That Magical Cedilla, How Easily It’s Erased

Long before we knew what cocktails were, or knew how to construct them in our own house, we had a bottle of curaçao. I think it was blue curaçao. Before we moved I drank it just to get rid of it. It tasted orange.

I only realized tonight that the very strange thing is how idiotic we once were about cocktails. Jen said it was because we were young and had stupid money to spend on cocktails in actual places, but that doesn’t make sense to me: we knew literally fucking nothing about drinking cocktails, and looking back, it’s unclear we ever drank cocktails at home. What the fuck? And I’m talking, like, 2009 or 2010 or something, not like 1976.

Part of doing cocktails at home is to subvert the mixologistic paradigm of the “lounge”; it’s ridiculous to pay 12, 15, 18 dollars for one lousy drink. The other part is to understand what you don’t actually know; there’s nothing artistic about mixing one ounce, one ounce, one ounce of this or that. That shouldn’t require a premium. Some of this other shit you encounter is different: house-tinctured tinctures mixed in single batches is labor intensive; of course I’ll bite. Which is to say, mixing your own drinks makes you a better consumer. Embrace it. “Now go start your own cocktail lounge.”

Jen was tasked with drink research, in preparation for doing our taxes. She found the Honeymoon Cocktail in the PDT book (page 143). It was good, if lemony. The base was apple brandy (Applejack), followed by equal parts orange curaçao, Bénédictine and lemon juice. It’s a vintage recipe, from 1916. We used some off brand Grand Marnier knockoff instead of curaçao.

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.