The stem of a glass — a wine glass, a Champagne flute or a martini glass — is there to help you keep your drink at the proper temperature. Glass is an excellent thermal insulator, and if you hold your glass by the stem very little of the heat from your hands will travel up to the drink, so it will stay cool longer.
Which is very useful for drinks that you want to drink very, very cold, like a sidecar.
Rhubarb Sidecar
Rhubarb Syrup
Rhubarb, chopped and frozen
An equal amount of granulated sugar, by weight
The juice of half a lemon
Sidecar
2 ounces cognac
1 ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
¾ ounce rhubarb syrup
Cook frozen chopped rhubarb and sugar over medium heat, stirring occasionally. By freezing the rhubarb, you have caused jagged crystals of ice to form and puncture most of the cell walls in the rhubarb. The sugar is emotionally needy and draws the juice from the rhubarb and bonds with it. It is unclear how the rhubarb feels about this, but it doesn’t really have any choice in the matter, because under heat the sugar is drawn into solution in its juice with a happy sigh. If you want to encourage this chemical matchmaking, you can use a potato masher to hurry the process along.
Bring the mixture to a boil, and wait a few seconds longer to make sure all the sugar has completely dissolved. Remove from heat, add the lemon juice to the mixture, then strain it with a fine-mesh strainer. Leave it to cool. (Don’t throw away the rhubarb solids; they are delicious.)
Wrap a double-handful of ice in a tea towel and beat it vigorously with something heavy (I use the pestle from my largest mortar and pestle, but a meat tenderizer or the bottom of a small pot will work well, too). When you have crushed your ice, fill a martini glass with it and set it aside for five minutes or so to chill. This will give you time to squeeze the lemon juice for the cocktail — unless you’ve got a particularly selfless one that gives generously of itself, this will probably take a whole lemon’s worth.
Combine the cognac, lemon juice and your now-cool rhubarb syrup (cool in a temperature sense; the mere fact that you are making this cocktail makes you cool in a social sense) over ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake extra-thoroughly; you want this cocktail to be colder than a penguin pawnbroker’s heart.
Dump the ice out of the martini glass; you’ve left it in until the last possible instant, to make sure the glass is as cold as possible. Strain the cocktail into it, with a hum of satisfaction at its color, a pinkish shade of apricot, like a bolt of silk in a hidden corner of a Turkish bazar. Find someplace quiet and comfortable — a screened-in porch, perhaps — and sip the drink while thinking about that time at that party when you were actually witty and attractive.
A sidecar is a classic cocktail in the same family as margaritas, whiskey sours and gimlets: a healthy belt of liquor, some sort of citrus juice and something sweet. In this case the brandy works really well with the fruitiness of the homemade rhubarb syrup. Rhubarb’s tartness plays well off the lemon juice. When a sidecar is skull-shrinkingly cold, the cognac takes a leading role in the taste, as it slowly warms up — because you’ve remembered to hold your glass by the stem — and the more delicate fruity flavors become a little more pronounced.
A sidecar is much like many of us, who start out cold and sharp but mellow out a little with age.
Featured Photo: Rhubarb Sidecar. Photo by John Fladd.
