Last Thursday was one of those days. You know the ones — you don’t really have anything to complain about, but you get on a mental hamster wheel and before you know it you find yourself scowling at the world, drenched in self-pity.
Fortunately, there is a solution for self-pity: rhubarb.
Even more fortunately, we are right in the middle of rhubarb season. As it turns out, aside from pie, rhubarb is a rockstar ingredient in cocktails. It is sweet and sour (well, OK, mostly sour, but it will be sweet by the time we’re done with it) and princess pink.
A rhubarb margarita, you ask? Yes, please.
Oh, you meant a rhubarb sidecar? Even better.
We’ll do something with gin this time (see below), but first we need to make some rhubarb syrup.
Rhubarb Syrup
- 1 pound or so of cleaned rhubarb stalks, chopped to half-inch dice. (The actual amount doesn’t matter too much, so long as you use an equal amount of sugar.)
- 1 pound or so of granulated sugar – the same amount as the rhubarb, by weight.
- Zest and juice of 1 lemon
Freeze the chopped rhubarb for several hours or overnight. This will form ice crystals that will poke holes in the rhubarb’s cell walls, releasing rhubarb juice more freely once we start cooking.
Later, combine the frozen rhubarb, lemon zest, and the sugar in a saucepan, and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until you get a sort of rhubarb compote swimming in juice, and the juice comes to a boil. Stir in the lemon juice, then take it off the heat and set it aside for an hour or so to sort of collapse in on itself.
Strain through a fine-mesh strainer. Eat the rhubarb compote over ice cream or on a buttered crumpet, and use the pink syrup for cocktails.
Just such a cocktail – Rose & Rhubarb
- 2 ounces botanical gin – At the moment, I’m enjoying Hendrick’s Oasium very much
- 1 ounce fresh-squeezed lemon juice
- 3/4 ounce rhubarb syrup (see above)
- 5 drops rose water – You might want to work your way up to five drops. Rose water can be tricky stuff. One drop too little, and you can’t really taste it, and one drop too much, whatever you’re making ends up tasting like grandmother soap. I had to throw away a perfectly good pear crumble once because I wasn’t paying attention and added a little too much rose water, and it ended up tasting like a rear-view mirror air freshener.
- 2 to 3 ounces plain seltzer
Combine the gin, lemon juice, rhubarb syrup and rose water with ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake thoroughly, and strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass. Top with club soda and stir gently.
Sit somewhere with a gentle breeze and listen to a mostly forgotten song from your youth as you sip this — anything from Meat Loaf’s 1977 album Bat Out of Hell will serve this purpose very well. (Though, admittedly, that’s from my youth). As promised, this pretty, pink drink is sweet and sour and a little floral.
After two of them, you probably won’t take yourself quite so seriously.
Featured photo: Rose & Rhubarb. Photo by John Fladd.