Rock Out with Your Cock Ale

Trup: Nay, nay, no more sobrietie than will do us good; but that's all one. Look ye, Mr. Spruce, for your wine I don’t love it; and for your ale ye have not a drop in London worth drinking; that's the short on’t.

Spr: How Mr. Trupenny, not a drop worth drinking? Did you ever taste our cock-ale?

Trup: Cock-ale? no; what's that?

Spr: Why there you shew your ignorance. Look ye, sir, I lay ye five pound you shall say, ye never tasted the like in the country.

~ The Woman Turned Bully (1675)
Attributed to Aphra Behn

With a recent post on a 300-year-old drink called negus, I intended to reach back into the misty past of drinking history. Rick Stutz over at Kaiser Penguin has stretched just a bit further with a recipe for Cock Ale. Yeah, with a real cock. Well, a chicken, anyway. The farm-to-table crowd argues about just such semantics.

As an erstwhile homebrewer and incorrigible book hound, I know that recipe well. My thoroughly annotated college-era copy of Charlie Papazian’s old Complete Joy of Homebrewing and its infernally bad index is dog-eared from once-constant reference. Papazian lifted it from Edward Spencer who yoiked it from Eliza Smith whose The Complete Housewife was the first cookbook published in America. The recipe’s been around.

Until Rick’s post, though, I hadn’t known of anyone actually making it. Now, I’ve mentioned before that I’m leery of flesh in my cups—bacon-infused bourbon and whatnot—but anyone setting a mug of cock ale in front of me will soon be faced with an empty mug. By all reports from the 17th and 18th centuries, the stuff was eminently quaffable.

The inclusion of animals in beverages is an old, old practice (whole or parts, live or dead), but has faded almost entirely away. Brewers weren’t the only ones in on the game: When Smith’s book was printed, personal stills were already popular both in North America and England where, in fact, one of the duties of a responsible wife was managing the household still. Cock water was a natural. Also snail water, but we’ll let that one slide.

The practice may be on the ropes, but it hasn't faded entirely away. Del Maguey released, as part of its single-village bottlings of Mexican spirits, Pechuga, a triple-distilled mescal distilled with a chicken breast suspended in the still. The stuff is pricey when you can find it, but I admit I’m curious.

Until I score a bottle, I have this recipe, typical of the mid-18th century, from a handwritten household recipe book once in the collection of Chef Fritz Blank, but now at the University of Pennsylvania. Although I included it in Moonshine, it was primarily as an historical curiosity. Might have to rethink that after prodding from a Penguin…

Cock Water

Take a red Cock from ye Barn’s door, pull it, take out ye Intrals & break all ye Bones, have in readiness of Rosemary, hops and Broad Time each 1 handful, red Pimpernel 2 handfuls, Raisins of ye Sun ston’d half a pound, Dates pick’d and ston’d a qtr of a pound, Currans wash’d and rubb’d dry a pound, Canary sack 2 qts; first lay most of ye herbs in ye bottom of ye still, then put in ye Cock, lay the fruit all about it, put ye rest of ye herbs over it, & pour ye sack in by ye sides, cover and past it close, begin the fire betimes & keep a constant heat under it. You may draw somewhat above 3 pints of very good; mix and sweeten if with Sugar-Candy to yr Liking.

Goes well with:

• The Restoration Comedy Project

Gift of the Negi

Hogsheads of honey, kilderkins of mustard,
Muttons, and fatted beeves, and bacon swine;
Herons and bitterns, peacocks, swan, and bustard,
Teal, mallard, pigeons, widgeons, and in fine
Plum-puddings, pancakes, apple-pies, and custard:
And therewithal they drank good Gascon wine,
With mead, and ale, and cider of our own;
For porter, punch, and negus were not known.

John Hookham Frere (1817)
Prospectus and Specimen of an Intended National Work, by William and Robert Whistlecraft, of Stowmarket in Suffolk, Harness and Collar Makers

~ ~ ~

In 1817 when Frere gushed on about a Christmas feast set before King Arthur in his mock-heroic Prospectus and Specimen, porter, punch, and negus were all the rage among his English audience. Two hundred years on, you have your pick of porters at any well-stocked bottle shop while punch—whether milk, planter’s, or Hawaiian—is hardly in danger of extinction.

The preparation of negus, however, though not wholly unknown to savvy imbibers, has fallen into neglect. Like eggnog, the port wine-based tot is a seasonal affair, creeping out of its obscurity once the veil of winter has descended, letting us know that Christmas is on us.

With the nation vexed by inclement weather and even sunny San Diego beset with cold nights and biting showers, when bamboo freighted with rain arcs nearly to the ground, what’s called for is liquor. And why not a mug of hot wine to send warming tendrils of boozy nutmeg goodness throughout the body? A mug? Make a Thermos full if you’re feeling punchy.

Through my early drinking years, port was linked in my mind inextricably to the English who, especially in the works of Dickens, seemed to guzzle the Portuguese fortified wine with alarming frequency. As far as I was concerned, they could keep it. Too sweet, too strong, it called to mind overpriced Mad Dog.

I’ve since learned two things. First, I had been sampling crap port—less porto than wino. Second, it turns out that, just as sweet tea explains itself best in the complementary presence of vinegar-based barbecue sauces, port shines in the company of other things—England’s justly famed Stilton cheese, for instance, or mellow cigars. As the British lieutenant-colonel Francis Negus* (d. 1732) discovered, port marries handsomely with citrus and spices. For three hundred years, the drink bearing his name has been almost an exclusively British concern. According to Oxford University Press’s 1894 The Dictionary of National Biography,

It is related that on one occasion, when the bottle was passing rather more rapidly than good fellowship seemed to warrant over a hot political discussion, in which a number of prominent whigs and tories were taking part, Negus averted a fracas by recommending the dilution of the wine with hot water and sugar. Attention was diverted from the point at issue to a discussion of the merits of wine and water, which ended in the compound being nicknamed ' negus.'

There are other origin stories, but all surround this same Francis Negus. A majority of 19th-century texts, while allowing for variants, go on to concur that a proper negus calls for five ingredients;

• A large measure of port wine
• Lemon
• Sugar
• Boiling water
• Nutmeg

Lemon is occasionally supplemented with orange and nutmeg with cinnamon (or more exotic ambergris). Unlike glögg, Glühwein, or mulled wine—revitalizing hot nips from northern climes—negus is made hot by the addition of boiling water rather than heating the wine itself. Wouldn’t want to lose all that Brumalian ethanol to the open air, after all.

So there you have it—wine, lemon, and sugar mixed together, heated with the addition of boiling water, and dusted with nutmeg. As ancient a yuletide beverage as you’re likely to find—And its health benefits are not to be denied: in The Gentleman's Magazine (1822), John Sinclair recommended negus on sea voyages to lessen "the puking."

I offer you two personal negi here, and no puking: one in the style of Mrs. Isabella Beeton (who presented a weaker negus intended for drinking “at children’s parties”—way to go, Mrs. B.) and another after M.E. Steedman, writing for more manly constitutions. Though Beeton’s recipe is the more widely disseminated, Steedman’s is the better. Both are sweet by modern tastes, so feel free to ease your foot off the sugar pedal. Their original recipes and proportions follow.

Negus in the Style of Mrs. Beeton
for a Brace of Victorian Children
4 oz. port (Sandeman Founder’s Reserve)
a wide swath of lemon peel (no pith)
½ oz. lemon juice
1 oz. sugar (demerara if you’ve got it, white if not)
8 oz. boiling water (plus extra for heating the mug)
fresh nutmeg to taste*

Pre-heat a sixteen-ounce ceramic mug or other container by filling it with boiling water. Toss the water once the mug is warm to the touch. Add the lemon peel, lemon juice, and sugar and muddle together. Add the port, grate in a dusting of nutmeg, and top off with boiling water. Cover or close until slightly cooled, then dish out into separate smaller mugs.

Yield: 12 oz

Negus in the Style of Steedman
4 oz. port (Sandeman Ten Year Tawny)
a wide swath of lemon peel (no pith)
½ oz. sugar (demerara if you’ve got it, white if not)
4 oz. boiling water (plus extra for heating the mug)
fresh nutmeg to taste*
1-3 drops vanilla extract, optional
(alternately, one or two of essence of ambergris, if you’re feeling flush)

Yield: 8 oz

Pre-heat a ten-ounce ceramic mug by filling it with boiling water. Toss the water once the mug is warm to the touch. Add the lemon peel and sugar and muddle together with a splash of port if necessary. Add the remaining port, grate in a dusting of nutmeg, and top off with boiling water. If using the vanilla or ambergris, now’s the time to add it. Give it a stir and drink when it’s cool enough to down.

*Notes
Nutmeg: The prodigious amounts of nutmeg called for in older recipes don’t necessarily indicate a fanaticism for the taste (“Oh, them old-timey cooks spiced up everything really high ‘cause the meat was rotten.”). Consider another reason—We’re accustomed to fairly high turnover in spices, but in 1723, 1891, and even 1958, a nutmeg could be years old by the time it reached our ancestors. Quite simply, much of the aromatic oils had dissipated by the time they reached the kitchen or bar, so it was necessary to oomph up the volume to wrest much taste from old dry spice. Feel free to de-oomph it to your own preferences now that we have access to less vintage provisions.

Pronunciation: Everyone familiar with it is agreed that the port wine-based drink is pronounced nay-gus. Everyone except William Makepeace Thackeray who informs us, by way of Edwin Hewett and W.F. Axton in Convivial Dickens (1983), that it’s nee-gus. Nay-gus seems more likely, but given the British penchant for surprising pronunciations (even of my surname among blood relatives in those parts), I wouldn’t rule it out at this juncture.


Original Recipes

Isabella Beeton (1861) Beeton’s Book of Household Management.

To Make Negus

1835. To every pint of port wine allow one quart of boiling water, ¼ pound of sugar, one lemon, grated nutmeg to taste.

Mode. – As this beverage is more usually drunk at children’s parties than at any other, the wine need not be very old or expensive for the purpose, a new fruity wine answering very well for it. Put the wine into a jug, rub some lumps of sugar (equal to ¼ lb.) on the lemon-rind until all the yellow part of the skin is absorbed, then squeeze the juice, and strain it. Add the sugar in the lemon-juice to the port wine, with the grated nutmeg; pour over it the boiling water, cover the jug, and, when the beverage has cooled little, it will be fit to use. Negus may also be made of sherry, or any other sweet white wine, but it is more usually made of port than of any other beverage.

Sufficient. – Allow one pint of wine, with the other ingredients in proportion, for a party of nine or 10 children.

19th Century bon vivant Jerry Thomas—as near to a patron saint of cocktails as Americans come—steals his negus recipe verbatim from Beeton’s Book of Household Management (though, to be fair, so did dozens of writers: recipe plagiarism is an old and well-honed craft and poor Mrs. Beeton has been shamelessly plundered; she may, in fact, have done some negus plundering herself).

William “The Only William” Schmidt, however, gives a few takes on it in his 1891 bartending guide The Flowing Bowl, one with port and another with claret (the English term for red Bordeaux wines):

394. Negus.

This beverage is of English origin, and there very highly estimated; it derives its name from its inventor, the English Colonel Negus.

Put the rind of half a lemon or orange in a tureen, add eight ounces of sugar, one pint of port wine, the fourth part a small nutmeg–grated; infuse this for an hour; strain; add one quart of boiling water, and the drink is ready for use.

395. Another.

In other countries they are used to take lighter wines. The recipe follows: put two bottles of claret, two sticks cinnamon, six cloves, a little pulverized cardamom, a little grated nutmeg, and a half a pound of sugar, one which you have previously rubbed the rind of a lemon, on a slow fire; cover well, and heat to the boiling-point; strain through a hair-sieve; add one pint of boiling water, and the juice of one and a half lemons, and serve in strong glasses, that are first warmed. [all sic]

M.E. Steedman (n.d. c 1890’s) Home-made Beverages and American Drinks gives us a more fortified version:

Negus
Rub 3 oz. of loaf sugar on to the rind of a lemon, pound it, and add to it a pint of port, a quarter of a small nutmeg grated, a pint of boiling water, and if liked one or two drops of essence of ambergris or rather more of vanilla. Serve hot.

Jerry Thomas also offers bubbly version:

Soda Negus
A most refreshing and elegant beverage, particularly for those who do not take punch or grog after supper, is thus made:

Put half a pint of port wine, with four lumps of sugar, three cloves, and enough grated nutmeg to cover a shilling, into a saucepan; warm it well, but did not suffer it to boil; pour it into a bowl or jug, and upon the warm wine decant a bottle of soda water. You will have an effervescent and delicious negus by this means.

George IV’s Negus

Dr. Samuel Johnson's dictum regarding port comes to mind: “Claret is the liquor for boys, port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.” And if one commingles port and brandy? Surely such a drinker must aspire to majestic heights of masculinity. From the premier issue of the The Portfolio of Entertaining & Instructive Varieties in History, Literature, Fine Arts, Etc. (1829) comes this blurb about a massive negus made for the Hanoverian King George IV.

HIS MAJESTY'S NEW WINE COOLER

ON Monday last the magnificent wine cooler manufactured for his Majesty by Messrs Rundell and Bridge, was, with his Majesty's approbation, filled with port negus at the manufactory in Dean-street that the workmen employed in its construction might toast his Majesty's health on the completion of their work.

This splendid vase weighs 6950 ounces, and contains 38 gallons. There were used in making the negus sixteen gallons of old port, one gallon of brandy, eight dozen lemons six dozen nutmegs, and 20 lbs of loaf sugar.

What's interesting to me about this one is the addition of the brandy—and the lack of any mention of boiling water. Perhaps it merely assumed, given the not quite double capacity of the vessel compared with the volume of the listed ingredients, but knowing a fair number of workmen myself—and the seeming absence of the king during the toasting—I wouldn't be shocked if it had been omitted entirely. Tuesday last might've been a painful day for those toasters...

============================
The Academy of Ancient Beverages
Negus isn’t the only venerable Christmas drink around. Short of milking a cow right into the syllabub bowl, here are some others to get your yuletide motor turning...

• Blair “TikiTrader” Reynolds cranks out a bowl of wassail over the The Mixolosem.
• Paul Clarke at The Cocktail Chronicles sets fires to a bowl of booze for a Christmas Rum Punch.
  
• The Boston chapter of LUPEC (Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails) pull out the stops with a boozy bowl, hot toddies, and sangaree. I have got to make it back to Boston…
• And, finally, there’s that lovely aged eggnog over at Chow I keep intending to make

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M’Harry’s Holland Gin

In 1809 Pennsylvania distiller Samuel M’Harry published his Practical Distiller, a small tome intended to set forth, as plainly as the language of the time allowed, directions for American distillers using the materials available to them to create American spirits and, in some cases, to emulate spirituous liquors from abroad. The book was, in not very subtle ways, very pro-American.

At the same time, M’Harry sought to clear away the myths and secrecy surrounding distilling and to advance it as an understandable science rather than a mysterious process that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. His techniques and recipe styles—even if improved upon by later advances in still designs—informed American moonshining for the better part of two centuries.

His recipes for working with corn, rye, apples, and peaches would be as familiar to Appalachian moonshiners even into the 1970’s. They can be forgiven if his buckwheat spirits failed to continue in American folk distilling. I’m curious about it myself, but have not yet come across even modern home distillers who are experimenting with buckwheat. Perhaps it was a Pennsylvania thing.

His recipe for “Holland” gin—that is, the jenever or genever coming back into tentative vogue—gives an idea of how distillers these 200 years ago sought to emulate popular foreign liquors with very local ingredients (remember, Pennsylvania has long been rye country).

How to make a resemblance
of Holland Gin out of Rye Whiskey

Put clarified whiskey, with an equal quantity of water, into our doubling still, together with sufficient quantity of juniper berries, prepared; take a pound of unslacked lime, immerse it in three pints of water, stir it well—then let it stand three hours, until the lime sinks to the bottom, then pour off the clear lime water, with which boil half an ounce of isinglass cut small, until the latter is dissolved—then pour it into your doubling still with a handful of hops, and a handful of common salt, put on the head and set her a running; when she begins to run, take the first half gallon (which is not so good), and reserve it for the next still you fill—as the first shot generally contains something that will give an unpleasant taste and color to the gin. When it looses proof at the worm, take the keg away that contains the gin, and bring it down to a proper strength with rain water, which must previously have been prepared, by having been evaporated and condensed in the doubling still and cooling tub.

This gin when fined, and two years old, will be equal, if not superior, to Holland gin.

The isinglass, lime water and salt, helps to refine it in the still, and the juniper berries gives it the flavor or taste of Holland gin.

About thirteen pounds of good berries are sufficient for one barrel.

Be careful to let the gin as it runs from the worm, pass thro’ a flannel cloth, which will prevent many unpleasant particles passing into the liquor, which are contracted in the condensation, and the verjuice imbibed in its passage thro’ the worm.

* Yeah, yeah: the genever bottle label is from the wrong century. It's one I picked up for a pittance at a paper ephemera show a few years back. It is, however, the kind of label that would have been printed in bulk and slapped on—gasp—American emulations of foreign spirits.
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Criminal Matt and the Bitter Bidders

It’s 5:09am and here I am again at the airport, wrapping up another work week in Florida on a complex project with a tight turnaround and lots of moving parts. Long days, not nearly enough sleep, barely any time to answer personal emails. A folder marked with the topic and my name seemed especially to fit my mood: How can an entire week go by without committing some kind of crime?

But there have been a few great moments: eating some fantastic meals in Kansas City on the way here in a Calvin-Trillin-let’s-pick-up-something-to-eat-on-the-way-to-lunch type of approach; a mouse barreling into a meeting leading grown women to shriek and, quite literally, jump onto chairs, and a whole “free” afternoon one day (tip: do not “peek” at your email before an anticipated nap unless prepared to deep-six plans for said nap).

An then a linguistics lesson—I’ve been reminded that Americans are not as precise in some pronunciations as we’d like to think. Years ago, a friend from France pointed out that Americans often pronounce T’s as D’s. Take, for instance, the word “little.” Many Americans seem to pronounce it as “liddle” but we almost all understand the meaning.

Now take “bitters.” As are more and more people these days, I’m a fiend for cocktail bitters—even dosing my morning orange juice with Angostura and making many of my own batches. In the midst of a procurement analysis, talk of “bidders” is fast and loose. It’s testament to my drinking geekery that talk about “the most qualified bidders” still gets my instant attention followed immediately with the slightest of fallen crest.

With all the smoke breaks folks take, I’m thinking a cocktail break is much better suited to conducting bidness in Florida. With a splash of bidders—the most qualified, if you please.

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Bookshelf: Pickled

A popular conceit holds that only the freshest in-season foods should grace our tables for proper, healthful and, let’s face it, morally sound meals. Unchecked, such policies might leave us bereft of such preserved pleasures as martini olives, colonial-era rum shrubs, country hams, lowcountry atjar, chow-chows, and pickled okra to grace bloody mary cocktails. Lucy Norris soundly plugs this philosophical bunghole with Pickled, her paean to the brined, fermented, and otherwise mildly rotten foods we can’t live without.

Pickled weaves oral histories gathered for New York’s NY Food Museum project among some eighty family recipes documenting ethnic picking traditions. The celebrated pickles of Eastern Europe’s winter larder—dills, beets, sauerkraut—bob to the surface, but Norris successfully dips deeper for fried dills, watermelon flesh (the other watermelon pickle), Korean kimchis, pickled fish, and preserved lemons.

Whether you regard them as summer in a jar or corruption in the cupboard, do yourself a favor: Make pickles before winter sets in for good. None of Norris’ recipes holds universal appeal—pickled duck tongues, anyone?—but the book is a gem for sensible cooks willing to buck a trend that implies pickles are déclassé, too much trouble or, worst of all, just plain make you a bad person.

The Barkeeper’s Favorite Weapon

Incidentally, in my youth the bung starter was the barkeeper’s favorite weapon. Most whiskey was sold from barrels, so at least one was to be found behind every bar. Time after time, when the unmistakable sounds of riot came from the saloon next door, I have looked on the scene from the safety of the rear entrance—our store and the saloon shared a back porch—and watched one of the Wolf brothers in magnificent action, conquering the field with a bung starter. By the time the police arrived, only an ambulance was needed.

~ Paul M. Angle
"My Father’s Grocery Store "

By and large, I’m content with my bar gear—copper pans, strainers, funnels, a fancy-ass mandolin, zesters, shakers, two-liter jars for infusions, and an array German, French, and American knives deck the kitchen walls and cabinets. As the collection metastasizes into the living room, there are julep cups, brandy snifters, bottles for homemade bitters, cordials, and ratafias, and several shelves of cocktail books. Honestly, it’s more than anyone truly needs at home.

But I’m missing one tool: a bung starter.

You heard me: a bung starter. Before aluminum beer kegs, barkeeps kept an oversized wooden hammer for removing the wooden bung that plugged the, um, bunghole. Quit your sniggering. With a barrel on its side and facing up, this little maul would be tapped on the outside around the bung to drive it, bit by bit, up out of the round hole so a spigot could be inserted to dispense the precious liquids within. Sometimes bungs eased out peaceably. Other times, they blew off explosively with a spray of beer. Eyes were probably lost, maybe even widows created. Whiskey and vinegar barrels got the same treatment.

I want one.

It’s not that I have any wooden barrels around the place needing their bungs popped. Nah, it’s more mundane than that. Because mint juleps are nearly our house drink, we go through a fair amount of crushed ice. And if it’s not for a julep, crushed ice comes in handy for a variety of other drinks, not least of which is the Painkiller, a rum and fruit juice concoction that likely has caused as much pain as it supposedly relieved.

As it stands, I’ll put whole ice cubes in a canvas bag not unlike a small pillowcase. Fold over the top. Wail on it with a rolling pin. Some folks use the gripping end of a big muddler (I’m looking at you, Thomas Waugh). Others use a household hammer, though I find too much risk of its edges ripping the bag. A rolling pin is—meh—an ok workaround. A fleischklobber for flattening meats could work, but I'm trying to avoid meat/cocktail cross-contamination these days.

Both David Wondrich and New Orleanian Chris McMillian have ice mauls that would make Thor flush with envy. While McMillian may wax lyrical over a mint julep as he reduces his ice to submissive little shards (see below), I’ve seen Wondrich thunderously hammer away, shattering ice into into submission as he worked into a maniacal sweat to keep up with demands of thirsty revelers.

That’s what I need: a broad surface to avoid inadvertently ripping the bag, wood with a touch of malleability to it, and enough weight that the whole thing swings like a dream.

Chris tells me that his source has dried up. Any woodworkers out there up for the task of a custom order?

Book Review: Gumbo Tales

When you consider that brown liquor
defined my childhood as much as, say,
snow days and sunburns did,
my predilection for the Sazerac
begins to look predestined.

~ Sara Roahen

During Tales of the Cocktail this past July, Mike McCaw and I mosied up to a table where a lithe young woman was talking to all comers and mixing Sazeracs and brandy old fashioneds for any who cared to sample. Bottles of brandy, whiskey, bitters, and the local anise spirit Herbsaint were at the ready, though running low, as the hordes of reveling attendees wound down Cocktail Hour.

Suddenly, she went wide-eyed. “Oh my gosh! Did that guy just steal my book?” Sure enough, the russet-and-red hardback she had authored with its cover of a time-worn cocktail sign was now nowhere to be seen, nor was the unsteady admirer who had been thumbing it moments before. That week, with the Hotel Monteleone was awash in premium swag, some thieving cad absconded with Sara Roahen’s personal copy of Gumbo Tales.

Just because the thief was in his cups doesn’t mean he was wrong. In fact, he might have made off with one of the choicest take-aways in the hotel. If New Orleans has ever been good to you, then take his lead and beg, borrow, or steal buy a copy of Gumbo Tales without delay.

Roahen, a Wisconsin transplant, has proven her food chops—as a line cook, restaurant reviewer for the New Orleans weekly Gambit, board member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, and, tenaciously, in her attempts to trace Wisconsin’s brandy old fashioned cocktails back to the Sazerac through an anonymous Mississippi riverboat captain.

She has written a book at turns both gut-wrenching and bust-out-loud funny about finding her place at the New Orleans table (and, apparently, not a few bars). In the process, she wrestles with defining gumbo, boiling live crawfish, the city’s seeming disinterest in vegetables (unless breaded, fried, cooked down, or dressed up with crab, ham, sausage, and cheese), its cult-like following of Hansen’s sno-balls, its robust St Joseph’s Day feasts, po-boy sandwiches, and an influx of newcomers, learning how and why, as she does, to remain in that postdiluvian city.

Those of us interested in the drinking and food cultures of New Orleans savor classic cookbooks such as Lafcadio Hearn’s 1885 La Cuisine Creole for shedding light on the origins of creole cooking. Others help explain the growth of both creole and Cajun cookery, such as Paul Prudhomme’s 1984 Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen or John Folse’s recent encyclopedic tomes on South Louisiana cookery (all of which, by the way, contain an abundance of recipes for alcoholic beverages, sips, and nips from absinthe drips to brandy milk punches).

Roahen’s book belongs on the same shelf, though it is something else. For one, it has no recipes. Like the city itself now, Gumbo Tales is defined by what some have called the federal floods, but which many just call Katrina. Here, the floods are both a lens for examining, and a touchstone that unites, everyone with connections to the city.

Katrina doesn’t mean just the 2005 hurricane itself, but also its evil twin Rita. It means the broken levees, the flooding, the deaths, the harrowing devastation, the political ineptitude, the broken families, and displaced lives that followed the storm and which continue to affect daily life in the city. All of that is enough to make even courageous constitutions turn to drink.

Listen to her take:

Earlier this week, from my car, I saw a man walk past a water-stained sofa that someone had hauled to the curb weeks ago. He got a few feet beyond it and then doubled back to arrange two of the sofa’s cushions that had gone askew. My throat tensed at this small gesture toward fixing our overwhelming mess.

Your throat may tense while reading Gumbo Tales, too. Mine did. It also prodded me to mix a Sazerac, made my mouth water, my stomach growl, and the walls echo with belly laughs as she readily points out her own foibles and outright lies:

No one but my kindergarten teacher flinched when at six years old I mentioned my desire to become a cocktail waitress when I grew up.

Or, in an effort to convince a reluctant Vietnamese restaurant owner that she was a seasoned trencherman:

I eat duck blood all the time.

Concerning a certain New Orleans fascination with a revered sno-ball queen:

Most of her followers do not want to date Ashley Hansen. We want to be her.

Some have said “Let New Orleans sink. It’s their own fault for living there.” The first chapter alone lays open that imbecilic rationale that could only be meant by those who’ve never been or, having been, never left the French Quarter and who know it only as a modern Gomorrah of tacky t-shirts, cirrhotic livers, hustles, and corruption.

To think that way is to say that humans are all teeth, toenails, and elbows. Yes, of course, we have those things—and what would we be without them?—But that’s so laughably far from reality nobody could seriously believe it.

Intentionally or not, the book is an eloquent argument for why the Crescent City is worth saving. Even after the storms, it remains one of the most vibrant cities in the United States (I’m not unbiased: my own mother recently referred to the place as “your beloved New Orleans” so take my endorsement with a grain of rice). Read the book, but when you’re done, put it away and high-tail it to New Orleans. Go for the first time, go for the tenth time. Just go.

Though she denies Gumbo Tales is a guidebook, a newcomer to the city or an inquisitive visitor who wants to get to know the place more intimately than a casual conventioneer does could do worse than to get a map, a highlighter, and a notebook to mark out, neighborhood by neighborhood, a hit list of po-boys, sno-balls, esoteric cocktails, bakeries, miscellaneous eateries, and watering holes.

New Orleans is one of the world’s great culinary destinations because of the people who love it so much. Roahen nailed it when she writes that people love the city as they love a person. And few have captured its residents’ obsessions with eating and drinking more poignantly and lyrically than a transplanted Midwesterner who has embraced the New Orleans table with the zealotry of a convert.

Sara Roahen has found her place.


Goes well with:

• As I mentioned, the book has no recipes, but I buy the argument that they don’t fit, that they might derail the narrative flow. Sara Roahen has collected them, however, and you can email her for those. Check out sararoahen.com for her blog, new photos, and contact info. Signed copies are available here, but she'll even personalize inscriptions for you if you email her.
  
• In this KCRW interview, Roahen offers this morsel: “Once you respond well to someone’s cooking, you are a friend of that place for life.” [Scroll down to the bottom of the linked page for the whole thing].
• If gumbo is your thing, check out The Southern Gumbo Trail, a Southern Foodways Alliance oral history project that profiles a mess of the cooks and places mentioned in Gumbo Tales.
  

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Earl’s Obituary

Earl (c.1994-2008), a grey domestic shorthair cat, was found dead Saturday, November 8th after a brief and wasting illness in San Diego, California. He is survived by Rowley and Morpheus, neither of whom particularly likes cats, but both of whom were inordinately fond of this one.

We picked up Earl at a Philadelphia animal shelter when he was about three years old and slated for euthanasia. For the next eleven years, he was our constant and pathologically affectionate companion who nosed his way into laps, onto chests, under blankets, and anywhere a warm body would tolerate him. He was practically a poster critter for the argument that—with attention and care in a good home—shelter animals respond with seemingly boundless love.

He was as dumb as a trunk of mittens. He cried incessantly in the morning when he wanted to be fed, even when his bowl held plenty of food. As often as not, he came away from the litterbox smuttynosed, with four or five grains of litter stuck to it. The pronunciation of his name bedeviled our friends from Colombia and Mexico who didn’t get the feeble and unoriginal pun of naming a grey cat Earl. At bedtime, he went completely apeshit, running through the house, sliding into walls and attacking feet, paper, and gym bags with his soft little clawless paws. The only trick he almost mastered was not to go outside when we left the door open.

But he was our cat and we loved him.

I’m writing this in North Carolina, en route to a two-week gig in Florida. The hours will be long and will not lend themselves to posting much here. Once I’m home and back to my bars, I’ll toast him with that New Orleans obscurity, the Obituary Cocktail. For this, I’ll finally crack open my single bottle from the first commercial run of Lance Winters’ St. George absinthe. I'd been saving it for a special occasion. Now seems right.

(Earl’s) Obituary Cocktail

2 ounces gin (Bluecoat or Plymouth, gins that won't fight the absinthe)
¼ ounce St. George absinthe verte
¼ ounce dry vermouth

Stir well with cracked ice until, like an earthquake, the drink turns opalescent; strain into a chilled cocktail glass. I don’t garnish much and neither should you. Certainly not here.

Failing that, I’ll go full-bore maudlin Paddy on him and break out the Irish, neat.

We miss you, old man.

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If I Had a Hammer: Ratafia aux Noyau Just in Time for Christmas

God bless Michael McGuan.

McGuan, our neighborhood wurstmacher at the San Diego restaurant The Linkery, emailed not long ago to say that he had collected a container full of peach pits for me. Unfurl that brow—this is hardly on par with saving last week’s Penny Saver or a clutch of candy bar wrappers. This was an actual favor, something that would have taken me a whole season of snarfing down cobblers, pies, crumbles, grunts, slumps, betties, smoothies, ice cream, and sangria. On a restaurant scale, however, such a collection of peach pits doesn’t take nearly as long. And, as they were destined for my house, they were wed with alcohol once they got here. Naturally.

Peach pits, also called stones and bunkers, have more value than might seem obvious at first blush. In a variety of forms—charred, split, still adhering to fruit flesh, fresh, dried, etc—they have long been added to moonshine, brandy, whiskey, and other distillates for the amber color and peachy-almond flavor they can impart.

Even more appealing are the kernels once those pits are cracked open. Peach kernels (noyaux in French) taste and even look a bit like small almonds. The smell strongly suggests both almond extract and fresh marzipan. That almond taste is readily surrendered to alcoholic solvents for a cordial with a decidedly old-fashioned taste of almonds and vanilla. Recipes for noyau, ratafia aux noyau, and crème de noyaux abound in older American household account books, recipe books, and homemade beverage collections where they almost always go by the French name. One still finds them in contemporary French cookbooks.

So, let’s make a batch!

Oh. Wait. Forgot something. Peach kernels, along with those of apricots, plums, cherries, and other members of the extensive family Rosacea, contain cyanogenic glycosides. Big whoop, you say, I need a drink, Pops, not a chemistry lesson. I hear you. Lord knows I’m not an environmental chemist, but those who know about such things say that on ingestion, these glycosides break down into prussic acid, also known as hydrogen cyanide (HCN), a substance listed under Schedule 3 of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Right there, smack dab on your bar cart.

You might recognize hydrogen cyanide as the primary component of the German gas chamber extermination agent Zyklon B. So, no fooling, crème de noyaux carries an element of danger.

Now, do you want to make a batch? I do. In small doses, noyaux does not seem to have ill effect—New Orleans Creoles have reputations for many things, but regularly keeling over from cyanide poisoning with a cocktail glass in hand is not among them. As Erik Ellestad writes over at Underhill Lounge in regard to apricot kernels, “Please take anything I say here as simply conclusions and choices I have drawn for myself. Make your own choices and draw your own conclusions.” I couldn’t agree more.

From the 4th edition of Picayune’s Creole Cook Book (1910), here’s the original recipe and proportions for this old New Orleans classic:

Peach Kernel Ratafia
Ratafia aux Noyau de Peches ou d’Abricots
¼ pound each of peach or apricot kernels
4 pints of brandy
2 ½ pounds of sugar
2 pints of water

Pound the peach or apricot kernels – some also pound peach stones – steep them for one whole month in four pints of brandy in an earthen jar, and at the end of that time add a syrup made of two and a half pounds of sugar and 2 pints of water. Mix all well together, and then filter as directed above [sic: below], and bottle and seal, and keep in a cool, shady place.

Ratafia aux Noyau is one of the standing Creole drinks, that is most agreeable, the taste being of a delicate vanilla and almonds combined.

A note on procedure: Peach pits are hard and cracking them takes some force. I use a hammer and rap the bunkers firmly on concrete outside until they split in half, then just pry out the kernels. Hammer the pits on a cutting board and you'll just deboss their images into the wood. I heard someone might have done that one time. If you like, put them in a towel before hitting to contain any flying bits, but controlled smacking should prevent peach shrapnel.

I cut the recipe in half (not for lack of brandy, but for the limited amount of kernels) and am macerating the crushed kernels and half their stones cracked and crushed into small bits in a brandy bottle. Come December, I'll add the syrup, let it mellow bit and see what we get. Here's hoping I don't take a big dirt nap...

Also from the same edition of Picayune’s Creole Cook Book:

How to Filter Cordials and Ratafias.

The filtering is of the utmost importance. A good home-made filter may be improvised by fitting pieces of felt into a funnel, very closely. Some use flannel, but the felt is far better. Filtering paper is sold by all druggists. Put the funnel in the mouth of the bottle, fit in the paper, pour in the mixture and let it filter slowly. Again, others use the ordinary brown or white paper, but this allows the aroma to evaporate, and the taste of the paper clings to the cordial. If you wish the cordial to be very transparent, take very dry, clear, transparent isinglass, and cut it very, very thin. Then dissolve it with white wine until it is perfectly liquid. Put it into bottles and preserve for use. When needed, coat the inside of the strainer with this, using a light brush or sponge. It will form a glue around the funnel. Pour the cordial or liqueur through this, straining several times, again and again, until it becomes perfectly transparent. Strain it the last time into bottles, and seal very tight. You will then have a clear, limpid cordial or liqueur that will not have lost its aroma by evaporation.

This simple method may be understood by even a child, and homemade cordials are not only very delightful, but far less expensive than the imported ones. Always have the Cognac as old as possible.

Goes well with:

• Erik Ellestad’s discussion of apricot kernels for his orgeat.
• Kenneth Barbalace’s Chemical Database entry on hydrogen cyanide.
• Wikipedia's description of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction
• Isinglass, called for in the filtering procedure above, is made of fish bladders and is widely available in homebrew stores since it's sometimes used by home brewers as a clearing agent for beers and wine.

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Two Loves Don't Equal a Happy Marriage

A few weeks back, I mentioned that, unlike other cocktail enthusiasts, I declined to contaminate my finest bourbons with bacon.

Odd, right? I mean, I dote on bacon. In fact, tonight's dinner will be BLT sandwiches since the local tomatoes are still good. Hell, I've even cured my own bacon. And bourbon? Don't get me started. It ain't just patriotism that keeps me stocked up with a robust inventory of that most American of commercial spirits. You'd think the two would go together like a hand and glove.

No.

On seeing Don Lee's video of making a Benton's old fashioned, Morpheus said "Man, that sounds delicious." So, in a moment of weakness, and in the spirit of experimentation and camraderie, I snagged a bottle of Four Roses yellow label Straight Bourbon and cooked off a batch of some of Allan Benton's sublime bacon. Following Lee's instructions, I made a batch of bacon-infused bourbon.

I feel like I've woken in a stranger's bed, one arm pinned beneath a smokey, booze-breathed hound sawing logs, and uncertain of how to extricate myself. Brother, I'm here to tell you, don't believe the hype of bacon-infused bourbon. The saddest part of this errant tale is that a perfectly good bottle of bourbon was ruined.

I admit that I liked the second sip more than the first. But as a thumbnail sketch of a choice between two evils, sip #1 and sip #2 do just fine.

However, all is not lost...the entire bottle of Four Roses was not graced with the porcine kiss: I decanted about six ounces before introducing the bacon fat. Had some straight, some over ice, some with a splash of water, and some, gloriously, in a proper old fashioned. For those who know 4R as a low-end bargain brand, the spirit seems to have undergone an upgrade in the last few years.

Now, it's true that I keep a lot of bourbon around. But there's always one or two bottles of what I consider the current "house" bourbon that balance drinkability and price for overall value. Over the years that's been Maker's Mark, Bulleit, and Eagle Rare. Four Roses, you have earned the place of honor. What a delicious whiskey. And at $19.99, it's worth snagging a bottle for cocktail experimentation.

Just keep it away from the swine.

The cheapest I've seen this whiskey is Hi-Times Wine Cellar.

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