Gin-Blind
Commander Lively’s Gin-Blind, a classic from “Jigger, Beaker, and Glass.
After a spate of what might be called nouveau cocktails, it was time to get down to brass tacks. Brass tacks in this case meant a journey back to the 1930s aboard the vessel of “Jigger, Beaker, Glass: Drinking Around the World,” the classic cocktail compendium from Charles H. Baker Jr.
Baker’s menu is extensive, nuanced and downright brilliant. After hours of deliberation yesterday afternoon, I settled on a gin cocktail that draws on Cognac, curacao and orange bitters for support. Baker writes, with apologies to all our copy editors for the minimal punctuation:
“We shall never forget the courteous open-hearted wardroom hospitality of the British navy in Indian waters, and Commander Livesey — together with his charming Australian wife — least of all. Along with another very mentionable discovery Livesey’s head-bearaer — a High-caste high-binder in the Mohammedian priesthood on feast days, was a wizzard with the shaker … Livesey’s words were: “We don’t prescribe this just before target practice, gentlemen.”
Like the menu from which I ordered it, this drink is complicated. Cognac and gin have an interesting interaction that’s bolstered by the orange flavors of the curacao and the bitters. If you’re not interested in gin, in cognac or in orange, though, the Gin-Blind isn’t for you. On the other hand, should you judge your palate to be adventurous, you’ll definitely want to give the Gin-Blind a try.
Ingredients
• 2 1/2 ounces of gin
• 3/4 ounce Cognac
• 1 ounce curacao
• Dashes of orange bitters
Ingredients
• Mix with lots of ice, shake vigorously and serve in a Manhattan glass. A twist of yellow orange peel is optional, to add oil. Enjoy.
COCKTAILS | The Seelbach salutes a venerable Louisville hotel
The Seelbach, the signature cocktail of the eponymous Lousiville hotel.
In our household, your writer is normally responsible for selecting a cocktail recipe and bartending. The other night, however, the tables turned and Mrs. F. did the honors. She selected the Seelbach, a bourbon and champagne cocktail that relies on bitters.
Named for the famed hotel in Louisville, where Fitzgerald is purported to spent some time while writing “The Great Gatsby,” the drink was concocted before the dark hours of Prohibition, likely around 1917. When the shadow of the 18th Amendment descended over the land, the recipe was lost and was not recovered until 1995, when a manager at the hotel came across it. It’s subsequently become a signature drink at the venerable hostelry.
Being that its roots are in the bluegrass, the Seelbach is anchored by bourbon and complimented by both Angostura and Peychaud’s bitters. Champagne and an orange rind top the drink off. Given the connection to the bubbly, this seems to me to be the kind of drink that’d be appropriate at celebratory occasions.
Ingredients
• 1 ounce bourbon
• 1/4 ounce Cointreau
• 7 dashes Angostura
• 7 dashes Peychaud’s
• Champagne
• Orange twist
Directions
Combine the first four ingredients in a flute, top with Champagne, garnish with orange twist and serve. Enjoy.
BRIEFING | Crisis at Pegu Club, the Normandie sails again and pay walls
Good morning. It’s been ages since I put together a briefing, and I’m trying to get back in the habit.
Culture
• Mario Pulice, creative director at Little, Brown, has lent the contents of his apartment — largely furnished with relics from the French Line’s piece de resistance, the Normandie, to the South Street Seaport museum. The furnishings, including a piano and chairs that were part of the legendary liner’s celebrated Art Deco interiors, will be part of a forthcoming exhibit, Decodence. The Normandie entered service in 1935 and was a favorite of Hollywood types and the Kennedy Clan. She met an early end in 1942, when she capsized at Pier 88. The Times reports.
Media
• The Pegu Club, epicenter of craft cocktail subculture in New York, was cited Jan. 19 for violating city health codes, the Times reports. In serving an Earl Gray MarTEAni without informing a customer that the cocktail contained egg white, which might have contained salmonella, the gin joint earned a citation from a city Health Department citation. Audrey Saunders, the luminary who owns the place, immediately stopped serving the drink. Read on in the Times.
• Bruce McCall, the humorist and artist, eviscerates today’s Type A parents in a wonderful little essay in this week’s New Yorker.
• If you haven’t yet seen it, you must explore New York Magazine’s hilarious dissection of the the Urban Woodsman. The bearded, buffalo-plaid wearing hipster is now an urban tribe, the magazine has decided.
Media
• The Lancaster, Penn., Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era, the Fayetteville, N.C. Observer and the Global Post will soon launch pay walls provided by Press+. The system comes from Journalism Online, a venture started by Steven Brill, the entrepreneur behind Court TV and other projects, and his partners. The Times reports. Take a look at some screenshots.
Politics
• Andrew Sullivan, writing in the Atlantic, reviews of the disturbing results of a recent Kos poll of today’s Republican party. “Marinating in paranoia,” as Sullivan writes, a majority the Party of Lincoln’s followers believe homosexuals should not be allowed to teach in our schools, that Sarah Palin is more qualified for the presidency than Barack Obama and that the president is a socialist and a racist. Heaven help us.
What are you reading?
COCKTAILS | Transport your Meyer lemons in a Sidecar
Meyer lemons deliver an excellent sidecar.
Meyer lemons, a cross between Mandarin oranges and lemons, were brought to the United States from China in 1908 by Frank Meyer, an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. We picked a few up during a recent foraging expedition at Fairway and thought they’d be a terrific addition to a cocktail.
We picked the Sidecar, the Cognac-based classic, to experiment with. The results were wonderful, as the tangerine-tasting Meyer lemon played wonderfully with the cognac and the Cointreau. We strongly recommend this variation.
Ingredients
2 ounces Cognac or brandy
1 ounce Cointreau
1 ounce Meyer lemon juice
Directions
Mix the Cognac, Cointreau and Meyer lemon juice together over ice in a shaker and serve in a cocktail glass. Enjoy.
COCKTAILS| U.S., U.K. unity is Old Fashioned
The English Old Fashioned, wherein Bourbon and Pimm’s celebrate the world’s greatest alliance.
Though the relationship has been rocky (There was that whole curfuffle in the 1770s over taxes and who can forget that dreadful War of 1812 incident?), there should be no doubt that when Britannic and American minds work together, civilization is generally preserved. Like so many other Yanks of British extraction, I too have a soft spot for the Old Country, with its royal pratfalls, rainy weekends in the country and affection for the drink.
So it should come as no surprise that I was immediately attracted to the English Old Fashioned, in which Bourbon and Pimm’s affirm the greatest alliance. The creation of Kathy Casey, whose “Sips and Apps” has been a welcome addition to our cocktail library this winter, the English Old Fashioned is definitely worth a try. The botanical flavors of Pimm’s mix well with the Bourbon’s earthy tones. The garnish — an orange slice, a cucumber slice and a cherry — also go miles in this cocktail. I did wonder if this might be a summer selection because of the Pimm’s, but it’s just fine for these colder months, too.
Ingredients
1 thin slice of cucumber
1 orange wedge
1 maraschino cherry
2 ounces bourbon
1/2 ounce Pimm’s No. 1
1 dash Angostura bitters
Directions
Muddle the orange, cherry and cucumber together in the bottom of an Old Fashioned glass. Add ice, Bourbon and Pimm’s. Stir thoroughly and serve. Should you take a sweeter Old Fashioned, add a sugar cube before stirring.
COCKTAILS| The Black Feather is worth plucking
The Black Feather, a Cognac-based cocktail, is a new favorite.
As my exploration of the mixology world continues, I’ve become more and more interested in apertifs. About 10 years ago, with the St. Lawrence boys, I went through a brief and undereducated port phase. I haven’t much cared for after-dinner stuff since. But getting into the cocktails this last year, I’m increasingly drawn to drinks that call upon liqueurs to serve as bases.
So I was very attracted to the Black Feather, a Cognac-based cocktail created by Robert Hess. No education in cocktails is complete without a course in Hess, a Microsoft software guru who’s also renowned as an expert on the art of American drinking. He’s the founder of the Museum of the American Cocktail in Las Vegas, had a hand in getting the Chanticleer Society going and is the host of “The Cocktail Spirit,” a wonderful little program on the Small Screen Network.
Created by Hess as his house cocktail, the Black Feather requires all-French ingredients: Cognac, dry vermouth and Cointreau. You’ll see below that there’s quite a bit of vermouth in this drink (Hess is a big vermouth advocate), but you can scale that as you like. Don’t forget your bitters, too.
Ingredients
• 2 ounces Cognac or high-quality brandy
• 1 ounce dry white vermouth
• 1/2 ounce Cointreau
• 1 dash Angostura bitters
• Lemon twist for garnish
Directions
Combine Cognac, vermouth and Cointreau in a shaker and stir thoroughly. Serve in a cocktail glass and garnish with a lemon twist, rubbing the edge of the glass with the rind side.
COCKTAILS| Homemade grenadine is worthy of your drinks
Homemade grenadine in the kitchen/cocktail laboratory of ejforbes.com contributor Maxwell Eaton III.
Grenadine is one of those cocktail ingredients I tend to steer clear of. It’s usually there just to wipe the flavor out of a drink or drench it red. Don’t get me wrong, my brother and I used to hide behind the pantry door and chug the stuff by the bottle, but that was a long time ago and we’ve come along way since college. My particular hang-up is with buying primo booze for a drink and then bombing it with a two-dollar-per-bottle dose of high fructose corn syrup and red 40. Because isn’t drinking about taking care of your body?
So yesterday I got it in my head to hit the kitchen and see what I could do about this Grenadine Situation. Here’s a homemade formula you can whip up based on a recipe over at jefferymorganthaler.com:
Ingredients
• 2 cups 100% pomegranate juice
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 oz pomegranate molasses
• 1 teaspoon orange blossom water
Directions
Heat (don’t boil) the pomegranate juice and stir in the sugar until everything has dissolved. Add the molasses (I found mine on the bare shelves of a Mediterranean market) and the blossom water (ask your liquor store) and stir until mixed. Finally, bottle it up with a splash of vodka to keep things preserved and refrigerate.
The results are impressive and the flavors complex. However, you might want to use a touch more than most drink recipes call for, as it isn’t nearly as syrupy and thick as a dash of Rose’s. Give it a whirl in a Jack Rose and enjoy.
Here’s to rain on the roof.
