Liqueur Legerdemain

"As he brews, so shall he drink." Bibulous Ben Jonson's words have a special ring of truth in the age of the side car, the stinger and the rusty nail--all typically colorful names for cocktails compounded with liqueurs. The latest, the rusty nail, is also one of the most mellow--a simple libation of Scotch on the rocks with a float of Drambuie.

Americans searching liqueur shelves are still occasionally baffled by the two words liqueur and cordial. They mean exactly the same thing. No such bafflement bedeviled the early liqueur drinkers in Europe, who used both words together, liqueurs cordialis, meaning liqueurs of the heart, to describe the mellifluent compounds invented by monks and dispensed in monasteries for all whose spiritual comfort was miraculously braced by a small potion of bodily comfort. Later, in France, the crèmes appeared, the creamy smooth liqueurs with the special softness and full flavor found not only in certain liqueurs but even more so in the mixed (text continued on page 120) drinks glorified with liqueurs. Another type, which bobbed up in the U.S.--fruit-flavored brandy--is simply a liqueur guaranteed to have a brandy base and to be of somewhat higher proof than other liqueurs.

But glossaries aside, what makes all liqueurs such effective tools in the hands of skillful barmen is the fact that, for mixing purposes, liqueurs are composite masterpieces to start with. When you crack a bottle of whiskey, you know that it's made from grain; rum comes from sugar; wine, from grapes. But liqueurs are blended from a fantastic assortment of seeds, roots, flowers, fruits, peels, berries, barks, herbs, essences, sugar, honey; and neutral spirits, brandy, rum and even wine at times. It's easy to believe, once you've carefully sipped it, that Chartreuse contains 130 ingredients. The reverently guarded formula was given to the Carthusians of Paris in 1605 and passed along by them to the monastery of La Grande Chartreuse, where it was perfected in 1757. Not even the torture specialists of the French Revolution nor the enforced exile of the fathers to Spain could pry loose the secrets of their velvety liqueur. When an outsider once joined the Pères Chartreux with the specific goal of discovering the coveted recipe, he was nabbed just as he managed to lay hands on the withered old document. What the culprit failed to realize was that his senior colleagues were not only liqueur-making monks but Frenchmen. And Frenchmen have never been in the habit of giving anything away, particularly one of their oldest and most renowned digestifs. Even as presumably simple a liqueur as the blackberry-flavored brandy made by Leroux contains several different kinds of berries; each must be balanced from ciop to crop each year and from batch to batch. To make the final blend even more like blackberries than blackberries themselves, a small stream of fresh raspberries with their silken flavor or rich-scented loganberries may be added as an artful overtone. All of this, in substance, means that when you concoct a drink such as a tall blackberry collins, you're starting out with compound rather than simple interest from the very first ounce you draw from the bottle.

Mixed drinks with liqueurs are not designed for stuffed shirts but for the enlightened minority that is sufficiently mature yet young enough to welcome new taste sensations. Especially at the kind of party where the tried-and-true roast beef is being offered, or at a buffet table where the reliable curried shrimp or platters of familiar cold cuts are on display, new liqueur combinations before or after dinner will pamper the most critical palates. When we think of liqueurs as exclusively after-dinner drinks, we forget that two of the most illustrious pre-prandial drinks--absinthe in France and the Sazerac cocktail in New Orleans--were both made with an anise liqueur. Absinthe, the green muse, contained wormwood and is now sensibly outlawed. It was the drink that not only caused the great French poet Alfred de Musset to miss many sessions of the French Academy but also brought down on his head the stricture of his fellow immortals that "He absinthes himself too much." Absinthe's direct descendant, Pernod, is a perfect example of how a liqueur can shine as well in the prolog of a party as in the epilog. It's one of those assertive high-proof liqueurs whose personality you might not expect to blend well in the mixed company of other potables. However, we know of no eye opener more soul-gladdening than the new brunch drink, the tiger tail--a jigger of Pernod and three ounces of freshly squeezed orange juice on the rocks with the juice of 1/4 or 1/2 lime all churned in an 11-oz. old fashioned glass and topped with a slice of lime. In France, the most celebrated predinner aperitif is the semitall vermouth cassis--vermouth, crème de cassis, soda water and ice. Actually, crème de cassis, a low-proof liqueur made from black currants, is seldom if ever taken at the end of a meal. A cousin of the vermouth cassis, the vin blanc cassis, makes an even happier balance. In proportions of seven parts white wine to one part crème de cassis, it's known as the kir cocktail, a particularly ingratiating drink for those who want their appetites gently elevated rather than suddenly jolted.

One of the unforeseen blessings of Prohibition was the talent developed by many hosts for making mixed drinks with liqueurs. The most barbarous bathtub gin, it was found, could be made potable by the addition of just-off-the-boat crème de cacao and sweet cream dervishly shaken with ice and alchemized into an alexander (35 years after the iniquitous dry era, women's infatuation for this sweet, rich cocktail shows no sign of slackening). It was a time when a man who owned a bottle of one of the old proprietary liqueurs could pour the tiniest float on a glass of doubtful Scotch and the dram was instantly made civilized. Although necessity is no longer the mother of new drinks, liqueurs, like silken diplomats, are still smoothing the way for venturesome drinkers. Countless travelers south of the border have taken to tequila. You can lead an American to tequila, but the best way to raise the curtain on the Mexican spirit is to serve a margarita, a cocktail of tequila, lime juice and triple sec. Beginners can be assured that Mexican tequila isn't the rough-and-tumble drink it once was. It's now carefully pot-stilled from mescal, aged in wooden casks and bottled at 80 and 86 proof. When-taken straight, it bears an almost uncanny resemblance to Holland Genever gin, another flavor that's usually not love at first sip but that eventually becomes captivating. To most Americans, tequila is still a new vessel on the drinking sea, but in a margarita the modest 1/2 ounce of triple sec (a liqueur that you don't have to learn to like) is the smooth operator that puts the margarita across. Banana frozen daiquiris made with the true fruit banana liqueur, a high-fidelity flavor at its finest, are both smoother and more consistent than frozen daiquiris made with fresh fruit.

For the past several years, the dessert cocktail has gained more and more acceptance. Many an alert host has discovered that his guests prefer an impromptu gold cadillac cocktail to a thick chunk of napoleon pastry, or an icy grasshopper to a stodgy Boston cream pie. Although dessert cocktails are made at the last moment, they're not an elaborate ritual requiring you to go A.W.O.L. from your guests while the drinks are being mixed. Many dessert cocktails are lavish with sweet cream, served biting cold, in deep saucer champagne glasses or oversize cocktail glasses. Many are simple floats--a float of sweet cream on a coffee liqueur such as Kahlua, or a float of whipped cream flavored with green crème de menthe on curacao. Recently, bottled liqueur amalgams have appeared: Vandermint, a Dutch combination of chocolate and mint; Sabra a liqueur from Israel made from cactus; coffee and crème de menthe in De Kuyper's Koffie Menthe.

Centuries ago, Hippocrates mixed his hydromel, a combination of wine, honey and herbs, and called it medicine. In the ages that followed, sorcerers of all stripes mixed spirits, sugar and spices and presented them to people such as Madame de Montespan, the mistress of Louis XIV, who called the drinks aphrodisiacs. Alchemists hoped that if they kept mixing liqueur combinations long enough, they'd eventually transmute base metals into gold. Hosts nowadays are more concerned with conviviality than with carats. They mix their drinks with liqueurs and hope the results are sterling. Each recipe makes one drink.

[recipe_title]Grasshopper[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. white or brown crème de cacao[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. green crème de menthe[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. cream[/drinkRecipe]

Shake well with ice. Strain into prechilled large cocktail glass.

[recipe_title]Coffee Grasshopper[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. coffee liqueur[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. white crème de menthe[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. cream[/drinkRecipe]

Shake well with ice. Strain into prechilled large cocktail glass.

(continued on page 184) Liqueur Legerdemain (continued from page 120)

[recipe_title]Gold Cadillac[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. white or brown crème de cacao[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. Galliano[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. cream[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/3 cup crushed ice[/drinkRecipe]

Put all ingredients into blender. Blend at low speed 10-15 seconds. Pour into prechilled deep saucer champagne glass. Another version omits crushed ice. Shake well with regular ice and strain into prechilled large cocktail glass.

[recipe_title]Mango Mint[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]1 1/2 ozs. mango nectar[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. light rum[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 oz. cream[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 oz. white crème de menthe[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 cup crushed ice[/drinkRecipe]

Put all ingredients into blender. Blend at low speed 10-15 seconds. Pour into prechilled old fashioned glass. Add a rock or two to fill glass to rim.

[recipe_title]Pink Squirrel[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. crème de noyaux[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. white crème de cacao[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. cream[/drinkRecipe]

Shake well with ice. Strain into prechilled sugar-frosted large cocktail glass.

[recipe_title]Yellow Fingers[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. gin[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. blackberry-flavored brandy[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 oz. banana liqueur[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 oz. heavy cream[/drinkRecipe]

Shake well with ice. Strain into prechilled oversize cocktail glass. Winner of the 1967 Bombay Safari contest.

[recipe_title]Brandy Alexander[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. brandy[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. white or brown crème de cacao[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. cream[/drinkRecipe]

Shake well with ice. Strain into prechilled large cocktail glass.

[recipe_title]Gin Alexander[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. gin[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. white or brown crème de cacao[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. cream[/drinkRecipe]

Shake well with ice. Strain into prechilled large cocktail glass.

[recipe_title]Side Car[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. brandy[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. curacao[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. lemon juice[/drinkRecipe]

Shake well with ice. Strain into prechilled large cocktail glass. All three ingredients may be varied to suit one's taste. For a strong brandy accent, use 1 1/2 ozs. brandy, 1/2 oz. Curacao and 1/2 oz. lemon juice.

[recipe_title]Stinger[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]1 1/4 ozs. brandy[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 1/4 ozs. white crème de menthe[/drinkRecipe]

Shake well with ice. Strain into prechilled large cocktail glass. For a dry stinger, increase brandy to 2 ozs. and reduce crème de menthe to 1/2 oz. May be served before or after dinner. It's frequently served with a glass of ice water on the side.

[recipe_title]Via Veneto[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]1 3/4 ozs. brandy[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 oz. sambuca[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 tablespoon slightly beaten egg white 2 teaspoons lemon juice[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]2 teaspoons lemon juice[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 teaspoon sugar[/drinkRecipe]

Shake well with ice. Strain over rocks into prechilled old fashioned glass.

[recipe_title]Margarita[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]1 1/2 ozs. tequila[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 oz. triple sec or curacao[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 oz. lime or lemon juice[/drinkRecipe]

Shake well with ice. Strain into prechilled salt-rimmed large cocktail glass. To prepare glass, rub rim with outside of lime or lemon peel. Dip into salt for a heavy salt border. For a lighter salt treatment, rub rim with outside of peel and sprinkle rim with salt shaker. Although traditionally the glass for a margarita is salt-rimmed, it may be sugar-rimmed if desired. A margarita may also be served with a twist of lime or lemon peel.

[recipe_title]Tequila Fresa[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]1 1/2 ozs. tequila[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. strawberry liqueur[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 oz. lime juice[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/4 teaspoon orange bitters[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 slice of lime[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 fresh strawberry[/drinkRecipe]

Shake tequila, strawberry liqueur, lime juice and orange bitters well with ice. Strain over rocks into old fashioned glass. Add slice of lime and fresh strawberry.

[recipe_title]Sazerac[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]2 ozs. bourbon or blended whiskey[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/4 teaspoon Pernod, abisante, anesone or any other absinthe substitute[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/4 teaspoon bitters (Peychaud's if possible)[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 teaspoon sugar[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]Lemon peel[/drinkRecipe]

Pour Pernod around prechilled old fashioned glass until inside of glass is completely coated. Add bitters, sugar and 1 tablespoon water. Stir until sugar is dissolved. Add 1 large ice cube and bourbon. Stir well. Twist lemon peel above drink and drop into glass.

[recipe_title]Cherry Cobbler[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]1 1/2 ozs. gin[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 oz. cherry heering or Cherry Karise[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 oz. crème de cassis[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 teaspoon sugar[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 oz. lemon juice[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 slice of lemon[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 maraschino cherry[/drinkRecipe]

Fill a 12-oz. glass with finely cracked ice. Add gin, cherry heering, crème de cassis, sugar and lemon juice. Stir well until sugar is dissolved. Add cracked ice to fill glass to rim. Stir. Add lemon slice and cherry.

[recipe_title]Apple Ginger Fix[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. applejack[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. ginger-flavored brandy[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 teaspoon sugar[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 oz. lemon juice[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 slice of lemon[/drinkRecipe]

Dissolve sugar in a teaspoon of water in an 8-oz. glass. Add applejack, ginger-flavored brandy and lemon juice. Fill glass with crushed ice; stir well. Add more ice to fill glass to rim; stir. Garnish with lemon slice.

[recipe_title]Brighton Punch[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. bourbon[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. cognac[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. benedictine[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. orange juice[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 oz. lemon juice[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. iced club soda[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 slice of orange[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]Slice of lemon[/drinkRecipe]

Shake bourbon, cognac, benedictine, orange juice and lemon juice well with ice. Strain into 14-oz. tall glass. Add soda and enough ice to fill glass. Stir. Garnish with orange slice and lemon slice. An individual punch brewed outside a punch bowl.

[recipe_title]Sangaree Comfort[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. bourbon[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. Southern Comfort[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 teaspoon lemon juice[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 teaspoon peach-flavored brandy[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1/2 teaspoon sugar[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]Iced club soda[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]Freshly grated nutmeg[/drinkRecipe]

Stir bourbon. Southern Comfort, lemon juice, peach-flavored brandy and sugar in prechilled old fashioned glass. Add ice to fill glass to rim. Add splash of soda. Stir. Sprinkle lightly with nutmeg.

[recipe_title]Sloe Gin Fizz[/recipe_title]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. sloe gin (creamy cap)[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]1 oz. gin[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]3/4 oz. lemon juice[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]Iced club soda[/drinkRecipe]

[drinkRecipe]Slice of lemon[/drinkRecipe]

Shake sloe gin, gin and lemon juice well with ice. Strain into 14-oz. tall glass half filled with ice. Fill glass with soda. Stir. Add lemon slice. It should be pointed out to the uninitiated that sloe gin isn't conventional gin at all but a classical liqueur made from the sloeberry.

The permutations of cordially constructed drinks have barely been tapped; skilled application of your own liqueur legerdemain will earn you a reputation as a host who's a good mixer.