We had the most luscious honey the other day.

One of our favorite breakfast and lunch spots, the Village Bakery and Café in Atwater Village, is carrying local honey made by Feral Honey (aka “our friends Amy and Russell,” said owner Barbara). The beekeeping is hands-off for the most part, all natural and organic (no pesticides or hormones) and the honey is made by wild bees in the Silver Lake area. All the nectar they gather is from within a 3-mile radius in the neighborhood, and it tastes like what’s growing in the area, and what’s in people’s backyards.

The current batch tastes of lavender with a touch of minty eucalyptus (although not medicinal-tasting), rich and complex and absolutely wonderful. It’s not cheap, but you get a lot of honey-bang for your buck.

Besides just eating it out of the jar with a spoon (which we found to be dangerously enticing, ’cause we just might finish the whole thing if we’re not careful), the first thing we thought to do with it was try it in one of the great classic cocktails that I think needs a lot more attention.

The Bee’s Knees cocktail popped up sometime during Prohibition (although we don’t know its exact origin) as one of many ways to disguise the taste of, shall we say, disreputable gin. It’s a very simple gin sour, but the twist here is that the sweetener, as you may have gleaned, is honey rather than sugar. You have a lot of room for variation and creativity with the myriad flavors of honey that are available, and we thought this marvelously floral honey would be a perfect match with the new Beefeater Summer Edition gin.

Beefeater Master Distiller Desmond Payne, looking for a followup to the very successful Beefeater 24, sought to come up with a gin that’s a bit lighter and more suitable for warm weather and summery drinks. The limited edition Summer gin is lighter in proof, 80 as opposed to 94, a slightly lighter juniper profile and the addition of black currant, elderflower and hibiscus flower to the range of botanicals. In tasting the gin neat you can’t really pick these individual flavors out, but the combination plus the lighter profile makes it very refreshing. It’s floral without being flowery, and the combination of flavors in the gin seems to make it want to leap into the arms of other ingredients. (Wes has been playing with this a fair bit, and once we get back from Seattle I’ll post a couple of his recent concoctions.)

Grab Beefeater Summer Edition while you can, because it won’t be around for all that much longer (and I certainly hope it shall return next year).

Now, for that cocktail …

To make honey syrup, combine equal parts of honey and extremely hot water and stir until the honey is dissolved. For rich honey syrup, use 2 parts of honey to 1 part hot water. It’ll keep in the fridge for a few weeks, and longer if you add a splash of vodka as a preservative. It’s so easy to make on the fly, though, that I’ll usually just prep enough for the batch of cocktails I’m about to make.

You can serve this drink strained and up with a lemon twist garnish, or on the rocks with a lemon wedge. Try more robust gins, or try swapping out the gin for rum or tequila. If you’ve never had this one, you’re going to fall in love with it. Why, it’s so good it’s the … (you know).

BEE’S KNEES

2 ounces gin (substitute rum or tequila)
1 ounce honey syrup
1 ounce fresh lemon juice

Combine in a shaker with ice and shake for 10-12 seconds. Strain into chilled cocktail glass and garnish with lemon twist, or over ice in an Old Fashioned glass with a lemon wedge garnish.

This coming Saturday, May 15, as part of World Cocktail Week, Cure in New Orleans (one of my favorite bars anywhere) is holding an event called “Bartending by the Book” which will benefit the Museum of the American Cocktail and the New Orleans Culinary and Cultural Preservation Society. This’ll be an interesting event, because the Cure bartenders are holding themselves to follow classic recipes from one of the city’s most venerable imbibing tomes, Stanley Clisby Arthur’s Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em, as difficult as that may be given the differences in ingredients between then and now.

Doubly interesting, as the creative bartenders at Cure tend to use the old recipes as jumping-off points rather than hew faithfully to them. At this event you’ll be in a bit of a cocktail time machine, sipping history as closely as we can get it.

The four drinks they’ve chosen for this event include the familiar — the Daiquiri, the Stinger and the Vieux Carré — and one that might not be so familiar, although it’s local. That one’s the St. Charles Punch, named not for the grand streetcar- and oak-lined avenue stretching from Canal Street to the Riverbend, but for the grand hotel which once existed there. Or one of them, at least.

The St. Charles Hotel actually had three incarnations. The first one was designed by the architect James Gallier, whose name was given to Gallier Hall on St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans’ city hall from 1853 to 1958. It was the first truly grand hotel in the city, which was up until then not known for luxurious accommodations (nor for well-built ones, like the Planters Hotel, which collapsed into the soft soil in 1835, burying sixty people and killing a third of them)¹.

According to Mary Cable’s book Lost New Orleans, it was quite a sight:

The St. Charles was certainly no common structure. It was taller than any building in New Orleans — six stories, surmounted by a gleaming white dome that could be seen for miles up and down the river. According to Norman’s 1845 guidebook, “The effect of the dome upon the sight of the visitor, as he approaches the city, is similar to that of St. Paul’s in London.” Mr. Norman, beside himself with admiration, went on to speak of the “indescribable effect of the sublime and matchless proportions of this building upon all spectators — even the stoical Indian and the cold and strange backwoodsman, when they first view it, are struck with wonder and delight.”²

The St. Charles Hotel, 1836-1851, from Lost New Orleans, by Mary Cable

It wasn’t around long; “[t]his spendid pile lasted a bare fifteen years. In the spring of 1851 a fire that started in the kitchen spread through defective chimney flues and within three hours the entire hotel was in ashes.” Miraculously, no one was killed. Perhaps it was for the best; “according to a contemporary architect (not Gallier) the foundations had settled at least 28 inches, the external walls were cracked and the floors were ‘very undulating.’”³

A second hotel went up in the same spot, designed by Isaiah Rogers and George Purvis, very much like Gallier’s Greek revival original but without the great dome. It opened a mere two years later and was itself burned to the ground in 1894.

The 2nd St. Charles Hotel, 1853-1894

Third time’s a charm … the third St. Charles Hotel went up on the same site two years later in 1896 and was quite a nice hotel, albeit without the grandeur of its predecessors.

The 3rd St. Charles Hotel, 1896-1974

For about sixty years it was a New Orleans favorite for Mardi Gras balls, coming-out parties, high-level political meetings and as a rendezvous for the elite, to whom it was the equivalent of New York’s old Ritz-Carlton. For no imperative reason, the third St. Charles was demolished in 1974. The ghosts of three memorable buildings now hover above a parking lot.⁴

According to Arthur this punch was a specialty of the bar at the St. Charles Hotel (presumably the third) and was in great demand among its patrons. I’m not sure it’s technically a punch, as the proportions are nowhere near the classic “1 of sour, 2 of sweet, 3 of strong and 4 of weak, plus spice.” There’s not much weak in here, no spice and it’s a very tart punch.

That said, it’s a delightful punch and goes down … dangerously quickly.

THE ST. CHARLES PUNCH
(adapted from Stanley Clisby Arthur’s
Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em)

1 teaspoon rich simple syrup (2:1)
1/3 teaspoon orange curaçao (1 dash)
1-1/2 ounces fresh lemon juice
1-1/2 ounces ruby port
1 ounce Cognac

Arthur’s original instructions: “Dissolve the sugar with a little water in a mixing glass. Add the lemon juice, the port wine, the Cognac, and last the curaçao. Fill the glass with fine ice and jiggle with the barspoon. Pour into a long thin glass, garnish with fruit, and serve with a straw. [...] Don’t omit the straw; this drink demands long and deliberate sipping for consummate enjoyment.”

I loved Anita‘s comment from the photo’s Flickr page: “Any drink that looks that good can demand pretty much anything it likes.”

I did without the original teaspoon of granulated sugar and splash of water, and substituted a rich simple syrup for ease of use. I also upped the curaçao to a teaspoon so it wouldn’t get lost — I am a fan of dashes of ingredients in cocktails, but I wanted the orange flavor to be a bit more there, and a tad more sweetness to counter the lemon. I also used cubed ice in the photo because I’m a lazy bastard. Don’t be like me — crush your ice!

1. Mary Cable, Lost New Orleans (New York; American Legacy Press, 1980), pp. 108-109.

2. Ibid., p. 109.

3. Ibid., p. 111.

4. Ibid., p. 114.

The legendary Pat O’Brien’s Bar in the French Quarter, New Orleans. Opened its doors on December 3, 1933, two days before the end of Prohibition (well, ya had to have a coupla days to get ready).

As the story goes, back in the 1940s the bar’s partners Benson “Pat” O’Brien and Charlie Cantrell were forced by liquor wholesalers to order as many as 50 cases of rum along with whatever other spirits they wanted, or else no deal. There was a glut of rum post-Prohibition and the dealers wanted to move it. Problem was, Pat and Charlie couldn’t care less about it. What the hell are we going to do with all this rum?! Their solution — create a drink to use up all this rum. After some tinkering they wound up with a powerful mixture of rum, passion fruit syrup and fresh lemon juice and created a taste sensation.

Pat O’Brien’s is quite possibly the most popular bar in the French Quarter, certainly among tourists — (a Times-Picayune article on the history of the place from a couple of years ago said that 95% of all first-time New Orleans tourists go there. You’ll even sometimes see some locals in there, although probably not so much as in older days. The Main Bar and Piano Bar in the front were once popular haunts for locals, and the Courtyard Bar, with its flaming fountain, is one of the most beautiful bar spaces in the city, and you should really go see it if you haven’t … as long as you don’t mind sharing the space with loud tourists and Texas frat boys.

There’s just one little problem — the drinks are pretty terrible.

Oh, you can get some okay mixed drinks there, but … well, Pat O’Brien’s put me off Mint Juleps for years because I made the mistake of ordering my first one there. I got a bright green concoction made with mint syrup and not a speck of fresh mint other than a wilted garnish that looked and tasted like Scope, and the bartender actually mocked me when he served it to me.

Regarding the Hurricane as currently served at Pat O’Brien’s, I have one word for you: sweet sweet sweet Sweet SWEET! (Okay, one word five times.) Rum? Oh yes, and lots of it, four whole ounces per drink. They go through a lot of it; it’s said that Pat O’s is the single largest purveyor of rum in the world. Passion fruit? Um … not so much. I’d say that flavor is undetectable in the drink. Lemon juice? Zilch. There is no balance of tart in this drink. Did I mention that it’s SWEET? Teeth-shatteringly sweet.

“A stealthy drink” is how my friend Chris Clarke once described it, and that it is. It’s like an alcoholic kool-aid in which you cannot taste the alcohol. And you can forget about any fresh ingredients — the recipe at the bar is rum (I don’t know which one they use in their well) plus “Hurricane mix,” which at the bar is a premade, artificially colored, artificially flavored bottled red stuff, which is also available in envelopes in powder form.

If you’re serious about cocktails, this isn’t anything you really want to be drinking.

In fact, in a post from Tales of the Cocktail’s weblog a while back, the Hurricane was listed as one of the worst drinks on Bourbon Street (then again, can you get a good drink on Bourbon Street anywhere past Galatoire’s?). Research for this post resulted in a highly amusing photo of a bunch of cocktail bloggers sucking down their Hurricanes like mother’s milk.

Shamelessly purloined from Trader Tiki

They look thrilled, don't they?

I don’t know when Hurricanes stopped using passion fruit syrup and citrus and when they started being red, but if you look at the list of ingredients — rum, passion fruit syrup and lemon juice — you don’t see anything red in there. Perhaps someone dumped grenadine in it once, and that evolved into the syrup … I really don’t know. If you do, let me know.

When I was in college, having just moved to Los Angeles from New Orleans, I was really homesick and didn’t know a damn thing about proper drinking. My homesickness caused me to bring back many envelopes of that awful powder and throw “Hurricane Parties,” the object of which was to socialize and get stinking drunk. (To be honest, we did have a great time, even though after the first round or two I stopped using “the good rum,” i.e. Bacardi, ahem, and started mixing them with plain wrap rum that was probably a step above tiki torch fuel.) If I didn’t have the powder, I used a a “faux-Hurricane” recipe that I found in an old local cookbook called La Belle Créole calling for a mix made with 46 ounces of Fruit Juicy Red Hawaiian Punch (back in the olden days, that was “one large can”), one 12-oz. can of frozen orange juice concentrate, and one 6-oz. can of frozen lime daiquiri mix. Though it didn’t taste all that much like the Hurricanes served at Pat O’s it was fruity, red, and we were too drunk to be able to tell the difference anyway.

A long time ago I found a recipe somewhere — I think it may have been in the Times-Picayune — to make a Hurricane out of all fresh ingredients. It looked pretty good, and I tweaked it to suit my tastes. It didn’t taste much like what was served at Pat O’s, but it was a pretty nice tropical drink and it was still true to the rum-passion fruit-citrus base. (It’s also nothing like the actual Original Hurricane; I’ll teach you how to make that in a bit. Keep reading.)

I had that older recipe up in an previous version of the website for ages, and it ended up in Gary Regan’s The Joy of Mixology. Here’s that version, slightly adapted; gaz swapped out lemon juice for my lime. If you can find fresh passion fruit juice or purée, use 2 ounces of that plus 1/2 ounce of simple syrup instead of the passion fruit syrup, otherwise mix as below:

Hurricane Cocktail: A Variation
(adapted from my recipe as published in The Joy of Mixology)

1-1/2 ounces light rum
1-1/2 ounces dark rum
1 ounce fresh orange juice
1 ounce fresh lime juice
2 ounces passion fruit syrup
1 teaspoon of real pomegranate grenadine

Shake with ice and strain into an ice-filled Hurricane glass or tiki glass. Garnish with a “flag” made of an orange slice and a cherry on a cocktail pick.

This is still a bit sweet but not nearly as sweet as the Pat O’Brien’s premix Hurricane, and it’s all fresh and not artificial.

Oh, and don’t skimp on the passion fruit syrup, either for the above variation or the real thing below. The go-to passion fruit syrup for years has been Trader Vic’s, but it has been reformulated with artificial ingredients and is no longer acceptable. You can get passion fruit syrup from Monin or Torani, opinions of which range from decent to acceptable to yuck, but you’ll really want to go to Aunty Lilikoi from Hawaii and order the best in the world. Seriously, it’s an order of magnitude or two better than the aforementioned ones.

As I understand it the original drink was made with lemon juice. If you’re a stickler for history and if you prefer it that way, use freshly squeezed lemon juice and you’ll be drinking some true New Orleans history. However, I think that lime works so much better and so perfectly in this drink that at home we make it with lime juice. Try it both ways and see which one you prefer.

For the rum try Appleton V/X from Jamaica, or Old New Orleans Amber Rum for a local touch. Jeff “Beachbum” Berry likes Gosling’s Black Seal, and Matt “Rumdood” Robold prefers Coruba “by a factor of about a billion point seven.”

This is for a reasonably-sized drink, not the super-sized one you typically see; unless I’m seriously getting my tiki on, perhaps quaffing at Tiki Ti when someone else is driving, the original proportions might be a bit much. That proportion called for four ounces of spirit, and two ounces of each of the other ingredients. If you want a big one served in a hurricane glass, just double this recipe, then prepare for blottofication.

The Original HURRICANE COCKTAIL
(adapted from the original recipe as seen in
Beachbum Berry Remixed, by Jeff Berry)

2 ounces dark rum
1 ounce Aunty Lilikoi passion fruit syrup
1 ounce fresh lemon juice (the original recipe) or lime juice (which I prefer)
Orange slice and cherry.

Combine rum, syrup and juice with ice and shake vigorously until the mixing tin frosts. Serve in a double Old Fashioned glass or tiki glass over crushed ice, and garnish with an orange and cherry "flag."

Now THAT’S a Hurricane, brah.

I don’t watch the Food Network anymore.

I used to watch it all the time. The ability to watch Mario Batali every day? Damn right! Hometown chef Emeril Lagasse too. (His studio show “Essence of Emeril,” not the silly live show when they cheered every time he seasoned something.) And my weekly obsession, Iron Chef — the real one from Japan, not the American version, which despite the presence of Alton Brown and (for a while) Mario and Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto I never really cared for. Oh, how I miss わたしのきおくがたしかならば!

Now the network is mostly crap, with pretty much all the actual chefs swept away and Alton Brown being pretty much the only thing worth watching; I still do catch “Good Eats” on occasion. Worst of all, though, and what has brought Food Network down to its nadir, is the truly awful Sandra Lee of “Semi-Homemade” and mindbogglingly enough some other show as well in which she mixes together a lot of pre-packaged crap and calls it cooking.

The thousand injuries of watching her “cooking” I had borne as best as I could, but when she ventured upon insult — making what she called “cocktails” — I vowed revenge. (OK, not really, but I love quoting “The Cask of Amontillado.”) By “revenge” in this case I mean “intense public mocking.”

Yeah, I know, I don’t usually diss people in this forum — it’s a lot more fun to write about what I like — but I do enjoy see perpetrators of mediocrity (and worse) actually get a bit of comeuppance.

This video has been making the rounds of the bartender world during the past few days after being brought to everyone’s attention by Jeff Morgenthaler via his Twitter feed, where said he hated to pick on her (uh huh) yet invited everyone to “watch Sandra Lee’s face in slow-mo as she tries to choke down one of her own cocktails.”

Yeah sweetie … what did you think a mixture of lemonade, heavy cream and vodka would taste like? Mmm, cream curdling right in your mouth. That entirely involuntary reaction displayed upon your face is your nervous system telling you, “Hello! You’ve just consumed something that might kill you or make you really sick! It’s a pretty noxious stimulus, so I might just have to engage your emesis reflex. Heads up!” Whether or not she actually hurled I can’t say.

Jeff continued with an epic weblog post in which he links to the ten “cocktails” Sandra Lee came up with last week, one for each of the 10 films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar — “the ten sweetest, vanilla-flavored, blue curaçao’d, nastiest cocktails of 2010, and an “appalling affront to the craft that so many of us have worked hard trying to restore over the past fifteen-plus years.”

Let’s hope not too many people actually made one of those awful drinks. (To be fair, her “Inglourious Basterds” drink is basically just a Negroni with a splash of orange juice — highly unoriginal yet probably drinkable. But ugh.)

In the interest of full disclosure I have to say that I too made a blue cocktail for the Oscar party, where all the food or drink that’s brought in has to tie in to one of the films nominated in any category, even if only via a bad pun. Inglourious Custerds was one of my favorites (honorable mention to Steve’s “Inglourous Basturma”). We also had A Serious Man-icotti, some great BBQ ribs for “The Lovely Bones,” an apple cider-glazed turducken (because the Fantastic Mr. Fox stole chickens, ducks, turkeys and cider from Farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean … brilliant!) and perhaps the best and most groanworthy pun of the night … the beers Diana brought that had Band-Aids stuck to the bottles. Why? “Hurt Lager!”

Cocktail-wise, rather than a flavored vodka sweet swill as Lee is always wont to dump into her cauldron of evil, I made a Daiquiri in one of the classic proportions of 4:2:1 and added a quarter ounce each of maraschino liqueur and blue curaçao, evening out the tart and sweet balance. I find that large general non-cocktailian crowds like this tend not to like citrus cocktails as tart as I like them.

The curaçao I used is Senior Curaçao of Curaçao as well — it’s a really good product, despite its intense blueness, and remains the only curaçao actually made on the island of Curaçao. I usually keep both their orange and blue versions around.

Plus, I was talking to Audrey Saunders the other day and she expressed her love of blue cocktails (”as long as they taste good”), so I consider that to be official permission.

The crowd seem to like them, for what it’s worth. I batched enough for about 24 small servings, and they were gone long before the end of that interminable Oscar broadcast.

I will confess, though, that I did not come up with a terribly clever pun to name the drink, though … lame lame lame.

NA’VI’QUIRI

2 ounces Cruzan light rum
1 ounce fresh lime juice
1/2 ounce simple syrup
1/4 ounce Luxardo maraschino
1/4 ounce Senior Blue Curaçao of Curaçao

Combine with ice, shake for 15 seconds, strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a little sparkly airborne floating jellyfish-looking thing from Pandora, or a lime wedge.

Perfect for sipping on those balmy Pandora days while you’re lounging under your Home Tree, wearing 3-D glasses and a breathing mask, or while watching “Dances With Wolves.”

Well, not you personally, probably. Maybe. Have you? Fess up!

Have you ever served someone a pink Mai Tai? Or thought you could just mix rum and pineapple juice? Or gotten some kind of blended slush? Or worse still, come across a bartender who thinks that a Mai Tai is “aah, just some rum and a buncha juices?” I’ve been unfortunate enough to have all of the above (that quote is a direct one, and in a tiki-themed restaurant no less), more times than I care to count. The most recent one was in a local restaurant and bar which supposedly prided itself on authentic cocktails. They listed the Mai Tai on their menu as “The Original Trader Vic Mai Tai,” listed all the correct ingredients even … and then proceeded to dump a jigger of fake Rose’s grenadine into the mixing glass at the very end. *facepalm*

(I returned it — gently, politely and even apologetically — but the bartender instantly hated me anyway. Sigh. To be fair, I was assured later that none of the other bartenders in the joint would have done that, and nobody liked the one who happened to serve me.)

The Mai Tai is one of the greatest tropical cocktails, and one of the most sadly abused. It was created by Victor “Trader Vic” Bergeron in his Oakland bar in 1944 and, as the story goes, first served to a friend who was visiting from Tahiti. Supposedly the friend exclaimed in Tahitian, “Mai ta’i roa ae!, variously translated as “The best!” or “Out of this world!” and hence the name.

If you’re not a cocktail geek, or if you haven’t been frequenting the right bars, it’s entirely likely that you’ve never even had a truly authentic Mai Tai, although I’ll bet you’ve had a lot of rum ‘n juice. A lot of folks don’t realize that the only juice in a proper Mai Tai is lime — no pineapple, no orange, no grapefruit. The orange flavor comes from curaçao, the sweetness from rich simple syrup (or “rock candy syrup,” made 2:1 sugar to water) and orgeat, a French-style almond syrup with hints of orange blossoms and roses. No grenadine. No red, no pink.

When you taste one, it’ll be like dawn breaking. You’re going to love the interplay of flavors, the sweetness and tartness in perfect balance, and the blend of fruit and nut and the tiniest hint of flowers make it taste truly exotic. You won’t get that from “rum and a buncha juices.”

If you haven’t done so yet, as of today you are now going to carry the torch for a real Mai Tai, and you’ll be taught by the best.

Now, we must admit that the really authentic Mai Tai will cost you more than you’d likely care to spend. Vic used a 17-year-old Wray and Nephew Jamaican rum for his initial Mai Tai which hasn’t been made in over 50 years, and remaining sealed bottles of it have sold for tens of thousands of dollars. However, if you’re idly rich or a Lotto winner keen on squandering your fortune on drink, there is an original, authentic Mai Tai to be had. Go to The Bar at the Merchant Hotel in Belfast in the north of Ireland. There bartender Sean Muldoon will make you a Mai Tai with one of their precious bottles of Wray and Nephew 17-year — I think they only have one left — and serve it to you as Vic served it to his Tahitian friend, for the low, low price of £750. That’s about $1,129.42 at today’s exchange rate. If you have one, please let me know how much you enjoyed it.

For the rest of us, a good aged rum will do, preferably a blend of two.

Let’s watch Martin Cate, owner of the fabulous Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco, show you how it’s done. This is from Chow.com‘s series, “You’re Doing It Wrong!” (Sorry about the commercial.) Martin likes Appleton Estate 12-year from Jamaica and El Dorado 12-year from Guyana, which is a great combo. I like to mix Jamaican rum (that Appleton being one of my very favorites) with a Martinican rhum agricole like Saint James Hors d’Age or Clément VSOP. Whichever you choose, make sure they’re dark and aged, and use one ounce of each.

Take it away, Martin!

The Mai Tai
(Original version by Trader Vic Bergeron, 1944, and therefore the ONLY acceptable version!)

2 ounces aged rum (preferably a blend of two)
3/4 fresh lime juice
1/2 ounce orange Curaçao
1/4 ounce rich simple syrup
1/4 ounce orgeat

Combine in a mixing glass with crushed ice and shake until the metal portion is frosty. Pour the whole thing into a double Old Fashioned glass. Garnish with half of a spent lime shell, face down, and a healthy sprig of mint (spank the mint before garnishing to release oils and aroma).

Remember Martin’s rules — no mixes! (That’s a general rule that if you read this site or any other cocktail-related sites you should know by now.) No juices other than lime. No grenadine. No flavored rums. Make rich simple syrup — it only takes a few minutes. Buy Trader Tiki’s orgeat! It’s ready-made, authentic and delicious!

And raise your glass to Trader Vic. Mai ta’i roa ae!