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.

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!

They Act Like “Tasting Like Fruit Punch” Is A Bad Thing

I’ve neglected what seem to be very useful tomes about cocktails, mostly because we have too many books around and they get piled high on their sides versus shelved up and down like you’re supposed to with books. Which is how I forgot about Jim Meehan’s The PDT Cocktail Book. I’ll leave it out to find some new recipes. Tonight we had a Persephone (page 207), mostly because I knew I had all the ingredients. I know Persephone is some Greek thing or something but I have no idea about the meaning because I’m mostly uninformed (or forgetful) about such things.

It caught my eye for the sloe gin, which I got a bottle of at the good (cheap) local liquor store. This was the Llords — two Ls — stuff though, not the fancy British sloe gin that gets produced but which is ten times the price of that which is branded with two Ls, like it’s getting ready to apply for a summer internship at a white-shoe firm or something. I kept coming across sloe gin in the Mr. Boston but it wasn’t until after I got a bottle that I realized that it was used for only a few recipes.

Also, they call for the fancy Dolin sweet vermouth, which isn’t happening. Instead, there’s that Tribuno stuff, which I know by look and had to go to the liquor cabinet just now to read the label.

The main ingredient is Laird’s Apple Jack, which we actually had.

So it’s mostly Apple Jack, then sweet vermouth then the sloe gin followed by lemon juice and simple syrup. It’s all good — except it’s scary how much it tastes like fruit punch.