Manhattan Creeps Up On You

The Lafayette, recorded for posterity in David A. Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks is one part dry vermouth, one part Dubonnet, six parts whiskey and one dash Angostura bitters.

You know, now that I’m rereading that it’s possible I screwed up everything. Maybe the whiskey shouldn’t have been Evan Williams green label cheap bourbon. Maybe when they say “Dubonnet” they mean the white kind (which I’ve never even seen and which is supposed to be gross) and not the red kind. If so, sorry.

It tasted like a variation on a Manhattan, which it said it was going to be. It was in the “Whiskey Cocktails of the Aromatic Variety” section. I still can’t believe this guy wrote this book. It’s huge and ridiculous in its breadth. Did he actually drink all this stuff? Could anyone?

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?

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.

Duboudreau, Too

Earlier, I wrote that The Duboudreau Cocktail (PDT, page 110), that which is eight parts rye, three parts Dubonnet Rouge, one part Fernet-Branca and one part Elderflower liqueur. We didn’t have Fernet-Branca before, mostly because it’s expensive, but when I went to the store today it was so high up on the shelf and the font on the price tag so small that I went for it. I think it sold for $30 something. I remember reading that people absolutely hate it on its own. It smells pretty intense; I never drink these on their own because I never do. There’s a quote in this piece on five Fernet-Branca cocktails that calls it “mouthwash with delusions of grandeur.”

Anyway, last time we substituted Cynar for it, which was good. This was also very good, although it tastes a little fucked up at first — at least to the point where Jen was like, “What is this, it’s weird.”