Author: John Fladd

A surprising number of cocktail recipes call for Champagne.

Cocktails made in a bar often use it to give a bit of bubbliness to a drink, and it looks good on the list of ingredients on the drink menu. If you’re drinking by yourself, it’s a nice little bit of self-indulgence, and if you’re with friends or a date, you can have fun pretending to be sophisticated. It’s no big deal for a bar to keep a couple bottles of Champagne or prosecco on ice, and use up one or two in a brunch service.

At home, it’s a slightly different story.

If you’re throwing a party, and will be using up a bottle or two of the good stuff over the course of an evening, it’s one thing. But most of us make one or two cocktails at a time, usually to celebrate making it to Friday. We don’t generally have an open bottle of Champagne, and it seems silly to open one just to make a couple of cocktails. If we’re opening a bottle of champagne, why not just drink that?

Beer, on the other hand—

This is a riff on a popular drink from the 1930s called an Air Mail Cocktail. Our version is slightly more down-market, but not less delicious for it.

2 ounces rum – whatever rum you feel like. In my particular case, I still have a quarter bottle or so of some rum I infused with peanut butter and bananas earlier in the summer. It sits on my kitchen counter, and seems to ask, “If not now, when?”

½ ounce ginger syrup – see below

½ ounce fresh squeezed lime juice

1 ounce lager beer – again, whatever you have on hand.

Cheetos – Just because. They seem like a good pairing for this drink.

Pour the rum, ginger syrup and lime juice over ice in a cocktail shaker, and shake for 20 seconds or so, until there is a line of condensation on the shaker, and you can hear the ice cubes start to break up inside.

Strain into a cocktail glass, then add the beer. Don’t worry about mixing or stirring. Things will work themselves out.

Have you ever had the post office hold your mail for you while you’ve been on vacation? Then when you get back, and get your mail all at once, it is a kaleidoscope of brightly colored political flyers, seed catalogs, time-share offers, and a postcard from yourself telling you how much fun you were on your vacation? The Junk Mail cocktail is a bit like that experience. Depending on what kind of rum you use, and how gingery your ginger syrup is, bright, fun flavors will come at your mouth from every direction.

This is a drink that will remind you that you really are fun when you relax a little.

Ginger Syrup — Grate a large hand of ginger on a box grater. Don’t worry about peeling it. Combine equal amounts of water and sugar by weight in a small saucepan, and bring to a boil to make a simple syrup. Remove from heat, and stir the shredded ginger into the syrup. Cover the pot, and leave everything to steep for several hours, or overnight. Strain through a tea towel, twisting and wringing the towel, to squeeze the ginger pulp. Bottled, this will keep in your refrigerator for a month or so.

Featured photo: Junk Mail. Photo by John Fladd.

• 2-pound bag frozen cherries
• Zest and juice of one large lemon
• 1½ Tablespoons brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon rosewater — if you decide you want more next time, go ahead, but proceed with caution
• 1 Tablespoon cornstarch
• 1 Tablespoon water
• 1 cup (120 g) flour
• 1 cup (99 g) sugar
• ½ cup (68 g) coarsely chopped pistachios
• ½ cup (1 stick) butter
• 1/3 cup (44 g) sesame seeds
• 1¼ teaspoons kosher or coarse sea salt
• 1/3 cup (80 g.) tahini (sesame paste)

Preheat your oven to 375°F.

In a large bowl, combine the cherries, lemon juice and zest, brown sugar, and rose water. Set aside.

Speaking of “aside,” an aside on rosewater: It would be a jaded and heartless person who didn’t like the smell of roses, which makes it a really good background flavor in Indian and Middle Eastern dishes. Rosewater goes well with stone fruit like plums or peaches, and with Middle Eastern ingredients like sesame or pistachios. Here, we’ve paired it with cherries. Be careful though — if you don’t put enough of it in a recipe, you won’t be able to taste it. Add one drop too many, and you’ll be hit with the essence of grandmother soap. Thread the needle,

Back to business: in another bowl, combine the flour, sugar, pistachios, sesame seeds, salt, and butter. Work the mixture with your fingers or a pastry cutter until it breaks up into something that looks like granola. Add the tahini, and stir everything to combine until it looks like extra-clumpy granola.

In a small bowl or ramekin, mix the cornstarch and water into a smooth slurry. This is like a paste, but runnier. Add it to the cherry mixture, and stir everything to combine. As the cherries bake, the cornstarch will help thicken the juice, so that everything will pull together when the crumble is finished.

Pour the cherry mixture into an 8”x8” baking pan, then cover the surface with the sesame crumble topping. Lumps are not only OK but encouraged.

Put the pan on a baking sheet for when (not if) some of the cherry filling flings itself out of the pan to an uncaring world during the baking process. Bake on the center rack of your oven for about an hour, until the topping looks golden brown.

Let the crumble cool, then eat with ice cream.

This is one of those desserts with a different combination of flavors and textures in each bite. The jammy cherries are tart and sweet, with a hint of roses. The crumble topping is rich with butter and sesame, with a whisper of bitterness that off-sets the sweetness. Each bite has a different fruit-to-crumble ratio.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.