Okay, so the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster might have been a bit impractical. (We didn’t quite have all of the ingredients.) Once again, it’s CocktailDB to the rescue. Apparently Wes was impressed enough with my results from it last night that he consulted our cocktail oracle again tonight, this time looking for interesting-looking cocktails with one particular ingredient in mind. He chose this one, which fooled me almost entirely. I guessed wrong as to the base spirit, although I guessed the modifiers correctly. It’s another one of those cases of cocktail alchemy where the whole is completely different from the sum of its parts.

Move Over Cocktail

1-1/2 ounces gin.
1/2 ounce dry vermouth.
1/4 ounce sweet vermouth.
1/4 ounce Cherry Heering.
1 dash aromatic bitters.

Stir with ice in a mixing glass and strain;
garnish with twisted lemon peel.

For the aromatic bitters we used Angostura; try Fee’s, Bitter Truth, Peychaud’s or whatever you have on hand. I expect each one will produce a drink of an entirely different character.

This one came to my attention in one of Gary Regan’s columns, where the Professor and Doc sample a 1930 classic. It was named after a 1920s Rudolph Valentino movie, based on a novel of the same title by Vincente Blasco Ibáñez. It has since become one of my favorite Scotch-based cocktails (and that’s not all …).

Blood and Sand

3/4 ounce blended Scotch.
3/4 ounce sweet vermouth.
3/4 ounce Cherry Heering.
3/4 ounce fresh orange juice.

Shake with cracked ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass.

The smokiness of the Scotch works well in harmony with the other ingredients here, as unlikely as that may sound. If you want to take it to another level, swap out the Scotch for a good smoky mezcal, such as one of the Del Maguey offerings, or perhaps Sombra if you want to crank the smoke level up even more. With this substitution, though, you should call it an Arena y Sangre.

[UPDATE] The above photo was taken at the 2007 Spirited Dinner at Commander’s Palace at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, in which Chef Tory McPhail’s dishes were paired with cocktails by Audrey Saunders and Dale DeGroff. The Blood and Sand is a classic cocktail, and the only straight-ahead classic that was served at the meal. Usually it calls for a blended Scotch, and though I’m not sure what Scotch they used in this one, it did have a bit of smoke it it, which made it so perfect to go along with what was to come. Let’s talk cocktail pairings with food … here’s the dish that this drink accompanied.

Our entrée was Sugarcane and Bourbon Smoked Duck, smoked over smoldering whiskey barrels with local figs, a sweet potato pone, BBQ’ed onions, vanilla bourbon syrup and foie gras ganache.

Jesus Gawd.

Let’s just go through this again, shall we? Duck with Bourbon and sugarcane rub, smoked over smoldering wood from whiskey barrels. This is one reason why Tory McPhail is one of my favorite people on the planet. This dish was just fantastic; I think Wes and I had our eyes rolled up in our heads more than once while eating this dish. And the really fascinating thing is that the booze in the dish wasn’t paired with the booze in the drink this time … the smoke in the booze in the drink was paired with the smoke in the duck in the dish.

THAT, my friends, is how you pair a cocktail with a dish.

I wanted thirds and fourths of this, and I’m going to cry next time I go to Commander’s because this dish won’t be on the menu. Maybe I’ll luck out and it will, though. Fingers crossed.

After I sent him the recipe for the Hoskins, Doc pointed out that it was a cousin of the Fin de Siècle cocktail, which indeed looked to me to be a sibling of the Hearst cocktail. If you throw in the Brooklyn, we’ve got ourselves quite a lovely little family, most with one gene in common — Amer Picon (or at least its American version, Torani Amer).

I’m really gettin’ to like that Amer, and will start to play with it a lot more. Oddly enough, the drink I first got it for, and the national drink of the Basques — Picon Punch — didn’t really do all that much for me when I first tried it. (UPDATE: I think it’s because the old vegetal-tasting formulation of Torani Amer didn’t really work all that well in a Picon Punch, but it does now. However, I digress …)

In the meantime … let’s mix:

Fin de Siècle Cocktail

1-1/2 ounces Plymouth gin.
3/4 ounces sweet vermouth.
1/4 ounce Amer Picon.
1 dash orange bitters.

Stir with ice in a mixing glass for no less than thirty seconds.
Strain into a cocktail glass; no garnish.

I hope I don’t find myself wanting to drink ten of these tonight.

Yep, that’s a Bronx Cheer; I’ve always been highly amused by representations of such in print, most likely due to a childlikeish streak that lurks in many of us. (Pthbbpt!)

However, as you may or may not know, the Bronx is a lot more than just a cheer, or a borough of New York, or the home of a nifty zoo. It’s a venerable old cocktail, one that deserves to be quaffed nowadays. Today’s edition of Gary Regan’s column “The Cocktailian” tells us many nifty stories about the Bull and Bear Bar at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where this drink was created (as well as the Rob Roy and the Bobbie Burns), and which saw “Mark Twain, Buffalo Bill, and Bat Masterson quaffing cocktails way back when the old place was on the site of today’s Empire State Building.”

Bronx Cocktail

2 ounces gin.
1/4 ounce sweet vermouth.
1/4 ounce dry vermouth.
1 ounce fresh orange juice.
1 to 2 dashes orange bitters.
1 orange twist, for garnish

Shake over ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
Add the garnish.

Two cocktails, actually. The first is something I probably should have noticed before; the second is a terrific variation. They’re both great.

In a recent issue of Ardent Spirits, Gary Regan brought up a nearly-forgotten classic that appeared in Harry Craddock’s The Savoy Cocktail Book, from the Savoy Hotel in the early 1930s. Wes tried it a couple of weeks ago and it’s his current favorite. I like it a lot myself, and I particularly like the variation. “We need more rye cocktails in the world!” he says, and I agree … and I’ll add that we need more Irish whiskey cocktails too.

The original recipe for this one called for proportions and then “the juice of half a lime”; given how the juice content of limes tends to vary, Gary modified the recipe to specific measurements, and it seems to work much better that way. As for the cocktail’s name … well, there’s a story. “In August, 1924, an American engineer nearly died of fever in the Philippines, and only the extraordinary devotion of Dr. B_____ saved his life. As an act of gratitude, the engineer gave Dr. B_____ the recipe of this cocktail.”

I think people should be rewarded with cocktail recipes more often.

The Oriental Cocktail

1-1/2 ounces rye whiskey
3/4 ounce Cointreau
3/4 ounce sweet vermouth
1/2 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice

Combine in a shaker with cracked ice; shake and strain
into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a brandied cherry.

Wes likes to drizzle a teaspoon or so of the cherry juice (or even better, some brandied cherry juice) down the inside of the glass so that it makes a little layer on the bottom. Very pretty, and you get a little burst of sweetness at the end.

One of Gary’s students at “Cocktails in the Country” came up with an ingenious variation. Make the exact same drink, except substitute Irish whiskey for the rye. The difference it makes is amazing, and in my opinion it’s an even more complex drink. When making this variation, the drink is called a James Joyce.