Though this is Halloween week, making it the ideal time of year for a ghoulishly good (gawd, it’s fun to get yr Halloween speak on) mix like the Warlock, it really brings a magical charm to any evening. Well, any evening that you’re feeling like a yummily mystical mixture of brandy, Strega, limoncello, orange juice, and Peychaud’s bitters (which should really be any evening, now that I think about it). Click on through to the below video and learn the exact tricks to making it, but be warned!!! It can change you into a conjuring zombie. But now you know.
It’s a holiday weekend, and you wanna get to it (hopefully yours starts on Friday, like mine), and I wanna get to it, but before then, I wanna drop a quick bit of holiday party science on you. You’re gonna eat too much this weekend (I’m also going for as many “nna” words a possible), but don’t wanna feel like the Blob (the fatty super villain, not the bubbly asteroid spin off). Which is why you should have the fixin’s for a Stomach Reviver on hand, cause it’ll cure your aching tummy, and let you have more fun-na. It goes like this:
Ice cubes
1-1/2 ounce brandy
1 ounce Kümmel
1/2 ounce Fernet Branca
2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
1. Fill a cocktail shaker half way with ice cubes. Add everything. Shake, strain into a cocktail glass or straight down the ol’ feed hole.
It’s the double bitters (FB and Peychaud’s) I believe, that alleviates that over-full feeling. At least it did for me the other night, after I’d consumed like six pieces of pizza, some salad, a few bread sticks, and probably some ice cream. Who can remember everything? Anyway, I was out of Kümmel (that caraway-and-sometimes-fennel-flavored treat), and so used homemade fennel liqueur, and it went down like a good date gone south. Wait, that sounded bad. I meant that it was really a touch sweet (but not too much) on the front end, and then a touch bitter at the end. I like that. You should too. If you don’t have Kümmel, play around with subbing in another sweetish spiced liqueur, and let me know how it treated you, and what you’re gonna call it (besides wonderful relief, that is).
PS: Check out that rad antique’y shaker I picked up not long ago. It pours like a little teapot. That got tall.
I was looking through my library (which isn’t like the booze Library of Alexandria or something, but which is an agreeable little stack of books about drinks, drinking, and more drinking) the other night for recipes for the Betsy Ross, because my pal Andrew had asked about it (for his new bar, which I talked about below. Really, this is turning into the Andrew Bohrer admiration society). Anywho, the flag-making patriot-in-liquid form as far as I found goes back to 1941 (and by the way, history buffs, I’m not saying I made a complete search of every known record and microfilm and microfiche, but just that I looked through the books in the above mentioned library), to a recipe in one of my favorites, the jolly Crosby Gaige’s Cocktail Guide and Ladies Companion. Which was published in 1941, as you might have surmised. Now, this is a winding road way of getting here, but while tracking down the info, I re-noticed another drink, across the page from Betsy Ross, a drink with the enticing and intriguing name, “Mrs. Solomon Wears Slacks.” Which is one of the top twenty-five drink names. Or, at least, that’s what I’m saying today. In honor of Mr. Gaige’s (or whomever’s) naming prowess, I made the mix, a brandy-based affair, and it was pretty swell. I even sugared the Champagne flute’s rim, as suggested, getting sweetly jiggy with it. I mussed around with the Slacks some (gawd, that’s fun to say), but the basic ingredients stayed the same (I went a snitch higher on curaçao and bitters, and brandy for that matter). I suggest serving it up at those affairs where slacks are worn, or anytime you want to be a bit daring (which slacks were in 1941. And that’s how I’m wearing it).
Ice cubes
Super-fine sugar
2 ounces brandy
1/2 ounce orange curaçao
3 dashes Angostura bitters
Lemon twist
1. Put a good helping of sugar (but not a mound or anything) on a saucer. Wet the outside rim of a Champagne flute (I used a lemon slice, but you could also rotate it through water on a saucer–just don’t get any water in the glass). Carefully rotate the outside rim of the glass through the sugar–but you don’t want to get any sugar on the inside. No, no, not a grain. So, be careful.
2. Fill a cocktail shaker or mixing glass halfway full with ice cubes. Add the brandy, curaçao, and bitters. Stir well.
3. Strain the mix into the flute. Garnish with the lemon twist (making sure now, that you get that swoosh of lemon oils from the twist into the drink and not into the atmosphere at large). Now, dance!
I wish I had a little sound file of me singing “baby it’s cold outside,” because I can’t think it without singing it, and since you’re here now, too, reading this, you should be able to hear what I hear–right? Or is that too meta-something-or-other? And speaking of somethings-or-others, I just learned when looking up “baby it’s cold outside” that in the classic version of the song, “the female voice in the song is called ‘The Mouse’ and the male ‘The Wolf.’” There’s something probably chauvinistic in that, but I like it anyway. Now, where was I? Oh yes, Ed Skoog. He came up with the following recipe for the Drowsy Chaperone, cause he’s so cuddly that when the lights are dim and he’s serving up a warm-but-brandy’d drink in front of the fire he likes the guardian keeping him and his lady love from getting to, shall we say, “amorous town,” he likes that guardian to dodder off into sleepy land. It has nothing to do with the musical comedy of the same name. But all to do with sidling up to that special someone with a toasty liquid treat in a snifter when the wind’s whipping along outside your door.
