But Mama Always Put Vodka in Her Sangria!: Adventures in Eating, Drinking, and Making Merry
Page 11
Since then I’ve come to love a French 75 (with gin, the way it was first made in 1915 at Paris’s New York Bar), a Black Velvet (created in 1861 at Brooks’s Club to mourn the passing of Prince Albert), and a Death in the Afternoon, a potent concoction invented by Ernest Hemingway for a 1935 celebrity bartender’s guide. I have even come to love bitters, especially the vast array available from Fee Brothers, a fourth-generation family-owned company in Rochester, New York. At Bar Tonique, an excellent and very chic establishment on Rampart Street in New Orleans, I was turned on to a particularly refreshing champagne cocktail containing a sugar cube doused with Fee Brothers’ grapefruit bitters rather than the usual Angostura. I have since become the drink’s chief proselytizer and the trio—champagne, the bitters, a box of La Perruche cubes—is now my go-to host or hostess gift, for which I am always profusely thanked.
The first published recipe for the Champagne Cocktail appeared in “Professor” Jerry Thomas’s seminal work, How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion, published in 1862. (The song “Champagne Charlie” became a hit six years later.) Thomas’s ingredients were “one-half teaspoonful of sugar, one or two dashes of bitters, and one piece of lemon peel,” and his instructions were to “fill tumbler one-third full of broken ice, and fill balance with wine.” His readers were also told to “shake well and serve,” but before the century was out, people figured out that a cube of sugar saturated with bitters at the bottom of a glass would dissolve slowly and evenly, so that both the shaking that hastened the champagne’s flatness and the ice that watered it down could be avoided.
Thomas’s original formula remains very much in vogue, but almost immediately there were variations. In the 1920s, a barman at London’s Savoy Hotel began serving one that added equal parts Grand Marnier and cognac to the bitters-soaked cube and garnished it with an orange twist rather than lemon. And then of course there were offshoots, including the great French 75. So named because the combination of gin and champagne delivered a kick not unlike the one supplied by the powerful French 75mm field gun of World War I, the drink was popularized at war’s end at New York’s Stork Club. Early on, rival recipes substituted cognac for the champagne and a current version, known as a French 76, substitutes vodka. Either way, it is delicious. It also “hits with remarkable precision,” the warning included by author Harry Craddock in his The Savoy Cocktail Book, published in 1930. Duly noted.
FRENCH 75
( Yield: 1 drink )
1 ounce gin
½ ounce fresh lemon juice
½ ounce simple syrup
Lemon twist
Pour the gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup into a shaker with ice and shake vigorously. Strain into champagne flute and fill to top with champagne. Garnish with twist.
NOTE: One of the many wonderful variations on this drink calls for adding a ½ ounce of Cointreau. Substitute an orange twist for lemon.
RITZ 75
( Yield: 1 drink )
1 ounce fresh lemon juice
1 ounce freshly squeezed mandarin orange juice
½ ounce simple syrup
1 ounce gin
Champagne
Lime slice
Orange slice
Cherry
Mix the lemon juice, orange juice, and simple syrup in a tumbler. Add lots of ice. Pour in the gin and top with champagne. Garnish with citrus slices and a cherry.
NOTE: While I love the elegance of champagne cocktails made in flutes, there is nothing more refreshing than a citrusy champagne “highball.” This variation of a French 75, created at the Paris Ritz, is a perfect example. In summer, I add mint to the garnish.
SIMCA’S CHAMPAGNE COCKTAIL
( Yield: 6 drinks )
1⁄3 cup sugar
½ orange, sliced
¼ lemon, sliced
½ cup cherries, macerated in brandy
¼ cup brandy or cognac
1 bottle champagne
Mix the first five ingredients in a jar and refrigerate for at least 1 hour or overnight. Strain.
Place a macerated cherry in bottom of champagne glass. Add about an ounce of the chilled mixture and fill with cold champagne.
BLACK VELVET
( Yield: 1 drink )
Guinness
Champagne
Fill a champagne flute halfway with Guinness. Carefully and slowly top with champagne.
NOTE: For a Brown Velvet, substitute Bass Ale for the Guinness.
DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON
( Yield: 1 drink )
1 ounce Pernod or absinthe
Champagne
Pour absinthe into a flute and top with chilled champagne.
NOTE: There will be a pleasant cloudy effect to this cocktail.
18
The Yucca Flats
The summers of my youth were spent largely at the house of our neighbors the Yarbroughs, who had six children (including three good-looking, much older, and very funny boys) and a “playroom” outfitted with a pool table, a card table, a stereo, and an ancient refrigerator. Depending on the summer, I was invariably in love with one of the brothers or their friends, and it was in their company that I picked up the skills that have contributed to my good health and happiness ever since: how to kiss, play poker (mostly penny-ante bourre and five-card draw), hold my beer, and hum along to pretty much every song on a nonstop vinyl soundtrack that included—but was not limited to—the Allman Brothers, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Sir Douglas Quintet.
The most memorable summer was marked by the introduction of the Yucca Flats—not the nuke site, but a passion-inducing concoction mixed in a galvanized metal garbage can with floating handfuls of squeezed citrus—and I’ve always wondered what else, exactly, was in there.
The good (and scary) thing about the Internet is that you can locate not just the answers to such questions, but also a lot of people who appear to have lived your same life. When I Googled “Yucca Flats,” a great many cocktail blogs appeared containing such comments as “We drink this when we are playing cards” and “It’s great for large groups … but it does sneak up on you.” One post recommended mixing it with your feet. There was some disagreement about the recipe (versions included vodka, gin, rum, tequila, or some combination thereof), but the consensus seems to be that a Yucca Flats is a whole lot of gin mixed with equal parts lemon juice and sugar, shaken or stirred with ice until really, really cold, and augmented with maraschino cherries and several squeezed halves of lemons, limes, and oranges.
I’m not sure I’d mix it in a garbage can anymore, but I think the Yucca Flats could find renewed popularity in this cocktail-obsessed age in which seasonal drink lists are incorporated into bar lists across the country. Warm-weather months mean a change from brown liquor to white, from heavy cocktails to those that are lighter, fruitier, and more refreshing, though equally potent. The Flats certainly qualifies on that front, and it might also be considered part of the trend toward what master mixologist Dale DeGroff calls “a culinary style of cocktails, utilizing exotic fruit and kitchen ingredients.” The kind of drinks DeGroff has in mind might include something like a lemon thyme margarita or a Rickshaw, the excellent drink at New York’s Gramercy Tavern made from gin, lime juice, and basil syrup. But hey, my kitchen also has plenty of lemons, limes, and oranges, as well as maraschino cherries.
Below I include a recipe I found for a Yucca Flats that comes closest to the one of my memory. But my research also turned up the fact that people were enjoying a similar drink more than a century before my poker-playing days. Cocktail historian David Wondrich uncovered an 1862 edition of the world’s first bartender’s guide, How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion, in which there’s a recipe for Gin Punch that sounds a lot like the Yucca Flats, though it is for a single serving. Jason Kosmas and Dushan Zaric, the genius mix-masters behind Manhattan’s Pravda, Members Only, and other game-changing bars, adapted the recipe to serve a crowd and added champagne to create what is essentially an upscale
Yucca Flats. If you happen to be drinking alone, a gin sour is an elegant and delicious alternative.
No matter what its incarnation, the Flats will always remind me of those carefree, formative summers spent in the Yarbroughs’ playroom. A few years ago, when Mrs. Yarbrough died, much of the old gang got together at her funeral and we vowed to have a memorial poker tournament in her honor. I already know what we will serve; the Allman Brothers will be on the playlist.
THE YUCCA FLATS
( Yield: Depends on the crowd! )
One 16-ounce box confectioners’ sugar
2 fifths gin
One 6-ounce jar maraschino cherries, with juice
6 oranges, halved
6 limes, halved
6 lemons, halved
Dissolve sugar in the gin in a gallon-size glass jar. Add the remaining ingredients. Fill with ice. Wrap jar in a towel and take turns shaking until the mixture is really cold and some of the ice has melted.
GIN PUNCH
( Yield: 5 ¾ quarts )
Decorative ice ring (see here)
6 navel oranges, sliced and cut into quarter wheels
6 lemons, sliced and cut in half
3 limes, sliced
1 pint fresh raspberries
1 pineapple, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 bottle Plymouth Gin
1¾ cups freshly squeezed lemon juice
1¼ cups simple syrup
¼ cup orgeat syrup
1 cup Massenet crème de framboise
3 cups water
1 bottle Brut Champagne
Prepare decorative ice ring, allowing a few hours for freezing.
Combine all the fruits in a large punch bowl. Add gin, lemon juice, syrups, crème de framboise, and water. Refrigerate at least 4 to 5 hours. Just before serving, add the champagne and the decorative ice block.
GIN SOUR
( Yield: 1 drink )
1 ounce lemon juice
½ ounce simple syrup
2 ounces gin
Stemmed cherry, for garnish
Shake first three ingredients over ice cubes in a shaker. For a straight-up drink, strain into a cocktail glass. Otherwise, strain into a rocks glass and add ice. Either way, garnish with the cherry.
19
Kentucky Sunshine
In the spring of 2012, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued a ruling in favor of Maker’s Mark Distillery, protecting the red dripping wax seal the brand has used on its bottles since its introduction in 1958. Bill Samuels, Sr., whose family has produced bourbon whiskey in Kentucky pretty much continuously since the eighteenth century, formulated the recipe for Maker’s Mark in 1953; his wife Margie came up with the idea of the seal and used the family deep fryer to perfect the method of applying it. Now owned by Jim Beam, Maker’s Mark is still run by the Smith family (Bill Sr.’s grandson Rob is the current CEO), so in 2001 when Jose Cuervo started selling a premium tequila called Reserva de la Familia, with a seal almost identical to that of Maker’s Mark, the brand struck back. The seal, referred to by the court as a “signature trade dress element,” is, after all, a literal maker’s mark. Also, no one wants to find out what would happen if a bottle of tequila were to be confused with one of bourbon.
I bring all this up because I have the high honor of being mentioned in the opinion, which was written by Judge Boyce F. Martin Jr., the most senior active judge on the court and my new hero. Martin makes the point that distillers began branding their bourbons early on, and he cites a Newsweek column I wrote mentioning that Ulysses S. Grant preferred Old Crow above all others. Thanks to Martin, I now know that Dr. James Crow, a Kentuckian by way of Scotland, is the man who perfected the sour mash method of whiskey making sometime between 1823 and 1845, and that he was one of the first makers to brand bourbon with his name.
Martin’s ruling is a treasure trove of such information and required reading for anyone remotely interested in bourbon, the whiskey first produced in the late eighteenth century in the “Old Bourbon” region of Kentucky. Recognized by Congress in 1964 as “a distinct product of America,” it must be made of a grain mixture that is at least 51 percent corn, distilled in America at less than 160 proof with nothing added but water, and aged for a minimum of two years in new, charred oak barrels. The corn is the thing. We’d all still be drinking Scotch or rye if it hadn’t been for the fact that corn, a crop unknown to Europeans before Columbus turned up, was so easy to grow in Kentucky and somebody had to figure out what to do with the surplus.
To read the opinion is to imagine the fun Judge Martin’s clerks must have had. Who knew that James Bond creator and martini aficionado Ian Fleming switched his allegiance to bourbon, or that Harry Truman started his day with a walk, a rubdown, a shot of bourbon, and a light breakfast?
Martin begins by quoting former Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, an Alabama native, who wrote, “I was raised to believe that Scotch whisky would need a tax preference to survive in competition with Kentucky bourbon.” It’s a funny line—and useful to Martin, who turns it around in favor of Maker’s Mark: “While there may be some truth to Justice Black’s statement that Kentucky bourbon is such an economic force that its competitors need government protection or preference to compete with it, it does not mean a Kentucky bourbon distiller may not avail itself of our laws to protect its assets.”
But Black’s line struck me for another reason. I have never been so passionate about bourbon, and I have always felt slightly guilty about that fact. Bourbon is not just America’s, but the South’s greatest (and pretty much only) contribution to the world of spirits as well as a significant contribution to the wider cultural landscape. Not being in bourbon’s camp is sort of like saying you don’t like blues or jazz or Creole cooking, and it is a sin compounded by the fact that my spirit of choice has always been Scotch.
Walker Percy said drinking Scotch was like looking at a picture of Noël Coward; Faulkner said between Scotch and nothing, he’d take Scotch. When I first moved north, Yankees were forever handing me glasses of bourbon, figuring that if a Southerner wanted whiskey, it would surely be made from corn. As it happens, I know a lot of Southern Scotch drinkers, most of whom, in the Mississippi Delta at least, were weaned on John Handy, a brand with a Cutty Sark base that was then blended with New Orleans tap water by the same people who owned the local Schwegmann’s grocery store chain. Mississippi was dry until 1966 and we were all at the mercy of what our bootlegger had on offer. In the case of Scotch, that was it.
Given the options, perhaps it’s no wonder that many of our greatest citizens preferred bourbon. George Washington distilled bourbon at Mount Vernon, and Abraham Lincoln’s father was a seasonal distillery hand. Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster all drank bourbon, as did Mark Twain. Walker Percy wrote an oft-reprinted essay in praise of the stuff, but he was no connoisseur since his early life was spent in the same town in Mississippi that mine was and everybody had the same bootlegger. On the bourbon front, the stock was usually limited to Old Crow, the aforementioned favorite of Grant, as well as of our postman, for whom my mother left a bottle in the mailbox every Christmas.
Percy preferred Early Times—the protagonist in Love in the Ruins holes up in an abandoned Howard Johnson’s with fifteen cases of it, along with three good-looking women and The World’s Great Books—mainly, he said, because at 80 proof he could drink more of it. Percy would likely be amused at today’s profusion of artisanal-style “small batch” bourbons, but in fact they recall bourbon’s heyday at the opening of the twentieth century when almost two hundred brands, each with very distinct characteristics, vied for drinkers’ approval.
Bourbon’s individuality comes from the quality of the oak barrels in which it is aged and the environment in which they are stored, as well as the length of aging and final strength. The resulting range of nuances can be so varied that a tasting vocabulary not unlike the one ordinarily reserved for fine wine is used to describe them. Percy happily settled for “the litt
le explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasophayrnx,” but were he alive to drink, say, a sixteen-year-old A. H. Hirsh Reserve, he might also detect, as one critic did, “smoky, floral aromas” and flavors of “fruit and chocolate.” Likewise, Evan Williams Single Barrel Vintage 1998 is said to boast aromas of “brown banana, cloves, and glove leather,” while twelve-year-old W. L. Weller has a “complex and toasty palate” and a “sweet and oaky” finish.
My favorite, twenty-year-old Pappy van Winkle’s Family Reserve, is as suave and rich as a fine brandy, and mind-blowing enough to have brought me around to the bourbon camp. I’m almost as happy with the comparatively inexpensive Knob Creek or Basil Hayden’s, sipped neat from a heavy glass. I think the reason I abhorred bourbon in the first place was that for years everybody I knew drank it with Coke.
These days, the national cocktail craze that has coincided with the explosion of small batch bourbons has sent folks back into the archives for more interesting and complex bourbon cocktails, including the whiskey smashes below. The smash is a drink that hails from what historian David Wondrich refers to as the cocktail’s “Baroque Age,” which ranged from 1830 to 1885, about the same time that Dr. Crow was perfecting bourbon. I was served my first whiskey smash at Commander’s Palace a few years ago by Lally Brennan and Ti Martin, the remarkable cousins who run the New Orleans landmark. Before it occurred to me that the whiskey in question would not be Scotch, I took a sip and both my mind and palate were immediately opened. In response, I’ve attempted to open the palate of many a lifelong bourbon drinker with my version of a Scotch old fashioned, but holdouts needn’t worry—the recipe is just fine with bourbon. Finally, I can find few holdouts against the fig-infused bourbon toddy from my friends Chris and Idie Hastings at Birmingham’s Hot and Hot Fish Club. Lately people have been infusing bourbon with everything from bacon to apples and cinnamon, but this infusion is a fine regional pairing that also makes a good drink.