Author: John Fladd

It’s not spring yet.

Count on spring at this point, and you’ll only get your heart broken. There are at least two more blizzards and a lot of mud before spring gets here.

But there are hints. Whispers of hints. Whispers of innuendos of hints.

An afternoon where you can get the mail in shirtsleeves.

Old guys in the library parking lot talking about sugaring equipment.

Parts — only parts at this point, don’t get too excited — of your front steps are bare of snow and dry.

We’re still in the lion part of “In like a lion; out like a lamb.”

So I went looking for a lion-themed cocktail, and found something promising called a Lion’s Tail — a sort of a cross between a whiskey sour and a daiquiri, with front notes of bourbon and hope, and back notes of loneliness and bitter disappointment.

It’s good — very good — but with two small issues:

(1) It calls for bourbon, which is a good idea. Bourbon can be caramel-y and delicious and add a note of class to the proceedings. But I’m out of bourbon, and I can’t afford the good stuff, anyway. (You can fake your way through a lot of drinks with bottom-shelf rum or gin, but in my experience, most bourbon doesn’t get good until it is physically painful to pay for.)

(2) It calls for a specialty liqueur called allspice dram — a low-octane but very flavorful ingredient. As it turns out, I do have a bottle of it at the very back of my liquor cabinet — a relic of a short-lived but intense tiki phase I went through a year or so ago — but seriously, who else is going to have this kicking around?

So let’s see what we can do to replicate this with more proletarian ingredients:

Step 1 – Make the original cocktail with more-or-less original ingredients.

** Sound of clattering. “Mumble, mumble …” Measuring … **

“Google, how many dashes to fluid ounce?”

“Blah, blah … Was this answer helpful to you?”

“No! Not even a little bit! … Wait! I meant teaspoons….”

** More clattering, mumbling. Finally, the sound of a cocktail shaker, then pouring. **

Verdict: This is very good. The allspice is a big deal. Huh, go figure.

Step 2 – Replicating the recipe

Lion’s Butt Cocktail

Ingredients

• Syrup – ¼ cup sugar, ¼ cup water, 20 allspice berries, cracked in a mortar and pestle
• 2 ounces rye
• ¾ ounce allspice syrup
• ½ ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
• ¼ tsp. angostura bitters

Combine sugar, water and allspice berries to a very small saucepan and stir, bring to a boil. Remove from heat and allow to steep for 30 minutes. Strain and set aside.

Combine rye, allspice syrup, lime juice and bitters with ice in a cocktail shaker.

Shake thoroughly, until you hear the ice splintering.

Strain into a coupé glass.

Verdict: Very nice, indeed.

The original cocktail was heavy on the allspice, which totally works — especially this time of year. For a tropical spice, it suits winter weather very well. This — I won’t say “knockoff” — er, tribute version is a little more lime-forward and a skosh less sweet. (I’ve grown to really like rye. I’m not sure why that’s surprising to me, but it is. But then again, almost-spring is a surprising time of year.) The rye works well with the lime, which works well with the slightly spicy syrup. Could this be slightly cloying and too sweet? Yes, but it is saved by the bitters swooping in, wearing a cape, and deflecting the sweetness.

If you find yourself with a warm afternoon, you might want to call in sick to that last video conference of the day, drag an easy chair out to the deck, and drink three of these while listening to songs you listened to while making questionable decisions in your youth.

The kids can eat cereal.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

You know those people who look at an ultra-modern piece of art and get legitimately angry about it?

“That’s not Art! My 5-year-old could paint that!”

Aside from the implication that young children can’t produce real art, I’m always struck by the irony of the situation. Good art is supposed to elicit an emotional reaction. The rage those viewers express is a pretty good indication that the art they are looking at is working on some level.

Consider the paintings in hotel rooms or bank lobbies. They are designed to be as inoffensive and unobtrusive as possible. Some of them are easy on the eyes, but how artistic are they?

Then, there’s something like “Amateur Opossum Actress” by Rebecca Kriz.

I contend — hear me out on this — that this painting ranks up there with a Norman Rockwell illustration in terms of striking an emotional chord of recognition. I suspect this opossum and my mother might have a long and fruitful exchange of ideas. Or, alternatively, a long, uncomfortable lunch, blanketed in sullen silence.

Imagine walking through a gallery, looking at impenetrable paintings of storm-wracked beaches or girls in black crying in the rain, and discussing ridiculous things like artists’ use of metaphor in a post-Marxist emotional landscape, then finding yourself in front of this opossum painting.

You would almost certainly laugh out loud.

Never mind the opossum; this painting expresses such a relatable human emotion that you’d have to be a very bitter person to not love it.

And what should you drink while you stand admiring it? Complimentary gallery chardonnay and cheese cubes don’t quite capture the spirit of this piece.

The title is “Amateur Opossum Actress,” which gives us a little bit of context. We want something that, while appealing, tries a little too hard. It should carry a little bit of the sweetness of a picture of an opossum, combined with a touch of the bracing experience of facing an actual opossum.

I suggest this:

The Amateur Actress

Ingredients

• 2 ounces dry gin — I’m still enthusiastic about Death’s Door.
• ½ ounce orange curaçao — Grand Marnier or Cointreau would work well here, too.
• ½ ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
• ¼ ounce grenadine (pomegranate syrup)

Shake all ingredients thoroughly.

Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

The twin keys to this cocktail are the use of an overly fancy glass, and drinking it skull-shrinkingly cold. After testing several different methods of chilling glasses, my go-to is rinsing a glass, then putting it in the freezer for 20 minutes. This works especially well in the summer, when humid air will condense into a thin layer of frost on the outside of the glass.

This is a take on a classic drink called a Pink Palace, and the color is definitely part of its appeal. The lime juice provides a good sour bridge from the sweetness of the orange liqueur to the crispness of the gin.

Sweet, like an amateur actress.

Icy, like her rage with her pretty understudy. (A hamster.)

More of this artist’s work can be found on her website at rebeccakriz.com or at inprnt.com/gallery/rebecca_kriz/amateur-opossum-actress.

Featured photo: The Amateur Actress. John Fladd photo.

I know you’ve had a lot going on in your life lately — it’s the start of another pandemic year, your children are listening to strange music that references coconuts?, and there’s been that haunting, moaning sound coming from the basement — so it’s totally forgivable that it’s slipped your mind that February is National Grapefruit Month.

The good news is that you still have three weeks or so to put up the decorations and plan a Fresca™ party.

In the meantime, let’s make a grapefruit cocktail.

Citrus is a family.

Oranges are the mom — sweet, with the merest hint of bitterness, like a sigh of regret; the backbone of the family.

Lemons are the sexy aunt who makes a lot of important life decisions based on alcohol.

Limes are the workhorse of the family. They hold down 15 jobs and still manage to tackle the hard songs at karaoke.

Grapefruit is the cousin who, while having a very good heart deep down, is the one you call when you need something shady. Grapefruit knows a guy who knows a guy. He never hides in the background. Expect him at a wedding in a loud plaid suit and wingtips. He’ll tip the minister with a Benjamin in a handshake while telling an off-color joke.

When you make a cocktail with grapefruit, the bitterness isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. You have to embrace it. Even if, like me, you prefer cocktails a little on the sweet side, be aware that grapefruit will refuse to be covered up.

Perhaps the most classic grapefruit drink is a Greyhound, a spin on a Screwdriver; gin or vodka — sometimes rum — with the orange juice replaced with grapefruit juice. There are really only two ingredients, so the flavor tends to be very straightforward. I’ve tweaked this particular recipe to add a little more complexity.

Greyhound

(slightly modified)

Ingredients

2 2-inch slices of grapefruit rind (Just the thin outer layer. The grapefruit will bring enough bitterness without using any of the white pith under the surface.)

1½ ounces good gin — I like Death’s Door.

1 ounce St. Germain, an elderflower liqueur

2 ounces unsweetened ruby grapefruit juice

Muddle the grapefruit peel thoroughly in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. This will release citrus oil and add an extra layer of grapefruitiness to the finished drink. Feel free to really smash the peel.

Add the other ingredients and four or five ice cubes to the shaker, and shake thoroughly.

Strain over ice in a rocks glass.

Grapefruit is the dominant flavor in this cocktail. The St. Germain takes a tiny bit off the edge of the bitterness and adds a hint of — floralness? Florality? Gin has enough character to go head-to-head with the grapefruit. This is a classic drink that you’ve probably never taken for a test drive. I think this will be a bit of a revelation.

I remember hearing a country song when I was little. I was very young and I’ve never — then or since — been much of a country music fan, but you accept Art where you find it, and the lyrics have stayed with me for 50 years.

The singer — I think it was Roy Clark — sang about the sad realization that love has died between him and his woman. He watches her pack her bag with tears in his eyes, then drives her to the bus station. He watches her get on the bus, and then, in words that have haunted me for more than half a century:

…Now we’re here at the station

And you’re getting on

And all I can think of is

Thank God and Greyhound you’re gone!

Featured photo: Greyhound. Photo by John Fladd.

The idea had been a solid one: walking around Boston’s North End, comparing the ricotta pie at as many Italian bakeries as possible.

Okay — I was comparing the ricotta pie. The rest of my party was comparing cannoli.

I get it — cannoli are good. Extremely good. But let’s face it. They’re no ricotta pie. I feel strongly about ricotta pie — to the extent that I fervently believe that if they held a Miss Greater Boston Italian Pastry beauty competition, an actual slice of ricotta pie would almost certainly win. Yes, the other girls would cry.

Until they ate the winner.

At any rate, we had taken a short break from pastry-eating and had stepped into an Italian deli to get warm. The rest of my group was oohing and ahhing over imported pasta and balsamic vinegar. I was looking at the olives in the deli case, when I accidentally made eye contact with the man behind the counter.

He gave me a half chin lift nod of recognition, then, seemingly recognizing something in me, he asked, “Are you an Olive Guy?”

As it happens, I am an olive guy.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to keep it cool, “I’m an Olive Guy.”

He looked briefly to each side, as if he might be overheard, then reached into the case and tapped a bin of small black olives. His voice dropped to just above a whisper.

“These, My Friend,” he confided in me, “these are the ’68 Barracuda of Olives.” He looked at me for my reaction.

I looked at the olives critically — I mean, it was already a foregone conclusion that I was going to buy the olives, but I didn’t want to look too easy. They were very small, about the size of black jelly beans, but darker. Much darker. The air around them almost shimmered as it was tugged at by their blackness.

“Yeah,” I said after a few seconds, “Gimme half a pound, please.”

My new friend didn’t move. He stood there, watching me impassively.

“Um, and another half a pound in another container,” I added.

He nodded very slightly with approval, and got me my olives.

They were extremely good olives.

’68 Barracuda

At this point, after that very olive-centric story, you could be excused for expecting an olive-based cocktail. And indeed there is a lot to be said for, and about, dirty martinis, the gold standard — the ’68 Barracuda, if you will — of olive-based cocktails, but that is a study for another time. No, this time, we’re going to go in the other direction — the Barracuda.

A Barracuda is a standard if not terribly well-known cocktail — very fruit-forward, and in spite of its name a fairly innocuous drink. Yes, it has a fairly lengthy list of ingredients, but it is a pleasant if not terribly memorable cocktail.

This is a tweak on the original.

Ingredients

• ice
• ⅔ ounce Galliano, an Italian, vanilla-forward liqueur, in a freakishly beautiful bottle
• ⅓ ounce grenadine
• 1 small Fresno pepper
• ⅔ ounce white rum
• ⅓ ounce fresh-squeezed lime juice
• ⅔ ounce pineapple juice
• sparkling wine — I used Cava.

Slice the pepper into a shaker, and muddle it thoroughly.

Add an ounce or so of white rum to the shaker, then “dry shake” it. This means to shake it without ice. (The capsaicin — the spicy compounds — of the pepper are alcohol-soluble, which means that the straight rum will extract them pretty well. They are not water-soluble, so the juices or ice would interfere with the process.)

Add everything but the sparkling wine to an ice-filled rocks glass, then top with the wine.

It’s up to you whether to stir, or not to stir.

The juices and grenadine give a dependable Tiki-like background flavor to a standard Barracuda. Regular white rum is happy to hide in the background, wrapped in a comfortable vanilla blanket of Galliano. The star of this show, singing out proudly like it’s ’80s Night at a Tiki karaoke, is the Fresno chile.

Why Fresno?

I’m glad you asked. For years my go-to chile has been a classic jalapeño. It’s got a great flavor. It’s hot, but not too hot. It’s been great.

But sadly, in recent years it’s let itself go. Eighty percent of the time it has no heat and even less flavor; it’s usually in lawn-clippings territory. The other 20 percent of the time it’s as if it’s sobered up and tries to make up for lost time, and blows the top of your head off. Fresnos are more dependable.

And, not for nothin’, they’re red, which suits this drink better anyway.

Featured photo: ’68 Barracuda. Photo by John Fladd.

So, you know how every three or four months you go through your pantry and get rid of all the food that you forgot about, which has expired?

Actually, you know what? We’ve known each other a while now, and this is a safe space. We can be honest with each other. It’s been at least a year and a half since you looked at the back of any of those shelves, hasn’t it?

It’s OK — no judgment. In fact, it sort of advances my point for me.

Anyway, you know how, when you finally get around to cleaning out the whole pantry, and take everything off all of the shelves, you find yourself looking at some exotic ingredients you barely even remember buying?

You must have had some recipe that called for lotus root, but seriously, when have you ever even considered using bee pollen? And that tin of smoked octopus? What were you thinking?

You know that feeling?

That’s an emotional road map to my liquor cabinet. I’ve got a truly distressing number of tiny sample bottles of liquor I totally meant to use in something, someday. Even worse are the almost full bottles of exotic liqueurs that are missing just that ounce or two that I used in that one cocktail that one time and then—

And then, what?

I’m not sure. Things get a little fuzzy when I think about it too much.

Anyway, this is all to scaffold my explanation for why, when I found a drink recipe I wanted to try and it called for a blackberry liqueur called créme de mûre, I balked at hunting down a bottle of it. Even if I was able to find a bottle of it, and it wasn’t too expensive, and it tasted good, when would I ever use it again?

Oh, yeah, right — like I could serve lemonade to guests next summer, and say with a straight face, “Oh, that? Do you like it? It’s créme de mûre. Remind me to get you some.”

I don’t know who could pull that off — somebody in loafers and a yachting cap, probably — but not me.

Anyway, I ended up making some blackberry syrup (see below) and figured that a small amount of it with a small amount of good vodka would probably make a decent substitute.

And it did. The drink was fine, just a little flat. It needed some acid, so I added some lemon juice, and it was better, then some more lemon juice and it was even better. At that point I realized that the bourbon in the recipe was distracting from the really good stuff — the little dance that the lemon and blackberry were doing—

And that’s how we ended up here:

Lemon 2 the Rescue

Ingredients

• 2 ounces nice vodka — this is another one of those times when you’ll want to avoid any harshness from the bottom-shelf stuff
• 1 ounce homemade blackberry syrup (see below)
• 2 ounces fresh squeezed lemon juice

Shake all three ingredients with ice.

Strain into a coupé glass.

Congratulate yourself on being so clever

On first sip, this tastes a bit sweet. You ask yourself if perhaps it could be a little less sweet, but then, like a woman on a horse in gleaming armor (A point of clarification: The woman is the one in the armor, not the horse), the lemon comes thundering to the rescue and lets your palate know that “Shh — everything is alright; let me handle this.” And then she does.

It’s another good omen. We’re going to get through this.

Blackberry syrup

In a small saucepan, bring equal amounts (by weight) of frozen blackberries and white sugar to a boil. Stir frequently, and if you’ve got one, it wouldn’t hurt to hit the berries with a potato masher at some point. Let the mixture boil for a few seconds to make sure that all the sugar is dissolved, then remove from heat. Strain everything through a fine-meshed metal strainer, and allow it to cool, then bottle it, label it, and store it in the refrigerator for a month or more.

Featured photo: Lemon 2 the Rescue. Photo by John Fladd.

For a variety of complicated, therapy-inducing reasons, we spent Christmas in 1974 with my mother’s twin sister and her family in southern California. I was 10 years old and my cousins were all teenagers, so everything that they did filled me with wonder and awe.

Like, when my cousin’s boyfriend showed me how to use my new magenta gas-powered airplane — not a remote-controlled one, but one of the ones that was controlled by nylon strings connected to the fuselage. He got the engine started and I watched in wide-eyed amazement as he got it airborne, circled it around us twice, then plowed it, nose first, into a parking lot. Clearly, the guy knew what he was doing, so I dutifully packed up all the pieces, brought them back home with me, and checked in on them dutifully every month or so for years.

Or when another cousin elbowed me firmly in the stomach and I found that I couldn’t breathe.

“It’s OK,” he said to me, “you’ve just got the wind knocked out of you.” His use of the passive voice terrified me, because it implied that this was something that just happened randomly – that you could be walking around, living your life, and suddenly discovering that you couldn’t breathe. My uncle confirmed that yes, I had indeed just had the wind knocked out of me, and that I’d be fine. After 25 minutes or so (OK, it was probably more like 15 seconds) I discovered that I could take tiny breaths, then slightly bigger ones, and could finally look a little less like a blobfish in a Shaun Cassidy haircut, gasping on a pier.

But for me, the best memory of the holidays that year was New Year’s Eve.

The adults all dressed up and went out to some unimaginably sophisticated grown-up party, leaving me in the care of the teenagers. My youngest cousin, who must have been around 16, watched old movies on TV with me all night; then, at midnight, we went outside and honked the car horn to ring in the new year. Afterward we came in and ate buttered noodles.

It was far and away the best New Year’s Eve of my life.

Grown-up New Year’s Eves have been less magical.

Take Champagne, for example. I realize that I have the taste buds of a rhinoceros, but cheap and moderately priced Champagne can best be summed up in a quote from Fozzie Bear in 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper: “You know, if you put enough sugar in this stuff, it tastes just like ginger ale!”

So, here’s the thing: I get it. New Year’s is largely an adult holiday, where adults gather with other adults and celebrate how adult they are, talking about adult things — dental plans and conspiracy theories, mostly — and drink the most adulty drink they can think of, Champagne. But unless you are a supermodel or a guy with a yacht, most of us never really develop a taste for the stuff.

Is there an alternative?

Yes. Yes, there is.

The Manhattan

Ingredients

• 1½ ounces rye or bourbon. This week I’m using Bulleit Rye. (I’ve recently discovered that I like rye. Who knew?)
• 1½ ounces sweet vermouth — the red kind
• 10 drops cardamom bitters
• 10 drops orange bitters
• 1 cocktail cherry, the fanciest you can find. I like Luxardo.

Add all ingredients to ice in a mixing glass. Stir gently. This is one of those martini-like situations, where you probably wouldn’t like the result if you shook it in a cocktail shaker. This will have a cleaner, more vibrant flavor if it isn’t aerated.

Pour into a rocks glass. Sip gently. A Manhattan is not a drink that lends itself to drinking quickly. You’ll want to — actually, who am I to say what you want? You will probably be happier with your Manhattan experience if you drink it a little at a time, trying to identify the different elements that you can taste.

Grown-up/shmown-up; the best part is finishing this drink and eating the cherry. Don’t let anyone try to tell you different.

So, are there drinks out there that are more adult? Probably. At this moment, there’s almost certainly some guy working his way through a bottle of scotch, while the bar owner says, “Hey Mr. A-Bailey, why you so a-sad? Go a-home to you wife, huh?” Or maybe that’s It’s a Wonderful Life; at this time of year it’s hard to tell the difference between melodrama and real life.

Anyway, there are probably other drinks as adult as a properly constructed Manhattan, but very few that are as enjoyable. It is sweet, but not too sweet — that’s what the bitters are there for — and boozy enough to let you know it means business. There is a mixture of flavors that will distract from any boring adult conversation you find yourself in.

Keep your chin up; we’ve got this.

Featured photo: The Manhattan. Photo by John Fladd