Another Day, Another Cocktail

Also, another cocktail book: this time, Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails: From the Alamagoozlum to the Zombie and Beyond: 100 Rediscovered Recipes and the Stories Behind Them by Ted Haigh. First off, it’s a great book: 1) it’s spiral bound to stay in place; 2) the artwork and accompanying images are fantastic — each drink has its own image, many of them historical; 3) the notes are great, and lively and down to earth but still informative. It’s also from 2009.

In general there’s a strange fetishization about old tymey-tyme cocktails. I don’t know if it’s a Nick & Nora sort of [insert worldwide hand motion for jerking off] this or that or what it is. It’s interesting, for sure, but I don’t totally buy that what’s old was necessarily better. Technology is important and real, and building on human learning and experience is what progress is all about.

But at the same time, it is really interesting to think about what dumb-ass rich 20 somethings were drinking back in days of yore. Sort of.

Apparently they liked fruit juices. So many of these cocktails in Vintage seem to revolve around orange juice or pineapple juice or lemon juice or (my favorite) orange and lemon juice. It’s like Al Fuckin’ Swearengen is trying to impress cocksuckers at the Gem; break out the fuckin’ canned peaches.

I mostly disregard orange juice but we have lemon juice around all the time: the Santa Cruz Organic Lemon juice is great; one of the local stores carries it.

[Looking back at what I’ve glibly jotted down, I should add that vintage cocktails are a glimpse into an evolving culinary tradition, and are a fascinating micro-level look at what life was like nearly 100 years ago.]

Anyway, back to the cocktail: tonight, the Barbara West Cocktail (page 59), which has gin, sherry (amontillado preferred, which is basically the first time in forever that we have the appropriate sherry on hand), lemon juice and Angostura bitters. It’s good (duh, all cocktails are good). I would drink this again. I think it’s also missing something — ever so slightly. The flavors kind of bob around each other — floral gin, nutty sherry, puckery lemon juice — without melding. It’s possible more Angostura would have been good, but the recipe clearly called for “one small dash.” In summary, I’m not sure this needs “fixing,” per se. Maybe it’s just an excellent starting point: gin, sherry and lemon juice is boss, and worth returning to [think about tweaks].

Can Sherry Regrow Your Hair?

The Dewey D. from the PDT book (page 105) is constructed from rye, Lustau East India Sherry, Aperol and Angostura bitters. We had cream sherry, which is sort of, kind of close to the Lustau thing. Also, I picked up the wrong bottle of bitters and dumped two big dashes of orange Angostura bitters in there (it’s not even the same color). All the same, this was good.

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.

Sherry Followup From A Fellow Tippler

Apropos of our recent sherry tasting, Humpday Tippler Craig passes along this field report . . .

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After indulging in seven sherries at the Humpday Tipplers club last week, I was inspired to break out a bottle of special sherry I had been saving — Alvear Fino Montilla:

I bought it a few months ago at Astor Wine after finally spending some time in their extensive sherry section. In Granada earlier this year we tasted a lot of sherries, but we were too busy enjoying the free tapas to take notes or pay too close attention to the details of the nose, taste, etc. It tasted good and went great with food, so that’s all we needed to know. Plus, at 1.20 Euro a glass it’s easy to get a little drunkypants, so who has time to keep track of how it feels on your palate? Here’s some tapas of tiny omelets with a couple of glasses of sherry at Bodegas Espadafor in Granada:

But after tasting the whole range of sherries from Fino to Amontillado to Oloroso at the Humpday survey, my palate is much more tuned in to the subtleties of this excellent drink. The Alvear Fino Montilla from Astor was crisp and extremely dry like most Finos with a very quick finish. It had a fruity aroma with a hint of funkiness. It was a little different than anything we tried with the club, it but still had that distinctive Fino essence. And as an aperitif, it was perfect with a few bites of Marcona almonds, olives, and cheese.

So I’m officially sold on sherry. From now on our bar will always be stocked with a bottle of top quality sherry at all times. You never know when that tapas craving will hit.

–CN

Humpday Sherry

Only vaguely familiar with Harvey’s Bristol Cream, I was skeptical of how our sherry tasting would turn out. My interest was piqued when Jen said that it was a wine that had a lot of enthusiastic fans and that restaurants have been adding sherry to wine lists, but I can’t say I was completely converted by the end of the evening. I probably had some preconceptions that it would all taste like raisins, but only one really had a raisin-y quality — the Lustau Pedro Ximénez, which was the sweetest sherry we tried. This Humpday definitely changed my general perception of sherry, so it was successful in that respect.

To me, tasting sherry is different than tasting wine. First off, swirling it in the glass doesn’t seem to do much beyond releasing the extra alcohol in the wine — after all, this is basically fortified hooch. In that sense it seemed like tasting spirits to me — you don’t swirl tequila because you’ll just get a big whiff of alcohol. The tasting part was strange, too — for me, each of the lighter sherries had a big almost grappa-like quality to them, followed by a finish of nuttiness and in one case (the Alvear Asuncion Oloroso Sherry) a distinct maple taste. It was fascinating, but so different than most wine, which to me tastes more balanced from beginning to end. Some of the sherries seemed to “settle down” on subsequent days, losing some of the grappa taste.

I spent a lot of time on the food, hoping that we’d get it right — sherry seemed like it would need more thought than, say, a steak and Cabernet required. The pairings were definitely interesting, and some of it was really good (not my doing — I just tried to follow different recommendations), but I still can’t see ordering a sherry with a main course. I’d of course try some more sherries — maybe we just didn’t get the right ones for me.