Ramos Gin Fizz

When considering recipes for any drink, the question to ask is, "What are the issues?" The issues with a Ramos Gin Fizz are many, starting with what to call it.

The Ramos Gin Fizz was originally called a New Orleans Fizz; it pops up early on as such. The drink also became known as a Ramos Gin Fizz later on, in deference to its inventor. There's no question that Henry Ramos worked at Meyer's restaurant in New Orleans, and there's no question, unlike with many other eponymous drinks, who the real inventor of this one was.
Jerry Thomas's 1887 guide, which mentions six gin fizzes, is of little help. There is in it a gin fiz recipe, but ironically, the 1887 edition of the guide precedes the invention of the New Orleans Fizz by a year, and three years after the death of Thomas.

Among noted present-day mixologists, you can't find Ramos Gin Fizz in Ted Haigh's Cocktail database; Ted is the ultra-traditionalist, and the drink goes by the earlier name there. But note Chuck Taggart has no problem labelling the drink the Ramos Gin Fizz. And their recipes are different too---slightly, but in critical ways.

Ted wants you to double up on the lemon juice; Chuck wants the lemon and lime to be present in equal measure. Ted calls a half-ounce of cream optional; Chuck calls out two ounces of it. Chuck wants you to shake the drink for over a minute; Ted doesn't specify.

There's also an option often found in bars to use powdered egg instead of egg white. But what makes a fizz a fizz is not an egg white; what makes for a fizz is sugar and lemon juice.

Overall, de gustibus non disputandum est. I like the Ramos without cream, and I wouldn't think of mixing it without egg white, and I too would double up on the lemon juice. In short, I'd follow Ted's New Orleans Fizz recipe to the letter, without the cream. But Chuck's recipe is certainly just as valid as Ted's, and tilted toward a mid-century modern moment, when cream found more favor in drinks than it does today.

The straight-up Margarita

You don't see many margaritas served in cocktail glasses, straight up, these days, but many years ago, this was the way they were served.

The practice was interrupted in the late 1960's, when such aberrations as the strawberry margarita, the Midori melonball, and the banana daiquiri introduced the barely-legal (yikes, there's a term I shouldn't use on blogger) drinkers of the baby boom to cocktails. The noble cocktail glass seemed inhospitable to slurpified, day-glo-colored booze; restaurants around the country opted to host this in the faux-champagne glass---you know, not the good champagne glass, the flute, but the saucer-shaped one ascribed to be shaped from Marie Antoinette's sein gauche.

Most adults grew up to enjoy their margaritas served on the rocks. But there is much to recommend taking one in straight up. Here's how to do it.

You'll need:

• a cocktail glass
• a Boston shaker
• ice
• tequila
• triple sec
• a lime

First, squeeze a lime. You're looking for about a jigger of lime juice. Set it aside.

Now put some rocks, maybe five---we like odd numbers---into a Boston shaker.

Pour two jiggers of tequila into the shaker, over the rocks.

Pour approximately 5/8 a jigger of triple sec into the shaker. You can always use a little more if you don't fancy your tequila.

Pour approximately 1 jigger of lime juice into the shaker. If you went up with the triple sec, you should probably go up a little on the lime juice too.

Shake---it's good to shake this one, as ice shavings are favorable for a margarita---and strain through a Hawthorne strainer into the cocktail glass.

If you see any variance on this recipe, it's usually in the triple sec. Some recipes call out Cointreau specifically; we're not going to deny that Cointreau is a dependable triple sec, and you should always remain gracious when guests bring you a bottle, but the amount of people on the planet who can distinguish Cointreau from any other triple sec when served in a margarita are decidedly small. Also, some recipes call for matching the amounts of triple sec and lime juice; this is a matter of taste, which is non disputandum anyway, but if you like to err on the dry side, start with 5/8 the amount of triple sec as lime juice, and work your way higher if that's not tasty enough for you.

~~~

On what tequila to use---well, who are we to tell you? Our favorite tequila for sipping is Corralejo; however, our favorite splurge for a margarita is Don Julio. But there are so many premium tequilas that it's a good idea to try your own, both straight and in a margarita.

And if you have some more time for tequila, you may put aside a few days to ponder Ian Chadwick's ponderous tequila site, which includes a glossary of tequila-specific terminology. Or come back---it'll be in the blogroll here for posterity.

Alaska Cocktail

This is a long and highly errant way to go to get to Alaska, but you may nonetheless feel good about the path.

When we want to experiment with spirits, the word cocktail makes us delighted. Origin of this fancy word is not clear, but there are a number of legends associated with it. the most common story is that of a widow of an American revolutionary officer in the war of American independence BETSY FLANAGAN who stole neighbour's chicken and decorated the glasses in the bar with cockstail feathers and thus it is called "coquetel". The very first book on cocktails was written by Jerry Thomsan in 1860, who invented Martinez or dry martini and tom and jerry.

I'm not sure that you can garble English much more efficiently. But at the end comes the payoff, the Alaska Cocktail, which may have a better pedigree than you might imagine:

Alaska Cocktail

45 ml. Gin

22 ml. yellow chartreuse

several dashes orange bitter

Method- Mix all ingredients with cracked ice in a shaker or blender. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Again, English is suspect. For clues as to how much fluid 45 and 22 ml. might be, refer to the far sturdier cocktail db for their Alaska Cocktail. (It's 1 1/2 oz and 3/4 oz.) The Alaska Cocktail is actually a very good summer drink.

Thanks to Chander for the reminder.

Hey Ho, it's Cocktail200!

Are you all set to celebrate the 200th Anniversary of the cocktail, defined?

Too bad. So sorry to hear that. You missed it. Well, not the whole year, but if you did not look heavenward as you drained your glass on Saturday, you missed the moment. You see, on May 13th 1806, the cocktail got its first explanation in a New York newspaper. Oh, the word had appeared before, back into the 18th century, usually as a description of a type of horse, and even once in 1803 as a drink, but this use was in a narrative penned by a young callow good-for-nothing reprobate (probably an ancestor of Alex) – exactly the sort that did enjoy cocktails in those days – and he just mentioned it in passing. Unless you too were a miscreant of the period, you’d never know what the hell he was talking about. Again, on May 6th 1806, the Editor of Hudson, New York’s newspaper, the Balance & Columbian Repository, mentioned our fledgling cocktail obliquely in a snarky aside regarding a local politician:

“….a certain candidate has placed in his account of Loss and Gain, the following items: –

LOSS:

720 rum-grogs
17 brandy (ditto)
32 gin-slings
411 glasses bitters
25 (ditto) cock-tail
My Election.

GAIN:

NOTHING.”

Well. One week later (it being a weekly newspaper) the Balance ran this exchange:

To the Editor of the Balance.

Sir,
I observe in your paper… the account of a democratic candidate…under the head of Loss, 25 (ditto) cock-tail. Will you be so obliging as to inform me what is meant by this species of refreshment?”

To which our fearless editor replied:

“ Cock-tail… is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters –it is vulgarly called a bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said also, to be of great use to a democratic candidate: because, a person having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow any thing else.”

No reference to the name of the poor Democrat was ever recorded, or is to this day known.

But there you have it; an etymologist’s wet dream: a new word meaning, defined in print. As I say, cocktails were quite bad form in those days, not only because they were consumed in the morning to stave off the effects of the night before, but also because they contained bitters.

“And what is wrong with bitters?” You might be so unwise to ask me. Well, in 1806, the cocktail was new. No cocktail glasses, no cocktail napkins, no cocktail lounges, no cocktail bitters. Putting bitters in your drink in 1806 was akin to stumbling to your medicine cabinet, grabbing the convenient bottle of Paragoric and dumping it into your hangover drink. Bad show, old chap, bad show indeed.

200 years later to the day, simultaneous celebrations for the now rather more gentrified drink form were held around the world: London, New York, Las Vegas, Sydney (Germany, Holland, Austria and Switzerland)… I attended the Las Vegas event, (at The Museum of the American Cocktail) which was simulcast with the New York one (at a bar with a satellite exhibit – a bar named, oddly, the Balance.) I gave a little speech, conducted tours and interviews, and drank. And ate. And drank. There’ll be more on that later. And drank.

At the event, the first annual The American Cocktail Awards™ (the Olives) were presented by the USBG (the United States Bartenders’ Guild) for the best drink. A little number named the “Wet Spot” won.

–Doc.

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.