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?

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.

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.