Posted by Paul Clarke, April 18, 2008 at 6:30 PM
Let's start the weekend right—with a cocktail recipe from Paul Clarke (The Cocktail Chronicles). Need more than one? Hit up the archives. Cheers!
What, you thought Manhattan was the only borough of New York that had a drink named after it? We’ll get to the Brooklyn later, but Staten Island and Queens? Well, sorry—better luck next time.
Like its namesake, The Bronx cocktail has taken a beating over the years. It all started out well (with origins at the old Waldorf-Astoria back when that was the place to drink), but when Prohibition hit, the Bronx became ... popular. This was a bad thing, you see, because all sorts of rotgut gin were being mixed into cocktails, and the Bronx was one of those that had enough other stuff in it to somewhat obscure the vile taste of the booze. By the time Repeal rolled around, many drinkers had lost a few layers of stomach lining to Bronxes and others of its ilk. As a result, it was remembered with so much ill will that the drink practically disappeared.
Let’s be honest: The Bronx is unlikely to be anyone’s favorite drink. But while it’s not exactly bottled excitement, The Bronx is actually pretty good, and surprisingly refreshing. Be sure to use fresh-squeezed orange juice (and if you add a dash or two of Angostura bitters, you’ve got a somewhat tastier Income Tax Cocktail on your hands), and approach it with an open mind. There are some things from the past worth revisiting from time to time.
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Posted by Paul Clarke, April 11, 2008 at 5:45 PM
Let's start the weekend right—with a cocktail recipe from Paul Clarke (The Cocktail Chronicles). Need more than one? That kinda week, eh? Here you go. Cheers!
As much as I like to imagine it happening, chances are that Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woolcott and the rest of the gang never tipped up a round of these.
While the members of the Algonquin Round Table likely never got on the outside of an Algonquin—the drink’s recipe didn’t appear in print until years after the legendary lunch meetings ended—this mixture bearing the name of that venerable hotel is as dry and captivating as was their wit. Fortunately, while the Round Table disbanded around 1929, it’s not too late to explore the flavor of the Algonquin.
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Posted by Paul Clarke, March 28, 2008 at 5:00 PM
Let's start the weekend right—with a cocktail recipe from Paul Clarke (The Cocktail Chronicles). Need more than one? That kinda week, eh? Here you go. Cheers!
Indecisiveness isn’t a characteristic limited to humans. Consider the weather: we’re fresh out of spring’s starting gate (those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway), but here in Seattle, a place of moderate maritime climes if ever there was one, bits of slushy snow were clinging to the blossoming daffodils late last night.
When the weather (or your palate) is being indecisive, it’s best for your cocktails to play along. That’s where the El Presidente comes in: made with light rum, it has a bright, summery appeal; but with the gravitas brought to the drink by dry vermouth and orange curacao, the flavor is ready to pull on a sweater against the evening’s chill.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 25, 2008 at 11:00 AM
Mothers & Menus is a New York City meal delivery service designed for families living through those first few crazy weeks with a new baby. Its founder, Karen Gurwitz, was frustrated after the birth of her first child: she wanted to lose her pregnancy weight, but since she was breastfeeding she worried about cutting out too many calories. Wouldn’t it be great, she thought, if someone else would figure out what she should eat and deliver it to her every morning? Such a service didn’t exist, so she invented it and committed to using whole and organic foods as much as possible.
Mothers & Menus sounds wonderful and flexible. But if it doesn’t fit into your budget (it certainly doesn’t jibe with mine) and you like making your own food (as I do), you might want to take a look instead at Gurwitz’s cookbook, The Well-Rounded Pregnancy Cookbook.
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Posted by Paul Clarke, March 21, 2008 at 5:30 PM
Let's start the weekend right—with a cocktail recipe from Paul Clarke (The Cocktail Chronicles). Need more than one? That kinda week, eh? Here you go. Cheers!
This Easter, the eggs won’t all be dressed up in pretty colors and beautifully arrayed in a basket.
As compared to the white-glove treatment most Easter eggs receive, the fate that awaits eggs at bars such as Green Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is much more harrowing. Last Easter, bar manager Misty Kalkofen marked the holiday by serving a menu full of cocktails that had eggs, in whole or in part, vigorously shaken into them. No word on if she plans to repeat the event this year, but here’s a drink created by Misty that certainly belongs in the Easter canon.
Mixed with applejack, Benedictine and maple syrup, the Fort Washington Flip retains hints of the winter just past; given the early Easter this year, don’t be surprised if the weather suits up to match the drink.
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Posted by Paul Clarke, March 14, 2008 at 5:15 PM
Let's start the weekend right—with a cocktail recipe from Paul Clarke (The Cocktail Chronicles). Need more than one? That kinda week, eh? Here you go. Cheers!
For a holiday so frequently associated with tipsy merriment, St. Patrick’s Day is certainly celebrated with a bum bunch of drinks.
Okay, there’s Guinness—I’ll give you that as the primary redeeming tipple for the day, with a tip of the hat also to the decent drams of Red Breast. But what else do you see being poured? Buckets of American lager tinted with vegetable dye, mugs of Irish coffee so laden with sugar and whipped cream that a drinker will lapse into a diabetic coma before inebriation sets in, and in the more raucous places the young folks frequent, the unfortunately named Irish Car Bombs.
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Posted by Paul Clarke, March 7, 2008 at 5:15 PM
Let's start the weekend right—with a cocktail recipe from Paul Clarke (The Cocktail Chronicles). Need more than one? That kinda week, eh? Here you go. Cheers!
If you’ve ever been to a luau-themed party or exotic bar, or sipped your way through a beach vacation, chances are you’ve been served a mai tai. Unless you’re especially lucky or just happen to have a thing for tiki drinks, however, chances are even better you’ve been served a fraud.
Spawned from the rum-soaked genius mind of “Trader Vic” Bergeron, the mai tai is one of the most regal refreshments in the exotic-drink universe. Originally made with 17-year-old Jamaican rum, imported French orgeat, Dutch curaçao and fresh-squeezed lime juice, the mai tai quickly became a phenomenon; it also quickly became perverted. Hordes of Trader Vic-wannabes took wild stabs at recreating Bergeron’s long-secret recipe, and the result is what we all-too-often experience now: a sweet, murky drink filled with assorted fruit juices and syrups, with little resemblance to the original swoon-worthy concoction.
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Posted by Paul Clarke, February 15, 2008 at 5:00 PM
Let's get this weekend started right. Here's a cocktail from Paul Clarke to kick things off. Need more than one? That kinda week, eh? Here you go. Cheers!
In 2008, if you’re an adult male who feels the need for a little, um, assistance in the intimacy department, you reach for one of the pharmaceuticals you see advertised during football games. In 1928, if you needed a little vavoom in the bedroom, you went to see Dr. Voronoff.
So popular was Voronoff’s vitality procedure in the 1920s that it inspired the creation of the Monkey Gland, a cocktail named for the rather sensitive part of an unfortunate simian’s anatomy that Voronoff surgically implanted into his eager patients.
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Posted by Paul Clarke, February 8, 2008 at 5:00 PM
Let's get this weekend started right. Here's a cocktail from Paul Clarke to kick things off. Need more than one? That kinda week, eh? Here you go. Cheers!
This cocktail has a name, appearance and elegant flavor well suited for Valentine’s Day. Unlike its floral namesake, however, this Rose is best enjoyed in quantities of fewer than a dozen.
Rescued from a vintage bar menu by cocktail historian David Wondrich, the Rose enjoyed a brief flash of popularity at the Chatham Hotel in Paris in the 1920s. Good luck finding it since then, which is a shame; soft, floral, lightly sweet and with a titillating aroma from the cherry eau de vie, the Rose is an exercise in delicate decadence, a drink that, like the Widow’s Kiss, can put the imbiber in a mindset from a completely different era.
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Posted by Paul Clarke, February 1, 2008 at 5:15 PM
Let's get this weekend started right. Here's a cocktail from Paul Clarke to kick things off. Need more than one? That kinda week, eh? Here you go. Cheers!
Regardless of what Punxsatawney Phil happens to see when he’s persuaded to emerge from his burrow in front of a battery of television cameras at Gobbler’s Knob this weekend, there’s plenty of winter yet to come. To keep seasonal affective disorder at bay, sometimes it’s wise to embrace the season for its good points: steaming plates of comfort food are all the more comforting in the winter; you can build crackling fires in the fireplace to drive away the chill; and deep, brooding cocktails seem to provide extra solace at a time when daylight is still at a premium.
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Posted by Jenn Sit, January 30, 2008 at 11:00 AM
Manhattan
- makes 2 drinks -
Ingredients
4 1/2 ounces rye or bourbon whiskey
1 1/2 ounces sweet vermouth
2 dashes Angostura bitters
2 Maraschino cherries
Procedure
1. In a cocktail shaker filled with ice, pour the whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters. Mix until outside of shaker is very cold to touch.
2. Place a maraschino cherry in each of two cocktail glasses. Strain the contents Dividing evenly, strain the contents of the shaker over cherries and serve immediately.
Posted by Jenn Sit, January 30, 2008 at 11:00 AM
Cape Codder
Ingredients
1 1/2 oz Vodka
3 oz Cranberry juice
1 wedge Lime
Procedure
Pour vodka and cranberry over ice and stir. Serve with lime wedge.
Posted by Paul Clarke, January 25, 2008 at 5:45 PM
Let's get this weekend started right. Here's a cocktail from Paul Clarke to kick things off. Need more than one? That kinda week, eh? Here you go. Cheers!
Drinks such as the Manhattan have recipes that are so engaging and enduring that the cocktail moves straight from inception into the classic column; others, such as the Harvey Wallbanger, enjoy a brief flare of popularity then mostly disappear. Then you have the undead: the drinks that enjoy a certain degree of fame for years or even decades then succumb to changing tastes and disappear from view, only to pop up again on the cultural radar long after being presumed dead.
Enter the Corpse Reviver #2. Part of a class of “corpse reviver” cocktails—so named because of their purported ability to bring the dead (or at least painfully hungover) back to some semblance of life—this drink was a staple of bar manuals back in the 1930s, only to fall off the map in the last half of the 20th century. Then, thanks in large part to cocktail historian Ted Haigh (aka “Dr. Cocktail”), the Corpse Reviver #2 was rediscovered by a generation of 21st century cocktail geeks.
High time, too. Delicately balanced, not too powerful, with a lingering, mysterious flavor, the Corpse Reviver #2 is enjoying a well-deserved second wind.
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Posted by Paul Clarke, January 11, 2008 at 6:00 PM
Let's get this weekend started right. Here's a cocktail from Paul Clarke to kick things off. Need more than one? That kinda week, eh? Here you go. Cheers!
Not every occasion calls for something as strong as a Martini. Sometimes you need a drink that's a little softer and more gentle, one that slowly works out the kinks from a long day yet has enough character and sophistication to make it clear you’re not taking any short cuts.
There are several drinks that go by the name “Trilby;” I don’t know where this one originated, but I really like it as an aperitif, and keep one at hand when preparing a weekend dinner. It’s simple, yet elegant, and soft but not too much; if you’re looking for an engaging pre-dinner companion, you could do a lot worse.
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Posted by Paul Clarke, January 4, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Let's get this weekend started right. Here's a cocktail recipe from Paul Clarke (The Cocktail Chronicles) to kick things off. Need more than one? That kinda week, eh? Here you go. Cheers!
We’re less than a week into the new year, and I’ve only broken a couple of my resolutions so far. For me, that’s a pretty good start.
Along with eating healthier, getting rid of clutter, and pausing to count to ten before I place a hasty bid on eBay, one of my resolutions is to combat my habit to procrastinate. Anybody else with me on that one? Yeah, I thought so.
Here’s a cocktail I came up with a couple of years ago, and it’s not too shabby if I say so myself. Its moniker derives from the fact that it took me more than a month to get around to posting it on my blog, for no reason other than its namesake. Tonight, after a light dinner, I’m mixing up one of these to enjoy while I go through the piles of paper on my desk and stay the hell away from eBay. Well, I dunno...maybe I'll do that tomorrow.
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