Within the last 24 hours I’ve learned of two active participants in the cocktail blogosphere who are now, um, on unscheduled sabbatical as a result of the global economic crap-tsunami (and that’s not counting the geniuses like me who thought it wise to quit a job just before the financial sector went into a tailspin). But hey, it’s Mixology Monday, and that’s always good for celebratin’, right? Unless the theme is Hard Drinks for Hard Times, as suggested by host Matthew Rowley, one of those who has EXTRA time on his hands nowadays — then, it’s one more reminder that it’s time to slowly freak out as you check your bank balance and your work calendar, both of which are looking pretty grim.

In times like these, there are all kinds of ideas on how to drink cheaper — I initially played with the idea of marking MxMo by making my own pruno, until I was stopped by a sudden attack of good sense. Elsewhere during this month’s MxMo — see, there are benefits to putting your post off until the last minute — there have been plenty of ideas on how to stretch the booze budget, whether it’s by purchasing cheaper brands, or putting the leftovers and free samples to good use, or by making your own hooch.  These are all good ideas, but for me, there seems to be one basic approach that’s not discussed very often, but which has been painstakingly described by one of the foremost writers on booze: the time-honored technique of stiffing your guests.*

In his 1972 book On Drink (happily reprinted just last year as part of an expanded collection, Everyday Drinking), Kingsley Amis dedicated an entire chapter to what he described as “The Mean Sod’s Guide”. At the beginning of the chapter, Amis makes his purpose clear:

The point here is not simply to stint your guests on quality and quantity — any fool can pre-pour Moroccan red into burgundy bottles, or behave as if all knowledge of the existence of drink has been suddently excised from his brain at 10pm — but to screw them while seeming, at any rate to their wives, to have done them rather well.

This is cheapskatery in its most creative form — transforming the host’s mission of generosity into an insolent penny-pinching endeavor in a way that makes it seem, at least to some of the assembled, that you’ve raided your liquor cabinet for nothing but the finest of spirits.

To accomplish this, Amis gives several suggestions, starting with the advance preparations:

Vital requirement: prepare pre- and post-dinner drinks in some undiscoverable pantry or broom-cupboard well away from the main scene. This will not only screen your niggardliness; it will also make the fetching of each successive round look like a slight burden, and will cast an unfavorable limelight on any individual determined to wrest additional drinks out of you. Sit in a specially deep easy-chair, and practise getting out of it with a mild effort and, later in the evening, a just-audible groan, though beware of overdoing this.

And, for the pre-dinner drink:

Procedures vary. The obvious one is to offer only one sort of drink, a ‘cup’ or ‘punch’ made of cheap red wine, soda water, a glass of cooking sherry if you can plunge that far, and a lot of fresh fruit to give an illusion of lavishness. Say you invented it, and add menacingly that it has more of a kick than might be expected. Serve in small glasses.

After dinner, more desperate measures may be called for:

[...] offer brandy, explaining a good deal less than half apologetically that you have no cognac, only a ‘rather exceptional’ armagnac. This, of course, produced with due slowness from your pantry, is a watered-down cooking brandy from remote parts of France or South Africa. [...] Ask the ladies if they would care to try a glass of Strelsauvada, a ‘rather obscure’ Ruritanian liqueur made from rotten figs with almond-skin flavouring which admittedly can ‘play you up’ if you are not used to it. They will all say no and think highly of you for the offer.

Rather than drink a similar slop, keep something special for your own drinks:

These must obviously not be allowed to fall below any kind of accustomed level, however cruel the deprevations you force on your guests. You will naturally refresh yourself with periodic nips in your pantry, but going thither at all often may make undesirable shags think, even say, that you ought to be bringing thence a drink for them. So choose between a darkly tinted glass [...] and a silver cup of some sort [...] which you stick inseparably to and can undetectably fill with neat whisky…

Fine ideas, all — but this is about cocktails. Fortunately, the same approach can apply. To adapt the “drink cheaper” motif, here are a couple of cocktails that appear to be the same thing, yet have a substantial difference in price per drink. First, for you–

CHEAPSKATE

• 2 ounces Blue Gin (~$3.18)
• 3/4 ounce Carpano Antica vermouth (~$0.66)
• 1/4 ounce St. Germain (~$0.33)
• 1 teaspoon Jade Edouard absinthe (~$0.52)
• 1 dash Regan’s Orange Bitters (~$.01)

Combine ingredients in bar glass and fill with cracked ice. Stir with a silver barspoon wrapped in a $20 bill to keep your fingers from getting cold. Strain into chilled cocktail glass. Grand total: ~$4.70

And for your guests–

UNWELCOME HOUSEGUEST

• 2 ounces Gordon’s gin (~$0.88)
• 3/4 ounce Martini & Rossi sweet vermouth (~$0.21)
• 1/4 ounce St. Germain (~$0.33)
• 1 teaspoon Kubler absinthe (~$0.33)
• 1 dash Regan’s Orange Bitters (~$0.01)

Combine ingredients in an empty beer can and fill with ice scraped from the sides of the freezer. Stir with a used fork and strain into a cocktail glass that looks something like yours so as to throw off any suspicion. Grand total: ~$1.76

In both cases you have a similar combo;but while in the former you’re accenting the rich botanicals of the Blue Gin and Carpano Antica with the cascading vegetal flavors of a good absinthe and enlivening the mix with elderflower liqueur, in the latter you’re using that same liqueur, as well as a more flat anise note from the Kubler absinthe, to pull the flavors up from the not-quite-as-exciting mix of Gordon’s and mainstream vermouth. Less vavoom than the former, of course, but still, not bad.

Times are tough; sometimes a little pampering is required, and $4.69 for a decent homemade cocktail is a bargain compared to an afternoon at the spa or a weekend trip to Vegas.

* Oh, and the “stiff your guests” part? C’mon, just joshing — unless you’re one of the hostile commenters that’s followed me over from the “Proof” blog, hopefully you figured that out before ripping me a new one in the comments section. Though as Amis noted in his final instruction: “If you think that all or most of the above is mere satirical fantasy, you cannot have been around much yet.”

Now head on over to Rowley’s Whiskey Forge and see what the other miscreants have been up to this MxMo.

Tags: Books, Drinks, Gin, Mixology Monday by Paul
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Before I screw anything up with a mangled literary reference, let me get this out of the way at the beginning: I never read David Copperfield.

Oliver Twist? Sure, a couple of times. A Tale of Two Cities? Certainly, though not so recently that I can recall much of the story. A Christmas Carol? Hell yeah — as recently as last Christmas. But way back in college, when I was skinny and had hair, I flirted with the idea of majoring in English, only to recoil from the subject during my sophomore year after a sudden and brutish encounter with mid-19th century English novelists (nothing against them, really — it just wasn’t my thing back then; if anything I was even more masochistic, given to forcing myself through Ulysses for the fun of it). I can’t blame David Copperfield directly, though I do recall weighing its heft in a university bookstore one afternoon, then placing it back on the shelf before going rummaging for some Nabokov.

What does this have to do with anything, much less Mixology Monday (which is hosted this month by Craig at Tiki Drinks and Indigo Firmaments, with the chosen topic of Spice)? Well, in my last-minute digging through drink books for a suitable concoction that could be assembled on the fly — sorry, very poor planning around here — I picked up a book that I’d been meaning to introduce during the Christmas season: Drinking with Dickens.

Written by the author’s great-grandson Cedric and first published in 1980, Drinking with Dickens is a fun little breeze through the author’s works, touching on characters and story lines associated with alcohol. While there are suitable spice-laden punches such as a Christmas Punch (somewhat similar to the recipe I list), what caught my eye was this: simply listed as “Gin Punch“, and noted as “Mr. Micawber’s favorite.”

Gin was no stranger to Dickens, nor to his mid-19th century world. The “Gin Craze” had swept London a century before, and gin was still a staple spirit for the lower, working classes, and mixing it in punch, whether hot or cold, was a not unusual method of consumption. In A Christmas Carol, fuddleduddy Bob Cratchit returns home after his rude encounter with Scrooge to compound “some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and [he] stirred it round and round and put it on the hob to simmer.”

Cedric Dickens notes that Mr. Micawber, a luckless yet perpetually optimistic character in David Copperfield based on the author’s father (thanks, Wikipedia!), also had a great fondness for gin punch. After one trying disappointment, Micawber goes to prepare some:

His recent despondency, not to say despair, was gone in a moment. I never saw a man so thoroughly enjoy himself amid the fragrance of lemon-peel and sugar, the odour of burning spirit, and the steam of boiling water, as Mr Micawber did that afternoon. It was wonderful to see his face shining at us out of a thin cloud of these delicate fumes, as he stirred, and mixed, and tasted, and looked as if he were making, instead of a punch, a fortune for his family down to the latest posterity.

Hey, punch as a fortune — I can get into that.

Ignoring the fact that the author’s recipes are sometimes suspect — Cedric Dickens never really reveals where he sourced them, and there’s a slapdash element to some — and that my own experiments with drinks of yore have occasionally resulted in spectacular failure, I decided to give this Gin Punch a crack. Here’s the recipe I’m working with, from Drinking with Dickens:

Gin Punch

• Juice 1/2 lemon
• pinch ground cinnamon
• 1 clove
• 1 teaspoon brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon honey
• 1 large measure sweet dark Madeira
• 1 large measure dry gin
• grated nutmeg

Into a warm tumbler put the juice of half a lemon, the cinnamon and clove, and the sugar and honey. Threequarters fill the glass with boiling water, add the madeira and gin and stir with a stick of cinnamon. Grate nutmeg thereon and drink quickly.

I’m choosing to ignore the “dry gin” reference in favor of a fuller-flavored and perhaps more historically appropriate genever, so Bols Genever is my gin of choice in this drink (and speaking of gin, during my Google-driven Micawber research I discovered that in the 1935 film version of David Copperfield, Micawber was played by W.C. Fields).

I’d post a photo, except my camera recently gave up the ghost and has yet to be replaced, so you’ll have to make due with this description: Okay, that’s weird. It’s not bad, definitely not, but the malty funkiness of the genever and the richness of the madeira — along with the little quibbles around the edges from the cinnamon, nutmeg and clove — combine to produce a flavor that nobody this century, or last, would likely have come up with.

It’s frigid and icy in Seattle, so a drink like this is not undesired on a night such as this one. I’m not sure if I’ll venture back down this exact path, but there’s room here for tinkering; Micawber’s gin punch is wanting, but there is hope in it for future experimentation.

So that’s what I got — the spice is relatively meager, but it sounded like a good idea at the time and I hope I get points for being adventurous enough to drink hot gin. Head on over to Craig’s joint to see what everyone else is up to.

Tags: Drinks, Gin, Mixology Monday by Paul
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I’m back, still breathing, after an unplanned two-week hiatus. During this vacation from blogging I spent a whirlwind couple of days in San Francisco, ushering out Cocktail Week at Absinthe and sitting (briefly) at Neyah White‘s bar at Nopa, and then spent the rest of the time diving headlong into the freelance life. But now that my Sitemeter readings are starting to free fall, and after receiving a “Dude, What’s up?” e-mail from a reader wondering if I’d abandoned this thing (thanks for checking in, Joseph), I felt the need to get my act together for a few minutes and post about something worthwhile.

Like this: If you’re at all familiar with the cocktail blogosphere, you’re certainly aware of LUPEC-Boston. Now, the ladies of LUPEC-B have taken their cocktail wisdom to the print shop, and the result is the Little Black Book of Cocktails, a slim but serious volume with recipes for a selection of vintage and contemporary libations, and photos of the LUPEC-B ladies by Matt Demers.

I finally got my hands on a copy of the LBBoC, and I have to say what a fine job they’ve done. The book has recipes ranging from old favorites like the Monkey Gland to new favorites (around here, at least) such as the Jaguar, and after wandering through the pages I don’t see a bummer in the bunch. Buy a copy from the LUPEC-Boston site, and you’ll be rewarded not only with this well-considered cocktail guide, but with the knowledge that the proceeds are going to the Friends Boutique at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Reading the book also made me finally get around to mixing a drink I’d been planning to try for quite a while. While Ted Haigh addressed this in an issue of Imbibe and Erik covered it during his recent stroll through Savoy’s H’s, I’ve sadly been behind in my consumption of Hanky Pankys. But, with the LUPEC book in hand and a bottle of Fernet Branca staring at me from the liquor cabinet, I thought it finally time for a dalliance with Ada Coleman’s creation.

Chin chin — and buy the book.

Hanky Panky

• 1 1/2 ounces gin
• 1 1/2 ounces sweet vermouth
• 2 dashes Fernet Branca

Stir well with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Squeeze a piece of orange peel on top.

Tags: Books, Drinks, Gin by Paul
7 Comments »

I really try to ignore St. Patrick’s Day. It’s a time when the fair-weather drinkers like to lay into the stuff, making bars about the last place I want to be. And as someone who’s let this particular interest slip among colleagues and casual acquaintances, it’s the time of year when I invariably get asked how to make an Irish car bomb, or what’s my favorite green drink. It’s almost enough to make you go on the wagon (fortunately, there’s Rick’s booze-whopper “Limit: One” Mixology Monday coming up, so I’ll be spared that particular inconvenience).

But hey, here it comes, and while preparing for my Serious Eats post earlier this evening I was digging through books looking for the earliest recipe for the Emerald I could find — this version, that is, not one of the handful of other drinks that have gone under that name — when I came across one such Emerald variation in Trader Vic’s Bartender’s Guide that seemed worth a shot.

And no wonder — after a closer look at the recipe, I had one of those “hey, wait a minute–” moments, and realized this is simply a Bijou wearing a different hat. (And I know this very same drink pops up again with a different name somewhere — no, I’m not thinking of the Tailspin, that’s got a dash of Campari in place of the orange bitters — so if anybody has better recall than I do, please chime in with a comment.)

But what the hell — Emerald, Bijou, whatever, it’s a nice drink. If you need something that sounds kind of Irish on the big day, but want to avoid the typical crap, keep the Emerald name on the drink and go for it.

Emerald / Bijou / ????

• 1 ounce gin
• 1 ounce sweet vermouth
• 1 ounce green Chartreuse
• 2 dashes orange bitters

Stir well with ice; strain into chilled cocktail glass.

Tags: Drinks, Gin by Paul
12 Comments »

I’ve found myself falling into a cocktail rut lately — and it’s not just a defensive posture from drinking so much apricot brandy. Relatively minor, as these things go, but it’s been a bit more of a challenge to come up with an idea of what I’d like to have. So, in pursuit of recipes that I’m quite sure I’ve never tried, I turned to quite possibly my most beloved mixology-related book: Charles Baker’s The Gentleman’s Companion.

Baker has no shortage of recipes that have never appeared elsewhere, sometimes with good reason: while the man spun a fine yarn about most anything poured into a glass, some of the mixes are slightly off, and others just downright weird. Here’s one of the latter, but for this one I don’t mean “weird” in an entirely disapproving light.

First, the setup: “Watch this one when out under the moon in a desert overnight camp, riding camels out across the vast dunes, or strolling in the moonlight around the Sphinx with some congenial young woman companion.”

The Sahara Glowing Heart Cocktail
from the Hands of one Abdullah an Arab Muslim Wizard back of Mahogany at the Mena House Bar, near the Pyramids of Ghizeh, which Are Just South of Cairo, Egypt

“Take of dry gin, 1 pony [1 ounce], absinthe, 1 pony, dry imported apricot brandy, 1 pony; donate 1/2 pony of bright rose coloured grenadine. Shake with lots and lots of ice and strain into a large saucer champagne glass, and pray Allah for forgiveness of all imminent and future sins of the flesh…

I’d be dishonest if I said Baker’s commentary wasn’t the primary driving force behind my effort at whipping up one of these, but I’m also trying assorted obscure absinthe cocktails (for reasons that will soon become evident), and this one seemed suitably obscure to include in the project.

Of the result, Baker writes: “To us this drink tastes a bit sweet [BINGO! --ed.]; also a bit dominated by absinthe or Pernod Veritas [ya think?!? --ed.]. So why not experiment to taste along these lines? … Ignore the grenadine, step up the gin to a jigger, whittle the absinthe to a dash or two inside the empty glass before pouring the chilled drink.”

Upon the first sip, I thought, “That’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever had,” and to be honest, I’m still thinking that as I finish the drink. But, this ain’t bad — while sweet, as Baker says, there’s also a really engaging interplay between the apricot eau de vie and the absinthe. I’ll try Baker’s suggested variation at some point, but for now, I disagree on removing the grenadine entirely: the drink benefits from the additional fruitiness it brings to the table, but at 1/2 an ounce, it does make the cocktail startlingly sweet.

As Baker’s cocktails go, the Sahara Glowing Heart has the appropriate level of screwball distinctiveness to it, but it’s also not a bad basis from which to start playing with variations. Now if I can just arrange for some of that forgiveness…

Tags: Absinthe, Drinks, Eau de Vie, Gin by Paul
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