Will and I spent the day together yesterday to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Though we didn’t partake in any cocktails (it being a Sunday and all), our friend Rosalie suggests mixing Orangina and whiskey for a simple but yummy cocktail. We’ll have to give that a try sometime.
Will surprised me with a Valentine’s Day treat from our favorite bakery, La Farine. It was a heart-shaped chocolate almond torte soaked in rum and coated in a dark chocolate ganache. He knows me so well!
The deliciousness doesn't translate well...perhaps I'll take some lessons in pastery photography!
As if that weren’t enough, he played the love song he wrote for me at Sunday Kind of Love, a house concert consisting of all kinds of awesome local talent singing original and covers of love songs. Rosalie accompanied on her violin.
You can’t really see much here (it was dark) but here’s a mediocre photograph for proof:
Am I the luckiest girl in the world, or what?
We spent awhile considering what would be a good Valentine’s Day cocktail to post, and the best we could come up with was a Cosmopolitan because it’s pink. Given that we’re not big fans of the Cosmo, instead we’ll just share the best photo we have of ourselves yesterday, and wishes for a wonderful Valentine’s Day for you!
Sending you love from the lushes this Valentine's Day!
I posted the Perfect Martini recipe the other week. It’s still my favorite drink, though I’ve since started enjoying the Pink Gin.
Fan of our blog, Marsha, commented that she had been unable to locate orange bitters, for which the recipe calls, and instead substituted the easier to locate Angostura bitters.
We just had to compare what we normally drink to what Marsha made. Our friends Nicole and Anthony–perfect martini newbies–came along for the ride.
We made two almost matching perfect martinis with each type of bitters and passed them around. We used our favorite orange bitters, Regans #5 Orange.
Will noted that he didn’t taste the presence of the Angostura as strongly as he tastes the orange bitters, and that he thought the Angostura made the gin taste more crisp.
I noted that the Angostura version was not as bad as I had feared it would be, but noticed that the orange bitters better rounded out the flavors of the sweet vermouth and gin.
Nicole noticed the juniper aroma of the drinks and could not recall having smelled a plant in acocktail before. She thought that the orange bitters version had a sweet, earthy note not enjoyed in the Angostura version.
Anthony didn’t find the martinis to his liking, instead preferring what we had next: Will’s original cocktail creation the Santa Rosa. A cocktail garnished with cilantro–the perfect apertif!
Just made my first sidecar ever.
Very nice
Fresh lemon juice makes all the difference.
Reminds me of a line from one of those blue collar comics, Ron White. If life gives you lemons, find someone with gin. Although, a sidecar has no gin, so it is not the best connection.
We agree wholeheartedly about the benefits of using fresh lemon juice. As for the gin and lemon juice, we will remember the principle the next time life gives us lemons.
This is rightly a classic. Our friend Zach complains that he often orders it at bars out of desire to be holding an “old man drink,” (which certainly the Whiskey Sour is) and finds it a rude awakening when he discovers himself subsequently holding a rather effeminate-looking yellow drink with a cherry in it. The drink thus presents itself as a paradox.
The Whiskey Sour:
1 1/2 oz. Bourbon or rye whiskey
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 oz. lemon juice
Muddle the sugar and lemon juice at the bottom of a glass, then add whiskey and stir on ice. Serve either on the rocks in an old-fashioned glass, or straight up. Garnish with a cherry.
The name that this drink has retained, the whiskey sour, points to an important truth about the historical development of mixology. Early on, before the vermouths and elixers and liqueurs entered the picture, there were two basic classes of mixed drinks: cocktails and sours. Cocktails were spirit + sugar + bitters. The Old-Fashioned, formerly called the “whiskey cocktail”, is the only drink of this class to have survived to the modern day. Sours were spirit + sugar + lemon or lime juice. So one could have a gin sour if one wished, or a brandy sour, or a tequila sour. The whiskey sour is the only one to have held on to the old name, but most of the popular cocktails that reign still are variations on the basic sour recipe: think Margaritas, sidecars, and even the gimlet!
As a variation, one can use equal parts Cointreau and lemon juice. I tried calling this the “General Grant” for awhile, but the name didn’t really work. Alas.
This is a drink that I serve to guests who are new to the whole cocktail thing. Nobody has ever claimed not to like it — but some of them might have actually hated it, who knows? In any case, Jen and I are big fans:
The Bronx Cocktail:
1 1/2 oz. gin
3/4 oz. dry vermouth
1/2 oz. sweet vermouth
1 oz. fresh-squeezed orange juice
Stir on ice, serve straight up with a cherry or orange peel garnish
was ranked number three in “The World’s 10 Most Famous Cocktails in 1934”,making it a very popular rival to the Martini (#1) and the Manhattan (#2).
That’s high praise!
The “origin stories” of these classic, pre-Prohibition cocktails are usually controversial or contested, in line with the maxim about success having many fathers. One of the claimed originators was a hotshot New York bartender named Johnnie Solon, who claimed to have invented the drink on the fly, in response to a wager between customers. He claimed to have chosen the name because
I had been at the Bronx Zoo a day or two before, and I saw, of course, a lot of beasts I had never known. Customers used to tell me of the strange animals they saw after a lot of mixed drinks. So when Traverson said to me, as he started to take the drink in to the customer, “What’ll I tell him is the name of this drink?” I thought of those animals, and said: “Oh, you can tell him it is a ‘Bronx’.”
Did people in those days really hallucinate animals so often? Science sadly affords us no means of discovering the truth.
This is a drink that I sometimes use to trick people into liking gin.
1 1/2 oz. gin
1/2 oz. Rose’s lime juice
Mix on ice in an old-fashioned glass. Garnish with a slice of lime.
Raymond Chandler, the great author of detective novels, liked to make this drink with half gin and half Rose’s. Indeed, if you consult the “Gimlet” entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find a quotation from Chandler recommending just this recipe. I think that such a ratio would make a disgustingly sweet drink, but that was the age of dictators and of the atom bomb, after all, and people needed some comfort.
The other night our friends Josh and Sarah brought over a bottle of Oxley Dry Gin for a tasting.
First things first, we tried a dry martini made with Oxley gin. Finding that we liked it in a martini, but weren’t getting enough information as to the taste of just the gin, we each had a small sip straight. None of us wanted to continue drinking it straight, but for the most part we are not straight gin drinkers. To finish we sampled Oxley in a sweet martini. Two martinis on a weeknight! What a special occasion this was.
Sarah noted that the gin taste of the gin finished quickly. This prompted an anonymous member of our party to shout “That’s what she said!” and some distracting giggles.
Josh surmised that Roger Moore would choose this particular gin for his martinis.
He later suggested that this is what Kitty Dukakis would drink to forget her problems… I suggested that he get a blog of his own to share these exciting insights.
Will noted Oxley’s very sharp taste, but I noticed a very sour taste on the tongue. We all agreed it had a very harsh finish when drunk straight.
We all noted its juniper aroma (surprise! a gin with a juniper aroma!!) and that we liked it in both the dry and sweet martini. It must be noted that when Josh purchased this gin, he specifically asked for a gin that makes an excellent martini. Oxley Dry Gin does not disappoint on that front!
The perfect martini is by far my favorite cocktail. I crave it around 5pm every Friday and avoid bars because I dare not try their rendition.
Vermouth lost popularity sometime in the past century (Will could tell you more about that), and the martini is a drink that has really suffered as a result. Nowadays people make it with just a wash of vermouth and rarely include bitters. You wind up with a chilled glass of gin (or vodka). That’s not a cocktail. That’s a gin (or vodka) on the rocks.
Traditional martinis, on the other hand, contain:
1 1/2 ounce gin
1/2 ounce either sweet (for a Sweet Martini) or dry (for a Dry Martini) vermouth
1 liberal dash of orange bitters
Stir all the ingredients over ice till chilled. Strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish the sweet martini with a brandied cherry or a twist of orange and the dry martini with a cocktail onion or olive.
While I enjoy both the sweet and dry martinis, the perfect martini is my favorite. Made with both sweet and dry vermouth, the perfect martini is a little sweet but has the savory tastes of the gin and dry vermouth.
The Perfect Martini
1/2 ounce sweet vermouth
1/2 ounce dry vermouth
1 1/2 ounces gin
1 liberal dash of orange bitters
Stir all the ingredients over ice till chilled. Strain into a chilled martini glass. The perfect martini steals its garnish from the sweet martini so top it with a brandied cherry or a twist of orange and enjoy!
Stir ingredients in ice, serve straight up with a cherry
Many in the cocktail set say that this should only properly be made with an American whiskey. I think such narrow provincialism has no place in the modern world, and generally use Canadian Club. But I’ve also had great success using Old Overholt rye whiskey. And there are many good bourbons on the market these days.
