This one’s a bit of a leftover from MxMo XIX, from Rick‘s mentioning getting his entry from Baker and also listing several other fascinating fizz recipes Baker had in The Gentleman’s Companion. (Speaking of which, I’ve had a tendency to skip around in that book, and I’ve actually never read it straight through from cover to cover. I oughta do that. Soon.) One of the ones Rick mentioned that really fascinated me was the Creole Fizz, which I thought I’d whip up since we’ve got some beautiful Plymouth Sloe Gin.

I mentioned this to Rick, and in shock and surprise he uttered an expletive that called into question the legitimacy of the circumstances of my birth. Such is the reaction among cocktailians when you mention this stuff, especially in the context of you having some when they don’t. (Hee hee. Sorry, didn’t mean to be a gloating bastard.) That’s because this is phenomenal stuff, redolent of the true fruit taste of the sloes, a perfect balance between sweet and tart, and none of the artifical cough syrupy flavor you get from pretty much every other sloe gin sold in this country. Fortunately he can get it the same place I got it — by mail, from Royal Mile Whiskies in Edinburgh, Scotland. They were one of the only liquor shops in the U.K. willing to ship to the U.S., and I got mine quickly and with little trouble. Unfortunately, such bottled joy comes with hideously expensive shipping costs. The 700ml bottles (odd, why not 750ml?) cost £16.13 each without VAT. Shipping will run £22, for a grand total of £54.26, or about $109.05. That’s a lot … but I think it’s worth it if you care about quality, and only the best ingredients going into your cocktails. If all I have is bottom shelf, $8.95 a bottle sloe gin, then I’d rather not use any.

Let us implore the Plymouth company to export their sloe gin to the United States! [UPDATE: Our imploring worked! Plymouth Sloe Gin is now available in limited quantities in the U.S. for about $32 a bottle.]

In the meantime, let’s make a drink. Here’s Charles H. Baker’s description from his book The Gentleman’s Companion, Vol. I: Exotic Drink Book; or, Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Glass:

THE CREOLE FIZZ, BEING a LATTER DAY HOT WEATHER & MILDER VARIATION of the ORIGINAL NEW ORLEANS SILVER FIZZ, & EMPLOYING SLOE GIN to LEND ITS SHY BLUSH to the COLOUR SCHEME.

Lyle Saxon gave us this one way back in 1930 during a visit to New York, tellign us about his acquisition of the old French Creole House on Royal Street…. Take either the Aziz Special or the New Orleans Fizz and substitute an equal amount of good imported sloe gin, and cutting the cream down a trifle. Garnish with a sprig of fresh green mint and that’s all.

With all due apologies to Mr. Baker, I did tweak the proportions a bit. Here’s the drink as I made it last night:

The Creole Fizz
(adapted from Charles H. Baker Jr.)

2 ounces Plymouth Sloe Gin.
1 ounce lemon juice.
1 ounce heavy cream.
1-1/2 teaspoons caster (superfine) sugar.
1 ounce egg white.
Soda water.
3 drops orange flower water.

Combine all ingredients but the soda with plenty of ice in a shaker. Shake until you are exhausted, and your hands are stuck to the metal like Flick’s tongue in “A Christmas Story” (at least one minute, preferable two or more).

Strain into a pretty glass, top with soda and garnish with a sprig of mint.

I can’t emphasize enough how much it’s worth it to procure Plymouth Sloe Gin. The use of any sloe gin other than Plymouth will make this drink infintely inferior.

Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles … Chuck finally got his act together and remembered to participate in Mixology Monday! Well, barely.

This month it’s being hosted by Gabriel at Cocktail Nerd, and because I’m behind on blog reading this week I missed the heads-up until last night. Rick emailed me to tell me he’d posted the New Orleans Fizz No. 1 and would I like tocontribute some history to the comments. “Oh, feck,” I thought, “I forgot MxMo again!!”

I was determined not to miss it this time, so I leapt into last-minute frenzied research mode. Rick had gotten his fizz recipe from Charles Baker’s Gentleman’s Companion, and I didn’t want to be quite so much of a copycat is to mine one of Baker’s many other fizz offerings (although I might do one or two of them this week anyway, ’cause I haven’t done them before and some of them look fantastic). I didn’t want to do a gin fizz either, and decided to reach for an old standard — Stanely Clisby Arthur’s 1937 classic Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em (mine’s a sixth printing from 1944 and hasn’t fallen apart … yet). I double-checked it for fizzes, and it was fairly thin in that regard. We had the Ramos Gin Fizz, plus a couple of Collinses, and basic “Gin Fizzes,” consisting of gin, lemon juice, powdered sugar and seltzer water, either plain or in three other varieties — Silver (containing egg white), Golden (containing egg yolk) or Royal (containing a whole egg). Classic, yes, but not exactly floating my boat.

I tried to think of some other spirits I might like to see in a fizz, and since I’ve been enjoying rum so much lately, and since I’d never had one, I thought, “Hmm. How about a rum fizz?”

Off to CocktailDB, where a search for “fizz” in a drink name turned up 114 results, 15 of which were based on rum — some of which looked interesting, some of which really, really didn’t, and one of which was called simply … Rum Fizz — rum, cherry brandy, sugar, lemon juice and soda. Relatively simple, but I saw it as a place to start rather than something I wanted to try for this event. Most of these fizz recipes called for soda, but I wanted something else.

As I was flipping through Arthur’s book, I came across a recipe I hadn’t really noticed before — the Tchoupitoulas Street Guzzle, described thusly:

1 split ginger beer
1 jigger Cuban style rum

Ginger beer is not to be had these days, but ginger ale will do as well. Mix with ice.

Guzzle is a somewhat inelegant word meaning to drink immoderately or frequently. Prior to the Civil War days the Iron Horse tavern was famed for its guzzle. As it increased in popularity among a certain New Orleans street it acquired the name of that street and became known as the Tchoupitoulas Street Guzzle. Tchoupitoulas (pronounced chop-a-TOO-las) was the name of an ancient Indian tribe that had its village in what is now the upper part of New Orleans. Just what sort of fire-water was their favorite guzzle history saith not.

Bingo. I had my idea for a more interesting rum fizz.

I played around with a few ideas, and settled on this combination for what I consider to be the first version of this drink. I whipped up a batch, Wes and I tasted them, and he declared it worthy of a writeup for Fizz Day.

For the rum, I used Old New Orleans Crystal Rum, but Cruzan Light 2-year-old Virgin Islands rum would work well, or any good light rum with some character (i.e., not Bacardi). I changed the lemon juice to lime, to give it more Caribbean character. I continued that by removing the cherry brandy (e.g. Cherry Heering) and substituting one of my favorite old/new liqueurs — it’s been around for ages but has only recently been available in this country — Clément Créole Shrubb. If you haven’t come across it or heard me mention it here before, it’s an orange liqueur not unlike Grand Marnier, but based on rum rather than Cognac and with a lovely, almost mysterious spicy quality. I had some rich demerara syrup left over from making Paul Clarke’s Swordfighter Swizzle, so I added a teaspoon of that for a bit more sweetness and depth from the bit of molasses in that sugar. Egg white for a foamy head, and Angostura bitters for a bit more spice to help tie it all together. And instead of soda, a nice, spicy ginger beer-type ginger ale. Not that wimpy, might-as-well-be-7Up Canada Dry stuff, we’re talking about the kind of ginger ale that’s intensely peppery, such that if you smell it after you open the bottle, you immediately sneeze. The result? Not too bad. Not too bad at all.

The Tchoupitoulas Street Fizz

1-1/2 ounces white rum.
1 ounce fresh lime juice.
1/2 ounce Clément Créole Shrubb.
1 teaspoon rich demerara syrup.
1 egg white.
2 dashes Angostura bitters.
3 ounces (approx.) spicy ginger ale (we used Blenheim’s).

Combine all ingredients with plenty of ice in a shaker. Shake the living crap out of it for at least a minute, until your hands stick to the outside of the shaker and you get so exhausted that you realize how truly out of shape you are, and that you would have been totally put to shame by Henry C. Ramos’ shaker boys. Strain into a goblet, top with the ginger ale and garnish optionally with a little grated nutmeg and/or cinnamon.

(To make rich demerara sugar syrup, dissolve 2 parts demerara sugar (or else “Sugar in the Raw”) in 1 part hot water. Cool, store in a jar and keep in the fridge.)

I’m probably going to play around with this one a bit more, but not a bad start.

Speaking of Bénédictine and Chartreuse … I missed this story by Gary Regan when it appeared in the Chronicle about a month ago. Who knew that Purgatory could be a bit like heaven?

The Purgatory Cocktail
(by Ted Kilgore, Monarch Restaurant, Maplewood MO)

2-1/2 ounces Rittenhouse 100-proof rye whiskey.
3/4 ounce Bénédictine.
3/4 ounce green Chartreuse.
Lemon twist garnish.

Stir with ice for no less than 30 seconds, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Add garnish.

Whoo, I’m going to ask for one of these after I’ve had a crap day at work. I might even make one tonight (although I don’t think I’ll have a crap day today), but I think tonight we may be going to Seven Grand.

UPDATE: We didn’t make it to Seven Grand tonight. Wes was tired after a long, crappy week at work and felt like staying in, so I decided to make Purgatory Cocktails tonight. Hopefully we’ll make it to Seven Grand tomorrow, but for now, here are the fruits of our labors. Well, drinking labor. (Feel free to sentence me to such hard labor.)

Man. That’s some big ol’ drink. Gary’s description was exactly right — that particular rye is robust enough to keep the herbal flavors of the Bénénedictine and Chartreuse (especially the latter) at bay and make them play well together. Complex and spicy and powerful (we’re talking about 2.5 ounces of 100 proof whiskey and 3/4 ounce of a 110 proof liqueur … yowza), this is one to add to the repertoire. Keep Rittenhouse 100 on hand for this, most assuredly — a softer rye like Old Overholt wouldn’t work here; it’s get wiped out. I’m not even sure Wild Turkey 101 Rye would work quite as well as the Rittenhouse does.

By the way, I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but just in case I haven’t … Rittenhouse 100 is the best rye value on the market today, in my humble opinion. A big, strong, spicy rye, an absolutely superb product, and it’s dirt-cheap — we get it for about $18 a bottle.

Or, saying more nice things about vodka. (See the post on the Gypsy Cocktail.)

One of the very first really great cocktail books I picked up about 10 years ago was Paul Harrington’s Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century. In it is an original of his which he called “The Drink Without A Name,” renamed by Robert Hess as The Harrington Cocktail (a much better name, I think). It’s almost entirely vodka, with small amounts of two liqueurs to provide subtle but pronounced flavors. It’s very good (but because I can’t help it I’ve made it with gin, and it’s really good with that too, especially with Hayman’s Old Tom).

I’ve increased the recipe from the way Paul and Robert usually give it, because I like a slightly larger drink, plus it’s easier for me to measure. By “barspoon” I mean professional barspoon measures, which is one teaspoon.

The Harrington Cocktail

2 ounces vodka.
2 barspoons Cointreau.
1 barspoon green Chartreuse.

Combine with ice and stir for 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with an orange twist.

Saying nice things about vodka? Heaven forfend.

It’s true, vodka doesn’t get a lot of respect from bartenders these days. It’s true, vodka is responsible for what one of my BarSmarts teachers called “The Era of the Fear of Flavor,” when vodka sales overtook gin sales in the late 1950s, and whiskey sales in the mid-1960s. Yes, it’s the base of a lot of lazy juice drinks, and all those Vodka Tonics we shake our heads to see turned out by the hundreds to people who apparently don’t want to taste much of anything, but want to get lit.

But where would a Moscow Mule be without vodka? I love Moscow Mules.

Vodka provides a bridge between the flavors of gin and Kina Lillet in the original Vesper cocktail.

Vodka in your Bloody Mary, baby. (Although I prefer gin, unsurprisingly.)

Truth is there are plenty of things you can do with vodka, if you use it wisely (i.e., not in something called a “Vodka Martini,” of which there is no such thing). Vodka can be used to round out the flavor of an intense or sweet ingredient, softening it while still maintaining it. A prime example of this comes from David Wondrich, via his first book Esquire Drinks: An Opinionated & Irreverent Guide to Drinking. He introduced me to a cocktail in which vodka is seemingly its base spirit but the true flavor of the cocktail is really based on a liqueur (by David Embury’s formula, something thought of as a modifier).

Bénédictine is a delicious, spicy herbal liqueur and one of my very favorites, but it’s also very sweet. I’m not big on really sweet drinks, and I rarely if ever sip liqueurs alone. This is a great way to enjoy the flavor of Bénédictine while keeping the sweetness in check. The dash of bitters helps bring it all together.

Make sure you use real Bénédictine and not “B&B,” which is a bottled mixture of half Bénédictine and half brandy.

The Gypsy Cocktail

2 ounces vodka.
1 ounce Bénédictine D.O.M. liqueur.
1 dash Angostura bitters.

Stir for no less than 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

This is actually quite nice. Dave says that you can make this with any “funky, herbal” European liqueur, such as Chartreuse, but he prefers this combination.

One of the very first really great cocktail books I picked up about 10 years ago was Paul Harrington’s Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century. In it is an original of his which he called “The Drink Without A Name,” renamed by Robert Hess as The Harrington Cocktail (a much better name, I think). It’s almost entirely vodka, with small amounts of two liqueurs to provide subtle but pronounced flavors. It’s very good (but becuase I can’t help it I’ve made it with gin, and it’s really good with that too, especially with Old Tom).

Vodka is also great for preserving homemade syrups, making spice and herb tinctures, and the like. Your bar is incomplete without it.

Now, that said, there’s really no reason for you to spend a lot of money on “premium” vodka unless you are a vodka connoisseur and enjoy sipping them chilled and neat. Those who enjoy that can discern subtle differences in vodkas based on what they’re made of (wheat, rye, potatoes, grapes, etc.), although that’s not my thing. However, once you put that in a drink all those subtleties disappear.

The best value in vodka on the market right now is Sobieski, from Poland. It wins blind taste tests left and right against vodkas costing five or more times its price, which is about $11 a bottle. It’s worth seeking out.