I’m thrilled to post the latest edition of Gary Regan’s fortnightly exploration of cocktails with The Professor, because it features a drink created by a friend of ours. Daniel Reichert (formerly of Vintage Cocktails) came up with a lovely, lovely drink called the Jamaica Farewell, and when he sent me the recipe a couple of weeks before last Christmas he reminded me (and all of us) that rum is something to keep you warm on cold winter nights, and mustn’t be confined to the summer. (That Cadenhead’s 12-year-old Jamaica rum I had the other night attests to that … good Lord, mon. My aged rum fanatic period is coming … and there goes my money, honey.)

Gary, as he often does, published an adapted version of Daniel’s cocktail — still quite good, but lacking one ingredient that was originally specified. This is unsurprising, because the aforementioned ingredient is, as we’ve noted in the past, extremely difficult to obtain, and Gary wants people to be able to make these cocktails with relative ease. The drink calls for a small amount of pimento (Jamaican allspice) liqueur — use St. Elizabeth’s Allspice Dram, or your own homemade. Here’s Dan’s original recipe:

Jamaica Farewell Cocktail
(created by Daniel Reichert)

2 ounces Appleton Estate V/X rum.
3/4 ounce Marie Brizard Apry.
3/4 ounce freshly squeezed lime juice.
1 teaspoon pimento (allspice) liqueur.
2 dashes Angostura bitters.

Shake with cracked ice and strain into a cocktail glass;
garnish with a lime wedge.

Gary suggests kicking up this drink with Appleton Estate 21-year-old rum, and that’ll certainly make it more special. However, to make it truly special … that teaspoon of pimento liqueur transforms the drink, lifts it be an exponent or two and carries you off to the beaches of Montego Bay. I’ll be finishing my lastest batch of pimento liqueur tonight, and I’ll let you know tomorrow morning how it turned out.

Now, let’s everybody sing along with Harry …

Down the way, where the nights are gay
And the sun shines daily on the mountain top,
I took a trip on a sailing ship
And when I reached Jamaica I made a stop.
But I’m sad to say I’m on my way,
Won’t be back for many a day,
My heart is down, my head is turning around,
I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town…

Yah, bredda …

Today’s Los Angeles Times Food Section features an article on blood oranges, which I absolutely adore. Beautiful color, wonderful sweetness, and far less acid than a common navel orange, these beauties are great for savory or dessert dishes, and make great drinks.

The article gives some nifty-looking recipes for blood orange marmalade and a blood orange sangría, but c’mon … is the best cocktail they could come up with a “Blood Orange Blossom”? The orange blossom, which is basically “gin and juice”, has got to be near the bottom of the barrel cocktail-wise, and was originally invented during Prohibition to cover up the flavor of awful homemade “bathtub gin”. Do something more interesting than that, for gawd’s sake. I came up with something off the top of my head one day that’s better than a bloody Orange Blossom:

Cacciavite
(or, “Italian Screwdriver”)

1-1/2 ounces Luxardo grappa (or any inexpensive grappa)
1/2 ounce Maraschino liqueur (Luxardo is good)
3 ounces freshly squeezed blood orange juice
2 barspoons of Campari

Build with ice in an double Old Fashioned glass. Stir for 8-10 seconds, garnish with a blood orange half-wheel and serve.

You might also wanna try my recipe for Blood Orange and Rosemary Sorbet, which is really fantastic.

This one’s from a recent addition to my collection of cocktail books: The Saloon in the Home, or A Garden of Rumblossoms, compiled by Ridgely Hunt and George S. Chappell, with many lavish engravings by John Held, Jr. It was published in 1930, three years before the end of Prohibition (my copy is autographed by the authors and inscribed December 1930), and is a collection of temperance songs, poems, stories, sermons and rants … interspersed with lots and lots of cocktail recipes. It’s hilarious, and I love it.

This cocktail falls right into the same category as the Manhattan, Rob Roy and Rory O’More/Tom Moore cocktails — just substitute the base spirit and stick to the classic formula.

The Hunting Horn

2 ounces applejack (use Laird’s bonded straight apple brandy).
1 ounce sweet vermouth.
1 dash Angostura bitters.

Stir with cracked ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
Garnish with a cherry.

We rather liked it.

You could try spiffing this up somewhat by using Calvados instead of applejack, and you could spiff it up even more by using Carpano Antica Formula or Punt e Mes instead of garden variety Martini & Rossi sweet vermouth.

On the same page of the book were two little temperance anecdotes and another cocktail recipe (which we have yet to try); I’ll share those with you too.

OH YEAH?

“Ten years from now hundreds of thousands of men who voted against us and struggled to keep the saloon, will go down on their knees and thank God they were overwhelmed at the ballot-box and this temptation far removed from them.”

— William Jennings Bryan, Columbus, Ohio, November 19, 1918.

AN UNFORTUNATE INCIDENT

“Very early yesterday morning, I saw a young gentleman of my acquaintance whom I knew to be too fond of ardent spirits, sitting upon a doorstep, quite exhausted from a daring feat he had been performing. On his knee were two strong door knockers, three bell pulls, and part of an area railing, all of which he had drunkenly taken into custody.”

— Dr. Henry Monroe, 1865.

The Whitney

One part Scotch whiskey.
One part Sherry.
The juice of half a Lemon.
One tablespoon of Grenadine.

Here’s to Mr. Bryan and Dr. Monroe … drink up!

This one’s an original, with several inspirations, and it took me a while to get right. I’m still not sure if I’m satisfied with it, but it is pretty darn good … and I’m not sure I can make it any better.

The first inspiration came from breakfast — Wes and I got some beautiful ruby red grapefruit in our box from Organic Express (now called Spud) a while back, and he was reminded of how his mom used to prepare them for breakfast. Halve them, score the sections, sprinkle with a generous amount of brown sugar and under the broiler until the sugar melts. Mmmmmmm, good good.

Next came from my near-obsession with the long-defunct product called Abbott’s Bitters. We tasted Abbott’s (after having heard about them for a long while) on our very first visit to Dr. Cocktail’s house a few years ago. He made us a classic Champagne Cocktail, which is very simple: a sugar cube in a Champagne flute, soak the cube with bitters, and fill with Champagne. He used Abbott’s, and more than soaked it — he must have used six or seven dashes. Abbott’s hasn’t been made since 1950, and the original formula hasn’t been made since the early 1940s, so vintage bottles of Abbott’s tend to be slightly evaporated, with a commensurate concentration of flavor.

The flavor of this stuff was amazing, deep and complex, with the “apple/pumpkin pie spices” (cinnamon, clove, nutmeg), hints of ginger and orange, and its complexity no doubt coming from the fact that it was the only bitters to have been barrel-aged. I was hooked.

Doc was kind and generous enough to present us with a bottle as a housewarming present, and as the level on that bottle began to go down, I was desperate to find more. Fortunately I had some lucky breaks, and I now have three 18-ounce bottles of the stuff, probably enough to last me for many years, if not the rest of my life, if I use it judiciously.

I also began collecting some Abbott’s memorabilia, including recipe booklets, matchbooks, an Abbott’s muddler, etc., and one of the recipe books (as well as the paper wrappers of the large bottles) had a recipe for what they called a “Grape Fruit Cocktail”:

I was a little reticent to use an entire teaspoon of Abbott’s Bitters on a half a grapefruit (the stuff hasn’t been made in 55 years, and the good stuff hasn’t been made for over 60, and is rarer than the proverbial hen’s teeth), so we decided to try good ol’ Angostura Bitters instead. About eight dashes on a half a grapefruit, sprinkled with dark brown sugar and under the broiler until the sugar melts.
Holy bejeebies, was that good. Serve that to your guests for breakfast sometime.

The second time we made this I said, “I want to make a cocktail that tastes like this.” I had several false starts — combinations of base spirit, grapefruit juice, brown sugar syrup and bitters that just didn’t work at all. I knew I was on the right track, but I got tired of myriad combinations that still didn’t taste right. Then one night it was Wes’ turn to mix our nightly cocktail, and he pulled one from Gary Regan’s The Joy of Mixology called the Bennett Cocktail, a classic 4:2:1 proportion of gin, lime juice and simple syrup with Angostura bitters that was delicious.

DING! The lightbulb went off over my head. Although I rarely use flavored vodkas anymore I’d just found a good deal on all four flavors of Charbay’s excellent fruit-infused vodkas (if you’re going to use flavored vodkas, Charbay and Hangar One are pretty much the best), and I’d been looking for something to do with them. I tried another version of my “Grape Fruit Cocktail”, and it worked.

I did a little tweaking of proportions here and there to see if it improved it any, and it didn’t. I think sticking with the classic proportion is the way to go. I like it a lot, although it’s not my favorite of my originals (that’d be the Hoskins), but I like it well enough. If you’re looking for a breakfast cocktail, this would work rather well.

I was torn about what to name it, and decided as I was writing this post. It’s named both after Wes’ mom and after Mr. C. W. Abbott, bitters-maker — the twin inspirations for the drink.

Verena Abbott Cocktail
(or, “Grape Fruit Cocktail”)

2 ounces Charbay Ruby Red Grapefruit vodka.
1 ounce fresh squeezed ruby red grapefruit juice.
1/2 ounce dark brown sugar syrup.
4 healthy dashes Angostura bitters.

To make brown sugar syrup, combine 1/2 cup dark brown sugar with 1/4 cup hot water. Heat gently until sugar is dissolved; cool and store in the fridge in a jar. Makes about 2/3 cup.

To make the cocktail, combine all ingredients in a shaker with cracked ice. Shake and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish: use a channel knife to make a long, curly twist of grapefruit peel, and drape over the edge of the glass.

If you’re feeling extraordinarily, foolishly extravagant, substitute 2-3 dashes of Abbott’s Bitters for the Angostura.

The more I think about the name, the more I like it. It sounds like a Hollywood character actress from Prohibition times, kinda.

Well, it only took them eight feckin’ months, but my insurance company finally approved payment for my sleep apnea device (the Modified UCLA Herbst Mandibular Advancement Device, or MUCLAH-MAD, as we say in the the biz (actually, we don’t say that at all)). There’s a grand I now don’t have to cough up to an increasingly annoyed doctor’s billing company, which is a great relief.

Wes cheered, and suggested we celebrate with a cocktail (as distinct from all those other evenings when we simply have a cocktail with no celebration involved). He wondered if there was a Procrastinator Cocktail, a Slowpoke Cocktail, a Cheapskate Cocktail or a Forgetful Cocktail. (Do you think he was trying to tell me something?) Alas, none existed in CocktailDB, and none of the three in-progress originals we’re working on seemed to fit those names. Via CocktailDB, his is the closest he came up with.

Elephants Sometimes Forget

1 ounce gin.
3/4 ounce Cherry Heering.
3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice.
1/4 ounce dry vermouth.
1 dash orange bitters.

Shake and strain; no garnish specified.

This was really good, with a perfect balance between sweet and tart. Unfortunately there was no attribution for its origin or its silly name.