Hot Toddy recovery

Something is going around Los Angeles that is somewhere between cold and flu, between sinusitis and bronchitis, between middle-age torture and the torture of the Middle Ages.

In your moments of wheeze and pain, consider the Hot Toddy.

Type in “toddy” and there are no less than twenty-two toddies listed at our favored cocktail database. Among our favorites:

Apple Toddy (applejack based)
Hot Brandy Toddy
Hot Buttered Toddy (with floating butter pat)
Hot Rum Toddy (very similar to an American Grogg) (rum based)
Hot Whiskey Lemonade

If you simply must have a coffee-based drink and you want a toddy too, you’re in trouble. But consider adding a cinnamon stick and floating some nutmeg on a drink invented by our editor, El Americano Tranquilo. Make it with a shot of espresso, instead of a coffee top-off, and fill the rest with hot water. What you’ll get is the engagingly spurious Espresso Tranquilo, which beats the hell out of your mocha frappucino every day.

Try one. Fire up the Schubert, or maybe Das Lied von Der Erde, sit back, and let nature and antibiotics take their inevitable course.

The Champs Elysées Cocktail

Word comes from the Island of the Manhattoes that the cocktail catering co. Cuff and Buttons serves sturdy drinks. Their latest discovery/uncovery is the The Champs Elysées, a drink we hadn’t tried until yesterday.

This is the way drinks should be: not invented, but uncovered. It’s the distinct words “single-district cognac” that appeal most in Cuff and Buttons version of this Champs Elysées drink recipe, and it’s the idea of flirting with single-district cognac that makes C&B New York’s premiere cocktail catering company. The inclusion of yellow Chartreuse (oxymoron?) puts us in a reverent state sweetly early in the day. You can make a chartreuse Chartreuse one too…as always, click the Doctor’s CocktailDB when in doubt. And even Absolut and Drinkboy have ideas about the drink.

Here’s the Cocktail DB recipe for a Champs Elysées Cocktail:

Shake in iced cocktail shaker & strain
1 oz Cognac (3 cl, 1/4 gills)
1/2 oz Yellow Chartreuse (1.5 cl, 1/8 gills)
1 oz fresh lemon juice (3 cl, 1/4 gills)
1/2 tsp sugar (2 dashes)
1 dash aromatic bitters (optional)
Serve in a cocktail glass (4.5 oz)

C’est de bon goût.

The New Orleans Buck

What do you do with white rum this time of year? One satisfactory way to plow through a bottle is to make a time-honored one, the New Orleans Buck. Recipe:

Build

1 1/2 oz light rum (4.5 cl, 3/8 gills)
1/2 oz fresh lime juice (1.5 cl, 1/8 gills)
1/2 oz orange juice (1.5 cl, 1/8 gills)
2 dashes Peychaud bitters

Add lime wheel

Serve in a highball glass (9.0 oz)

The concoction comes out the color of a pale coral reef.

The New Orleans Buck appears in many old bartender guides, including Thomas Mario’s Playboy Bartender’s Guide. Other recipes call for ginger ale or club soda, and some even for dark rum. Many call for no bitters at all. We favor the light rum with the orange and the lime and Peychaud’s.

The French 75

It looks like lemonade, so you can sip it in front of your husband without much notice. It consists of simple things including gin, which is a part of all households all the time, and champagne, which should be but is not. There may be some of the latter pumped and rubbercorked in just the right quantities in your fridge right now. Or there might even be a gloriously unopened bottle you received as part of the Nationwide Re-gifting Program.

As usual, the CocktailDB has the best recipe:

French 75

1 oz fresh lemon juice (3 cl, 1/4 gills)
2 tsp sugar, stir (1 cl, 1/16 gills)
2 oz gin (6 cl, 1/2 gills)
Fill with ice, Champagne
Add lemon wedge, cherry, orange slice
Serve with straws
Serve in a tall glass (14.0 oz)

What was the name of that cocktail again, and why does it sound so sexy?

A French 75 (the Soixante Quinze) was a big artillery piece from WWI. One of the earliest print references to the drink is from 1927:

“Here’s How”, Judge Jnr, 1927

This drink is really what won the War for the Allies:

* 2 jiggers Gordon water;
* 1 part lemon juice;
* a spoonful of powdered sugar;
* cracked ice.
* Fill up the rest of a tall glass with champagne!
* (If you use club soda instead of champagne, you have a Tom Collins.)

And you probably have lots of club soda left from New Years Eve too. But try it with champagne first. It will keep the embers glowing.