Mimosas formidable.

Plus formidable.

Last year I reminded you about the virtues of french 75's in a new year. This new year, the topic is mimosas.

But before I get to mimosas, I'll tell you: french 75's made our past year---our past year, which was awful---a little happier.

So now the mimosa, a far gentler subject for the usual post new year's surfeit of champagne.

There are two basic recipes, and one is far more basic than the other:

The one you've probably already had:

1 1/4 oz orange juice (3.5 cl, 5/16 gills)

Fill with Champagne, ice

Serve in a cocktail glass (4.5 oz)

The one you're about to try:

1/2 ounce triple sec (1.5 cl, 1/8 gills)

1 1/2 ounces fresh orange juice (4.5 cl, 3/8 gills)

3 1/2 ounces chilled Champagne (10.5 cl, 7/8 gills)

1 orange slice for garnish (1/2 oz, 1.5 cl, 1/8 gills)

Build in the order given in a Champagne flute. Add the garnish.

Serve in a champagne flute (6.0 oz)

Yes. Triple sec. Surprised? That recipe is from Gary Regan's The Joy of Mixology, a book which is more about process and theory than recipe. Gary Regan is certainly accomplished, and also is a bit of an Internet-as-cottage-industry phenomenon. But so is About.com, and take a look at this awful recipe for the same drink; or maybe you too measure orange juice by the carton. So let's put it to the fire: does Gary know something so many others don't? Why would you add triple sec to something like orange juice, which is so sweet to start? (BTW, Rachel wants you to add triple sec too, but at the end, rather than at the beginning---I guess she wants you to light fire to it too, or something.)

Give up? Well, I'll tell you. It's about alcohol.

Adding triple sec is like infusing what would otherwise be a very fluffy Mother's Day drink with something more formidable. You're bumping your mimosa to actual cocktail level.

Triple sec is made from oranges, so it doesn't rustle your orange juice's feathers, and shouldn't overlay your natural oj sweetness too much---especially if it's high-proof triple sec. Triple sec runs up to 60 proof, and you shouldn't waste time with much less than that. If you're going to put it in a mimosa, putting something that's about 30 proof is not really adding much of anything.

It seems intuitive, and likely need not be said, to not use your favorite champagne for a mimosa. If you're drinking your favorite champagne, drink your favorite champagne---don't sugar coat it. Of course. You're insulted I even mentioned anything. Well, it must be said. It must be said because there are sites that say, "a bottle of favorite champagne" and where orange juice from a carton suffices. I will be very goodly god-damned if I am going to slop a bottle of Bollinger Grand Année into any kind of juice, let alone juice from a carton. In fact, I don't think I've had orange juice from a carton in the new millennium. Or maybe since the Ford administration.

You need a tasty champagne, to be sure, but you can do with an easily acquired one. Prosecco is popular right now and prosecco is excellent for mimosas, in my opinion.

As for glassware---you know, it's really shouldn't be fetishized for this particular drink. You're not going to be noting the size of the bubbles. I like even serving them in tumblers, as demonstrated above, for the guests get more at a time.

Rocks with champagne? If you're using a tumbler, why not? You put champagne in punch, don't you? And what is a cocktail, if not a punch for one?

The mimosa is one rare drink that you can enlarge a bit with considerable impunity. But if you must, the champagne flute makes for handsome presentation. The only problem is, with the flute, you'll be refilling them every seven minutes. Me, I'd look for some good Italian tumblers and clink.

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.

It's all true.

It’s true. It’s the multi-belief-system holiday season again. Time to reflect/give gifts/remember/get revenge/blow people up, as one’s personal-yet-codified dogma dictates. One thing is for certain, though, as was so eloquently expressed by our liege, J. Mailander, there’s punch.

One of the best explanations of the overriding importance of punch is in this book: “Mixologist; The Journal of the American Cocktail.” In it, David Wondrich, Esquire Magazine’s drink maven, takes us through what punch was when punch was king, and what punch was, was pretty specific. Punch had (and meant) five ingredients. This would’ve been around, oh, the 1630s. The five ingredients were: citrus fruit, cane sugar, water, spice, and number five: arrack. Of these, in Europe, all were arcane except water. Now, all are common except arrack. Arrack, while strange to Western ears, is a name well known in the Middle East. It’s an anise-flavored spirit, and an acquired taste. In the 17th century, it was mainly just a word for liquor.

A hundred years later, punch was the monarch of drinks, and monarchs drank it – as did everyone, from cups ladled from large bowls just as we’d expect. They even upended the bowls in a traditional round robin toast of greeting and kinship. And punch could be served hot or cold as the season dictated. By now, however, the arrack in the best punches had become more specific, and the best of it was known as Batavia Arrack, an odd combo of rum distilled with fermented Javanese rice. This was obviously close kin to rum but it had a better reputation owing to the Dutch influence (they were instrumental, through their colonizing, in its European introduction) and to it’s use in the trendiest punches. Sophisticates went to great lengths to distinguish their punches from anything containing rumbullion. As with all things, eventually punch’s star declined. This happened as it always does – through the chemical process of bastardization. First, of course, they’d sneak rum in. Just in time for Gin Lane, well looky, it’s a gin punch. And hot whiskey punch was the direct ancestor to the Hot Toddy, Mr. Wondrich posits.

As punch became old-hat, more than just the ingredients were bowdlerized too. The extended-family conviviality of the punch bowl gave way to the greatest outrage of all: the single serving punch. Oh, flasks of brandy, mugs of beer, spiced mugs of hot beer presented with a fireplace poker, were served singly, but punch…punch was the glue that bound society together, and it was coming apart. Religious reactionaries will speak of the dissolution of the nuclear family and point to liberal, evolutionary, immoral, secular ideas as the culprit. Historians and sociologists who are a little more thoughtful nod toward the Industrial Revolution and the tight packing of human beings into steamy terrariums called “cities.”

In fact, it was punch. The dissolution of the family began when punch ceased, in the main, to be shared. The slow, incremental movement of focus from the communal to the individual began here.

The offspring of the single serving punch was, of course, the cocktail.

By the time the first cocktail recipes saw print in 1862, punch still abounded as an also-ran. It became a thing of events, commemorations, and holidays. It has, today, turned into a chimera, inhabiting the silhouette of punch but really being something else, something less. No one takes punch seriously anymore.

The punch I served lucky guests at Casa de Cocktail was a rum punch from the early 19th century that, with slight variations, was christened “Columbian Punch” in 1893 to honor the quadricentennial-plus-one-year of Columbus’ New World frolic. The year-late World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois was the first World’s Fair. The punch was this:

Columbian Punch*

1 quart of Jamaican rum,
1 pint of brandy,
the juice of 2 lemons and 2 oranges,
1 pint of freshly brewed oolong tea,
2 sherry glasses (4 oz.) of green Chartreuse.
Sweeten this mixture to taste,
pour into a large punch bowl,
add ice (a bag of ice from the store is about right)
and pour in a quart of Champagne (750ml is fine)
Stir and ladle.
(*) From “Beverages And Sandwiches For Your Husband’s Friends”
by One Who Knows. ©1893.

It was a serious punch and a fleeting glimpse at the fine thing punch once was.

Happy multi-belief-system holiday everyone!
The elves are weeping.