Good, Better, Best; Or Whatever

The Easter Elchies cocktail (Mr. Boston, page 179), named for some fucking house on the Macallan estate, calls for eight parts single malt scotch, one part Cherry Heering and one part Punt y Mes plus on dash of orange bitters.

Of course we didn’t use single malt scotch because WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD USE SINGLE MALT SCOTCH IN A COCKTAIL? I actually have a bottle of single malt here, maybe two, and honestly, I never know when to drink it. Most nights seem not to rise to the level of single malt. The bottle(s) just sit there. Weird because they’re not that much more expensive, or at least the single malt I get. Which is to say, if they cost twice as much, you’d think they only get tasted every two or three times you drink booze. Instead, it never gets drunk. I probably should just change that. It would be a more “mature” move.

So anyway, cheap blended scotch with that weird Polish cherry stuff I got and mostly Punt y Mes but also a little bit of sweet vermouth because we ran out of Punt y Mes. And . . . it was good! Uncle Goober noted the Rob Roy-plus thing going on. Oh, yeah, right — I always forget about that; variations on this-or-that. Would it have been more good with single malt scotch? Is that ever even a possibility?

The Most Correct Smoked Pork I Ever Made . . .

I just did the most correct smoked pork I’ve ever made. It went something like this . . .

1) Started early: The first time I tried a butt or whatnot I began early in the morning for a late afternoon/evening party, which was not enough time. People say to expect 1.5 hours a pound. I think it takes even longer. The past couple of times I had the thing in the smoker for four or five hours, which apparently is as long as you need to get it smoked up (the idea being that anything longer doesn’t really add anything further), then put it in the oven for the remainder of time. The last time I did it I started around 8 p.m., kept it in smoke until 12 or 1, then put it in the oven under foil at 225 degrees. It basically wasn’t ready by the time I needed it (noon), which brings me to . . .

2) The oven temperature: By the way, I’m convinced, and it didn’t take much convincing, that there’s no reason to keep it on the grill for 16 hours or so. It’s an asinine proposition, in fact. Not only does it not need it — i.e., smoke doesn’t do anything after four or five hours — but what in God’s name would you want to stay up all night stoking a grill with charcoal every half hour when you could put the thing in an oven with a constant temperature? And the right temperature, I now know, is 250 degrees. I got nervous last night and turned it down to 225 while I was sleeping (2 something a.m. to 6:45 or so) but I shouldn’t have — I turned it back up after waking up and it still took a while — until 12:45, which was OK this time.

3) The wood: I used hickory before and this time I tried apple wood — there was a ridiculous sale on Amazon for wood so I got a bunch. Apple wood smells super nice when it’s burning. This tasted good is all.

FYI: I took it out of the oven at 200 degrees, which I’ve never attained before — usually I’m in a pinch because the whole thing is taking too long so it comes out at 190 or something. This took forever to creep up there — 188 to 200 must have taken two or three hours — but it makes a difference. So the thing was about eight pounds. It went on at 8:15 p.m., came out of the smoker at 1 a.m. or so and then didn’t get out of the oven until 12:45 p.m. So way longer than 1.5 hours a pound. Crazy. But it didn’t matter because people weren’t here until later, so whatever. I actually think our stove turned itself off because it assumed we forgot, probably around the 11 hour mark.

Also, this was not the butt or what I usually get — the guy at the butcher store asked if I wanted the skin and I shrugged and said sure. I’m googling and I *think* it was part of the shoulder but I’m not sure how. Whatever. It was still good. This is roughly the rub I used; it was late and I did the first thing I googled.

Oh, and putting “pork shoulder vs pork butt” into the Yahoo image search engine first yields a warning that there may be unsafe-for-mixed-company pictures included and then actually includes unsafe-for-mixed-company images. Fucking morons. Seriously, was it “pork” or “butt” that did it? You guys are ridiculous.

Silent Third

Now here’s an under the radar drink that I only alighted on because it had triple sec in it and I was wanting to use triple sec. Until relatively recently I assumed triple sec was some crap that you put in margaritas, and I don’t make margaritas, so whatever. Then I had a Deshler and then I actually looked up what this “crap” was. So I didn’t buy Cointreau but rather the random DeK***** stuff that is at the store and which probably is really OK or whatever.

The Silent Third is a drink that’s like a scotch sour in a way — 2 parts scotch, 1 part triple sec and 1 part lemon juice. Jen liked it, for what it’s worth.

This Wonderful Little Cocktail/Microaggression Against Catholics

You might know “hanky panky” as some kind of fuddy-duddy phrase last heard on Benny Hill or something starring Richard Dawson, god rest his soul. Well, it’s also a cocktail. (Interestingly, there’s a short link between “hanky panky” and some old-school anti-Catholic sentiment in England; in essence it goes some shit in Latin mass to “hocus pocus” to “hanky panky.”)

The apocryphal story goes that some old British actor, looking for a cocktail with some “punch,” whatever that means, found this and called it “the real hanky-panky,” which isn’t really connected at all to the original trickeration connotation or the modern sexcentric meaning. I guess it’s like calling something “the shit,” or even [trying to come up with a phrase like “the shit” but being too inartful in googling it then getting stuck in an eddy of Urban Dictionary so we’ll leave this as a truly inartful placeholder until something comes to mind].

So anyway, the Hanky Panky, which I discovered in the PDT book (page 138) but which is jacked from Harry Craddock’s The Savoy Cocktail Book, goes like this: 8 parts gin, 6 parts sweet vermouth and 1 part Fernet-Branca. I wish I could remember what it tasted like but that was too long ago now.

Many Intelligent And Even Not So Intelligent People Have Wonderful And Quippy Things To Say About “Timing,” None Of Which Will Appear In This Space

Note to myself regarding cooking steaks over charcoal: next time try 4 minutes one side/3 minutes the other instead of 5 minutes/4 minutes.