The Fine Art Of Screwing With Recipes

So clearly this Bénédictine we got is burning a hole in my pocket — or whatever; it sounds scary and dangerous to think about alcohol burning parts of one’s clothing — because I went to that well again. When I was flipping through The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks I noticed a lot of recipes that used it. Tonight I found one called a Monte Carlo (page 260).

The thing people seem to talk about with Embury’s book is the “opinionated” nature of his writing. You see that in this recipe. It calls for one part Bénédictine, two parts rye and one or two dashes of Angostura bitters. And immediately he’s like, “This drink is a bit on the sweet side. It can be improved by adding 2 parts lemon juice and increasing the rye from 2 parts to about 4 or 5.” I don’t know what his deal is with refusing to write out numbers under 11, but whatever. In essence, it’s a much different drink. I like the freedom of being able to not give a fuck about recipes.

So to that end, I ran out of rye so I used bourbon instead. I followed his advice, however, and upped the whiskey-everything else proportion and added the lemon juice. I think there’s a lot of lemon — maybe half that much lemon would work. Also, I get the concept of rye — that particular rye flavor would probably stand out better. But it was still OK — I’d try it again, with some tweaks.

Accutely Accented, At $34.99 A Bottle

So one of the things we never have around because, honestly, it’s kind of expensive is Bénédictine. And one of the things you always see in cocktail recipes is Bénédictine. So when the snow finally melted and I got to drive over to the liquor store that’s so much cheaper than the one within walking distance, I thought long and hard about all the stuff that’s normally too prohibitively expensive to indulge in. And I bought some Bénédictine. And then I went home and promptly made a cocktail that used Bénédictine. And that cocktail was the Woolworth in the The PDT Cocktail Book (page 270).

The Woolworth is blended scotch, Manzanilla sherry, Bénédictine and two dashes of orange bitters. We had only a little bit of Manzanilla sherry, so we used the fresh bottle of Amontillado to make up the difference, reasoning that it was close enough on the sherry spectrum to Manzanilla. The one was nuttier and richer than the other, and the cocktail had a pronounced sherry note, so I get why’d you use Manzanilla.

At the end of the day (even if you hate the phrase “at the end of the day” even though this was basically the end of the day — the polite term is “reverse happy hour,” which is basically just a nice way of saying “after the kids finally fall asleep”) this is a good cocktail. Sherry is great to use, and should be used more, and is a great antidote to the world’s generalized sweetness. As for the Bénédictine, we just need to figure out other ways to use it, before it disappears.

If Only Every Cocktail Packed 3.6 Grams Of Protein In It

I’m not opposed to using egg whites in cocktails — far from it; I love the idea of sneaking in extra protein wherever possible, especially for the kids, who seem to be content subsisting on bread, pasta and fruit. It’s just that harvesting egg whites is a complete pain in the ass, so whenever I see recipes with them, I basically automatically rule them out. Sort of like anything with vodka.

So what a thrill when I made Alton Brown’s Google-rankumphant Shepherd’s Pie recipe and was left with a spare egg white. “Woman,” I shouted from the kitchen, “make something with egg white!”

She chose the Judgment Day from The PDT Cocktail Book (page 152), which is basically a pisco sour with St. Germain and an Absinthe rinse. It’s good; we like pisco sours fine, but this rounded out that puckery-ness in a way that isn’t too cloying. I’d hit that again, if only I had an egg white.

The Lost Art Of Looking At Your Goddamn Bookshelf

Another deep dive into the bookshelf. I didn’t know we had some of this stuff. Tonight, David A. Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, which I only started to skim through. It’s not a paint-by-numbers recipe book, I’ll tell you that much. It seems awesome (in the true Grand Canyon sense of the word) and complete and not unlike the opener to Kung Fu, where pebble-snatching David Carradine is getting hipped to karate or whatnot. There are recipes in it, but they’re rough and told in “parts,” as in one part gin to one part chocolate sauce to two parts rubbing alcohol. It seems brilliant. And not just because it’s not shy about saying, “substitute this for that and you get these” — in other words, where some of the newer cocktail books like to pimp “[name brand] bitter” and “[specific expensive] small-batch bourbon” this one just says “1 part Italian vermouth.”

I found the Sweet and Lovely (page 274), which was .5 part maraschino, .5 part grenadine, 2 parts lime juice, 3 parts gin and 5 parts Applejack. It was balanced and, er, lovely, and completely hidden on the 274th page of this crazy book. More later.

When Cocktails Were Larger And Filled With Fruit

Continuing the foray into The PDT Cocktail Book, I alighted on the Eclipse Cocktail (page 113), which involves tequila, Aperol, Cherry Heering and lemon juice. As any good bartender will tell you, the first rule of mixology is to use ingredients you have; we had those ingredients.

The combination is good (most cocktails are “good” though, aren’t they?), less sweet and more nuanced than last night’s Persephone. Still fruity, but good. Tonight it occurred to me that we might be living a sort of cocktail time capsule in this book though — it was published in 2011, and I wonder if the trends from four years back were more fruitacious than today. The few times I’ve been out at real-life cocktail places recently it seems like the drinks were more angular and challenging than fruitacious. (“Angular” just popped into my head; I remember guitars being described as “angular” in days of yore; I have no clue what that means.)

To go back to the Eclipse, the proportions kind of blow the typical three-ounce cocktail out of the water: 2 ounces tequila and 3/4 ounces of each other ingredient adds up to [thinking] 4 1/4 ounces of beverage: yikes!