Leaving the Twentieth Century

I've been in the process of working up a small cocktail offering for a function we're hosting at Sygn in a couple of months time. There are some obvious choices for it - the event isn't industry-focused so I won't be going too obscure or bleeding edge with anything - but flicking through various menus and recipe books led me to the Twentieth Century cocktail.

Twentieth Century Cocktail

35ml Gin
15ml Lillet Blanc
15ml Crème de Cacao (white)
25ml lemon juice

Shake all ingredients with ice; fine-strain into a chilled martini/coupe. Garnish with a twist of lemon zest.

According to Ted Haigh's Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, it was named for a train, the 20th Century Limited, that plied the route between Chicago and New York in the near aftermath of Prohibition. Haigh suggests that earliest written record comes from the Café Royal Bar Book of 1937 and that "we now have a firm idea of exactly what Art Deco tastes like."

On a personal level, I found the Twentieth Century profoundly depressing. It's not because it's a bad drink - it certainly isn't - but there's something about the way those four ingredients just sing together that make me wonder if I'm ever going to put together a recipe that comes close.

On paper, it's just four ingredients. In the real, it's exceptional, and that's something to aim for.

Forty Four: Remember Remember

So, November. The long nights are here, forcing a day's worth of warmth into the slivers of daylight that punctuate the week. Winter is most definitely here and there's only one thing to do: blow stuff up. It's funny how we feel it's appropriate to celebrate a failed detonation with fireworks, but if you can't spin festivities out of a treasonous plot then what can you do? After a long evening enrapturing children and scaring pets, there'll come a point when the thing you really want is to be inside with something warm - a nice hot cocoa, perhaps - and if that point happens to coincide with a powerful need for a cocktail, then you'll likely be disappointed. There are some options: a liqueur coffee of some description, a hot toddy, or - if you're still feeling particularly pyrophiliac - a Blue Blazer; but on the whole, the hot cocktail is something of a lost art. It's worth noting that before the advent of refrigeration, mixed drinks would have been served either cold-compounded (whack it in a vessel and give it a stir) or heated, either indirectly (by adding some hot water, for example) or directly (by, say, shoving a red-hot poker from the fireplace into the drink. If you wanted to be all refined, I'm sure there were more subtle ways of doing it).

Of course, making and serving a cocktail hot will usually require some extra equipment. For this week's drink, I went all in and headed toward the much-abused coffee machine at work, though not with the intention of making any coffee. Sure, there's a coffee flavour in the recipe but not everyone's looking for a caffeine rush in a warming, late-night tipple. We don't all wanna get a buzz on.

Remember, Remember

In the base of warmed brandy balloon or coupette, combine:
25ml bourbon (I used Bulleit)
15ml Kahlua (or your choice of coffee liqueur)
1 barspoon maple syrup
25ml hot water

In a milk jug, combine:
50ml half & half (25ml milk and 25ml double cream if you don't prep half & half)
15ml white creme de cacao
10ml Navan vanilla cognac liqueur

Using an espresso machine, steam the mixture until creamy. Layer over the bourbon/Kahlua/maple syrup combination and garnish with a sprinkle of shaved chocolate.

Nine: Flame's Edge

New drinks are weird, intangible things. Sometimes, they can be engineered. Sometimes, they come from little more than an instinct. And sometimes, they just happen. We've been hosting cocktail masterclasses at work for a while now. They've proven to be popular with birthday and hen parties, possibly because it provides a decent excuse for exposing the guest of honour to phenomenal amounts of alcohol. There's a standard format for the session - a champagne cocktail of some description on arrival, followed by a demo of the different ways of making cocktails before getting each member of the group to make their own drink. Depending on the size of the group and how much time we have, I sometimes try to mix up a couple of drinks based on suggestions from the group. Most of the time, it's pretty easy to come up with something that ticks all the boxes. Every once in a while, though, it's a bit tougher.

On Saturday night, they wanted fire.

The problem was that I had totally run out of overproof rum, removing the easy option for fuel. So, I decided to go for Jamie Boudreau's Rubicon - only to discover that the kitchen was out of rosemary.

It was starting to feel like one of those dreams where you turn up to your high school graduation naked, but the idea behind the Rubicon has intrigued me since Jamie posted the recipe. In his words:

The burning Chartreuse also has the benefit of cooking the rosemary, releasing a lot of aroma and allowing the flavors to better permeate the beverage as oils are released. As for the “wow” factor, when you extinguish the flame with the rest of the ingredients, a thick white smoke develops.

I'm pretty certain blue flames come under "wow", too. So, taking the Rubicon as a starting point (after all, there's no going back from this point), here's what we ended up with.

Flame's Edge

An orange
10ml Green Chartreuse
40ml Monkey Shoulder
15ml Lemon Juice
20ml White Creme De Cacao

Strip three long strips of peel from the orange with a channel knife. Place two of the strips in a rocks glass with the Chartreuse, keeping one aside for garnish.

Pour the whisky, lemon juice and Creme de Cacao into a shaker, add ice and prepare to shake. Before you do, light the Chartreuse in the glass with orange zests. Shake the remaining ingredients and strain into the glass, extinguishing the flame. Fill the glass with crushed ice and garnish with the remaining orange zest twist.