Author: John Fladd

• A small handful of fresh basil (about 5 g) – leaves and stems
• 1½ teaspoons granulated sugar
• 2 ounces cachaça or flavorful rum
• 1 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
• 3 ounces passionfruit cocktail – you can find this on the top shelf of the bottled juice aisle at your supermarket or in any Latin grocery store or bodega
• 3 ounces good tonic water to top – I like Fever Tree

Aside from being delicious, the cool thing about this drink is that it is super easy to make, but it also involves several flashy-looking (but easy) bartending techniques.

Drop the basil into the larger half of a cocktail shaker, then add the sugar. Aside from adding sweetness to this enterprise, it is also abrasive, and will help break down the basil when you muddle it.

Cool Bartender Technique #1 – Muddle the basil. All this means is that you’ll mush the basil up with a stick — in my case, I use the billy-club-like pestle from my largest mortar and pestle. Smash the basil leaves up, and grind them up with your muddler (stick) and the sugar. After a minute or so of energetic muddling, the basil will have turned gloppy (a technical term) and dark green. Rattle your muddler against the sides of the cocktail shaker to knock off any basil or sugar that might be stuck to it.

Cool Bartender Technique #2 – Add the cachaça to the basil glop, and dry-shake it. Dry shaking means to shake ingredients without ice. In this case, a lot of the flavor of the basil is found in aromatic oils that you have liberated with your muddling. These oils aren’t water-soluble — in other words, they won’t mix easily with water-based ingredients. They are, however, extremely sociable in the presence of alcohol. (Aren’t we all?) By shaking the basil and cachaça together without any ice, the alcohol will have a chance to strip away the basil’s more sophisticated flavor compounds.

Once the basil oils have been suspended in alcohol, they will mix more readily with the rest of the ingredients. You can add the ice, now. Also add the lime juice and the passionfruit cocktail. (Shake the passionfruit cocktail, in case it has separated.) Seal the cap on your cocktail shaker, and shake the mixture enthusiastically.

Cool Bartender Technique #3 – Strain the passionfruit mixture over fresh ice in a tall glass. There are several ways to strain a cocktail. If you have shaken it in a two-piece Boston shaker, you can simply break the seal between the two halves, and carefully pour the liquid out from where the two halves meet. This will do a good job of keeping the old ice and any large blobs of basil mush from getting into your glass, but you might find yourself with a few more floating bits of basil than you want. I double down and pour the mixture through a mesh drain strainer — about $2 at any hardware store — which limits any green floaters to very small pieces of basil.

Depending on the size of your tall glass, and how much ice you’ve put in it, you might find that your passionfruit-basil mixture fills it almost to the top. In this case you might have to take one for the team and drink a vigorous sip of this highly flavorful drink to bring the surface level down a couple of inches from the top of the glass.

Finally, add three ounces or so of tonic water to the glass, and stir it gently, to add some effervescence to it. Garnish with one of the spent lime halves, and drink with a straw. It tastes fruity and sweet and sour, with funkiness from the cachaça, acid from the lime juice, and a lingering kiss of basil.

Highly recommended.

Featured photo: Basil Cachaça Smash. Photo by John Fladd.

Derry library hosts unique dinner club

According to Erin Robinson, there was a time when shrimp poached in cream and tomato sauce was considered very cosmopolitan.

“It was called Cosmo Club Shrimp,” she said, “and there was in California at the time this social group called the Cosmo Club. When you find that sort of thing when a food’s named after a place, you want to start digging in further to find out more about it.”

Robinson is the Reference and Genealogy Librarian at the Derry Public Library and the organizer of the Library’s Historic Table Dinner Club. Once a month curious readers meet to share food made from recipes in a particular cookbook, either a history of a particular time and place or a vintage book shared online.

Robinson has been helping organize these historical experiences at the library for the past year and a half, she said.

“It … actually sprung out of our Genealogy Club,” she said, “and thinking about different ways to experience history but in maybe a non-conventional way. I always think of food when I’m thinking of that and tasting history. The first topic we ever did, I asked people to bring a recipe from their own family history. So we got a lot of traditional recipes that had been handed down. And that was interesting, because of course stories of home and family came out of those. After that tidbit of information it’s like a passageway to further inquiry. So we had a lot of discussions about the place and then we had to go back and look at which one it was specifically.”

The time and place of July’s topic is California in the early 1900s, Robinson said.

“This upcoming one is a vintage cookbook from 1914 and it’s called Midnight Feast. It was written by Mae E. Southworth, and she was a librarian from California. What we’re going to do is we’ll have the cooking. The food is interesting. It’s always a little hit or miss with the flavors, because some things don’t carry so well into the present day and some are just the same. So people choose a recipe from the cookbook and bring it along and they bring [a list of] the ingredients with any substitutions. They write it down so people can assess if they want to try it and/or should if they have allergies. Then what we do is we talk a little bit about the different options as we eat. We’re going to do some trivia based around that time period.”

According to Robinson, the each month’s food topic is a way for participants to connect with history — either their own or something truly unfamiliar. She gave two recent explorations as examples: “We did Jubilee, by Toni Tipton Martin, which looked at African-American history and had wonderful recipes. We also [read] Grandma’s World War II Kitchen. So that was interesting because a lot of people remembered from their parents’ tables some of the recipes.” Some of the club cooks remembered their parents talking about food rationing and victory gardens, Robinson said.

Robinson hopes to bring some focus even closer to home in future meetings.

“There’s a New Hampshire cookbook,” she said, “that was published in the early 1900s, maybe 1904, called A Bachelor’s Cupboard and it was all about teaching a bachelor how to make the best food and it was written by A. Lyman Phillips. I was doing research and her name was Amy who wrote it, Amy Lyman Phillips. She was a hoot. She was an aviator at one time. She drove with this lady who was Blanche Stewart Scott, who was technically the first woman to drive across country solo in a car. She went with her to report back on it. So she’s just a really fascinating person from New Hampshire who happened to write this cookbook under this pen name.”

Historic Table Dinner Club
When: Tuesday, July 22, at 6 p.m. discussing Midnight Feasts (1914) by Mae E. Southworth
Where: Derry Public Library (64 E. Broadway, Derry).
Sign up: Register through the Derry Public Library’s events calendar at derrypl.org/adult-events.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

News from the local food scene

• A picnic with experts in fresh food: Join the New Hampshire Farm Bureau for its annual summer picnic on Saturday, July 19, from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the Osborne Farm on Upper City Road in Loudon. Bring your own food, or purchase it from the Gravy Train Food Truck. All attendees will be entered in a raffle for excellent prizes, and there will be farm-themed games and lawn games to play. General admission is $5; children 10 and under attend for free. Register at nhfarmbureau.org/2025-nhfb-summer-picnic.

• Meat bingo: Amputee charity Less Leg More Heart has been gaining a reputation for fun and creative fundraising. Join them for a Meat Bingo Madnessevent Saturday, July 19, from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Rod and Gun Club (358 S. Main St., Laconia, 524-9824). Twenty-four games of Bingo will cost $30, for a chance to win meat prizes. There will be raffles and food and drink on site. Simply show up; no pre-registration required. Visit lesslegmoreheart.com/events.

• Save the date for spicy: Get your tickets for the New England Hot Sauce Fest, presented by the Spicy Shark and returning to Smuttynose Brewing Co. (105 Towle Farm Road, Hampton) on Saturday, July 26, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The event features local hot sauce companies selling and offering samples of their spicy products, as well as bounce houses, food trucks and more. General admission tickets are $15 in advance; VIP tickets are $20 in advance and give you a 10 a.m. admission time. Proceeds will benefit the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation and the Seacoast Science Center, according to newenglandhotsaucefest.com.

• Really good fudge: In a June 24 press release Van Otis Chocolates (341 Elm St, Manchester, 627-1611, vanotis.com) announced that its Whipped Honey + Peanut Butter Swiss Fudge has been named the 2025 Confection of the Year by Retail Confectioners International (RCI), a national trade association representing independent candy makers across the U.S. and Canada. The fudge is described as handcrafted with smooth peanut butter, locally sourced whipped cinnamon honey, and delicate feuilletine for a subtle crunch, the release said. See vanotis.com/whipped-honey-peanut-butter-specialty-swiss-fudge.