Author: John Fladd

When I was extremely young, my father was a big fan of easy listening music. His favorite song was called “I Want Some Red Roses for a Blue Lady.” I remember this song as being awful.

Yesterday I thought of it for some reason and looked it up. It turns out that Wayne Newton recorded it in 1965. As I called it up on YouTube, I knew that I would listen to it and realize that now, as I hobble into late middle age, it would actually be pretty good. I would find myself enjoying it and that a week from now it would be on the driving playlist I use to torture my teenager.

As it turns out, it’s even worse than I remembered from my childhood. The trauma from hearing this as a kid must have forced the worst of it from my memory. Even I wouldn’t inflict this on The Teen.

On the topic of questionable decisions from the 1960s, I was reading through 1969’s The Esquire Drink Book, looking for a new cocktail recipe. When it comes to Mad Men-era, charming-but-arrogant drink recipes, Esquire had a bit of a corner on the market.

The recipe that grabbed my attention had a name so of its time that even after I read through it, said, “Nah!” and flipped past it, I kept returning to it: The Bosom Caresser. I mean, if you’re looking for a Swinging Sixties, Wayne Newton on the hi-fi, “My wife doesn’t understand me” type of drink, this seemed like a no-brainer.

Long story short: I ended up making it and it was OK. It was not spectacular and I don’t think I’ll make it again. The combination of brandy, marsala wine and raw egg yolk did not fill me with enthusiasm.

(That said, I did find out the hard way that if you do make a cocktail with a raw egg yolk in it, you should dry-shake it with the alcohol first, before adding the ice. Dropping a yolk into a shaker full of ice will make some of it freeze and you will end up with really unappetizing globs of it floating around in your drink that you will need to filter out before serving. We know that now.)

So where does that leave us?

In my case, invigorated from a long hot shower, to wash the sleaze off me and the memory of Wayne Newton out of my memory. As an antidote, here is the classiest drink I know:

Lady in Blue

Ingredients

1½ ounces very cold gin

¼ ounce créme de violette

¾ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice

½ ounce simple syrup

3 drops orange blossom water

A “slip” of blue curaçao

Combine all ingredients, except the blue curaçao, with ice in a cocktail shaker.

Shake until frost forms on the shaker and your hands become uncomfortably cold.

Strain into a martini glass. This is one occasion where you should not frost the glass first; you will want to show this cocktail off. The frosted glass would mess with that.

Pour a small slip of blue curaçao down one side of the glass. It is denser than the rest of the drink and will pool in the bottom of the glass.

While this is a delicious cocktail — crisp, gently sweet, subtly floral and just ginny enough to grab your attention — this is probably the prettiest drink you will ever make. If you find yourself needing to impress somebody, this is the drink to make. It’s gorgeous without making it seem like you’ve tried too hard.

Featured photo: Lady in Blue. Photo by John Fladd.

Editor’s note: Sometimes the essence of a drink can be summed up in short story. ‘Tis thus with this week’s cocktail.

Elizabeth closed her eyes and took several deep breaths, before opening them again and walking to the bar.

Friggin’ Sheila O’Brien

Elizabeth had spent the better part of a week making arrangements to get one evening to herself, to spend a couple of hours alone, drinking a glass of wine and reading. She’d grabbed a book from the middle of the pile on her nightstand. She’d even remembered an umbrella.

And then Sheila had been standing by the door inside the bar.

They’d gone to high school together; Sheila had always been able to smile and cut Elizabeth down with a sentence, to crush her effortlessly. From how easily she’d done it again tonight, it was almost like she’d been practicing.

But, Elizabeth thought as she settled herself at the bar, that was over for the moment. She caught the bartender’s eye. Raven, was that her name?

She started to order a glass of the house white, but Raven was a step ahead of her and deposited an espresso martini in front of her. This is absolutely not what Elizabeth would have remotely considered ordering, but it did look good…

It was dark and deep, and skull-shrinkingly cold. The coffee was rich and a little bitter, but there was a sweetness in the background that rounded it out.

Elizabeth looked up at Raven and started to speak, to thank her for reading her situation so well, but the bartender beat her to the punch.

“You have kind eyes, but I wouldn’t mess with you.” Then she walked away.

This was not what Elizabeth was expecting, but the more she thought about it, and the more of her martini she drank, the more she liked the sound of it.

She almost hoped Sheila was still by the door when she left.

Espresso martini

Ingredients:

2 ounces coffee-infused vodka (see below). Could you make this with regular, run-of-the-mill vodka? Yes, of course, but it wouldn’t contribute to the depth of the overall flavor. Using the infused vodka will deepen the finished drink.

½ ounce Kahlua

½ ounce simple syrup

1 ounce cold-brew coffee concentrate

Combine all ingredients over ice in a mixing glass and stir gently but thoroughly with a bar spoon.

Strain into a chilled martini glass.

If you are drinking this at a bar, make direct eye contact with yourself in the mirror.

There is a lot of reverse nostalgic snobbery associated with an espresso martini. It is often too sweet, or creamy, and it doesn’t tend to get a lot of respect. Made very strong, very black, and only a tiny bit sweet, it is a force to be reckoned with.

Speaking of snobbery — there are a lot of cocktail purists who, given the opportunity, will lecture you at great length about how you should never shake a martini. It “bruises the gin” apparently. It is incredibly galling to admit that they are right. This drink will taste noticeably different if it is made in a cocktail shaker than if it is stirred. It’s got something to do with science. It’s worth the extra minute or so to mix this gently.

Coffee-infused vodka

Ingredients

10 grams whole French-roast coffee beans

6 ounces 80-proof vodka, probably not your best vodka, but not the bottom-shelf stuff, either

Using a mortar and pestle, or cereal bowl and the bottom of a drinking glass, crush the coffee beans. You’re not trying to grind them into a powder, but break them up quite a bit.

Combine the vodka and crushed coffee beans in a small jar. Shake them together, then store somewhere cool and dark for 24 hours, shaking periodically.

Strain and label the coffee vodka.

Featured photo: Espresso martini. Photo by John Fladd.

I understand that you’ve got a lot going on right now — a pandemic, work headaches, psychotic squirrels terrorizing your birdfeeder, etc. So it’s understandable if you’ve lost track of things and forgotten that it is Yachting Season. We’ve only got so much emotional bandwidth, and some things drop through the cracks.

Fortunately, Esquire has your back. Or at least they did in 1969.

The Esquire Drink Book from that year strikes a very particular tone. Hidden amongst the recipes for Brandy Daiseys, Black Roses and racially-insensitively-named drinks that were probably pretty good but have been ruined for us now are the cryptic instructions for an innocuous-sounding cocktail called the Connecticut Bullfrog:

“This cocktail must never be served on shore but always on a boat, provided that the boat is not over 45 feet long, and the owner is the skipper (no hired hand). The ingredients are awful but the result does have something. Here they are and you must have them on board:

4 parts gin

1 part New England rum

1 part lemon juice

1 part maple syrup

Shake these ingredients together until your arms ache. Then have someone else do the same thing with about 10 times the usual amount of ice.”

— Esquire Drink Book, Frederic A. Birmingham, 1969, E.P. Dutton & Co., p. 216.

Having all these ingredients on hand, and being emotionally and intellectually at sea, I felt the need to field test the Bullfrog. I am the sole owner of my entirely imaginary yacht — which, being imaginary, is infinitely less than 45 feet long.

Not surprisingly, the Bullfrog was problematic from the get-go. I filled the large half of my cocktail shaker with ice — about 11 ounces — and added the seven ounces of liquid ingredients, at which point the smaller half of the shaker would no longer contain all the components.

(This cocktail deserves a poster: “The Connecticut Bullfrog cannot be contained.”)

So, I switched — as you will have to, if you decide to dance with the Bullfrog — to a large, one-quart jar.

I told my digital assistant to start a stopwatch, and started shaking.

The jar got uncomfortably cold very quickly — cold, as in frosty enough to bond my hands to the glass. Once I was able to pry them loose, this was solved by wrapping the jar in a tea towel.

The next problem was an unexpected one. I was pretty sure that my arms would start aching fairly quickly. I am not terribly fit in a general sense, but a regular regimen of martial arts and cocktail shaking have apparently toned me in unexpected ways. I lasted nine minutes. I know this because I asked my digital assistant how long I’d been shaking this jar.

“Over an extended period, possibly;” she told me, “then again, maybe not.” This sounds philosophically important, but was not as useful in a practical sense as I was looking for in the moment.

It took another full minute of shaking to stumble on an acceptably worded command to find out how long this exercise had been going on.

As instructed, I handed the jar off to my teenager in the next room, who lasted two minutes, five seconds before losing interest and handing it back to me.

At this point, a reasonable shaker (in a cocktail sense; I’m reasonably sure a Shaker, as in the 19th-century furniture-making religious community, would not have found themselves in this situation) could be forgiven for thinking that this project’s glitches were more or less over. Unfortunately, physics had other plans.

Air — particularly moist air — expands when it is heated and shrinks when it cools. Home canners use this fact to hermetically seal jars of compote and … stuff. Apparently, the same effect occurs when you shake an icy alcohol solution in a wide-mouthed jar for 11 minutes. It took a rubber jar-gripper and a lot of swearing to open the Bullfrog jar.

Pouring the contents into a tall glass was easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy in contrast.

So, is the Connecticut Bullfrog worth all the effort? Is it actually any good?

Almost disappointingly: yeah, it is. I really wanted to sneer at a cocktail designed to be drunk by investment analysts named Scooter and Bunny, but this is one of the most refreshing drinks I’ve had in a long time. The combination of gin and dark rum — I went with Myers’s — gives an almost whiskey-like background flavor, which plays well with the acid of the lemon juice. There isn’t enough maple syrup to make this too sweet, but enough that there is some body and depth.

I do feel that more experimentation is called for — specifically, subbing out juice and syrup for other, less 1 percent-y ingredients –— and, as a friend observed to me, given the sheer amount of shaking required by this recipe, the drink really ought to be called the Kinetic Bullfrog.

Featured photo: Connecticut Bullfrog. Photo by John Fladd.

I deeply distrust economics.

Yes, I acknowledge that economics provides some convenient answers, but I don’t really trust it. It’s like the character in a movie — always shot with shadowy lighting — who supplies the hero with important information. Everything seems on the up-and-up, but something about the whole exchange makes you realize that she really isn’t on the hero’s side. When things fall apart badly in the third act, you nod your head and tell your eye-rolling date, “Yup, thought so.”

Economics pretends to explain a great deal about human nature, but once you make peace with the concept that money is imaginary and economics is arbitrary, everything sort of falls apart.

“Why is such-and-such worth so much money?”

Because that’s what people agree it’s worth.

“Janitors and farm workers do work way more important than CEOs; why don’t we pay them more?”

Because we don’t want to.

Totally. Arbitrary.

And yet — OK, have you ever made an impulsive purchase or invested a lot of time and money in something that ultimately hasn’t worked out? Hobby supplies or a disappointing vacation or a boyfriend — that you kept around or stuck with long after they ceased to be rewarding?

You or I might call that Poor Judgment, but economists have a name for it (because of course they do): the Sunk Cost Fallacy. The idea is that we don’t want to “waste” all the money and heartache that we’ve put into something unproductive, which makes sense on an emotional level but isn’t actually terribly logical. That money and effort are gone, no matter how you feel about it. Investing more time in Bradley or shelf space on scrapbooking materials doesn’t make much sense if they aren’t going to fulfill you.

Which brings us to triple sec.

It is a sweet, low-octane, vaguely citrusy liquor that 99 percent of us have around because of that time we were going to make a pitcher of margaritas, but we forgot to buy limes, and then we had a series of hard weeks at work and ended up drinking all the tequila one slug at a time, directly from the bottle, in lieu of sending ill-advised texts.

Anyway, an economist would tell us to throw away the triple sec; it’s just taking up shelf space. Marie Kondo would ask you if it was bringing you joy, which — let’s face it — it isn’t at the moment. It’s really hard to envision a scenario where you are lying on a polar bear rug in front of a fire and purring, “Hey baby, let’s drink some triple sec.”

Let’s give Marie — and the polar bear — a break, and stare the economist in the eye and let him know that yes, in point of fact, we are using that triple sec.

The Firecracker

3 1-inch cubes (~45 grams) of fresh watermelon
1½ ounces golden rum
1 ounce triple sec
½ ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

Muddle the watermelon thoroughly in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. It will surprise you how easily it dissolves, like it’s been waiting for an excuse to completely fall apart. Better it than you.
Add ice and the other ingredients. Shake until very cold.
Strain into a coupé glass.

Drink several of these while watching Wall Street Week in Review and shouting “YOU DON’T KNOW ME!” at the TV.

Surprisingly, it is the watermelon that takes a back seat in this cocktail, providing color and a vague fruitiness. The rum is great — rum is everybody’s friend — but is there mostly to bridge the different varieties of sweetness. The stars of the drink are — again, unexpectedly — the triple sec and cayenne. Citrusy sweetness and in-your-face spiciness don’t seem like they would work together, but they do. That’s yet another mystery that economics can’t solve.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

All flowers supposedly carry symbolic meanings, but some are more emotionally fraught than others.

When I was a child, my mother told me that our elderly neighbor was sick and that we should probably send her some flowers.

Me: “How about lilies? Those are pretty.”

Mom: “Honey, those represent Death.”

Me: “So, no?”

Even if you don’t buy into the whole symbolism of flowers thing, it still permeates our culture. If you showed up for a blind date and they brought you a dozen long-stemmed red roses, you’d start looking for escape routes.

My dad is a carnation man. Growing up, anybody, any occasion, I could pretty much expect him to give a bunch of red and white carnations. They lasted forever, smelled good and didn’t carry too many expectations. Me — I’m an alstroemeria guy. They are pretty, don’t make anybody nervous and are pretty much bullet-proof; stick them in some water, and they’ll outlast the sour cream in your refrigerator. The downside is that they don’t have much of a smell.

Why flowers smell so good is a bit of a mystery. I mean, we know why they smell good — to attract bees, hummingbirds and chorus girls — but nobody has ever been able to figure out how to breed reliably fragrant roses, for instance. The intersection of botany and human chemoreceptors is a complicated and mysterious dance.

Nowhere more so than in a cocktail.

Scientists estimate that somewhere around 80 percent of everything we eat is actually based on what it smells like. If you’re holding a shmancy party and want to serve a cheese board, experts will tell you to take the cheese out of the fridge an hour or so before you actually want to serve it, so that the volatile chemicals in the cheese loosen up and become easier to smell, and thus, taste. This is one of the reasons why so many cocktail recipes call for you to chill a cocktail so thoroughly — as your drink warms up, the flavor will evolve as the esters float up into the back of your palate.

That gets tricky, though, when you are basing your cocktail on floral smells. Rose water or lavender pull you into a dangerous standoff — too little, and your drink won’t taste like much of anything. One drop too much, and you’re dealing with the little decorative soaps in your grandmother’s bathroom.

This drink depends on that. Your first sip or two should be extremely cold. The taste should be crisp and a little gin-forward. As it warms up — and, not for nothin’ that’s why glasses have stems; to slow down the warming process — it will start to smell more perfumy and floral. The taste will match the color; it will start to taste pink.

Rose N. Hibiscus

2 ounces gin (For this, I used Collective Arts Rhubarb and Hibiscus Gin, which a friend who distributes gin in New Hampshire gave me, because it is gently hibiscus-y, but pretty much any gin will work, though it will add its own stamp onto the finished drink.)
1 ounce hibiscus syrup (see below)
1 ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
1/3 oz. amaretto
5 drops rose water

Combine all ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake until very cold.
Strain into a martini glass.

Why this strange combination works so well:

The botanical backnotes in the gin play well with the rose water. Roses play well with almonds — in this case, the amaretto. Almonds and lemons go together extremely well. Lemon, in its turn, is a classic pairing with gin. The hibiscus makes it pink. If you like your drink a little crisper, pour small amounts of it into your glass at a time, and drink it extremely cold. If you want a little more of the flowers, pour it all in one go and let the perfume develop as you drink it.

Much like carnations and alstroemeria, this is delicious to share with somebody without making anything weird between you. All it says is, “I like spending time with you.”

Hibiscus Syrup

5 ounces water
5 ounces sugar
1/3 ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
1/3 ounce dried hibiscus blossoms

Combine sugar and water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring often.
Let the simple syrup boil for 10 to 15 seconds to make certain the sugar is completely dissolved.
Remove from heat. Add lemon juice and hibiscus blossoms.
Cover and steep for 30 minutes.
Strain and bottle. Keep indefinitely in your refrigerator.

A Market in Manchester carries dried hibiscus and they can also be found online. Rose water is available in most supermarkets and can usually be found in the international foods aisle.

Featured photo: Rose N. Hibiscus. Photo by John Fladd.