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Roll Out the Barrel Aged Negronis

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Patience, they say, is a virtue. But for me it’s not something that is terribly innate. However, during a period not too long ago when I found myself favoring the Negroni on a nightly basis, I stumbled upon this New York Times article, which led me to Jeffrey Morganthaler’s post about barrel aged cocktails. As it featured the Negroni as a prime candidate for barrel aging, I was excited to give my current drink of choice a six-week steep and see what the outcome was.

As I’d never had a barrel aged cocktail of any kind I wasn’t sure if laying out the cash for a full on barrel was the best idea. Luckily, Tuthilltown Spirits sells a 375ml barrel aged cocktail “kit” probably for people just like me. Once it arrived I measured and mixed my gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth, poured it into the jar, and stared at it for six weeks.

Barrel Aged Negronis

When the moment of truth arrived, I made a classic Negroni and lined it up next to the barrel aged version to compare. And to be honest, I was a bit surprised when I took the first sip of my six-week old concoction. Unlike the brightness of the original cocktail, my barrel aged Negroni tasted much smoother. The bitterness of the Campari was softened by the oak notes now present as a result of the aging. Put in music terms, if the original Negroni has a lot of high frequencies, the aged version has a more mid-range profile. Most striking to me, however, and not at all surprising I suppose, is the way the flavors melded together to create something much more like a singular spirit than a mixed drink.

The final verdict was that the barrel aged Negroni was so distinct from the original version that trying to compare them was more or less pointless. If you like Negronis you might like barrel aged Negronis. Or you might not. Try one for yourself if you really want to know!

Barrel Aged Negronis
Barrel Aged Negronis

One part gin (I used Beefeater)
One part Campari
One part sweet vermouth (I used Martini and Rossi)

Mix the gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth together without ice. Pour into your aging vessel and let stand for approximately six weeks. After six weeks, transfer your aged cocktail into a glass jar or bottle. When ready to serve, measure 3 – 3.75 ounces, stir with ice, then pour into a chilled old fashioned glass over a large ice ball. Garnish with an orange peel.

DIY: Housemade Bitters and the Wonderland White Manhattan

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I tossed “how to make your own house bitters” into Google’s search engine so many times, I’m no longer sure where the original impulse came from. Given my love for odd ingredients, science experiment-like kitchen activity, and small jars, however, it’s not difficult to see why the fascination stuck. After combing through some online instruction, this recipe published in Food + Wine (and contributed by Brad Thomas Parsons, the man who literally wrote the book on bitters) seemed a manageable place to wade into the pond.

Recipe selected, it was time to go shopping! I don’t know about your kitchen, but my pantry wasn’t already stocked with devil’s club root and wild cherry bark. Online retailers such as the Dandelion Botanical Company, however, were ready to outfit me. I must admit feeling a certain “earth mama meets wicked witch” vibe while scanning the shop’s inventory and selecting my poisons, er, I mean, herbs. I also ordered a copy of Parsons book for good measure. I could already feel that this was going to be habit forming.

bitters ingredients

Bitters Making

Once I received my collection of small ziplock baggies filled with various dried leaves and twigs, I measured out all the required bitters-making ingredients into a jar and had it all made up in a manner of minutes. The most difficult part of the recipe was the waiting–in total, the process takes a little over two weeks–and remembering to shake the mixture each evening. (In the end, B set a recurring alarm for us on his phone.)

As time wore on, there was some required straining and boiling, but mostly more waiting. Eventually the time arrived to add the final bit of maple syrup and bottle this concoction. For want of small bottles, it was time to go shopping again! (Now, shopping is not normally an activity I enjoy, but in the virtual aisles of Specialty Bottle, I think I began to understand how most women must feel in shoe stores.)

Bitters Bottles

Admittedly, now as I read through recipes for such interesting things as Rhubarb Bitters, I see that my autumnal-toned bitters may have been a little heavy for the season. Indeed, its warm and rich taste profile is well matched to bourbon and rye and apple pie. I was not about to wait for the falling leaves before using it, however, so Wonderland Mixologist Brian Sacawa designed us a drink to imbibe in the meantime.

Housemade Bitters and the White Manhattan

Wonderland White Manhattan

2 oz. Catoctin Creek Organic Mosby’s Spirit
1/2 oz. dry vermouth
1/2 oz. bénédictine
2 dashes Woodland Bitters
Cherry

Fill a cocktail shaker with ice and measure in all the liquid ingredients. Stir, don’t shake, the drink and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a cherry.

Housemade Bitters and the White Manhattan

Pretty in Pink Week: Market Strawberries

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We’re not really a fruit household. I mean, there’s Brian’s banana-a-day habit and my endless juicing of lemons, but aside from that, it’s the rare apple or lime that crosses our threshold; like cakes and cookies, the sweets just don’t carry much traction. Give us brussels spouts or give us broccoli, but please hold the peaches, pineapples, and grapes.

Still, even a hardhearted Team Savory fan such as myself could not resist the loveliness that was the first market strawberries of the Maryland season. And when my friend Marie helpfully prompted that I could “totally put a couple in a salad,” my defenses were crushed.

At home, I did indeed find a way to work them into an arugula salad with a tangy herbed buttermilk dressing. But I also got to thinking about that colonial fruit preservation method known as the shrub. I’d kept a jar of this vinegar-laced syrup a couple summers back and put it to good use in generous glasses of seltzer (yes, my homemade seltzer contraption is still going strong!). Perhaps it was time to make some more? Yes, yes indeed.

Strawberry Salad with Herbed Buttermilk Dressing
Serves 2

2 generous handfulls of baby arugula, spinach, or greens of your choice
6 strawberries

For the dressing

1/2 cup buttermilk
1 T white Balsamic vinegar
1 T fresh chopped basil or dill (or a mix)
salt and pepper to taste

Mix all dressing ingredients.

Rinse the greens (if necessary) and hull and slice the strawberries. Plate and drizzle with the dressing.

The Strawberry Shrub

After some internet research and reflection, I decided to go with the 1:1:1 ratio of fruit:sugar:vinegar. I macerated the fruit with the sugar (now that is a satisfying feeling) and left the mixture to sit for 24 hours. At that point, I added a cup of apple cider vinegar and will now mind it, shaking daily, for seven days. Then it’s strain and refrigerate until needed. Here is a helpful post, if you’re looking for more detailed background and instructions. The last time I did this, I worked in the reverse order, first infusing the vinegar and then cooking in the sugar. So we shall see how this new experiment compares.

Easter Egg Cocktail: The Sergio Leone

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Since we didn’t color Easter eggs or bake an Easter ham, I was on the hunt for something to celebrate the holiday. A recent interest in exploring cocktails that make use of raw eggs led me to several recipes that had obviously been posted in advance of this weekend for people just like me.

Of the bunch, the Sergio Leone cocktail, caught my eye as much for its tip of the hat to the famous spaghetti Western director as for the fact that it was the only one I could mix up with the supplies currently available in our not-too-shabby-but-clearly-lacking-in-some-areas home bar collection. I love the tang produced by bourbon and fresh lemon juice. And with the maraschino acting as the bridge between the two, the result was a not-too-sweet cocktail worthy of a grown up Easter celebration. A small orange peel disk as a garnish gives the illusion of a brightly colored Easter egg hidden at the bottom of the glass.

The Sergio Leone Cocktail
Adapted from RPM Italian mixologist Paul McGee’s recipe featured online in Wine Enthusiast Magazine

1½ ounce Willett Bourbon
½ ounce Luxardo Maraschino
¾ ounce fresh lemon juice
¾ ounce simple syrup
½ egg white
1 orange peel disk for garnish

Combine the bourbon, maraschino, lemon juice, simple syrup, and egg white in a shaker without ice. The “without ice” part of the equation is important. A little tip I picked up from a bartender at The Patterson House in Nashville: when working with raw eggs, it is best to do the initial shake sans ice to allow the egg white to emulsify. (I can attest from first hand experience that shaking raw egg with ice initially will lead to a result you will certainly pour down the drain.) Shake vigorously for 10-12 seconds. Next, add some ice to the shaker and shake as normal. Pour the drink through a fine mesh strainer into a chilled coupe, garnish with the orange peel, and enjoy.

Apples and Oranges: The Calvados Cocktail

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I’m the kind of girl who tends toward secondhand stores and camping vacations, so my husband has taken up stealth note taking whenever we’re in a shop where I actually admit to a passing interest in a material object before checking the price and setting it back down. What can I say? I inherited my father’s thrift and my mother’s fear of malls; I rarely suffer buyer’s remorse as a result.

This personal, um, quirk is how I came to be gifted a lovely bottle of Calvados Boulard for Valentine’s Day, inspired by a recurring event that goes like this: I decide to make this soup, consider buying a bottle of Calvados to use as indicated in the recipe but then, after noting the price, decide to just make do without–substituting a bit of unspecialized brandy or bourbon if we happen to have it on hand.

I haven’t had the chance to lace Calvados into anything just yet, of course, but I decided to explore what cocktails might put it to immediate good use in the meantime. I settled on this one, and I am not disappointed. So much so, in fact, I might actually replace the bottle of Coin­treau that’s now empty!

The Calvados Cocktail
More or less as it appears in Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, though much lighter on the bitters

1 1/2 oz Cal­va­dos
1 1/2 oz freshly squeezed orange juice (really, it’s worth it, and one orange should get you there)
3/4 oz Coin­treau
2 dashes bitters

The Calvados Cocktail process

Chill glassware. Measure ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake and strain onto a coupe glass. Cheers!

The Calvados Cocktail process

Fuzzy Math: The Hot Toddy (A History)

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I am very excited to be able to welcome musician and mixologist Matthew Guerrieri, a.k.a. Soho the Dog, into the Kitchen. What began with me pestering him for a hot toddy recipe transformed into me pestering him for an entire post, and boy did he deliver. Please enjoy, and big thanks to Matthew–for his wit, his knowledge, and his willingness to handle flaming alcohol in the name of thorough recipe testing.—Molly

In 1805, having become the first professor of chemistry at Yale University, Benjamin Silliman traveled to the British Isles to get up to international speed on the subject he had been hired to teach. Silliman also took the opportunity to observe the social mores of his hosts, duly reporting the habit at the end of dinners (“when they are meant to be hospitable”) of “the drinking of hot toddy.”

A pitcher of hot water is placed upon the table, and each guest is furnished with a large foot-glass holding nearly a pint, in which he mixes his water, spirits and sugar, in such proportions as he pleases; whisky is preferred on these occasions, but that of the highlands, which is the best, is so expensive, in consequence of the excise, that it is not universally used.

Each foot-glass has a small wooden ladle, which is employed to dip the hot toddy out, into wine glasses, from which it is drunk.

Silliman, the founder of the American Journal of Science and the first man to distill petroleum, fairly sized up the hot toddy. “[I]t may well be presumed, that the fumes of such a hot inebriating mixture, must occasionally turn the brains of parties not restrained by considerations of decorum or of religion,” he wrote. “And indeed, among the most sober people, it is easy to perceive some exhilaration produced by the hot toddy, as they sit and sip from hour to hour.”

The hot toddy—alcohol, sugar, hot water, and (sometimes) lemon—is, indeed, conversational fuel, a drink designed to be nursed through an evening’s badinage. It also defies formula, encouraging each drinker to adjust to both their own preference and the needs of the moment. What kind of spirits? How much hot water? (I like a 2-to-1 water-to-alcohol ratio, but that’s just me.) How sweet? (I like a half-teaspoon of sugar per ounce of water, but that’s just me.) Citrus or no citrus? (I like to boil the water with a slice of lemon, but, again, &c., &c. Incidentally, true drinking savants may insist that a toddy with lemon is properly called a skin. If you have constructed your toddy well, such captiousness will not bother you in the least.)

hot toddy makings

And the hot toddy, in its heady simplicity, is one of the last remaining links to the incunabula of pre-19th-century drinking habits, a cocktail that pre-dates the very term. Start tinkering with hot toddies, and you can start teasing out connections, tracing the crooked path of history.

Follow the path far enough back, and you end up in India. “Toddy” was originally the term for the sap of the Indian coconut tree, left to ferment in the sun. Sir Thomas Herbert, Gentleman of the Bedchamber to King Charles I, described it this way in 1638:

The Toddy Tree is not unlike the Date or Palmeto, the Wine is got by pearcing and putting a Jar or Pitcher under, that the liquor may distill into it…. The Toddy is like Whay in colour, in taste and quality like Rhenish wine, at first draught uncouthly relisht, but every draught tasts better and better, and will easily inebriate; a little makes men merry; too much makes them mad; extreame is mortall: in the morning tis laxative; in the eve costive; at midnight dangerous.

That last assertion was neither license nor euphemism, if one believes John Ovington, who, in his famous account A Voyage to Surratt In the Year 1689, noted the risks of toddy:

Several Europeans pay their Lives for their immoderate Draughts, and too frankly Carousing these chearful Liquors, with which when once they are inflam’d, it renders them so restless and unruly, especially with the additional heat of the Weather, that they fancy no place can prove too cool, and so throw themselves upon the ground, where they sleep all Night in the open Fields, and this commonly produces a Flux, of which a multitude in India die.

An irony, given the hot toddy’s later medicinal reputation. (It should be noted: the appearance of spirits and hot water in an abundance of 19th-century medical journals aside, a hot toddy will not actually cure the common cold, and while it will make the patient feel terrific for a few hours, the chance of feeling worse once the toddy wears off is, alas, all too present, leaving the prospect of a) penitence or b) maintaining a steady dose of hot toddies for the duration of the illness. Given—as I have been led to believe by Dickens and Poe—the comparative damp and filth of the 19th century, one can imagine people drinking hot toddies continuously from cradle to grave. I do not doubt that this happened.)

Toddy, properly distilled into brandy-like form, was called arrack—as was various other distillations from Southeast Asia, of sugarcane, of rice, of fruit. (In some sources, “toddy” becomes a generic term for anything distilled into arrack.) In the 19th century, arrack was a de rigueur ingredient for punch—the possibly spurious etymology of “punch” as deriving from the Hindi panch, or five, is derived from the basic five-ingredient punch recipe: arrack, tea, sugar, water, lemon. I haven’t found any evidence that anybody actually drank arrack by itself in hot-toddy form, but that won’t stop me from trying it.

Now, to the best of my one-day’s worth of Internet-sourced knowledge on the subject, coconut-based arrack is not commercially available in the United States. What is available is Batavia-Arrack, distilled from a sugarcane-rice base. Eh, close enough.

Alternate History Hot Toddy

4 oz. Water

2-4 tsp. Sugar

Slice of lemon

Boil together. Pour over: 2 oz. of Batavia-Arrack

The result: A strong toddy, and one displaying the drink’s tendency to amplify rather than subsume the qualities of its base spirit. Batavia-Arrack is kind of like white rum, but with an oilier feel and a bit of sake-like bread-y sweetness from the rice, both of which boost the richness of this toddy. There’s a lot of burn up front—it was actually turning my tongue numb, almost like a Szechuan peppercorn—but goes down smooth and lastingly warm.

Probably in much the same way that India’s name was applied to the West Indies, the term “toddy” somehow was transferred from its coconut-sap origins to a concoction that also went by the name of “bumbo,” a drink that at least bears a family resemblance to the modern hot toddy. It’s also, perhaps, when the qualifier “hot” became attached. In his 1784 book A Tour of the United States, J. F. D. Smyth relates the typical daily routine of the American “gentleman of fortune” (read: plantation owner) in the South:

[B]etween twelve and one he takes a draught of bombo, or toddy, a liquor composed of water, sugar, rum, and nutmeg, which is made weak, and kept cool

If a toddy was by definition a cool drink, one would, presumably, have to get specific about a hot variant. (Bumbo was, according to common legend, a favorite drink of Caribbean pirates, and certainly seems to have been prevalent there—Tobias Smollett’s picaresque naval satire The Adventures of Roderick Random, published in 1748, gives the recipe. The name, though, might derive a particular kind of drinking cup, made from the shell of a snail: as early as 1612, one can find Angelo Grillo, Italian cleric and poet, friend of the composer Claudio Monteverdi, telling of receiving “a gift, a shell [Cochleam] from the Indian sea, which they call Bumbo,” a cup of “the sort you should have at a banquet.” Which may explain the word’s double-life as a slang term, as explained by Francis Grose in A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785):

BUMBO, brandy, water, and sugar; also the negroe name for the private parts of a woman.

A related usage applied the term to the rear end—a possible genesis of our modern bum.)

The rum toddy reached its apotheosis at the hands of the legendary Charles H. Baker, Jr., playboy and epicure, who included in his collection The Gentleman’s Companion the Baker “Horse Collar,” “ORIGINATED,” Baker wrote in his inimitable way, “by the AUTHOR, A.D. 1935, upon RUNNING into STONINGTON, RHODE ISLAND, ahead of a HOWLING NOR’EASTER when HEADING SOUTH from LAWLEY’S YARD to FLORIDA in MARMION“. (His yacht, naturally.) Baker’s recipe:

orange spiral

The Baker “Horse Collar”

“Tin cups for mariners, silver julep cups for fancies

Carta de Oro Bacardi, Jamaica, Barbados, or Haitian rum, 2 jiggers

Orange peel, 1 to each cup, cut in unbroken spiral

Brown sugar, 1 tsp per cup

Whole cloves, 6; or powdered clove, 1/4 tsp per cup

Boiling water, enough to fill

Butter, 1/2 tsp, optional

Photo by Matthew Guerrieri

Line cups with spirals of orange peel, first dipping them in rum to moisten. Dust sugar on peel, then cloves the same. Put a jigger of rum in each cup, put cups on hot stove, and after a moment set aflame. Let burn until edges of peel start to brown and sugar to caramel. Blow out. Take off stove, add other jigger of rum, fill up with hot water, give a brief stir and serve—either with or without a lump of butter on top the size of a hazelnut.”

(Being neither mariner nor fancy, I made do with a stainless steel cocktail shaker. I did manage to get the peel off the orange in one piece. However, not being keen on the idea of putting flame-hot metal near my mouth, I transferred everything into a mug.)

The result: This is a good one, and not just due to the theatricality of its construction. Baker’s drinks aren’t always the subtlest things, but the Horse Collar is more delicate than it reads, the brown sugar and burnt caramel blending with the vanilla overtones of the rum, the oil from the orange peel lending a faint tropical note, the cloves perking up the aroma. Plus: fire!

One of the more common variants of the hot toddy today uses tea in place of water. I can’t find a specific hot toddy recipe using tea prior to the 1940s or so, but that doesn’t mean the idea isn’t venerable. If you remember the five-ingredient punch prototype, you realize that such toddies are really one-glass-at-a-time versions: punch à la minute. The Hammarubi of cocktail writers, Jerry Thomas, starts his classic 1862 manual How to Mix Drinks, or, The Bon-Vivant’s Companion with a chapter on punches, many of which are mixed by the glass. And the terminology is slippery, for instance: “In making hot toddy, or hot punch,” Thomas writes, “you must put in the spirits before the water: in cold punch, grog, &c., the other way.” (Elsewhere, Thomas reaffirms the notion that punches and toddies and the like are resistant to precise formulae; my favorite is his entry for Scotch Whisky Punch: “As it requires genius to make whiskey punch, it would be impertinent to give proportions.”)

So here’s an improvised one, halfway between a toddy and a punch. (Terminology alert: according to Thomas, the inclusion of nutmeg makes this one technically a sling.)

Hot Bourbon Toddy-Punch-Sling

3 oz. water

1-3 tsp. sugar

Slice of lemon

Boil together. Add to: 2 oz. brewed tea (black or green, your call)

Add: 2 oz. bourbon

Grate over the top: Fresh nutmeg

The result: Substantial and smooth, edging into an almost dessert-wine quality. A lot depends on how strong you brew the tea: fairly weak, it tends to de-emphasize the whiskey’s alcohol; fairly strong, it contributes a sharpness of its own.

Hot Toddy Lineup

So that’s arrack, rum, and bourbon so far. You can make a hot toddy out of anything, though. Gin toddies were, to survey the literature, quite popular in the 19th century. You can really boost the time-travel factor by using some of the old tom gins that have come on the market as of late, riding the classic-cocktail revival. My favorite is Ransom, a conjectural recreation of the sort of gin that might have been floating around in Victorian times: a malted-barley base, barrel-aged, bright, forward botanicals.

Photo by Matthew Guerrieri

Old Tom Toddy

4 oz. water

2-4 tsp. sugar

Boil together. Pour over: 2 oz. old tom gin

The result: A toddy that obviates the need for added spices. The steam carries the botanicals straight into your head; the whiskey-like musty-caramel undertones finish off each sip in chewy style.

To drink an old tom gin toddy is to channel some essential part of the collective British palate. Mulled wine, brandy punches, hot beer (the list of traditional British hot beer drinks is long and fascinating)—I don’t think the people of the British Isles have ever met a type of alcohol they didn’t want to heat up and spice. Given the self-spicing nature of an old tom gin toddy, one gets a sense of why the British took so strongly to gin in the first place: it was pretty much a one-stop source for the flavors they had been cultivating for centuries.

All of these, however, are tangents to the classic hot toddy, the one Benjamin Silliman sampled (or merely observed), the simple triumvirate of whiskey, water, and sugar. Scotch has long been considered traditional for a hot toddy, so much so that it gave rise to an alternate origin of the name. From Charles Mackay’s A Dictionary of Lowland Scotch (1888):

In Allan Ramsay’s poem of “The Morning Interview,” published in 1721, occurs a description of a sumptuous entertainment or tea-party, in which it is said “that all the rich requisites are brought from far; the table from Japan, the tea from China, the sugar from Amazonia, or the West Indies; but that

Scotia does no such costly tribute bring,

Only some kettles full of Todian spring.”

To this passage Allan Ramsay himself appended the note—”The Todian spring, i.e. Tod’s well, which supplies Edinburgh with water.” Tod’s well and St. Anthony’s well, on the side of Arthur’s seat, were two of the wells which very scantily supplied the wants of Edinburgh; and when it is borne in mind that whiskey (see that word) derives its name from water, it is highly probable that Toddy in like manner was a facetious term for the pure element.

A stretch, certainly. But it does indicate the close relationship between Scotch whiskey and the hot toddy.

Still, I’m with Silliman’s hosts—single-malt scotch does seem a bit extravagant for the hot toddy, superb if you’re feeling flush, but otherwise somehow at odds with the drink’s talent for elevating humble ingredients. Straight rye is my hot toddy base of choice, the spirit’s natural spiciness and burn turned up by the heat and dressed up by the sugar.

But, to reiterate, that’s just me. And that’s the beauty of the hot toddy: it’s less of a cocktail than a template; at the same time, its resultant qualities—relaxation, stimulation, contemplation—are perfect for the pastime of trying to pin it down anyway. Argument and rumination are somehow made more civilized, more elegant, more satisfying. As Silliman observed, under the charm of the hot toddy, “it sometimes happens that a circle, before mute, becomes suddenly garrulous and brilliant.” Warm weather can wait.

Hot Toddy Row