Rowley’s Gift Guide for Drinkers: Sazerac Glasses

Not long ago, a properly made Sazerac cocktail was something you'd find almost exclusively in New Orleans. Oh, they make 'em in San Francisco and—here and there—you could find one in New York. But the drink itself is an icon of the Crescent City, a cocktail anachronism from an earlier age. It's so identified with the city that it's now the official cocktail of New Orleans.

Visitors will find them at the Sazerac Bar in the bottom floor of the refurbished Roosevelt Hotel. If you can't make it to the bar or the Roosevelt's gift shop, but want a set of the right glasses in which to serve the drink, go online to the Tales of the Cocktail gift shop and order a set of four glasses. If you've got whiskey fans on your gift list, they'll thank you for this one. Shoot, you might just get this one for yourself.

New Orleans booster and cocktail wrangler Chuck Taggart calls this "an absolutely exquisite cocktail" and I concur. His notes on it are here. And, please, do as he says: use rye whiskey, not Bourbon.

$30 for a set of four. Order here.

See the gift guide as it grows here.

Rowley’s Gift Guide for Drinkers: Homemade Vanilla Syrup

In twenty years of cooking my own meals, I have made some flat-out amazing dishes. So far, none has been as delicious as my own homemade vanilla syrup.

If you are inclined to make your Christmas presents, here’s one that drinkers on your gift list should get some miles out of. It’s an integral component to the tropical Nui Nui, lends an ethereal air to a Ramos gin fizz, and in small doses lends a velvet softness to whipped cream for topping Kahlua-spiked hot chocolate.

There are two primary ways of making the syrup at home. One uses high-quality vanilla extract. The other—the one that I feel gives superior results—uses actual vanilla pods. We will take a look at both. First, a quick-and-dirty version that starts with a sugar syrup that I tend to keep around in large quantities.

Quick & Dirty Vanilla Syrup

1 cup 2:1 simple syrup*
1 tsp vanilla extract

Stir the vanilla extract into the syrup and bottle. And Bob’s your uncle: It is now ready for use.

Note: use a high-end vanilla extract or don’t bother making your own syrup. Reputable brands include Penzey’s and Nielsen-Massey Vanillas. I use the heady Mexican brand Orlando Gaya Hijos from Veracruz.

Now, here’s the recipe I use when I don’t need a bunch of syrup immediately. As in Philadelphia-style vanilla ice cream, tiny black seeds are shot throughout.

Rich Vanilla Syrup

2 cups sugar
1 cup filtered water
5 vanilla pods

Pour the sugar and water into a small, heavy saucepan. Slice each vanilla pod along its length and open like a book. Scrape as many of the tiny black seeds as possible into the pot. Using kitchen shears, snip each pod into 1” lengths. Add these to the pot and bring all to a boil. Immediately reduce to a simmer, beat gently with a long-handled whisk to release even more seeds from the pods and allow the syrup to simmer about two minutes. Let the syrup cool in the pan. Strain the larger pieces of vanilla pods and set aside, but leave in all the small black seeds in the syrup. Bottle and refrigerate.

Air-dry the pods and toss them into a bin of sugar to infuse it with the aroma of vanilla. Next time you make Rich Vanilla Syrup, use this vanilla-scented sugar.

* Using the term “simple syrup” is enough to raise voices among some bartenders and cocktail aficionados. “Simple” in this instance does not refer to a perfect one-to-one ratio of sugar to water. It means simply that the syrup contains no ingredients other than sugar and water. Bartenders had no special claim on the term which has, in fact, been used by pastry chefs, soda jerks, confectioners, and home cooks for a very long time. Each of these has different ideas about the correct proportion of sugar to water in “simple” syrup. Increasingly, you may hear of “rich” syrup when proportion of sugar is higher than that of water. This 2:1 rich syrup is the one we use almost exclusively at home. It’s just so simple.

The easiest way to make rich syrup is to add two parts sugar to one part water in a saucepan, heat only until the sugar dissolves, then cool and bottle. Store under refrigeration.

See the gift guide as it grows here.

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Rowley’s Gift Guide for Drinkers: Parker’s Wine Bargains

The myth is that wines that cost $25 or less
are worth just what you pay for them
and are never terribly interesting.
This is totally untrue, and with work,
one can unearth these small treasures
that deliver seriously good wine
at remarkably fair prices.

~ Robert Parker

I’ll spend $80 on a nice whiskey, but once a bottle of wine creeps up to $30, I start to lose interest. This is not because I dislike wine: I like it quite a lot, but I’m deeply turned off by snobs of any stripe and the world of wine is lousy with them. There can be such pretense to the very vocabulary of wine, I’d just as soon not hang out with intense “wine people.” My loss: they could probably steer me to some great drinks.

And wine books? Feh. Except for those that give broad overviews, they grow out of date quickly. But Simon & Schuster just released an ephemeral buying guide I’m glad to have: Parker’s Wine Bargains: The World’s Best Wine Values Under $25.

Parker and his vinous staff list over 3,000 value wines by origin and winery, give succinct tasting notes, and include a “best of the best” index for each category.

For a wine piker like me, Parker’s guide is a handy little shopping tool. And it makes a fine gift for those those who—like me—enjoy great drinks but could use some advice of which bottle to pick up.

See the gift guide as it grows here.

See also MxMo XXVI: Hard Drinks for Hard Times.

Rowley’s Gift Guide for Drinkers: Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails

Discretely check your drinker’s shelves before getting this one: it might already be there. Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails—now in its second edition—is the most useful introduction to classic cocktails on the market. While other scholars tackle classic drinks admirably, the breadth and depth of Haigh’s book are simply unparalleled.

Richly illustrated with graphics from Haigh’s personal collection of drinking ephemera, the book pulls together 100 recipes (“From Alamagoozlum to the Zombie and Beyond”) along with their backstories, origins, and liberal doses of unvarnished opinions about the proper way to make certain drinks or the spirits that elevate them from the merely lovely to the sublime.

The stand-out planter’s punch recipe below I first tasted at Tales of the Cocktail. Haigh reproduces it in this edition with notes on how New Orleans rum collector Steve Remsberg gathered the recipe (including the Secret Mix) from Jasper LaFranc at the Bay Roc Hotel in Montego Bay. It’s a keeper and we’re so glad it’s not forgotten.

Jasper’s Jamaican Planter’s Punch

1.5 oz dark Jamaican rum (Coruba)
1.5 oz Jasper’s Secret Mix (see below)

Add to a 10-ounce highball glass filled with cracked ice. Stir vigorously. Top off with more ice.

Jasper garnished his with a pineapple spear, an orange slice, and a cocktail cherry.

Steve garnishes his with fresh mint.

Jasper’s Secret Mix

Juice of 12 limes
1.5 cups sugar
1.25 oz Angostura bitters
½ whole nutmeg, grated

Stir the ingredients together in a mixing vessel until the sugar dissolves.

Let steep in the refrigerator for at least two hours.

Store in a bottle in the refrigerator.

Vintage Spirits retails at $19.99. You can score a discounted copy at Amazon, but at $12.95 it’s slightly cheaper still through Mud Puddle.

See the gift guide as it grows here.

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Rowley’s Gift Guide for Drinkers: Pre-Prohibition Cocktail Books

If you’re buying holiday presents for modern “cocktailians,” chances are they’ve got strong opinions about the proper way to make old drinks such as an Aviation, an Old Fashioned, a Japanese Cocktail, a Monkey Gland, or a Hari-Kari.

Set yourself up for being served some tasty beverages down the road by buying your little drinker some of Greg Boehm’s reproduction bartender manuals that include these drinks and hundreds more.

Under the Mud Puddle imprint, Boehm publishes facsimile editions of-out-of print cocktail manuals with introductions by modern drinks authorities such as Robert Hess, David Wondrich, Ted Haigh, Audrey Saunders, and Brain Rea. While original copies of some titles can go for hundreds of dollars through antiquarian sources or eBay, the Mud Puddle versions—which are near clones of the originals—can generally be had for under $30 each.

In general, the books document not just cocktails from bygone eras, but also recipes for country wines, cordials, syrups, and bitters. Of my thousands of recipe books, these are some of the tomes I mot enjoy plucking from the shelves. They are a must for anyone intent on getting serious about their cocktails.

For the record, here’s O. H. Byron’s 125-year-old recipe for the Hari-Kari

Hari-Kari

Make a whiskey sour large enough to half fill a brandy glass or tumbler when strained, and fill with seltzer or Vichy to suit the party.
Dress with fruits in season.

From The Modern Bartenders’ Guide
O. H. Byron (original 1884)
Mud Puddle Books 2008

Order this and other reproductions here: Mud Puddle Books

See the gift guide as it grows here.

Rowley’s Gift Guide for Drinkers: Saffron Swizzle Sticks

Swizzle sticks—those little wooden dowels heavily encrusted with big, beautiful rock candy crystals—are easy enough to find in shops catering to the tea and coffee crowd. Those you’re likely to find are either uncolored clear or caramel sugar. Root about in candy stores, Asian markets, and baking supply houses and you may come up with a riot of colors—blue, magenta, orange, green, or even just bags of cheap raw amber lump crystals.

But if there’s a market in your community that supplies Middle Eastern foods, drop in, poke around, and see if you can’t find a box of the Persian saffron swizzle sticks known as nabat. Nabat is not just flavored with Iranian saffron, but when it’s in swizzle stick form, it often sports whole threads. Used as stirring sticks, they imbue hot drinks with funky, earthy sweetness.

Me? I especially like them in Rock & Rye, a drink that lets the musky, floral, and slightly bitter saffron play its lingering, seductive background notes.

Source:
Indian Foods Company sells a 9-stick box of nabat for about $11. The same box at North Park Produce, one of my neighborhood stores in San Diego, runs $4.

See the gift guide as it grows here.

Rowley’s Gift Guide for Drinkers: Introduction

Got a cocktail enthusiast in your life but are at a loss for a holiday present? I’ve got some ideas.

Every year, my family asks what I’d like for Christmas. Truth be told, I already have nearly everything I want. My wish list is either so modest (lunch and a movie with friends) or extravagant (a vintage BMW R75 or a old school Moto Guzzi) that I don’t really expect them as gifts.

But I do have notions for others who, like me, enjoy a drop of spirits on occasion. For the next several weeks, I’ll throw out sporadic ideas for books, bottles, tools, and the small things that make drinks and drinking better.

Next up: Saffron swizzle sticks.

See the gift guide as it grows here.