Getting the Apple out of Apple Whiskey, 19th Century-Style

Among the papers of John Ewing held by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania lies an undated manuscript from about 1810. It describes a process for making a variety of ersatz liquors from a base of apple brandy, often called in early American idiom, apple “whiskey.” Once treated with charcoal and redistilled, such local orchard brandy could be made to seem like French brandy, Jamaican rum, Holland gin, etc. Emulating more expensive imported liquors using local goods was common throughout the colonial era, through the early Republic, and into the twentieth century. Time and time again, I come across recipes for faking one kind of spirit with another in household account books and recipe manuscripts. Though it’s less common these days, one still finds recipes to make, for instance, homemade gin from store-bought vodka.

From an unknown 19th century distiller, here’s

 To make gin out of apple whiskey

Fill hogshead of 100 or 120 gs. [gallons] with apple whiskey, into which pour a bushel of charcoal—stir the charcoal every hour for two days—stirring so often may not be necessary—then draw off whiskey and put it in a still—distill it and it will be found perfectly clear of the apple—In this state if mixed with French brandy, jamaica spirit or holland gin in the proportion of about one third whiskey to 2/3 of foreign liquors it will impart to the liquor any unusual taste or flavor. 

If in the distillation you add 15 or 20 lbs of juniper berries to the hogshead, it will make good gin. 

Before the still is filled 15 or 20 gallons of Water must be put in the still. 

 A 60 gallon still may be run out twice in the day—Charcoal must be made out of maple, chestnut or light wood—must never be wet—When taken out of the coal pit they should be put out by throwing dirt over it—burnt perfectly well—out at the top so as to let the smoke out—to be ground fine.

The manuscript goes on to calculate that the profit on 100 gallons of apple whiskey converted to gin is $16.30, or about $225 in today’s money. Not enormous profit, but if it were steady, one eventually could buy a house.
 
Me? I think it would be a shame to strip the apples from apple brandy, especially when so many good ones are coming back on the market. If you're curious about American non-grape brandies and happen to be in New Orleans next month, check out Paul Clarke's session Fruit of the Still at Tales of the Cocktail. 

Bookshelf: Bitters

It has become a cliché of modern bartending that bitters are to cocktails as salt is to soup. They are the seasoning, the ingredient that can turn merely acceptable drinks into stellar ones. Or, as one Filipino friend explained to another in a turn close to my heart, “Bitters are to cocktails as bay leaves are to adobo.” You may or may not be able to pinpoint the taste, but without it, everything has a certain flatness.

If you already make your own cocktail bitters, chances are that Brad Thomas Parsons’ recent book on the subject holds little new for you. On the other hand, if you’re just starting to dabble or don’t know where to begin, Bitters conveniently brings together a lot of material in one place. With no other bitters manual in print, one might even call it indispensable for the DIY cocktail enthusiast.

After some introductory remarks and history, Parsons dives into the meat of the matter with short profiles of some two dozen players in today’s bitters boom: Fee Brothers, Bittermans, The Bitter Truth, Dr. Adam Elmegirab’s Bitters, Bar Keep Bitters, Scrappy’s, and more. Not a bad lineup considering that a decade ago, Angostura, Fee Brothers, and Peychaud’s were the three remaining bitters producers that survived Prohibition. He includes recipes for thirteen bitters such as apple, orange, rhubarb, coffee-pecan, and root beer bitters. A substantial collection of cocktail recipes using bitters — more than half the book — rounds out the pages.

Parsons clearly has spent much time obsessing over bitters; he interviews appropriate authorities and booze pundits, he includes the right companies and products, and he hits the high points of history. He’s done his homework. Yet there’s a clumsiness about his writing. After going on for some length about sassafras, for instance, Parsons calls for using it in a recipe — but what part of the plant? The powdered leaves he writes about? The root he mentions? They are as different as ham and bacon. Or consider this entry under Snake Oil Bitters: “Not much is known about this lineup of Brooklyn bitters or their creator...” Really? That’s either lazy or disingenuous.

The passage that prompted me to bark out in disbelief, though, is this:

Once I’ve sized up a joint, I’ll ask the bartender, “Do you make your own bitters?” More often than not, the answer is yes.

Oh, come on. Laudable as making bitters is, I guarantee you that the vast majority of American bartenders do no such thing. I can only imagine that this is a sampling error stemming from Parsons’ preference for places with what he deems “serious bar programs.” I like those places, too, but they're far from the only game in town.

While there are welcome lists of bittering and flavoring agents, there's no attempt to give them Linnaean names or even thumbnail descriptions. When plants' common names vary from place to place and related plants often parade under the same name, specifying genus and species is especially important, a convention one finds in the most useful gardening books and horticultural tomes. The lists entirely omit traditional bitters coloring agents such as sandalwood, Brazil wood, and cochineal. 

Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad to own a copy. If you’re into cocktails, you should get one, too, if only to understand this core ingredient better. Even if you have no intention to macerate, infuse, percolate, and use homemade bitters, there’s a wealth of recipes for cocktails using commercial examples. It's just that I would prefer to have seen a stronger editorial hand here, a more rigorous historical and scientific review before Bitters had gone to print. If I sound disappointed, it’s because the book is merely good; it could have been great.

From Brad Thomas Parsons’ Bitters, here’s his twist on cherry bitters, inspired by time in the Pacific Northwest. “Devil's club, sometimes known as Pacific ginseng,” he writes, “is a shrub that grows in North American forests with a cool, wet climate, and for me it instantly evokes memories of hiking the trails around Snoqualmie Falls. Rounded out with the addition of Oregon hazelnuts, this aromatic bitters takes me back to Seattle every time I add a dash or two to a drink.”

Cherry-Hazelnut Bitters

Makes about 20 ounces

½ cup lightly toasted and skinned hazelnuts
½ cup dried tart or sour cherries
2 tablespoons devil's club root
½ tsp schizandra [sic] berries [see note]
½ tsp wild cherry bark
½ tsp cinchona bark
½ tsp cassia chips
¼ tsp chopped dried orange peel
3 star anise
2 cups 101-proof bourbon, or more as needed
1 cup water
2 tablespoons rich [2:1] syrup

Place all of the ingredients except for the bourbon, water, and rich syrup in a quart-sized Mason jar or other large glass container with a lid. Pour in the 2 cups of bourbon, adding more if necessary so that all the ingredients are covered. Seal the jar and store at room temperature out of direct sunlight for 2 weeks, shaking the jar once a day.

After 2 weeks, strain the liquid through a cheesecloth-lined funnel into a clean quart-sized jar to remove the solids. Repeat until all of the sediment has been filtered out. Squeeze the cheesecloth over the jar to release any excess liquid and transfer the solids to a small saucepan. Cover the jar and set aside.

Cover the solids in the saucepan with the water and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Cover the saucepan, lower the heat, and simmer for 10 minutes.

Remove the saucepan from the heat and let cool completely. Once cooled, add the contents of the saucepan (both liquid and solids) to another quart-sized Mason jar. Cover the jar and store at room temperature out of direct sunlight for 1 week, shaking the jar daily.

After 1 week, strain the jar with the liquid and solids through a cheesecloth-lined funnel into a clean quart-sized Mason jar. Repeat until all of the sediment has been filtered out. Discard the solids. Add this liquid to the jar containing the original bourbon solution.

Add the rich syrup to the jar and stir to incorporate, then cover and shake to fully dissolve the syrup.

Allow the mixture to stand at room temperature for 3 days. At the end of the 3 days, skim off any debris that floats to the surface and pour the mixture through a cheesecloth-lined funnel one last time to remove any solids.

Using a funnel, decant the bitters into smaller jars and label. If there's any sediment left in the bottles, or if the liquid is cloudy, give the bottle a shake before using. The bitters will keep indefinitely, but for optimum flavor use within a year.

Note: The schizandra [sic] berries called for are from the plant Schisandra chinensis, widely used in traditional Chinese medicine. Look for deep red dried berries in health food stores, spice shops, online shops, and in Korean markets, where it is sold as an ingredient for tea under the name omija. Go for whole berries rather than powdered for an easier time filtering.

Brad Thomas Parsons (2011)
Photos by Ed Anderson
Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All, with Cocktails, Recipes, and Formulas
240 pages (hardback)
Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 1580083595
$24.99

Rabbit à l’Epicurienne, an Easter Treat

We've mentioned Agnes B. Marshall before. She's the Victorian Alton Brown, the one who was writing about making and using ice cream cones almost two decades before their supposed invention at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and suggested using liquid oxygen in 1901 to make ice cream at the table for the amusement of dinner guests.

As Easter creeps up on us, my thoughts wandered back to Mrs. Marshall while I considered what sort of rabbit I'd like to prepare for Sunday dinner. I'd thought about a Spanish preparation with olives and chorizo; simple pan-fried rabbit with a thyme-infused cream sauce; and even a rabbit mole. In the end, I decided going out for dim sum held more appeal than prepping bunnies for the table. With the task of actually cooking a coney out of the way, I could afford to let my musings get more complicated.

Think of them as bacon stitches

In her recipe Rabbit à l’Epicurienne, Mrs Marshall calls for larding a tender rabbit, an old technique that entailed cutting fatty bacon (or, more often, fat) into small planks called lardons, threading them through a wicked-looking large-bore needle, then inserting them in the surface of lean meats. As the meat roasted, the fat would melt, simultaneously basting and flavoring the roast. With a larding needle, it's tedious, but not hard. Without one, it's a pain in the ass.

From her massive 1891 cookery tome Mrs. A.B. Marshall’s Larger Cookery Book of Extra Recipes, here's Agnes B. Marshall’s recipe for Rabbit à l’Epicurienne

Rabbit à l’Epicurienne


Take a nice tender rabbit, skinned and cleansed, leaving the ears and tail on, remove the liver, take the thin skin from the fillets and cut off the bottom part of the leg to the first joint, then stuff the rabbit with a farce as below and truss it; lard all over the back and legs with finely-cut lardoons of fat bacon, trim these evenly with a pair of scissors, and brush the rabbit over with warm dripping; cover it with a well-greased piece of kitchen paper and put it in a baking-tin and bake, or if liked roast it for forty to fifty minutes, keep it well basted with the fat, and when done take it up on a flat dish; remove the trussing strings and arrange hatchet skewers in their stead, then place the rabbit on a crouton of fried bread on the dish it is to be served, and pour round the sauce as below, and at each end garnish with Saratoga potatoes [homemade potato chips or crisps]; brush the rabbit over with a little thin warm glaze, and serve at once for a remove for dinner or luncheon.

Farce for Rabbit à l’Epicurienne — Put the liver of the rabbit into a stewpan with enough cold water to cover, bring to a boil, then strain and rub through a fine wire sieve; mix it with two ounces of finely-chopped beef suet, a dessertspoonful of finely-chopped parsley, one chopped eschalot, a saltspoonful of coralline pepper, two whole raw eggs, three ounces of Chestnut crumbs…and one tablespoon of fresh mushrooms chopped fine; when well mixed together, use.

Sauce for Rabbit à l’Epicurienne — Put into a stewpan one ounce of butter, two peeled and sliced onions, a saltspoonful of Marshall’s Coralline Pepper, ditto of salt; fry it for fifteen or twenty minutes, then mix with one ounce of Marshall’s Crème de Riz, a teaspoonful of Liebig Company’s Extract of Meat, the strained juice of a lemon, two sliced tomatoes, half a pint of water, a bunch of herbs and a few drops of carmine; stir on the fire till the mixture boils, summer for half an hour, remove the herbs and rub the contents of the stewpan through a tammy, then use after rewarming in the bain-marie.

Happy Easter!

A.B.Marshall (1891) Mrs. A. B. Marshall’s Larger Cookery Book of Extra Recipes. Marshall’s School of Cookery, London.

Bookshelf: Forgotten Skills of Cooking

Every time we go to the supermarket, 

an increasing number of items 

are oven-ready or ready-to-eat: 

cheese is grated, mushrooms sliced, 

fruit segmented — I swear, if they sold toast 

we’d buy it.

~ Darina Allen

A few years ago, I found myself at the home of San Francisco cocktail writer and sometimes bartender, Erik Ellestad. A number of liquor writers had descended on the Bay Area, some to cover meetings of the American Distilling Institute, some just to eat and imbibe. While the rest of us mixed drinks, Pennsylvania blogger Rick Stutz made butter.

Yes, he made butter.

This is both as mundane and amazing as it sounds. Mundane because, well, butter is ubiquitous in America: even if you don’t eat it, you know where to get some. Amazing because almost nobody actually makes the stuff at home. I recognized instantly what Stutz was doing when I heard the mixer beating cream way too long. I was irked with myself because, as simple, straightforward, and easy as is it to make butter at home, it hadn’t even occurred to me as an option — and I’d grown up in a house with a butter churn.

Darina Allen found that over half of the students at her cookery school in Ireland had likewise forgotten how to make butter. Her epiphany came when one who had overwhipped her cream was on the verge of throwing it out. Allen stopped her and took the opportunity to teach the class how to make butter from the failed whipped cream. The students hadn’t necessarily forgotten what they had already known; rather, as a society, the Irish had lost kitchen skills that their grandmothers had known.

Butter bats in ice water

Allen set about correcting that alarming loss that by hosting a series of “forgotten skills” classes at her heralded Ballymaloe Cookery School. Courses included “How to Keep a Few Chickens in the Garden,” “How to Cure a Pig in a Day,” “How to Build a Smoker and Smoke your own Food,” and others on foraging, gardening, dairy, and other topics that spoke to eating what one grew. In her love for game, stillroom crafts, animal husbandry, and making the most of every scrap, she’s a bit like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (with good hair). She still teaches at Ballymaloe and, if you’re so inclined, you can sign up for classes. Most are under €150.

If, however, you cannot quite make it to County Cork — where my mother’s family is from — you are in luck. Mrs. Allen has spun her courses into a book: Forgotten Skills of Cooking. With 700 recipes in 600 pages (and weighing in at just under 5 pounds), it’s one of those books that might — just might — stand in as the sole cookbook for those who want only one. For those drawn by the rustic allure of modern urban homesteading, that goes double.

If you’ve ever thought you’d like to cure your own hams or make marmalade rather than buy it, do yourself a favor and check out the book. A casual flipping of the pages is enough to tell you that an Irish hand is at the stove. You will find recipes for soda bread, salmon, periwinkles, spiced beef, crubeens (i.e., pig’s feet), Irish stew, champ, and colcannon. Overall, though, the recipes strike a balance between hominess and worldly sophistication. You’ll find Moroccan takes on lamb, numerous Italian and French recipes, smoked eggs, duck rillettes, How to Make Crackling, applesauce, sweetbreads, hand-cut potato chips, paneer, porter cake, etc.

There are instructions for raising chickens (“Everyone knows how passionate I am about keeping hens”) and hanging game with extensive notes on preserving and vegetables. The tone that comes across more clearly, regardless of the topic at hand, is one of experience and encouragement, telling us, frankly, that some kinds of forgetting are warranted.

Shaping the butter

What kind? Undoubtedly, it’s the inner voice that tells us, when we see a looming expiration date, automatically to throw out that carton of yogurt or that when we see three moldy berries in a box, it tells us to bin the whole thing rather than discard the fuzzy bits and make a little pot of jam. That’s the voice to forget. Rather, use your own senses to tell when something’s bad or off. Bad berries are bad berries and if they can’t be used, then so be it, but a date of expiry can’t possibly be one’s only guide.

When you understand that electricity came to Mrs. Allen’s home village only when she was only 9 years old, the inherent thriftiness of her approach makes sense. When you’ve lived through the last three years of economic turmoil, you realize her timing could not have been better.

Forgotten Skills of Cooking is a tome I’m glad to have. It jogs my memory of foods and preparations I’ve already forgotten and explains how the old ways once again have become new.

Thank you, Mrs. Allen, for reminding me that I did indeed grow up in a house with a butter churn. I hope you don’t mind if I use my KitchenAid mixer, though, when making my next batch of the yellow stuff.

Note: for the following recipe from Forgotten Skills of Cooking, butter bats (or, as my mother calls them, butter hands) are small wooden paddles used to handle to form fresh butter into manageable cubes, logs, lumps, and balls. They are grooved on one side to allow liquid to stream away and use minimal surface area to shape the butter.

Butter

2.5 quarts/liters of unpasteurized or pasteurized heavy cream at room temperature
2 tsp pickling salt (optional)

Soak the wooden butter bats or hands in iced water for about 30 minutes so they do not stick to the butter.

Pour the heavy cream into a cold, sterilized mixing bowl. If it’s homogenized, it will still whip, but not as well. If you’re using raw cream and want a mor traditional taste, leave ut to ripen in a cool place, where the temperature is about 46F, for up to 48 hours.

Beat the cream at medium speed in a food mixer until it is thick. First, it will be softly whipped, the stiffly whipped. Continue until the whipped cream collapses and separates into butterfat globules. The buttermilk will separate from the butter and slosh around the bowl.

Tip the mixture into a cold, spotlessly clean sieve and drain well. The butter remains in the sieve while the buttermilk drains into a bowl. The buttermilk can be used to make soda bread or as a thirst-quenching drink (it will not taste sour). Put the butter back into a clean bowl and beat for another 30 seconds to 1 minute to expel more buttermilk. Remove and drain as before.

Fill the bowl containing the butter with very cold water. Use the butter bats or your clean hands to knead the butter to force out as much buttermilk as possible. This is important, as any buttermilk left in the butter will sour and the butter will spoil very quickly. If you handle the butter too much with warm hands, it will liquefy.

Drain the water, and wash twice more, until the water is completely clear.

Weigh the butter into 4oz, 8oz, or 1lb slabs. Pat into shape with the wet butter hands or bats. Make sure the butter hands or bats have been soaked in ice-cold water for at least 30 minutes before using to stop the butter sticking to the ridges. Wrap in parchment or waxed paper and keep chilled in a fridge. The butter also freezes well.

Makes about 1 kilo (2.2 lbs) butter and 1 quart/liter buttermilk.

Recipe note: If you prefer salted butter, add ¼ tsp of pickling salt — also called “canning and pickling salt” — for every 4oz of butter before shaping it.

Photo note: Other than the cover image of the book, each of the images here are photos by Peter Cassidy and can be found in Forgotten Skills of Cooking.

Darina Allen (2010)
Forgotten Skills of Cooking: The Time-Honored Ways are the Best — Over 700 Recipes Show You Why
600 pages (hardback)
Kyle Books
ISBN: 1906868069
$40.00

Goes well with:

• Darina Allen is an acclaimed teaching instructor at Ballymaloe Cookery School in County Cork. Every country, I suppose, could claim it has a local Julia Child — but most agree that Mrs. Allen is undoubtedly Ireland’s.
• Erik Ellestad writes about food and drink at Underhill-Lounge where he famously has been recreating drinks recipes from the the Savoy Cocktail Book “starting at the first, Abbey, and ending at the last, Zed.” At last check, he was one drink away from completion. Mind the anomie, Erik.
• Rick Stutz writes about cocktails, heavy on the homemade ingredients, and with a perceptible tiki bias at Kaiser Penguin.
• Morton’s sells 4lb boxes of canning and pickling salt with no iodine or free-flowing agents. Me? I’d go with some finely ground sea salt.
• Mrs. Allen does not cover making one's own whiskey. I do. 

Capuchin Capers? Them's Just Pickled Nasturtium Pods

The first I’d heard of capuchin capers was in John Evelyn’s 1699 Acetaria. Subtitled A Discourse of Sallets, the book details the types and uses of plants destined for grand salads of 300 years ago. In recent years, we’ve become accustomed to more eclectic salads than those of, say, the mid-20th century. When once iceberg lettuce ruled America, we now don’t give a second glance at arugula, mâche, radicchio, and perhaps torn herbs tossed in the bowl.

Nasturtium seed pods

17th and 18th century salads — or, rather, sallets, salats, and such spellings — could be a riot of colors, vegetables, fruits, flowers…and seeds. Capuchin capers were nothing more than the seed pods of nasturtium plants preserved in the manner of more exotic — and pricey — Mediterranean capers.

Although many older sources mention the striking similarity between pickled nasturtium pods and actual capers (also a pickled bud), I gave them short shrift; it seemed just one more example of a foodstuff born of scarcity while users convinced themselves it was just as good as the real thing.

Turns out, capuchin and Mediterranean capers are surprisingly similar. The color is not quite the right green (too light), the covering (ridged and grooved) is off, but the smell and — more importantly — the taste is close enough that after running an experimental batch earlier this summer, I went into the fields to gather enough buds for a few pints.

Fence row nasturtium flowers and seed pods in San Diego

Evelyn notes nasturtiums ought “to be monthly Sown: But above all the Indian, moderately hot, and aromatick, quicken the torpent Spirits, and purge the Brain, and are of Singular effect against the Scorbute [scurvy]. Both the tender Leaves, Calices, Cappuchin Capers, and Flowers, are laudably mixed with the colder Plants.”

“Monthly sown” because nasturtiums are in their entirety such useful plants and a supply throughout the growing season makes good sense. For using the plants’ “hot and aromatick” properties into winter, Evelyn recommends candying the buds as strewing herbs (that is, strewn on the floors of homes to keep down the stink in pre-modern England). Haven’t tried that. But those capers are another story.

Evelyn’s cappuchin capers (also capuchin, capuchine, capuccin, etc) are named after capucine, the French word for nasturtium. One presumes the French name for the flower comes from Capuchin friars who may have grown them as medicinal plants in their monasteries. One is not, however, a scholar of French etymology, and will leave that that shit alone for now [edit 2 Aug 2010: see Tammy's note below for confirmation of my inexpert use of French].

Adapted from The River Cottage Preserves Handbook’s recipe for Nasturium “capers”, here’s

Capuchin Capers

5 tsp salt
7 oz nasturtium seed pods
2 bay leaves (see "Notes on aromatics" below)
2.5 cup white/rice wine vinegar

Add the salt to 2.5 cups distilled or bottled water. Stir to dissolve. Rinse and drain the seed pods, then add them to the brine. Allow to stand 24 hours at room temperature.

Drain and dry the pods well. Pack into sterilized small jars, add the bay leaves (and/or other aromatics, if using). Leave about half an inch of headroom, then top with vinegar. Seal with vinegar-proof lids and leave in a cool, dark place for at least two weeks.

Notes on aromatics: Poke around old receipt books and you’ll find seemingly unending recipes for nasturtiums and their buds. They do have a peppery bite and go well in salads, with steaks, etc. Historically, a broad range of aromatics have complemented that bite when preserving the seed pods: dill, tarragon, chervil, nutmeg, black pepper, mace, cloves, bay leaves, etc. I used bay leaves only, but play with the flavors that suit you.

Strew the “capers” in salads, use them in tartar sauce, make compound butters, season tapenade with them. They’re versatile, they’re cheap, and they’re a bit of the 17th century you can bring to your own table as easy as pie. Or, rather, pye.

Goes well with:

• Evelyn, John (1699) Acetaria. A Discourse of Sallets. Prospect Books out of the UK has issued a handsome printing edited by Christopher Driver and with a forward by Tom Jaine — Powell’s in Portland carries it. (Prospect also released C. Anne Wilson’s laudable history of distillation, Water of Life).
• My take on The River Cottage Preserves Handbook.

Tracking Old Family Cordial Recipes

Americans may have forgotten some of the finer points of making tonics, tinctures, and infusions at home but we are, bit by bit, figuring them out again.

Take cocktail bitters. Hats off to all the bartenders making their own (and, please, keep doing so) but housemade bitters no longer raise eyebrows. Not because they are dull or passé, but because, more and more, we are coming to expect a level of applied curiosity in our bartenders. Bitters are one of the more familiar expressions of that trend.

As part of unboxing our own curiosities about the nation’s drinking past, older homemade beverages such as dandelion wine, sloe gin, and cherry bounce are showing up here and there. It’s a trend worth encouraging.


Tracking down those old recipes takes some legwork. Oh, sure you can find reprints of plenty of old bartending manuals for the 19th-century recipes, but sometimes our own friends and families can be surprising sources of information. I can’t even count the number of friends—city dwellers and professionals—who talked to me about my research into moonshine, found it totally alien, then reported back sometime later surprised to find that their own uncle, grandfather, cousin, or mother had first-hand experience making or moving applejack, corn liquor, or other black-market hooch.

I assure you, it’s the same with cordials, ratafias, tonics, and other homemade alcoholic beverages in your own family. While the holidays are still under way, ask around your own families and office parties to see who’s been making what. And, if anyone demurs with “Oh, that old stuff,” press ahead. It’s how my mother’s rumtopf recipe ended up in my moonshine book under the title The Stuff squared off against a recipe for curtido y mistela, a recipe from Chiapas from my good friend Noe. Who gave him the recipe? His mother.

That his mother supplied a recipe for homemade cordial isn’t surprising. Keep in mind that, from Charlemagne’s France through Elizabethan England to today, women tend to be the keepers of these recipes. Of course, men make boozy concoctions, but odds are, if there’s a written recipe for homemade drinks, it’s in a woman’s hand, so talk to aunts, grandmothers, and the extended networks of cousins. Below are some thoughts for tracking down older cordial recipes. And, remember, it's not just the ounces of this and the pints of that—the meat of the stories lies in how and when they were used and by whom:

• Ask about holiday parties from years past
• Browse through old family Bibles or journals for spare recipes tucked in between the pages
• Go through handwritten recipe books or cards with the woman who wrote or inherited them, asking about drinks recipes
  
• Ask how your older relatives kept cool in the summer (Do they remember August before air conditioning? Did they have a cellar with home-canned goods? What else was down there?)
• Ask how they kept warm in the winter (tactfully, now—you aren’t suggesting that they are coeval with dinosaurs)
• Ask what they did with wine/liquor bottles once they’d been emptied
• If they keep gardens or fruit bushes/trees, ask where it all goes at the end of the season
• Ask about traditional drinks brought from ancestors who immigrated to your country (anything from French vin cuit to Puerto Rican coquito)
• Was there a special bottle that kids weren’t supposed to get into? Ask about it.
• Ask what would be a good drink to put up on a child’s birth for his 21st birthday

For the record, my recipe for cherry bounce is posted over at Tuthilltown spirits. Very nice when made with corn whiskey, but bourbon is just fine…

What does your family put up in bottles and jugs?
.

Three Boozy Egg Drinks: Eggnog, Eierlikör, and Eierpunsch

Egg-based liqueurs tend to crop up mostly in winter months when the cold makes us crave extra calories. For Americans, eggnog stands as the classic example. Old egg recipes and what they’ve become — not just eggnog — are on my mind the days as I tease apart the convoluted family tree of egg nogs, flips, advocaat, Eierlikör, and other rich, egg-based drinks. That project continues and will turn into something down the road, but in the meanwhile, I offer you three items.

The first is Jeffery Morgenthaler’s recipe for eggnog from the pages of Playboy (which I read, in all honesty, for the recipes).

Clyde Common Eggnog
Beat a dozen eggs in blender for one minute on medium speed. Slowly add 2 1/4 cups of sugar and blend for one additional minute. With the blender still running, add 3 teaspoons of freshly-grated nutmeg, 1 1/12 cups of Amontillado sherry, 1 1/2 cups of anejo tequila, 4 1/2 cups of whole milk and 3 cups of heavy cream until combined. Chill thoroughly to allow flavors to combine.

The rest of the article How Not to Spike Eggnog is here.

The second is a video about William Verpoorten, the Bonn-based liqueur-maker whom Deutsche Welle dubs “Der König des Eierlikörs” (the King of Egg Liqueurs). Verpoorten claims to use 1.3 million eggs per day for his firm’s Eierlikör, a German liqueur whose primary ingredients—as Verpoorten makes it—are egg yolks, alcohol, and water. Notice the lack of cream and milk, making this similar to, but not quite, what we think of as an eggnog.



The last is a recipe for Eierpunsch, a rum-and-wine egg “punch” from my battered copy of Elise Hannemann’s Kochbuch (Berlin, 1904). Keep in mind I learned German when I was very young, so it's sketchy these days, but I do still get by. My working translation [with corrections for directions omitted in the original] is below. Anyone want to correct my translation? Please do.

Eierpunsch

2 egg yolks
2 whole eggs
3 Tbl lemon juice
1/4 liter white wine
1/4 liter water
1/16 liter rum
120g sugar

Whisk the egg yolks and whole eggs together with sugar, lemon juice and 1/8 liter of cold water until frothy; Pour in 3/8 liter of boiling water [and white wine combined] and cook the whole thing on a very hot hearth whisking until frothy. Then, pour the rum into the punch and serve immediately.

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Bar Food: Spanish Fig Cake

With San Diego temperatures plummeting to the mid-60’s, I can’t help but recall our decade in Philadelphia where—to make it through the harsh winters—I guzzled hot tea by the liter. Occasionally bits of Spanish fig cake helped. But it isn’t just for tea. As a bar snack or part of an appetizer spread, fig cake complements Manchego cheese, a slice of membrillo, and a small bowl of olives. It doesn’t hate a glass of sherry or port if you roll that way.

Now fig cake isn’t your typical baked cake like red velvet or a pound cake; it’s a dense little drum of dried figs mixed with Marcona almonds or sometimes hazelnuts. Done properly, it’s not overly sweet since there’s little more than figs and nuts in it. Mitica makes a popular version and Zingerman’s sells chucks of the stuff.

But there’s also a way to make it at home with no cooking at all.

While researching sweetened whiskeys this morning, I came across a recipe for A Spanish Dessert Treat in a 1904 English candy-making manual. Yeah, I said candy-making manual. I like sugar work and collect old candy books. You wanna make something of it?

The little brown tome bearing Alan Davidson’s fishy bookplate I picked up for a measly $30 from Bonnie Slotnik*. The Treat inside it was a dead ringer for the fig cake I knew back East.

This recipe calls for fresh bay leaves to be inserted between layers of the cake. It’s not just a matter of taste. Old importer guides and grocer manuals report that bay leaves packed in bundles of imported figs helped prevent insect infestation. Layer some in if you have access to fresh bay and like the taste. Dried sounds…unappetizing. Ignore Mrs. Rattray’s suggestions of gilding this particular lily with sugar.

A Spanish Dessert Treat

Split some fresh-dried figs of the best quality, “pulled figs” [see below] by preference, and arrange in each three or four split blanched almonds; close the fruit and put it in layers in a screw tin, such as a small brawn tin, or into a jar in which increasingly heavy weights can be put; between each layer put a few fresh bay-leaves; when the whole mass is perfectly solid, the pressure having been daily increased, lift it out and cut into slices with a sharp knife. These may be formed into the basis of a sweet, dusted with icing sugar, and decorated with royal icing.

Mrs. M. E. Rattray (1904)
Sweetmeat-Making at Home.
C. Arthur Pearson, London.

Pulled figs note: Since this is (at least) a 105-year old recipe from a British source, I hit the shelves to see what the Brits would have meant by “pulled figs” just as the 20th century was getting its sea legs. According to The British Pharmaceutical Codex (1907),

“Natural" figs are those which are packed loose and retain to some extent their original shape. “Pulled" figs have been kneaded and pulled to make them supple; these are usually packed into small boxes for exportation, and are considered to be the best variety. "Pressed” figs have been closely packed in boxes so that they are compressed into discs.

Snip off any remaining stems regardless of which kind of dried figs used.

*I’ve scored a few of Andy Smith’s discards from Bonnie as well. Few trips to New York are complete without a stop in her little used cookbook store. At least not when you’re a book geek like me.

Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks
163 West Tenth Street
New York, New York 10014-3116
phone: 212-989-8962
fax: 212-989-8102
bonnieslotnickbooks@earthlink.net

Bittered Wine

Among bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts who make their own bitters, some recipes stand out for their uncommon ingredients—cocoa, chipotles, or mahleb, for instance. Others for their technique.

The usual method is to macerate seeds, bark, roots, leaves, and other aromatic and bittering agents in alcohol. Sometimes all the ingredients are put in a container all at once in a mass. Other methods call for a series of alcoholic tinctures (e.g., one jar of bitter orange peel, one of cardamom, one of gentian, one of cherry leaves or celery seeds, etc.) to be mixed once each has achieved a sufficient concentration.

M. E. Steedman falls under the "unusual technique" camp by calling for an actual fermentation of an aged bitter wine. Though related to cocktail bitters, bittered wines are older, less alcoholic, and more clearly intended to be tonic medicines. Here, his technique for a wormwood and gentian mash gets a dose of yeast to create a low-alcohol wash (probably around 6% abv), but not before boiling part of it. Finally, it’s cleared with isinglass and further fermentation stopped by adding brandy.

Slainte!

Bitter Wine

Boil 6 gallons of water, 15 lb. pure cane sugar and 3 oz. ginger together for half an hour, skimming when necessary, then pour into a large vessel containing 1½ pints of wormword, 3 pints each of red and green camomile, 3 oz. of camomile flowers, 1½ oz. of gentian root, and 2 handfuls of rosemary. Cover and infuse for five days, then boil part of the liquid and add it to the remainder to make the whole lukewarm. Stir in 6 table-spoonfuls of liquid yeast, and strain into a cask (reserving about a gallon to fill up the cask as the fermentation subsides), bung lightly til the hissing noise ceases, then add one and a half ounces of dissolved isinglass, and one and a half pints of good brandy. Stop the cask securely, and in 9 months bottle off and keep for six months longer.

~ Home-Made Beverages and American Drinks
M. E. Steedman (nd) The Food and Cookery Publishing Agency, London.

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Syrup of Violets, Three Ways

“My God, have mercy upon me! " and, uttering a fearful cry, Barrois fell back as if he had been struck by lightning. D'Avrigny put his hand to his heart and placed a glass before his lips. "Well!" said Villefort. "Go to the kitchen, and get me some syrup of violets."

~ The Count of Monte-Cristo (1893)
Chapter 79: The Lemonade
Alexandre Dumas

Given the number of bottles laced with violets at Tales of the Cocktail this summer, smart money says we'll be seeing more floral drinks mixed at some of our favorite watering holes. Obscure-spirits wrangler Eric Seed of Haus Alpenz already imports a 20% abv Crème de Violette made from Alpine Queen Charlotte and March violets. Rob Cooper—whose St Germain elderflower liqueur has achieved such popularity that it’s been called “the ketchup of bartenders”—showed his Crème Yvette, a liqueur that also incorporates violets. It should be hitting shelves this fall.

Violets have an aroma that reminds some of old ladies’ perfume. Yet Crème Yvette is a core ingredient in classic cocktails such as the Blue Moon of which Ted Haigh waxes to eloquently in his Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails. Marleigh Riggins over at Sloshed! teases us with a sampling of Blue Moons which—for a while at any rate—will be difficult to create at home until Crème Yvette achieves wider distribution. She presents a version with Crème de Violette.

Until then, I offer a workaround: Syrup of violets. Alexandre Dumas knew of violet syrup over a hundred years ago, but this erstwhile kitchen staple has an older history in English cookery. Though I haven’t tried these recipes, I suspect adding spirit to a violet syrup base may make an interesting addition to the bartender’s arsenal, especially if the spirit is Grand Marnier or another orange liqueur, vanilla-infused rum, or other liquors with more character than vodka or plain neutral spirits. Clearly, these aren't substitutions for either Crème Yvette or crème de violettes, but nonalcoholic bases from which to experiment.

First off is Eleanor Parkinson who gives this 1844 version in The Complete Confectioner, Pastry-cook, and Baker:

Syrup of Violets—One pound of violet flowers, one quart of water, four pounds of sugar. Put the flowers cleared from their stalks and calx, into a glazed earthen pan; pour on the water boiling hot, and stop the pan quite close; let it remain in a warm place for a day, then strain off the infusion through a thin cloth; add the sugar, and place in the bain-marie: stir it well and heat it until you can scarcely bear your finger in it; then take it off, and when cold, bottle.

English botanist Nicholas Culpepper offers us in his Complete Herbal (1814) a recipe that’s essentially the same—down to the glazed vessel—but without heating.

Syrupus Violarum

Take of Violet flowers fresh and picked, a pound, clear water made boiling hot, two pounds, shut them up close together into a new glazed pot, a whole day, then press them hard out, and in two pounds of the liquor dissolve four pounds and three ounces of white sugar, take away the scum, and so make it into a Syrup without boiling.

Going back another two centuries, Elinor Fettiplace, in her handwritten 1604 recipe book, gives directions To Make a Sirrop of Violetts:

Elinor Fettiplace’s Sirrop of Violetts

First make a thicke sirop of sugar and clarifie yt well, then take blew violets and picke them well from the whights then put them in the sirrop, let them lye in yt 24 howres keepinge yt warme in the meane time, then straine these violets out and put in fresh, so do 4 times then set them on the fire, let them simper a good while but not boyle fast put in some Juice of limonds in the boyleinge then straine yt and keep yt to yor use.

Both Fettiplace and Parkinson hit on a detail sometimes missed by those who don’t often make floral infusions: they remove parts of the flower before infusing. Naturally, the stems have no place in a delicate syrup such as this, but neither does the whole petal. The “whights”—or white part of the flowers—are removed before the infusion. Rosewater and rose syrup recipes often call for the same procedure. The idea is to eliminate bitterness that can result from including the white parts of the flowers.

Now all I need is a gallon or so of unsprayed, aromatic violets and a pair of sharp scissors.

Goes well with:

• Hilary Spurling (1986) Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book: Elizabethan Country House Cooking. Viking Press, New York. Spurling, wife of a modern relation to the 17^th-century Fettiplace, has admirably presented the cookery styles, concerns, patterns, and recipes of a housewife at an age when England enjoyed immense power and wealth (yet still had trouble putting down those pesky Irish). The book is out of print, but well worth tracking down for an understanding of household management, including the products of stillrooms.
• Diane Ackerman's Natural History of the Senses includes a discussion of violets and their peculiar effect on human smell: unlike, say, the aroma of steak or cigar smoke, humans' ability to smell that of violets is not constant. Our perception of their smell comes in waves. Ionone, one of the flower's components, temporarily short circuits our sense of smell. After a few minutes, we can smell violets again and their aroma comes on clearly and strongly. Buy Ackerman's book here or check it out in your local library. Then get some flowers and try it for yourself.

Blue Moon photo courtesy of Marleigh Riggins.

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Elixir Pro

Work has kept me away from the Whiskey Forge recently, but there are some fun writeups in the pipes, including a healthy dose of bitters and an overview of this past weekend’s Tiki Oasis in San Diego. What a blast that was.

In the meanwhile, I offer Elixir Pro, a boozy recipe that predates America’s commingling of Polynesian idols, rum, and little paper umbrellas. Admittedly, I haven't tried it but offer it as an historical curiosity.

Note that the recipe calls for brandy or "N.E." rum. Given the Connecticut origins of the tattered old pamphlet in my library, this isn't a pun on "any" rum but instead refers to old New England rum, distilled from molasses shipped from sugar-producing Caribbean islands. Of these, Medford rum's reputation reached well beyond the boundaries of its native Massachusetts. For an overview of Medford rum, see Wayne Curtis's And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the World in Ten Cocktails.

Elixir Pro is a useful family medicine for digestive disorders. Pulverize one ounce of saffron, one ounce of Myrrh, one ounce aloes. Steep the myrrh in a half pint of brandy or N. E. rum for four days. Add the saffron and aloes: let it stand in the sunshine or a warm place for a fortnight, shaking it twice a day. Then fill up the bottle with brandy or N. E. rum. The longer it stands the better.

~ The Pocumtuc Housewife, A Domestic Guide to Cookery as it is Practiced in the Connecticut Valley (1906)

Bookshelf: Cocktail Boothby Hits the Shelves (Again)

Before going to press the manuscript of this little encyclopedia was submitted to many first-class bartenders, successful saloon-keepers, famous connoisseurs and well-known clubmen from all parts of the globe for their approval and endorsement, one and all of whom have unhesitatingly declared it to be “The Dope.”

~ Hon Wm. T (Cocktail) Boothby
The World’s Drinks and How to Mix Them (1908)

It’s time to drop the old chestnut about the scarcity of William Boothby’s bartender’s guides. While that was true a year ago, “Cocktail” Bill Boothby, dead these almost 80 years, is enjoying a new life through the publishing efforts of Fritz Maytag and Greg Boehm.

Boothby was a bartender, author, and California assemblyman who plied his trade in San Francisco before Prohibition. That he worked the stick in New Orleans, New York, Kansas City, Chicago, and Philadelphia before returning to California is irrelevant: San Francisco claims him as her native son.

Cocktail historian David Wondrich says of Boothby "If one had to pick a single name to stand as dean to the whole tribe of San Francisco bartenders, it would be the Honorable William T. Boothby, head bartender at the Palace Hotel and author of one of the most useful bartender's guides of the golden age of American drinking.”

Until this year, getting your hands on a copy of one of those bartender’s guides was an iffy endeavor. But if your tastes lean toward antiquarian books without a matching antiquarian book-buyers’ budget, you’re in luck.

Anchor Brewing Company has reprinted Boothby’s 1891 manual, Cocktail Boothby’s American Bar-Tender, in a handsome new paperback edition with a new 12-page forward by Fritz Maytag and David Burkhart who dive into historical and news archives for details about the man and his times. From a later edition of the book, they introduce Boothby’s own Boothby Cocktail, essentially a Manhattan cocktail with a champagne float:

The Boothby Cocktail

2/3 jigger Whiskey
1/3 jigger Italian Vermouth
2 dashes Orange bitters
2 drops Angostura bitters

Stir well with ice, strain into a chilled cocktail glass, add Maraschino cherry, float on one spoon of champagne and serve.

Particularly fascinating for me (yes, I admit, I have spent parts of more than one summer vacation in archives working on my librarian’s tan) are reproductions of 16 handwritten pages of recipes from the collection of John C. Burton. The pages were found tipped into a 1900 edition of the book and include such drinks as the Vampire Cocktail, the Pineapple Bronx, and the Brandy Daisy.

Not to be outdone by the historical addenda in Anchor’s California edition, Mud Puddle Books in New York has issued a damn-near perfect reproduction of Boothby’s 1908 The World’s Drinks and How to Mix Them. The hand of John Burton is apparent here, too, in his introductory essay giving a succinct biography of William Boothby.

Mud Puddle’s Greg Boehm has made quite a name for himself reprinting old cocktail manuals that aren’t just facsimiles—from the paper to the fonts to the binding, boards, and endpapers, his reproduction books look and feel as the originals did when they were published sometimes more than a century ago. Like any ethical publisher, Mud Puddle makes sure the books are clearly modern works. Each, for instance, has an introduction explaining its relevance by modern drinks historians such as David Wondrich or Robert Hess.

For a look into California bartending as it was done a hundred years ago, do yourself a favor and check out Boothby’s work. Whether you want to plunk down the cash for an original is up to you, but in the meanwhile, consider grabbing both Mud Puddle’s and Anchor’s editions. Despite the great deal of overlap in the books, I got both and will be mixing drinks from them for years to come.


William Thomas Boothby (1891)
Cocktail Boothby’s American Bar-Tender
152 pages, paperback
2009 reprint by Anchor Brewing Co.
ISBN 978-9822473-4
$14.99
Buy it here.

Hon Wm T. Boothby (1908)
The World’s Drinks and How to Mix Them
143 pages, paperback
2009 reprint by Mud Puddle Books
ISBN 978-1-60311-189-8
$19.99
Buy it here.

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Grossmuttis Kartoffelsalat (We Call it Tater Salad)

Since moving to body-conscious Southern California, I’ve cut way back on taters, but with Irish roots on one hand and German on the other, I’ve got a double spudlust that makes my knees nearly buckle at the prospect of something so verboten as a bacon-studded German potato salad.

What better time than Memorial Day, though, to bust out a big bowl of the stuff to satisfy my lust for carbs? For weeks, I’d been craving the bacon fat-and-vinegar-laced salad that Philadelphia chef Fritz Blank used to make for staff lunches or special occasions when I would visit. It wasn’t the kind of food he’d serve at his fancy French restaurant Deux Cheminées, but to bolster our holiday grill of bratwurst, burgers, and chicken, it was just the ticket.

Blank, a former Army captain and microbiologist, is meticulous about recipe preparations and his original notes for this salad are worth reading for the amount of precise detail about the recipe. This meticulous scientist makes legions of jigger-wielding nouveau “cocktailians” look downright sloppy. Scroll down for a link to his notes and procedures for his grandmother’s potato salad.

With apologies to Fritz, I’ve adapted his grossmutti’s Kartoffelsalat to my kitchen and tastes. Most notably, I’ve cut the fat by nearly half (but kept every single drop of bacon fat) because I don’t care for an overly slick salad. I also used Yukon Golds, but cut into small slices, somewhere between the coin-shaped slices he calls for and the cubes he reserves for American-style potato salads.

Roll out the barrels, baby: this German classic is good all summer long.

German Potato Salad

5 lbs C or B-sized golden potatoes
1 ½ gallons of water
½ cup salt

¾ lb. double smoked bacon, cut into 1/4-inch slices
1 cup thinly sliced green onions, white part only
¾ cup fresh parsley, chopped “medium”
1 level tablespoon freshly cracked black peppercorns
1 ½ tablespoons coarse sea salt
1 cup of rice wine vinegar or a mild champagne vinegar
1 ½ cups oil mix (combined rendered bacon fat plus peanut oil)

Place the potatoes, ½ cup salt, and water into a 16-quart pot. The water should cover the potatoes by about 4 inches. Bring to a full boil over high heat; reduce to a gentle boil and cook uncovered until the potatoes are tender yet firm. Start testing after about 20 minutes. Test by sliding a knifepoint into potatoes: it should go in easily with minimal resistance. Carefully drain placing the potatoes in a single layer onto a tray to cool slightly.

In the meanwhile, render the bacon over medium heat until crispy, but not hard. Drain and reserve the drippings.

While the potatoes are still hot but able to be handled, slice them into bite-sized slices (or the “coins” Blank calls for) into a large mixing bowl. The slices should about 1⁄4-inch thick or slightly more, and should not break apart or crumble.

Add all of the remaining ingredients on top of the potatoes, and mix gently with a large spoon, silicon spatula, or your hands to distribute everything evenly. Do not overmix or break up the slices.

Let the salad sit for a few hours at room temperature to develop the flavors. Taste carefully and re-season if necessary with salt, pepper and/or vinegar. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Goes well with:

• Blank’s original recipe for his grandmother’s potato salad on his message board Ask Chef Fritz.
• A Chef & His Library, an exhibit I curated about Blank’s extensive cookbook collection at the University of Pennsylvania
• Mimi Sheraton’s The German Cookbook: A Complete Guide to Mastering Authentic German Cooking
• Horst Scharfenberg’s The Cuisines of Germany: Regional Specialities and Tradition Home Cooking
• The New German Cookbook: More than 230 Contemporary and Traditional Recipes by Jean Anderson and Hedy Würz
• Karl Friedrich von Rumohr’s The Essence of Cookery (Rumohr, writing in the 19th century, has been called “Germany’s Escoffier.” Take that for what it’s worth).

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Forbidden Ham: Konohiki Short Pig

If tiki pads paid as much attention to their food as they do drinks, a lot more converts would be listening to Jake Shimabukuro and donning Hawaiian shirts. As it stands, tropical cocktails take the lion’s share of attention while hungry drinkers frequently make do with appetizers that just don’t try as hard as the well-crafted beverages.

Exceptions are out there, of course. Jeff Barry, Wayne Curtis, and Chris DeBarr put together a tiki meal for last year’s Tales of the Cocktail on New Orleans that paired locally-sourced foods with “exotic” spices and reportedly elevated the stellar cocktail experience to new heights (can’t vouch for that as I was making a glutton of myself that night at Cochon with a table full of distillers and snoots of Ted Breaux’s Perique liqueur).

But thoughts of that dinner surfaced recently after I bought a spiral-cut ham. The industrial glaze packet included with the ham reeked of clove oil, too much cinnamon, and too much sugar. So I threw it out. A light glaze was called for while the ham baked, but what to substitute at a moment’s notice? Over the pings of the warming oven, a siren call softly came of tiki cocktails. Yes, tiki would save my ass.

The ham could not be simpler, assuming you have two tropical staples on hand: Angostura bitters and orgeat, the almond syrup called for in drinks such as the classic Scorpion Bowl or San Diego’s own Coronado Luau Special. Heating the orgeat and bitters with Dijon mustard proved just the taste I was going for. Pineapple might work, but I didn’t have any. Clearly, this is a recipe the invites dinking and tweaking.

The ham may be whole or half, bone-in, or boned. In this instance, it a half, bone-in, spiral-cut number.

Konohiki Short Pig

One ready-to-eat ham

Glaze
1 cup/250ml Dijon mustard (whole grain or Creole is fine)
1 cup/250ml orgeat
½ oz Angostura bitters

Preheat the oven to 350°F/162°C. If the ham has skin, cut it off and trim any fat to ¼” or so. Line a roasting pan with aluminum foil and place the ham, fat side up, in the pan. Cook about ten minutes per pound (so about two hours for a half ham, up to three hours for a larger one) or until the internal temperature reaches 130-40°F/54-60°C. Remove from the oven and bump the temperature to 425°F/218°C.

In a small pan, heat the glaze ingredients together and whisk until smooth. Pour this glaze over the ham. If it is spiral-cut, make sure the glaze gets down in between the slices. Heat in the oven another 20-30 minutes, basting now and then with the juices and glaze that pools on the bottom of the pan.

Remove the ham from the oven, cover it loosely with aluminum foil and let it rest about 20 minutes before carving and serving.

And—because I think the guy's amazing—Jake Shimabukuro playing While My Guitar Gently Weeps. You can play it while your short pig gently bakes.


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Bookshelf: Cordial Waters

Volodimir Pavliuchuk is so well known among hobbyist distillers that if he spent a week in internet silence, home distillers from New York to New Zealand would call his local police to make sure the man had not fallen in his boiler.

Pavliuchuk, better known as Wal, is a pillar of Yahoo’s online distillers’ group. His near daily posts about and links to historical recipes, PDFs of old distilling manuals, ethnographic accounts, essays, and dissertations on producing spirits spur hobbyist distillers to recreate bygone, lost, and forgotten spirits. Or, at least, to know about them.

And now Wal has a book. Cordial Waters: A Compleat Guide to Ardent Spirits of the World hit the shelves recently and home distillers everywhere should be breaking out wallets right about…now.

The book covers distilling basics, including simple recipes for creating vodka, whiskeys, brandies, rum, and other spirits from primary ingredients. Purists may balk at plain white sugar in some recipes or additives for emulating peat or barrel aging, but recall that the recipes are for home enthusiasts who may not have access to expensive professional equipment. If those bother you, skip them. There’s plenty enough here worth digging into.















The meat of Cordial Waters—the reason you want to buy this book—is 260 recipes Wal gives for flavored spirits; cordials, liqueurs, flower waters, crèmes, gins, flavored whiskeys and brandies, citrus infusions, bitters, kümmel, pastis, absinthes, monastic liqueurs, genevers, vodkas (flavored with bison grass, tormentil, tobacco, birch buds, spruce, and more), spiced rums, cream liqueurs, spirits spiked with beans and nuts, shrubbs, and—for you tiki fans—Hawaiian okolehao. Hell, he’s even got mesquite mash. And mastic liqueur. Laudanum. Crazy shit with alkermes, cochineal, and ants. So many more culled from sources spanning centuries and continents.

The recipes have been scaled to standardized 1- or 4-liter batches. Many readers—perhaps especially those with little experience, or patience with, interpreting older recipes—will find this a great convenience since such recipes often call for outdated or uncertain measurements [hands, drachms, “enough,” two bottles (what size?), until it becomes a stiff paste, etc.]. By presenting the recipes in liters and grams, Wal skillfully works around the uncertainties a novice might encounter.

Readers with a tenacious historical or bibliographic bent, however, will regret that the book does not present original recipes alongside the adaptations nor does it cite each recipe’s source. This redaction—understandable given the book’s space restrictions—nevertheless is frustrating because original recipes contain valuable clues about techniques, procedures, purposes, and sometimes even reasons why mixtures were made at certain times and not others.

An 1890 falernum recipe, for instance, calls for milk, presumably cow’s. Milk? Really? See, that’s interesting in and of itself. I trust Wal, but want to learn about its role from the original. Was it a fining, maybe? Combined with lime juice, allowed to settle, then racked and strained, that may just work, but modern versions from the cocktail crowd and rum enthusiasts don’t use it. A citation would give enough information to start a library hunt in earnest. Ah, well. Second edition perhaps.

Regardless, Cordial Waters is a delight. Those who want to learn more no doubt will latch onto innumerable nuggets of insight larding the book. Buried in notes for a rosa-solis recipe, for example, is mention of a 1609 recipe that calls for Brasilwood boiled in rosewater to create a red color. What New York or San Francisco bartender is doing that? Also noted is that drying celandine (Chelidonium majus) reduces its toxicity and that adding 0.1 gram of silver nitrate/liter prior to redistilling causes hydrogen cyanide in stone fruit spirits to precipitate as insoluble silver cyanide. These are good things to know.

It’s not all fancy, outrageous, or outré concoctions. There are plenty of recipes that can be made with little more than store-bought vodka and fresh herbs or spices. Knowing something about cocktails and liquor, though, would be a great help in understanding procedures and, occasionally, when to veer from directions.

Of particular use is an appendix explaining the Pearson Square. Homebrewers and winemakers are familiar with this handy diagram that allows mixers to calculate quickly the amounts of two liquids required to fortify or dilute alcoholic beverages. Several examples (including one suggesting that Pavliuchuk likes his martinis 7:1) show in clear detail how to make simple calculations using the square.

Who should buy it? Every hobbyist distiller. Who else? Bartenders, cocktail enthusiasts, drinks historians, botanists, ethnopharmacologists—anyone who enjoys making cordials and liqueurs. Certainly anyone with a still will find inspiration here. In these tight times, and with the long-overdue ascendancy of cocktail culture, that’s a lot of people.

Who else should buy it? You.

Do so here.

Goes well with:

• Moonshine! ~ my own novice's guide to distilling. Publisher's Weekly calls it "the last book one will ever need on the art of in-house hooch." Perfect for Father's Day.
  
• The Compleat Distiller ~ Mike Nixon and Mike McCaw's treatise on the science of making spirits, a classic among modern hobbyist distillers.
  
• Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails ~ Ted Haigh's erudite profile of cocktails fallen into obscurity and now enjoying a renaissance. Second edition is forthcoming.

Volodimir Pavliuchuk (2008)
Cordial Waters: A Compleat Guide to Ardent Spirits of the World
152 pages, paperback.
Published by The Amphora Society
Pakuranga, New Zealand
$25


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German Bitters, an Untried Recipe

My French is entirely self-taught and I’m not by any assessment fluent. Oh, I’m competent enough not to starve or go without a roof when I travel in France. I’m also able to dig through old books to find recipes for those homemade tinctures, infusions, macerations, and beverages of which the French still seem inordinately fond.

But because I’m leery of sounding foolish with my ham-fisted translations in print, I turned to upstate New York cider maker and longtime friend S. David White, who yielded a more user-friendly reading than the one I came up with for this old recipe. The result seems to yield more of an amer style bitter than the cocktail bitters we usually think of. Did you catch that "seems" so? Haven't made this concoction. Just offering for your consideration. Might in fact be a delightful cocktail ingredient.

This recipe, for German bitters, is from M. Ferreyol’s 1894 Manuel Pratique pour la Fabrication rapide et economique des Liqueurs et des Spiritueux sans Distillation (reprint available here). White’s translation follows (and, in the Shake ‘n’ Bake tradition, I helped).

Bitter allemand

Anis vert……………………………………………...…10 grammes
Bais de genievre…………………………………......10 —
Ecorces d’organges ameres seches……...…….10 —
Sauge seche………..………..………..………..….….10 —
Absinthe seche………..………..………..………..…10 —
Calamus………..………..………..………..………..…10 —
Girofles………..………..………..………..………..……5 —
Menthe seche………..………..………..………..…….5 —
Lavande fleurs seches………..………..………..…..5 —
Racine d’angelique seche………..………..……..…5 —

1º On pile finement toutes les substances et on les fait macrer pendant 10 jours dans 1 litre d’alcool a 90º.

2º On soutire la maceration et sur le residue on verse un mélange compose d’alcool ½ litre et l’eau 1 litre.

3º Au bout de 10 jours, on mele les deux macerations, on colore avec du jus de cerises noires, puis on filtre.

German Bitters

Anise...………..………..................10 grams
Juniper berries ..………..………...10 --
Dried bitter orange peel ..……...10 --
Dried sage ..………..………...........10 --
Dried absinthe..………..……….....10 --
Calamus ..………..……...........…...10 --
Cloves ..………..…................……...5 --
Dried mint..............………..……….5 --
Dried lavender flowers....…...…...5 --
Dried angelica root..………..……...5 --

First — Finely grind all the ingredients above and macerate them for 10 days in a liter of 90 degree alcohol.

Second — strain off the maceration [e.g., the liquid] and retain. Onto the residue pour a mixture of ½ liter of alcohol and 1 liter of water.

Third — After 10 days, mix the two macerations. Color the liquid with black cherry juice, then filter.

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Opium Syrup: Babies Cry for It

A predilection for old cookery books, leather-bound pharmacopeia, and druggist circulars has stocked my shelves with recipes, formulae, and scraps of knowledge whose heyday has past. In some cases—old cocktails, bitters, moonshiner memoirs, handwritten household account books—the loss to the general public is regrettable. Other times, taking some of these compounded goodies recipes out of circulation is just as well.

Take, for instance, Professor H. Blits’ 1890 Patented and Improved Methods of Canning Fruits, Vegetables, Etc. The book itself is a gem (in addition to liquor, I’m a fiend for pickling and preserves). In it, Blits includes recipes for curing drunkenness, making candles burn all night, and…the famous soothing syrup. 19th Century babies, apparently, cried for it. Or, given its opium content, one presumes it was more accurate to say that babies cried loudest when it was withheld.

FORMULA 2024.
The famous soothing syrup—babies cry for it.

It is perfectly harmless, and very beneficial and good for colic. One pound granulated sugar, one pint of water; let this come to a boil; then boil down 10 minutes more, stirring as little as possible; and one ounce of McMund’s [sic: McMunn’s] elixir of opium and eight drops of annis [sic: anise] oil; when cool, bottle and cork. If you can’t get McMund’s, use one ounce of deodorized tincture of opium instead. The tincture opium in this shape is harmless, as it is very weak; it is not half as strong at the patent soothing syrup now the market. Dose—child one month old, five drops, every hour until relieved; three months old, fifteen drops every hour until relieved; six months old and over, one teaspoonful every hour until relieved.

Given the typos that sound almost right, I'm guessing either Blits or his publisher took down the recipe by ear rather than after much hands-on practice. McMunn's, after all, was a fairly well-known opium elixir.

Twenty drops of this syrup, though, and I bet the patients slept like babies. Precious little junky babies.

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