By the creamy, swirly look of it (as seen in pic above) + by the name of it => This cocktail must contain ice cream or at least cream-cream, no?
No.
Me: Hey, J. and M. [our favorite married-couple-with-new-baby-in-Montreal friends] invited us over on Mother’s Day afternoon for cocktails. J.’s mother and grandmother are in town. J. says her mother and I will get along because we’re both drinkers.
The PhoBlograpHusband: Wait — for cocktails?! [J. doesn't drink; M. will drink beer but only because that's the law in Canada.]
Me: I know, right? J. even emailed me their list of what booze they’ve got in the house and, omg, it’s sooo “we never drink hard liquor.” It’s, like, gin, vodka, Jack Daniel’s, a little bit of dry vermouth, OJ.
PHB: We should bring our own stash over.
The first time I ever drank alcohol (Mom, stop reading now) was at a party at Jeff Dakin’s house. I was 16, I think, and there was Budweiser in cans. As I couldn’t stand the taste of the champagne of beers, I emptied a can into an oversized, plastic cup and mixed it with OJ, which was all I could find in the Dakin family fridge that struck me as even plausible to combine with pissy lager. And so my career in mixology began .
I remember being so embarrassed by this that I only did my mixing when nobody else was in the kitchen, but I also remember coming up with a name for my concoction — the Rosebud — which means I must’ve talked to other kids there about it, or at least that I saw the humor in what I was doing.
If I’d known then about red wine and Coke, think 0f how boldly I could’ve plundered Mr. and Mrs. Dakin’s wine stash instead of making do with OJ’d-down, mass-produced swill. Imagine my rapt, pimple-pocked audience as I explained that rendering cheap booze palatable for consumption was a noted hallmark of youth across the seas! Think about what a precocious, pretentious ass I would’ve sounded like, expounding upon my own multiculti self-awareness. (Why, I may as well have checked my humility at the door and enrolled as one of Suri Cruise’s classmates at Avenues!)
H.L. Mencken called the martini the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet, but I think the Sidecar goes one better: It’s as engrossing and enrapturing as the Great American novel.
Cue the Jay-Z soundtrack bandwagon sound effects Jazz Age music — it’s The Great Gatsby week at The Five O’Clock Cocktail Blog!
Some people discover pencillin. Others spill battery acid and then somehow, suddenly, they’ve invented the phone. Me? I improvise Sazeracs with applejack brandy.
While riffling through my ever-beloved Difford’s Encyclopedia of Cocktails recently, I was stopped dead in my tracks by Simon Difford’s recipe for a Sazerac. Ask any goomba how to make a classic one and you’ll be told rye whiskey, bitters (Peychaud’s, sometimes Angostura too), a sugar cube, and an old-fashioned glass coated with absinthe. Well, that’s just not good enough for Monsieur Lord Simon Difford, Esq., Ph.D. VII…
Ceci n’est pas une Cosmopolitan.
Girly-looking, manly-named!
Here we have a Tuxedo Martini. It is of a piece with the Stork Club, a cocktail I blogged a few weeks back, in that both were christened after the New York City hotspots where they were invented. Allow me to quote my ever-dogeared copy of Difford’s Encyclopedia of Cocktails:
“Created at the Tuxedo Club, New York, circa 1885. A year later this was the birthplace of the tuxedo, when a tobacco magnate, Griswold Lorillard, wore the first ever tailless dinner jacket and named the style after the club.”
A few things:
In some circles, the El Presidente is otherwise known as a Cuban Martini. It’s also one of those cocktails with slippery origins; in my Difford’s Encyclopedia of Cocktails, this is the fourth of four known El Presidente recipes printed. Variations include:
- El Presidente #1: Light rum, pineapple juice, lime juice, grenadine; a slim change-up on a classic daiquiri, replacing its simple syrup with pineapple juice. (Which, now that I think about it, is a great idea.)
- El Presidente #2: Light rum, dry vermouth, bitters. Difford’s describes it as “bone dry” and “rather like a rum-based, old-school Martini.”
- El Presidente #3: Light rum, dry vermouth, Cointreau, grenadine. A Trader Vic’s recipe, of which Vic himself allegedly said, “This is the real recipe.” (But I think he claims that about all of his concoctions? At least about the Mai Tai, which he said he flat-out invented.)
- El Presidente #4: Light rum, dry vermouth, Cointreau. “Dry but not bone dry, with balanced fruit from the triple sec and vermouth.” Ding ding ding ding ding, we have a winner!
I have seen recipes for champagne martinis that call for just vodka and sparkler. I have come across others (more than I would have guessed) that all swear by a spoonful of raspberry puree in the bottom of the glass, with some fizz and whatever else on top. And I have read that just bubbly and Cointreau is what constitutes a proper Champagne Martini — if “proper” is even a descriptor we can properly use when discussing a cocktail that bears, at best, a second-cousin resemblance to a proper-proper martini-martini.
My new favorite acronym is MINO — Martini in Name Only. It was, I will admit to you devout drinkers, a fact of life I had to swallow (straight, no chaser) when I agreed to author a cocktail book called The Big Book of Martinis for Moms. Clearly, not all 175+ recipes in the book are vodka- and or gin-based, for one thing. Believe you me, I did strive to make as many of the book’s recipes fall in line with a classic martini’s most hallowed guidelines. As it turns out, Mom does not live on vermouth alone.
Hey, bourbon face! Are you as cray-cray in love with bourbon as this blotto besotted bourbonperson is? Do you eat, drink dream drink and sleep drink bourbon? Have you considered naming a pet and/or child Bourbon?
Then have I got a cocktail for you! Like me, you’re probably always on the hunt for yet another way to enjoy your bourbon. After all, just because you can’t spell “Manhattans” without “man” doesn’t mean man should live on Manhattans alone! So here’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna add pineapple juice to your Manhattan.
I’ll wait a moment for you to finish going pppppppppppffffffffttttttttttttttttt… wuhhhhhh?
When I was penning The Big Book of Martinis for Moms – because that’s how one writes a book; one pens them ever so eloquently; one doesn’t thrash at one’s laptop until the “c” key gets permanently stuck or try to organize one’s writer-blocked thoughts by haphazardly slapping a bajillion Post-Its on the wall like a mental patient — I had an idea for a chocolate-cherry cocktail.
If you’ve read skimmed why haven’t you bought this book yet please buy this seen the book, you know that the cocktail recipes therein each correspond to a particular feat of motherhood that deserves a potent, potable reward. So like babyproofing the house is an accomplishment that calls for a Rusty Nail, while helping with homework earns Mom a Brainstorm. The chocolate-cherry cocktail, I thought, would be a mother’s just desserts on those blessed afternoons or evenings when she gets to do nothing at all, fluffy-slippered feet resting atop the coffee table. In other words, like drinking a bonbon.
