Author: John Fladd

A drink named…

During the 1920s and 1930s, if you were young and had the means, Paris was the place to be.

The war had ended — at least everyone thought so. In the boom times of the Roaring Twenties the arts flourished like they never had before. The French embraced jazz, experimental art and edgy literature. Unencumbered by Prohibition, Parisians were extremely open-minded about cocktails (and indeed, many other fun things as well). American authors and artists moved there in droves.

They stayed through most of the ’30s. The Great Depression hit France as hard as anywhere, but things seemed just as bad at home, and again, there were cocktails. And if you were young, and beautiful, and American in Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s, the place to be was Harry’s New York Bar, on the Rue Daunou. Hemingway drank there. George Gershwin composed An American in Paris there.

And then there were the drinks. Harry’s claims to have invented the bloody mary. Also the Sidecar and the French 75. And this one.

What’s that? What’s it called? Um — er —

HEY! Look over there! Is that an oscelot?!

Anyway, the thing to keep in mind when you are making this particular drink — Excuse me? What’s it called? Darling, let’s keep this pure and special. Let’s not complicate things with too many questions.

As I was saying, the thing to keep in mind when making this particular drink is that while it is, at its core, a relatively straightforward cocktail, it lends itself to more and more elaborate ingredients and techniques. It is easy to slip down a rabbit hole of obsession. As I did.

The Recipe:

1 1/2 ounces mid-level gin (I’ve been drinking Death’s Door lately)

1 1/2 ounces fresh squeezed tangerine juice (OK, you’re going to use orange juice. You know it. I know it. All I’m saying is that I made this with tangerine juice and it is good that way.)

1/2 teaspoon absinthe (Seriously, no more. Absinthe is a very serious player and she is not here for your nonsense.)

1/3 ounce (2 teaspoons) Oleum Saccharum — see below. (Again, let’s face reality. You’re going to read about OS, nod, then probably not make it. Admittedly, it’s a bit of a project. You can replace this with the same amount of grenadine, which will also give your final drink a lovely color.)

1 ounce lime juice (This was not called for in the original recipe, but this drink benefits from extreme cold and a little extra acidity.)

1) Shake all ingredients over ice until skull-shrinkingly cold.

2) Strain into a chilled coupé glass.

3) If you insist on a garnish, then apply one high-octane cocktail cherry with stem. (I’ve been liking Luxardo lately).

This is a lovely cocktail that looks sophisticated and paces itself well. In spite of having just a few ingredients, its flavor is complex. It takes thought and reflection to sort out the fruitiness of the juice and the licorice notes from the absinthe. It lends itself to thoughtful consumption. Is it too sweet? Is it sweet enough? Seriously — licorice? Is the tangerine juice assertive enough? Should I have gone with the orange juice that Harry suggested? What if I played around with ruby grapefruit juice? These questions are to be expected if you’ve made this well. I like to think of it as an intellectual’s cocktail.

And that, my friend, that is how you make a Monkey Gland. Yeah, I know. Would you like another?

Oleum Saccharum
Oleum Saccharum is at its heart a homemade syrup of citrus oil and sugar. It requires you to use a technique called maceration, which is not as naughty as what you’re thinking, but in this case just as self-indulgent. It is the name for extracting juice or oil from fruit with sugar.
Using a vegetable peeler — the Y kind works better for me than the type that looks like a paring knife with a glandular condition — remove the outermost layer of rind from some well-scrubbed citrus fruit. In my case, I used a combination of tangerine and lime rind. (See above.) If you can, try not to get any of the white pith that is beneath the rind; it will add a bitter note to your syrup. (Unless you’ve gotten sucked down the rabbit hole and want to play around with bitterness. In that case, you’re on your own.)
The recipes I’ve found call for 200 grams of rind to 150 grams of sugar. I never have that much fruit rind available; just use a 4:3 ratio (that’s 1 to .75). Alternately, if you are the type of person who plans and thinks ahead, you could save rind in your freezer until you’re ready to make a batch of this.
Combine the rind with sugar and let it sit for about six hours, stirring or shaking occasionally.
After letting it macerate (stop giggling), use a small funnel to pour your oleum saccharum into a tiny bottle. If you leave the rinds in the funnel to drain for an hour or so, you can get a few more precious drops. Store it in your refrigerator until you’re ready to use it.

Featured photo: What’s in a name? Photo by John Fladd.

Zombies!

One fairly common New Year’s resolution is to read more classics of literature. I didn’t actually make that resolution this year, because I really don’t need any more sources of failure and self-recrimination. But that said, I’m probably ahead of the game and have read more classic literature during the first few weeks of this year than many people who did make that resolution.

To wit, 1951’s The Holiday Drink Book.

I did rather well for myself over the holidays and was given several antique cocktail books, this being easily the most festive.

Is it dated? Yes. Does it include dated references to ingredients — claret or sauterne, for example — that we don’t use anymore? Undoubtedly. Does it include unfortunate illustrations of leprechauns, cannibals and serving wenches? Um, yes. That, too.

That said, given the first few weeks of this new year, I think we could all use a stiff drink. And if you are looking for a stiff drink, I say, go to the source — the 1950s, the era of the Three-Martini Lunch. And, if you are looking for a stiff drink from the 1950s, you could do worse than go with the grandfather of all stiff drinks, a Zombie. The Holiday Drink Book puts it rather well: “In appearance and effectiveness the Zombie is the king of all table drinks.”

I’m a big believer in sticking strictly to a recipe the first time I make something. It drives me crazy when someone omits all the butter from a recipe and replaces half the flour with oat bran, then complains that their muffins taste cardboardy. It’s a good idea to cook what the recipe’s author had in mind before messing with it too much.

But you do need to draw the line somewhere.

Did I use four types of rum in my test Zombie, as specified? I did. Did I garnish it with fresh mint leaves and a dusting of powdered sugar? Yes.

But here’s where The Holiday Drink Book and I parted ways: Their recipe calls for papaya juice.

Now, I don’t want to hurt your feelings if you happen to be a papaya, but certain harsh truths need to be recognized. Papaya is a trash fruit. If fruit cocktail and oatmeal had a torrid half-hour in the alley behind a bar, the result would be something very much like papaya. So I had to play with the recipe a bit. Ultimately, this is what I came up with:

The Purple Zombie

The juice of one lime – approx. 2 oz.
1 oz. pineapple juice
1 oz. frozen grape juice concentrate – the deeply purple kind
1 oz. golden rum
2 oz. dark rum – I used Meyers’s
1 oz. white rum – I went with Mr. Boston
½ oz. apricot brandy

Enough over-proof rum to float on the surface of the cocktail – in my case, Gosling’s Black Seal 151-proof dark rum

4 up-market cocktail cherries – right now, I really like Luxardo.

Fresh mint leaves to garnish

1) Combine the first seven ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until very cold. I like to include one of the spent lime halves, as well. I don’t know for a fact that it improves the flavor, but I like to give limes the vote of confidence. They are the hardest-working members of the citrus family, and I like to make them feel needed.

2) Remove the lime half, then pour the contents of the shaker — ice and all — into the most garish tiki glass you own.

3) Float ½ an ounce or so of the 151 over the top of the drink. Pour it over the back of a spoon, much like you would the whiskey in an Irish Coffee, so it stays on the surface.

4) Garnish with snobby cocktail cherries and fresh mint. If your mint leaves are large, chiffonade them (cut them into ribbons).

Three important points about The Purple Zombie:

a) The mint leaves totally make this drink. Somehow the herbiness of the mint plays very well off the dominant taste of the cocktail, which is the rum. Don’t skip the mint.

b) Do skip the powdered sugar. I’m not entirely sure what they were thinking with that one.

c) “Wait a second. You got all snobby about papaya, then replaced it with frozen grape juice concentrate? What kind of beatnik hypocrite are you?” What can I say? It works. The drink needs some sweetness to balance the alcohol and the grape juice concentrate does that very well while adding to the fruitiness. Why not just grape juice? It isn’t quite sweet enough. You need to go with the hard stuff.

Plus, it turns your Zombie purple.

Am I saying that drinking a Zombie will remove any of the heavy weight that the past year has put on your shoulders? No. But I am saying that if you approach it right, a good Zombie might give you the emotional shoulder pads to allow you to claw your way through to February.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

An adventure in sesame: Drinks with John Fladd

Do you remember reading those Choose Your Own Adventure books when you were a kid?
You’d get to a turning point in a story, then find instructions like:
“To poke the sleeping bear with a stick, turn to page 130.
To run away from the sleeping bear as fast as you can, turn to page 170.”
So, then you’d turn to page 170, and read something like:
“Oh, no! You run away so fast that you don’t watch where you are going and ram into an oak tree, dislodging a porcupine, which falls on you. You scream so loudly that you wake the bear, who eats you, then picks his teeth with the quills. The End.”
This drink is a little like that, minus the hostile wildlife. It is an adventure in sesame.
I’ve been thinking a lot about fat-washing, lately. Fat-washing is what upscale bartenders call a method of infusing alcohol with the flavor of something oily. You hear occasionally about bacon-washed bourbon, or butter-washed rum. Almost any food that is fat-soluble is also soluble in alcohol. Shmancy bartenders can use that chemical loophole to add background notes to a cocktail. Theoretically, you could use this technique to make a peanut butter and jelly martini, for instance. (Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Let me write that down…)
A week or so ago, it occurred to me that if you can fat-wash peanut butter, couldn’t you do the same thing with tahini, the sesame paste used in hummus? I adapted a recipe for peanut butter-washed bourbon:

Tahini Rum

1 liter inexpensive white rum (As usual, you probably don’t want to use your good stuff, when you are covering up most of the subtle flavors with tahini. I used Mr. Boston.)
16 oz. tahini (I like Krinos.)

  1. Combine rum and tahini in a very large jar or other air-tight container. Shake with great vigor.
  2. Store the jar somewhere warm and dark for seven days, shaking twice per day.
  3. Strain through a fine mesh strainer, then filter through a coffee filter.

This results in a fantastic sesame rum. It is silver in color. It is smooth and tastes delicious. You could easily sit in an armchair with a brandy snifter of the stuff. There is, however, a drawback:
The rum and the tahini have spent a week getting their groove on. At the end of it, the rum has gotten everything she wants out of this fling, says, “Well, this was fun…” and goes on her way. The tahini, on the other hand, has turned into Rick Astley, and is determined that he is never going to give her up.
As much as the rum has bonded with the tahini, the tahini has bonded with the rum, and without the use of a lab-grade centrifuge — which my wife will not let me buy — a liter of rum nets you between 10 and 12 ounces of finished product. Given that there was a relatively small investment in the rum to begin with, that might be OK.
But there is another way:

Sesame Rum No. 2

1 cup white sesame seeds
4 cups white rum

  1. Over medium-low heat, toast the sesame seeds in a small skillet, stirring constantly, until they have turned the color of a graham cracker or a lion.
  2. Transfer seeds to the same large jar or airtight container. Add the rum. There will be a satisfying sizzle.
  3. Shake, then store in the same warm, dark place for four days, shaking twice per day.
  4. Filter through a coffee filter.

This sesame rum is not as smooth and silvery as its little brother, but it is also delicious. It has a deep golden color and really pops in your mouth, shouting, “It’s SESAME TIME, Baby!”
And you net about a quart of rum.
So, now you’ve effectively made the first of your Choose Your Own Cocktail choices — silvery and sleek, or bold and bronzy.
Here is your second choice:
The Vera Cruz Chameleon
3 oz. Tahini rum
3 gr. (a very small handful) cilantro
¼ oz. simple syrup
Tonic water to top (I like Fever Tree)
Tiny ice cubes

  1. Rinse the cilantro, then muddle it thoroughly in the bottom of a cocktail shaker.
  2. Add rum, then dry shake. (This means without ice.) This will allow the alcohol to extract color and flavor from the cilantro.
  3. Add ice and simple syrup, then shake again, until cold.
  4. Strain into a large glass, over tiny ice cubes.
  5. Top with tonic, then stir gently.

This is really delicious. The first flavor to hit you is the cilantro, but there is a delightful, smooth sesame aftertaste. If you are a cilantro fan — and of course you are, because you are smart and tasteful — you will love this.
But wait! What’s that you say? You’re not a cilantro fan? That’s very sad, but I’ve got you covered there, too.

The Lebanese Chameleon

3 oz. Sesame Rum No. 2
3 gr. (a very small handful) flat-leaf parsley
¼ oz. simple syrup
Tonic water to top
Tiny ice cubes

  1. Rinse, muddle and dry shake the parsley as above. Do NOT shake a second time.
  2. Filter your parsley/sesame rum through a coffee filter, into a tall glass, half filled with tiny ice cubes.
  3. Add the simple syrup and stir vigorously.
  4. Top with tonic, then stir again, this time gently.
  5. Drink with immense satisfaction.

So, do you remember that classic of American literature, The Cat In The Hat Comes Back? The one where the cat leaves a greasy pink bathtub ring that threatens to engulf the neighborhood? If you don’t filter the parsley rum, you will get the same stain, but in swamp green. It will taste delicious but will not look appetizing. If you want to skip the filtering step, drink this cocktail in a tiki mug.
A note on tiny ice cubes: I recently discovered that you can buy small silicone ice trays that make tiny (about ¼-inch) ice cubes that are like crushed ice, but better! They chill your drink extremely well and they look really, really cool.
So you can make a cilantro-based cocktail with tahini rum or sesame rum, or use the same recipe — again, with your choice of rums — with parsley, instead. You are somewhat spoiled for choice.
And there are no bears.
John Fladd is a veteran Hippo writer, a father, writer and cocktail enthusiast, living in New Hampshire.

Featured Photo: The Vera Cruz Chameleon. Photo by John Fladd.

The Blue Train

Shortly after the end of the First World War, it became fashionable for wealthy British to spend at least part of their winter in Southern France. Their money went further there and the Riviera had been spared the worst of the destruction during the War. They could see and be seen by their peers, while sitting in the sunshine and pretending to be bored by their privilege.

This was so common that a train service developed to pick the Smart Set up in Calais, on the other side of the English Channel, then take them, via Paris, to different stops along the Mediterranean. Because the sleeper cars were painted blue, this train became known as The Blue Train.

One interesting aspect of this was that upper-class British adventurers started challenging each other to race the Blue Train across France in their cars. For a brief period of time this became a standing challenge, like swimming the Channel, or shooting leopards — a chance to show off for their peers and look good doing it. Because, of course, the other members of their social circle would be on the Blue Train itself.

“I say,” one of the passengers might say, pointing at a cloud of dust in the distance, “do you think that is Waldo and Reggie?’

“I believe it is! Oh, jolly good; we must drink a toast to them! Waiter!”

Which, theoretically, is where we get The Blue Train Cocktail.

If you go searching for a recipe for a Blue Train, you will find dozens, which vary wildly in their ingredients and methodology, but the oldest ones are extremely simple:

• Three parts brandy

• One part pineapple juice (Pineapple juice? Where did that come from?)

• An unspecified amount of Champagne

I like the romance of this drink and such a simple formula seemed extremely flexible, so I decided to try various riffs on it. Instead of Champagne, I substituted prosecco – because what am I, fancy? – and several different types of brandy:

• Several sources suggested using apricot brandy and that seemed promising. As it turns out, not so much.

• Ginger brandy was even worse.

• Then I decided to return to the fruit theme and made a batch with blackberry brandy. Please, for the sake of everything that is good and wholesome, do not do this.

After a great deal of experimentation and heartache, I was able to fine-tune this recipe to its ideal proportions:

• Three parts brandy

• One part pineapple juice

• An unspecified amount of Champagne

(1) Shake the brandy and pineapple juice over ice.

(2) Strain into glasses

(3) Top with Champagne

This is not a drink that is meant to be sweet. If you use prosecco and a sweet brandy, it ends up tasting like cider, which is fine, but then, why not just drink cider? This drink calls for a drier, more bracing, more refined set of ingredients. I am a big proponent of using bottom-shelf alcohols; when you are making cocktails with strong-flavored ingredients, the subtler nuances of more serious, expensive labels can easily get overwhelmed and covered up.

Not in this case. If you’ve got good brandy, self-respecting brandy, this is a good time to break it out. The same with the Champagne. I’m not saying to buy the best Champagne, but this is a good opportunity to use a dry Champagne that isn’t afraid to look at itself in the mirror. This is not a drink that was developed by people who cut corners.

Serve this with something salty, like caviar.

Or Cheez-Its.

Cocktail-inspired gift suggestions

• Truly excellent cocktail cherries — Bada Bing Cherries from Stonewall Kitchen ($7.95 for 13.5 oz., or $34.95 from 72 oz., if you’re really serious) A good cocktail cherry can save a cocktail. A good cocktail cherry can bring a moment of sunshine and contentment in a gray and sullen world. These are very good cocktail cherries. They are rich and deeply flavored, with the slightest hint of muskiness, like a half-heard whisper. And they fit in a stocking.

• A proper kitchen scale — KUBEI Upgraded Lager Size Digital Food Scale ($23.99) Like many people over the past several months, I got sucked into the fraught world of sourdough bread. In theory it’s pretty simple. There are few ingredients. Peasants have been making it for centuries. In the trenches, though, sourdough is a cruel mistress who will toy with your emotions and leave you a spent, whimpering husk.

The secret to establishing detente with her is a good kitchen scale.

Weighing – especially by the gram – gives you freedom and power in the kitchen. Your measurements become precise. You use fewer dishes. You start writing weight-equivalents in your cookbooks.

This is an excellent, affordable scale. It switches easily between grams, ounces and pounds with the press of a button. It is battery-powered but can be plugged in or even recharged. It measures to an accuracy of a hundredth of a gram. It has a tare button.

A tare button!

If you don’t know what that is, you will. Oh, you will…

Featured Photo: A Blue Train. Photo by John Fladd.

S’mores martini

Sylvester Graham would hate this article. For the purposes of this week’s cocktails, here’s what you need to know about Graham, who died in 1851:

• He didn’t invent the graham cracker — he encouraged people to grind their own flour (he said white bread was made from “tortured wheat”). Some mills started producing a rougher-ground, whole-grain flour that they called Graham flour. Graham crackers were made using this flour.

• He was horrified by alcohol.

• He was very impatient; he couldn’t understand why Americans didn’t just listen to him and change their lifestyles instantly (he basically thought pleasure and anything that gave you pleasure — alcohol, meat, sex — is bad for you).

So, here’s our first tie-in with Sylvester Graham: What’s with all the exotic ingredients, Cocktail Boy?

I’ve been looking back at the last several cocktails I’ve written about and I’m pretty sure some of you have been thinking to yourself, “OK, this drink sounds very interesting, but do I really need Nepalese orchid pollen to make it?” The most exotic ingredients in today’s drinks are cocoa nibs and grapefruit juice. (No, not together.)

The bad news is that Cocktail No. 1 will take you a week to make.

Cocktail No. 1 – The S’mores Martini

After making chocolate vodka last month, I decided to see if I could make graham cracker vodka (Sylvester Graham connection No. 2).

I’ll spare you the experimental methodology, but in short, it works.

Graham Cracker Vodka

1 sleeve (135 grams) graham crackers

3 cups 80 proof inexpensive vodka

Combine graham crackers and vodka in a blender. Blend at whatever speed pleases you for one minute. Feel free to chuckle evilly as the graham crackers meet their fate.

Pour into a wide-mouthed, airtight jar.

Store in a warm, dark place for a week, shaking twice daily.

(And this is really important) On Day 7, DO NOT SHAKE THE JAR.

Gently pour the clear liquid through a fine-meshed strainer, then through a coffee filter, into a labeled bottle.

Strain the remaining graham cracker glop overnight, then filter and add to your bottle.

S’mores Martini

2 oz. chocolate vodka

2 oz. graham cracker vodka

3-4 miniature marshmallows, for garnish.

In a mixing glass (see below), pour equal amounts of chocolate and graham cracker vodka over ice.

Stir gently but thoroughly.

Pour off, into a chilled martini glass.

Garnish with toasted miniature marshmallows, much like you would a conventional martini, with olives.

Some bartenders make standard, conventional martinis by pouring an ounce or so of vermouth over the ice in the mixing glass, stirring it around, then pouring it out. The vermouth-washed ice adds just enough vermouthiness to the gin to make a solid dry martini. I suspect that if one were to wash the ice in this drink with creme de cacao before mixing in the chocolate and graham cracker vodkas, it would deepen the flavor even more. That would stretch the boundaries of Sylvester Graham-like simplicity and humble ingredients, though.

Observation No. 1 – Is this idea a bit cutesy and Food Networky?

Yes, but if you find yourself with chocolate and graham cracker vodkas, the Universe sort of demands that you do it.

Observation No. 2 – Shaken versus Stirred

For years, I’ve heard martini snobs sneering at the whole James Bond, shaken-not-stirred concept. But for the sake of … um, I’m not actually sure what … I decided to make two different versions of this martini, one shaken brutally in a Boston shaker (the kind with two halves) and one stirred in a mixing glass.

Shockingly, there was a real difference, and not a small one. The shaken martini had a different look, a different mouth-feel and even a different taste than the silkier one made in the mixing glass. By comparison, it seemed like it was made in a frat house. The stirred one was delightful and civilized.

Does this mean that you’ll have to invest in a special mixing glass and long spirally bar spoon? I did, but I suspect you could do just as well with a glass measuring cup and the blunt end of a butter knife. But let’s say you suffer from a Sylvester Graham-like impatience. Try this instead:

Featured photo: S’mores martini. Photo by John Fladd.

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