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January 30 Menus from the Museum, part 2By Phil Greene
”I’m, uh, strictly on the water wagon, I don’t drink anymore, I quit. But of course I’m going to sample this drink to see if you’ve made it right. That’s the only purpose I’m doing it is to help you out. (here, Huey flashes a sincere look into the camera) I wouldn’t touch a drop of it (wagging his finger) if I wasn’t trying to help you, to find out if you’ve mixed it right. (Huey takes a long pull on the drink) That seems like all right (another long pull) But I won’t take except enough to sample it…, but, better be sure about it, I’ll try it a little further. (another long pull) I believe that’s all right. (another long pull) I think it’s perfectly all right (another long pull, followed by a dramatic blinking of both eyes) I’m sure it’s all right!” (finishing the drink, slamming down the glass, the crowd erupting in applause). Afterward, Huey addressed the reporters present. “An old family custom, my grandfather devoted his first day in Louisiana, spending it in the barroom teaching the young men how to mix drinks, and handing them back until he’d finally mastered the proposition.” When a reporter asked, “Are you sure he handed them back,” Huey retorted with a chuckle, “Well, handed the glass back.” Huey’s older brother, Julius Tyler Long, a Shreveport attorney, was highly indignant upon hearing this tale. "John D. Long, our grandfather, was a farmer, a religious man who never saw or made a Ramos Gin Fizz...”
Tomlinson said, “This is the best gin fizz I ever tasted; how do you make it?” And I, remembering that I taught Joe how to make it, said, “Well, I’ll tell you,” and I began to count off the ingredients; but as I counted them off, I realized that I had forgotten one. I could not think what it was, so I called to Joe. He came, barefooted and carrying the enormous cocktail shaker in his hand. He poured out the dividends in our glasses. “You remember I taught you how to make a gin fizz?”
“Well, I have forgotten one of the ingredients,” and I named to him the ones I remembered. He stood grinning at me. I said, “Tell Mr. Tomlinson what it is; I’ve forgotten.” And Joe said, “Nosuh, Boss; if you is forgotten, that is all the better for me, and I ain’t goin’ to tell you, Suh, because the making of drinks is a strictly confidential secret.” ------------ 1 tablespoon powdered sugar Add all ingredients to shaker along with some large lumps of ice. If it’s a large shaker, add the seltzer now, if smaller, do so later (or the effervescence will foam over). Shake like hell for at least 3 minutes (in my cocktail seminars, we shake for the duration of Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up,” but Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” will also do). Serve in a small high-ball or Delmonico glass. January 29 Wandering BartendersBy Dale DeGroff
(Originally published in Beverage Media) Bartending at the highest level has a unique skill set. A talented bartender assembles skills that far exceed the simple act of supplying well made drinks quickly and accurately. A service bartender who spends his time out of view can get by with just making drinks accurately and quickly but once in front of the public the real talent of the bartender kicks in. When a new party walks up to the bar a quick glance and a few words is all a bartender has to make several important decisions. Why are these people here beyond the simple answer to enjoy a drink and how can he enhance their experience. Can he take them beyond the ordinary? A good bartender confident in his recipes absolutely can if he can sell the idea in an attractive way. I cringe when bartenders explain to me that this drink or that product doesn’t move; the bartender is the MOVER! The bartender may have to decide if he can serve the party at all and if not how does he handle that situation successfully with a minimum of disruption and without losing composure. An accomplished bartender can turn and unhappy of difficult guests into a friend of the house. That is after all what we get paid to do. Many of the skills described above can only come from experience. Young bartenders, like chefs or servers tend to move around early in their careers learning different skills in different jobs. In my early days as a waiter in a high end New York City Bar and Grill I learned people skills that were invaluable later as a bartender. I also spent so much time in the kitchen that I began to understand not just the culinary side of the business but the tempo or flow of a working kitchen. And how the kitchen, bar, and front of the house all must mesh for success. This idea of the bartender as a wanderer started at the dawn of the modern bartending profession in the nineteenth century with Jerry Thomas. Thomas widely accepted as the father of the modern bartending profession traveled all around North America, and parts of South America and Europe. He was different from his fellow bartenders in one respect he took notes. Esquire drinks editor David Wondrich has provided us with an in lively depth documentation of Thomas’s career and some of his contemporaries against the backdrop of the times in his new book Imbibe. Thomas and his contemporaries developed this unique skill set that made them a valuable asset to the new cocktail bars that were opening in cities around the country in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Sadly the developing profession after only 60 or 70 years was interrupted by Prohibition. As a result Prohibition provided the next big incentive for the wandering professional. Skilled bartenders traveled to Cuba and to Europe taking jobs in leading establishments in London and Paris to practice their distinctive skill and introduce the unique American cocktail to people steeped in old world tradition. Some like Harry Craddock and Harry McElhone went on to very long and successful careers becoming authors just as Thomas had done in the middle of the nineteenth century. Post prohibition United States presented a series of challenges to the newly legitimized industry not the least of which was finding skilled bartenders. Two men who learned the skill of mixing and who had the vision to see an opportunity were Donn Beach and Victor Bergeron. Donn Beach, aka Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt started tropical cocktail themed bar concept that became known as the tiki bar. Both he and Bergeron trained countless young men many of them Asian immigrants. These young bartenders kept little black books of recipes for these very specialized drinks. As the tiki craze spread across the United States those books of closely guarded secret recipes became the passports that opened the doors for this new generation of wandering bartenders. The recipes were trade secrets that made these skilled craftsmen valuable to the entrepreneurs who rode the tiki trend in cities all over the USA. Jeff “Beachbum” Berry chronicles these times in his latest book, "Sippin Safari," SLG publishing, 2007. The wandering bartender tradition has taken a new turn with the emergence of the culinary cocktail tradition of the last several years, a tradition that has seen the raw materials of the cocktail expanded to include herbs and other savory ingredients from spices to exotic and unusual fruits and vegetables. The cutting edge of the culinary cocktail movement was the style bars in London over the last seven to ten years. Those young bartenders eager to expand their knowledge and experience have traveled to other parts of the world and have had a significant impact from the Eastern Europe to the United States, Australia, and Southeast Asia. This is truly an exciting time to be a bartender; below are a couple drinks inspired by the new culinary style cocktails. THAI BOXER
Tear the cilantro, mint, and 10 of the basil leaves into small pieces, and add them to a mixing glass with the lime juice, coconut milk, and simple syrup. Grind the torn leaves into the liquid with a wooden muddler for a few seconds, add the rum, enough ice to fill the glass two-thirds full, and top with the ginger beer. Stir the ingredients together and fine strain into an ice-filled collins glass, and add the garnish.
BLUEBERRY & SAGE SOUR*
Muddle the blueberries and two of the sage leaves together with the lemon juice in the bottom of a Boston glass. Add the gin the agave syrup and shake well with ice fine strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a large blueberry pierced through with the stem of the third sage leaf. * Prepare the individual syrups by mixing 1/2 base with 1/2 water then combine the syrup as follows: 2 parts simple syrup, 2 parts agave syrup and 1/2 part honey syrup.
BRUT PEARINGS*
Muddle the pears and the RoterApfel together in the bottom of a Boston glass. Add the Plymouth Gin and slowly pour the Brut down the side of the mixing glass while dragging the other ingredients toward the top with a long bar spoon. Fine strain into a chilled flute and garnish with a slice of Bosc pear and a sage leaf. *Original Cocktails from Dale DeGroff January 17 Menus from the MuseumBy Phil Greene
Today I’ll look at a couple of vintage menus from the old Roosevelt Hotel New Orleans. One, resembling the Ramos Gin Fizz itself, is dated 1951, while the “Bar… Suggestions” menu is likely pre-WWII. A Ramos Gin Fizz for 30 cents! A Martini for 25 cents! If there were ever a good reason to perfect time travel, this is it. Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. This classic drink is tailor made for sipping on those easy summertime days – it comes from sub-tropical New Orleans, after all - e-a-s-y, as long as someone else is makin’‘em, that is. In truth, the Ramos Gin Fizz is worth every minute of building and shaking that goes into one. Minutes? Yep, according to Stanley Clisby Arthur’s 1936 book, “Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Make ‘Em,” the Ramos “needs a long, steady shaking...until the mixture gets body - ‘ropy’ as some experienced bartenders express it.” What’s “ropy?” To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity, I can’t define it, but having made many Ramos Gin Fizzes, I know it when I see it (apologies are offered to my former law professors at Loyola New Orleans, but I’m sure they understand). The Ramos was invented by a guy named, you guessed it, Ramos (RAH-mose). In 1888, Henry Ramos (his friends called him Carl) purchased a New Orleans saloon called the Imperial Cabinet, where the drink was likely born. In 1907, Henry moved to another New Orleans bar, the Stag, on Gravier near St. Charles. The drink became so popular that during the 1915 Mardi Gras, the Stag employed 35 “shaker boys” behind the bar. If a shaker boy tired, he’d toss his shaker to the one behind him to carry on. Whole lotta shakin,’ indeed. Prohibition came in 1919, and the honorable Henry Ramos closed his bar, unlike most Orleanians, who scoffed at the Volstead Act. Indeed, New Orleans held a dubious distinction in the eyes of Prohibition agent extraordinaire Izzy Einstein. Einstein traveled the country searching for speakeasies and other scofflaws, and would record the time it took for him to procure illegal hooch. In D.C., it took an hour; in Atlanta, 17 minutes; and in Pittsburgh, it took only 11. In New Orleans? 35 seconds. Izzy got off the train, hopped in a cab, asked where he could get a drink, and the obliging cabbie produced a flask. You see, New Orleans’ legendary status in the hospitality field is not a recent invention, it’s hard-wired. Henry Ramos died in 1928; the Noble Experiment still had another 5 years to run. But while he closed his saloon, he published his secret recipe, as a gift to the ages, or perhaps his own method of civil disobedience? So, when Prohibition ended in 1933, New Orleans’ bartenders knew how to make the previously proprietary drink. Which brings us to the Roosevelt. The Ramos Gin Fizz was one of several “house” drinks at the old Roosevelt Hotel Bar in New Orleans back in the day. The Roosevelt made a practice of “adopting” great old New Orleans drinks that had lost their home, another example being the Sazerac (invented by my ancestor Antoine Peychaud in his pharmacy, probably in the 1850s, and perfected at the Sazerac House in the 1870s). The hotel, originally called the Grunewald, opened in 1893, and featured a subterranean-motif nightclub called “The Cave” (quite possibly America’s first nightclub). It became The Roosevelt (named for Teddy) around the time of WWI and in 1965, the Fairmont New Orleans (One of many Katrina casualties, it is currently closed). While the Ramos does contain quite a few ingredients, they’re standard: lemon juice, lime juice, cream, gin, egg white, sugar, seltzer. And then there’s orange flower water, easily available at Amazon.com, among other places. The orange flower water offers a floral bouquet not unlike that found in a glass of viognier wine. Indeed, its inclusion in a Ramos has prompted the classic line, “It’s like drinking a flower!” Whether or not you add vanilla extract is up to you - Orleanian bartenders have long debated the use of “the twin drops of extract wrung from the heart of the vanilla bean,” as Arthur called it. Like the issue of shaking or stirring a Martini, or crushing or merely bruising the mint in a julep, this is yet another controversy in the hornet’s nest that is mixology. The Louisiana Kingfish Make a Ramos Gin Fizz and understand why the drink became the obsession of the Louisiana Kingfish, Senator Huey Long. Huey loved to drink, but trouble often found him when he did. One evening in 1933, Huey was out with friends at the Sands Point Casino night club on Long Island. With several Sazeracs under his belt, Huey made a spectacle of himself, eating food off other patrons’ plates, dragging women out on to the dance floor, and generally behaving like a dog. During a visit to the men’s room, unable to find an empty urinal, Huey proceeded to take aim between the legs of one of the men standing before him. His aim was not the best, and it netted Huey a cut above his eye seen in photos that graced the tabloid newspapers for days. So, in hopes of improving his image for the Presidential election of 1936, Huey decided to go “on the water wagon.” But he fell off that wagon during a trip to New York in July, 1935, and it was the Ramos Gin Fizz that prompted the fall. Huey stayed as he always did at the New Yorker Hotel. Announcing that he wasn’t able to find a decent Ramos Gin Fizz in the city, he arranged to have the Roosevelt’s bartender, Sam Guarino, flown up to New York, to teach the New Yorker’s bar staff. Of course, Huey required a quality control inspection. He sipped it, his first drink in nearly two years, and then ordered another. “Huey wanted that drink so damn bad,” said one of his bodyguards. “I’m merely sampling this to make sure you gentlemen are getting the real thing.” Two hours and five drinks later, Huey solemnly proclaimed, “And this, gentlemen, my gift to New York.” (This is part one of a two part blog on the Ramos Gin Fizz.) January 08 NY Vodka CupResults of the New York Vodka Cup competition, sponsored by Finlandia Vodka, November 27th, 2007
Cocktails:
Garnish with a lime wheel and served up. Long Drink - Asta
served on the rocks with salted rim and a cucumber and flower garnish. After Dinner - Lavender Blonde
Strain, serve up, top with dry champagne, garnish with wedge of pineapple and three bluberries. Runners-up:
Aldo Barrio, Hawaiian Tropic Zone
Jonathan Pogash, Hospitality Holdings La Perla“When in doubt, add more tequila!” By Jacques Bezuidenhout
Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish: Lemon Twist Duke’s Style When in New Orleans...Miss New Orleans? Love Wine? Tune in to The Wine Show, on WGSO 990 in New Orleans, Every Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Central Time, the Show airs Live, and is streamed on the web. Charismatic and knowledgeable host of this weekly, two-hour radio program is Tim McNally, a great friend to the Museum. New Year, New BlogMost New Year's resolutions involve fixing bad habits; while for some people that means drinking less (what a concept!), for us at the Museum of the American Cocktail, it means turning this blog into something far more active, with more posts from our board members and more interaction with readers and members.
Me, you may not know - I'm Jack Robertiello, former editor of Cheers and currently a writer for that magazine, Santé, Nation's Restaurant News and other publications and websites. I'll be acting as the MOTAC blog's traffic cop and contributor, gathering new posts from various sources, much as I did as editor of the On The House blog for the last two years. So if something catches your eye, something you think MOTAC members should be aware of, please pass along to me at applejak@earthlink.net. For now, here's to a year of better drinking. Were the first bartenders Italian?Meet the Liqourista
By Dale DeGroff (Originally published in Beverage Media) Around the Mediterranean the tradition of flavored wines and spirits goes back thousands of years and was even practiced by the Phoenicians, who were the first great sailors and returned with exotic goods from around the known world and beyond. The Greeks and the Romans were flavoring wines and were certainly aware of the process of distillation, if not practicing the art. When the western world fell into the darkness of the middle ages monks took refuge in monasteries under the protection of feudal lords and collected the accumulated knowledge for safe keeping. But the storage of information was not all that went on in the monasteries. In many cases the work that went on behind the doors of these “laboratories” led to an explosion of information and technology when the renaissance or rinascita finally arrived. The Renaissance was the birth many new professions and among them the liqouriste. Liqouriste were favored members of court who were specialists in fabricating beverages from alcohol and multiple ingredients. Doug Frost, wine and spirits professional remarked in a tasting of amaro recently, “Amari are truly the first bottled cocktails”, and in a sense liqouriste could be considered the first modern bartenders. The work of the liqouriste has left Italy with the richest group of flavored wines and liquors of any country in the world. Travelers returning from Italy face the stark reality that until the next trip they must endure a forced abstinence from the myriad of liqueurs, amari, vermouth, and bitters they enjoyed while traveling the boot. “Every little town has their own specialty spirit or fortified wine:”, is often repeated by these pilgrims returning home from this mecca of epicurean delights. But indeed that does not go far enough; it seems that almost every household in every little town has their own house specialty. Now that I have complained a bit I will pull back from my blanket statement because today the Italian offerings are so much richer than they were 35 year ago when I got into the business. Tuaca, Strega, Campari, Fernet Branca, and Frangelico were the best known of the sparse Italian offerings in the 1970’s. But today dozens of cordials, Amari, and aperitivi and are exported. Here in the United States we have more than 30 amaretto and sambuca bottlings, a half a dozen Amaro, and a couple dozen miscellaneous offerings from Mezzaluna Espresso liqueur to a line of fruit liqueurs from Fragoli and at least a a half dozen Limoncello The categories of liqueur, amaro, bitters, and vermouth often overlap making it difficult to classify them one from the other. Amari and liqueurs are digestives but in the cafes it is not unusual to see the Italians sipping them in the afternoon for a midday pick-up. And the aperitivi which are meant to include vermouth and bitters are more than pre-prandial with consumption beginning right after breakfast and carrying on throughout the day in some cases. We find many of theses herbal and spice concoctions very much at home in a tiny glass next to an espresso; the rules are flexible according to individual tastes. These strong flavors present a challenge to the bartender. We figured out vermouth 150 years ago when American bartenders replaced the sweeter curacao with vermouth and created the superstars of the cocktail world the Martini and the Manhattan. We must take cue from these pioneers and find richness and body to stand up to these huge flavor bombs; American straight whiskeys is certainly rich soil to till and it follows also that gin is a perfect companion for amaro or bitters but nothing new here Count Negroni got it when he asked his bartender at Hotel Baglioni in Florence for a splash of gin in his Americano. Today Bartenders are routinely replacing the milder sweet vermouths with Punt e Mes or even spicier Carpano Formula Antico. Below are couple of my recipes and a few from pals on my side of the Atlantic who love working with amaro, bitters, and anything Italian! MANGO FRIZZANTE*
Created for Keith McNally’s Italian restaurant Morandi in NYC
Preparation
PIMMS ITALIANO*
Preparation
INTRO TO APEROL (Audrey Saunders of Pegu Club)
Preparation
LITTLE ITALY (Audrey Saunders of Pegu Club)
Preparation
DAMSEL IN ROUGE (cocktail by Gary Regan for World Cocktail Day) Preparation
ARCHANGEL (cocktail by Sasha Petraske for World Cocktail Day) Stir gin and the Aperol with ice to chill. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a lemon zest. RESURRECCION (Tony AboutGanim from Mocha by Michael Turback)
Preparation
Sauce Preparation In a saucepan bring water to a boil and dissolve cocoa, espresso powder, sugar and salt. Cool and refrigerate until ready to use. CALIFORNIA NEGRONI (Kim Haasarud of Liquid Architecture, Los Angeles California) Fill a highball glass with ice and garnish with grapefruit wedge. Set aside. In a cocktail shaker combine the gin, sweet vermouth, Campari and fresh squeezed grapefruit juice. Shake moderately and strain into iced highball glass. Top off with tonic water. TRI AMICI (George Delgado, former head bartender Window on the World) Shaken with an orange wedge in the shaker and strained into an ice filled rocks glass. Garnish with an orange spiral. Originally I was using this drink as a digestive when I felt like I ate too much, on other occasions I have used it as an aperitive (here I serve it straight up) when I wasn't in the mood for a Manhattan or Martini... It works great either way, before or after dinner!
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