DEAR PRUDENCE

In the interests of continued financial prudence – to which I referred in an earlier post – I’ve utilised some elements in my latest creation which might not as a rule find themselves in a chic cocktail.

Yet needs must.

                                                         Keen for my next cocktail...
                                           a prudent chap. Remember him?

A few weeks ago, I had made a bile o’ jam, as they say in Aberdeen – the rhubarb and ginger variety.

As a result, I had half a jar left of stem ginger pieces still covered in their thick, gooey juice.

Also wilting away at the back of the cocktail cabinet was half a bottle of Liqueur de Framboises, a strawberry concoction hunted down in Fortnum’s for an earlier creation, and still exceedingly potable, given its 21% alcohol volume.

So get to work then, mister, I ordered myself. The guests will be here any minute.

It’s more common for the dear better half to do the ordering but she’s making herself even more beautiful at the moment.

The name I’ve given it – Ginger Pop – will appeal to those of un certain age but don’t let the kiddies get anywhere near it, whatever you do.

GINGER POP

Serves four

Ingredients:

2 fl oz good vodka taken straight from the freezer

1 fl oz Grand Marnier

1 fl oz juice from jar of stem ginger

Good dash of orange bitters

Juice of half a lime

12 black seeded grapes

4 tiny chunks of stem ginger

Chocolate sauce

Caster sugar.

Method:

Place four or five ice cubes in a cocktail shaker

Add the remainder of the ingredients

Shake vigorously

Remove Martini glasses from the fridge where they’ve been chilling

Smear a smudge of chocolate sauce on the base of each glass and attach a grape to each. (This is an idea I got from Nightjar, the fab cocktail bar I wrote about last time.) The thick consistency of the sauce will ensure the grape adheres to it. (I used a yum variety: Chocolate & Orange Fudge Sauce from Fudge Kitchen, a wondrously thick extravagance which you can – not without a certain degree of guilt – eat straight from the jar with a spoon.)

Run a wedge of lime around the edge of each glass then dip it into a saucer of caster sugar

With each of four cocktail sticks pierce a grape followed by a stem ginger fragment then another grape

Pour the liquid into the glasses

Place a fruit-laden cocktail stick into each

Serve.

As is customary, you’d wait until the magical Cocktail Hour of 6pm to serve these (even if I do say so myself) delights. But the clocks spring forward later tonight so we’re going to neck ’em at five o’clock.

Radical, what?!

All things ginger have a deep resonance in certain parts of the country, not least the west of Scotland. You may know someone such as the following... If so, don’t advertise it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7DPZIMr-aM

Maybe it's a big horse...

The London Evening Standard – a free paper owned by a Russian oligarch – boasts that it has its ear to the ground regarding cultural life in the city. 
Yet it has only just discovered (15/03/12) that Londoners – I use the term loosely – love cocktails. 
Where have their staffers been all this while? At fires? Riots? Covering Parliament?
The report in question, too, misses out on possibly the best spot in town.

Nightjar – named after a nocturnal bird with short legs (see above in daylight for a change) – is squeezed between two greasy spoons on the edge of Shoreditch, where the bells once chimed to the tune of "When I am rich". 
When indeed? 
Yet there are plenty of well-off punters around in this neck of the wood, situated within thieving distance of the City.

And inside, it's dark. Really dark. As my picture above shows. 

The bar, unobtrusive until then, opens its double wooden doors at 6pm, aspiring to the ambience of a Chicago 'speak' in the prohibition era. 

All that's missing is for the doorkeep to whisper "Leave your piece at the desk".

Mind you, if you asked that of a thirsty Glaswegian, you might be surprised to discover the punter divesting himself of a jam sandwich instead of a gat.

The cocktails at Nightjar are a wonder, costing about £10 each – and are in abundance. We had – as the pic shows – a White Lady and a Cosmo Roast. Because the lady loves a Cosmopolitan. (God knows what she sees in me.)

My selection wasn't like any White Lady I had ever encountered or even tasted before, but that merely confirmed my opinion that for every cocktail, there are umpteen recipes.

The place sells bar snacks too: decent tapas-style stuff for about £3 a pop. 

We had salmon balls, gorgeous warm bread and olives and feta-stuffed zucchini rolls.

Dulce et decorum est that a salmon should lay down his balls for a hedonist.

From 8pm a small band play selections from the hot jazz days. You know the kind of thing...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxxPP8VMk44&feature=related

I was recommended to visit by a friend who had travelled all the way from Glasgow for one night only just to try it out. He and his companion spent several hours and much mazooma there.
Possibly not to be recommended. The place being so dark, you might end up tumbling into the lap of an oligarch's female companion.
Then you'd be required to give the billionaire and his broad-shouldered телохранители the Possil stare.
That might do it. Might

HEALTH RATHER THAN WEALTH

Well, the doctors are constantly on about it, despite some of them drinking like fish. 

Funny expression that...do fish actually drink the water they swim in? As WC Fields once said – possibly more than once – when explaining why he preferred his whisky without water: "Fish *!+^ in it."

I can't actually write what he said...this is far too upright a forum. And Bill Fields was, as most people will know, infrequently upright.

But to get back to the point – doctors and their ilk are always on at the rest of us to lead a healthy lifestyle. So, in the interests of prolonging healthy life, I've concocted a little something that will put years on you.

No, that's not right...take years off you, I mean.

It's a well-balanced cocktail that has resonances in World War II, during which the wealthy and well connected – some of them spies – carried on in the old fashioned way in London's top hotels as if the only thing that had changed was the lack of a decent butler.

Not for us the Old Fashioned...

Not for us the sumptuous, gin-heavy Gibson or Dry Martini.

Not in this blog episode at any rate.

No, what we're after here is using up the ingredients lying around in the (cocktail) cupboard...waste not want not...a bit of make do and mend in the way of our antecedents – not the idle rich sort.

If you discount the alcohol in it, the drink in question might be regarded as a real tonic, a pick-me-up...something you could munch a couple of before you go to work. Assuming you require to be compos mentis at work, that is. But who wants a job like that?

In my case, I had a few things lying about, items that were beginning – as a very tidy person – to get on my nerves. Items such as a small bottle of apricot brandy, untouched and unanticipated; the dregs of a bottle of triple sec and some five-day old fruit.

There are those who would just have chucked the liquid down the sink and the fruit in the bin, yet being a recycling-minded cove, I put my mind to the test.

What to call it though..? I'll keep thinking as I write. 

Meanwhile – and you'll appreciate the essence of the possibility of an early spring here – the working title:

HEALTH DRINK

Ingredients:

2 fl oz apricot brandy

1 fl oz triple sec

1/2 fl oz Rose's lime juice 

Juice of three clementines

Juice of half lemon

Good dash of orange bitters

Method:

Place four ice cubes in shaker

Add remainder of ingredients

Shake vigorously

Pour into cocktail glasses adorned with slice of fresh lemon

Serves four.

Speaking of the war and the inclusion of clementines reminds me of Winston Churchill and his beloved wife, Clementine, or "Dear Clemmie", as he called her by way of an endearment.

We could call this cocktail, therefore, Dear Clemmie, in memoriam of distant times when things were great for some, crap for the bulk.

Take a peek at the following and you'll be desperate certainly for a wee snifter...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUzQy4mmT3Q

Puttin' on the poor mouth


Off to Paris in a fortnight and had hoped to renew our acquaintance with the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz. 
But the horror, the horror... the old place is being renovated and won't be open when we get there. 
Our charming hostess, Chantal, whose mother once had a drink with Hemingway at the very spot many years ago, will have somewhere else to treat us, I'm sure. I will report on that accordingly.
Mais pour maintenant...

The above publication, not long off the presses chaudes of the Ritz a la Place Vendome, alludes to the fab cocktails that can be savoured there. 
To quote: "It is said that the Hemingway bar makes the best Dry Martini in the world." 
Given that the head barman Colin Field was once voted best barman in the world by Forbes Magazine, that might seem a reasonable assertion. 
Yet it is, as are so many other claims about cocktail recipes, somewhat precious.
What makes a good dry martini after all is pretty damn simple:

• it must be as cold as a mother-in-law's stare
• secure the best gin available
• include two or three olives on a stick...
• and oh, I almost forgot – a passing acquaintance with vermouth is occasionally called for.

And you could replace the olives with les petits oignons and call it a Gibson.
Easy.
Whatever! as the young ones say when they can't think of anything else to say.
Maybe it's just as well we're not going to the Ritz – we're far too poor. At 26 euros for a glass of the house champagne, we might need to remortgage the maison if we fancied a night out there.

The following is what they used to say in the old days...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFabjc6mFk4

Chile for some.

The folks in Chile obviously enjoy their cocktails on the cold side. I just read that a guy with a big truck has been nabbed after chipping five tonnes of ice from a glacier in Patagonia to sell as ice cubes for cocktails. 

"Designer" ice cubes, at that, according to the report.

What the hell is a designer ice cube? Is it still a cube? Is it like a Rubik cube or did someone just cross the Rubicon with this little escapade?

I hope they threw the buce at the thief. Did you spot the anagram there? Or did you just think I'm a bad speller?

You may think the following track is about Chile but you'd be wrong. Jimi Hendrix can't spell either.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_YD8gVV_r8&feature=fvst

On another track...we're going to a hot cocktail spot in London very soon. According to a chum who's been, they serve the most amazing concoctions and there's no shortage of them.

Watch this space.

Another pleasant stop-off for the weary traveller is in Paris. More on that later, too.

Meanwhile, if you fancy a nice cocktail in Bonnie Scotland, do try Oran Mor at the corner of Great Western Road and Byres Road. Those in the picture are a classic champagne cocktail and two mojitos.

Yum, as they say in the West End.

First Christmas

What to do if there are too bloomin' many of you for Christmas? Why, have another one a week earlier. 
Call it First Christmas. 
Don't invite George Michael...he'll only crash the car getting there. 
Never mind Last Christmas - let's celebrate First Christmas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8gmARGvPlI

You'll probably want a decent cocktail to celebrate. These wonderful, polite young gentlemen in the picture seemed to enjoy it...and it's pink!

Pink Christmas Cocktail

Ingredients:
4 fl oz Stolichnaya vodka
1 fl oz Triple Sec
2 fl oz Creme de Cassis
Handful of fresh blueberries
Good dash of orange bitters
Juice of half an orange
Juice of 1 lime
Juice of 1/2 lemon
2 fl oz double cream


Method:
Place the cocktail glasses in the fridge for at least an hour before serving. I use champagne coupes for this cocktail – they're very celebratory, don't you know.
Place all the ingredients, except the cream, in a blender and whizz briskly. Add the cream and whizz for a few seconds.
Remove glasses form fridge. Place a sprig of mint in each glass then balance on the rim a cocktail stick on which a small wedge of orange (skin on) is skewered amid two fresh blueberries on either side.
Dust the surface of each glass with sieved icing sugar.
Serves six (with, hopefully, a little to spare for top-ups)

Suffice to say, don't overdo it. if you were to have too many you might end up seeing things...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=944cPciN-kw

Won by a neck

Race to it.

As Churchill almost said, “Some horse, some neck!”

This cocktail, famous as it may be, looks nothing like a horse’s neck, despite its taxonomy. Yet, as London Cocktail Week fades to a memory, I thought I’d better throw in my tuppence worth with a classic – but with a twist, naturally.

Click on the picture below for a bigger image.

The neck in question is supposedly represented by the curlicue of lemon peel residing in the glass then hanging out over the rim, in the way that a horse’s neck might.

I mean, who thinks these things up?

What you must have, however, is a small but very sharp knife in order to slice the peel off a lemon in one piece. The phrase ‘Don’t try this at home’ should really apply here but not to the rough tough type who enjoy a cocktail.

"Hey, I just did a 12-hour shift down a tin mine" doesn’t cut it, I’m afraid, with the fearless cocktail provider.

“Just drink this Horse’s Neck and give us peace. But wash your bloomin’ hands first!”

Before we start, have a listen to the following track. I know it’s a Stones song but this version is ten times better…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjpa_OYAEpo

Back to business. The classic Horse’s Neck cocktail is not unlike a Rye and Dry, ergo in my own recipe I like to jazz it up un peu.

On no account, entertain any so-called cocktail barman aficionado who, when commissioned to prepare this recipe, shakes his weary head and sneers, “Yes, hmm, but it ain’t a Horse’s Neck.”

Fact is, cocktail recipes change with the winds that blow these so-called aficionados in and out of town. One Horse’s Neck recipe might suggest bourbon as the main ingredient while another would plump for brandy.

So who cares? Be an iconoclast. It’s your personal taste that remains the only concern.

Here we go …

Horse’s Neck

Ingredients

2 fl oz good bourbon (Jack Daniels will do nicely)

8 fl oz ginger ale (a ratio of approximately four to one in favour of the ginger ale works best for my gang)

Juice of 1 lemon (strained)

Juice of 1 small orange (strained)

4 dashes of Angostura bitters

4 ice cubes

Peel of 4 lemons

Method

Place ingredients – NOT the ginger ale –  in a cocktail shaker and give it a vigorous workout.

Pour into a large jug and add the ginger ale.

Into 4 small tumblers, insert the sliced peel of each lemon, allowing the “neck” to hang out. (see picture above). Fill each glass up with more ice cubes then pour in the mixture from the jug.

Serves four but there will probably be enough left for a top-up. Always be prepared, as good Scouts would.

As with other healthy cocktails in my previous posts, this Horse's Neck can count as one of your five a day.

With trends like these, who needs enemas?

Do not, most definitely, try the following at home …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2Z6eJOrP_Q