Food History

The only alcohol in my day has been the last bit of blackberry liqueur I drank so I could wash the jar and make way for the medlar liqueur. I think I need more pretty bottles. They can wait, though, since nothing else will be decantable for a few months.

I still have two drinks to test, but won’t be able to do them till Wednesday or Thursday night. I’m in teaching mode now, and can’t inflict drink-induced fatigue on my students. Well, I could, but there would be a wrongness to it.

To make up, I thought you might like the highlights of some of the other testing that has come my way. It’s only highlights, because both Mary from LA and Nicole Murphy have given so much detail in their reports that it would be giving the recipe away if I posted the whole email. You still have to wait until October for the very best of the recipes.

Mary has reported on two drinks and has just one to go. She had male help for the first drink, but they maybe couldn’t take the pace, because they weren’t around for the second.

The opinions on that first drink:

“I would order this drink in a bar, at least every now and then. Steve liked it better than a conventional martini (although, to be fair, he’s not the world’s most enthusiastic martini fan!). Andrew said it was a bit too sweet for him, but then he doesn’t care much for sweets in general.

Our rating: Pretty good — 3 1/2 out of 5 stars. Could go up to 4 or higher with minor modifications as suggested above.”

The second drink was Crème de Menthe-based and Mary says of it “Good, but I think I still like creme de menthe best in hot cocoa.” I need to try that, when the weather gets really cold.

Nicole ran into some troubles with ingredients (as did everyone – brands and exact tastes change over 90 years): she pointed out that rye whiskey is “not something you get at Liquourland.” She did her homework (as did everyone else – I love this team of testers – they work things out and all I have to do is nod sagely and report the results) and discovered that the whiskey she could get wasn’t quite as dry as rye would have been.

“Knowing that, I have to say this is a nice cocktail made with bourbon, but I wouldn’t want it any dryer. It’s pretty bloody dry as it is - Tim took one mouthful and thrust the rest of the glass at me with a screwed up face. The first mouthful for me was interesting, in the way the first mouthful of a martini is interesting - it realigns your tastebuds and there’s a moment of wondering whether it’s worth it. But then you have the second mouthful, and the third, and by the end of the glass you’re well and truly ready for the second. I liked this so much I made it up again a few nights later. You’ll need a dryish cocktail for people with that taste, and this is a nice one.”

The other was a washout, or, in Nicole’s words “I can’t see this one being nice at all.”

Two out of four progress for more tasting. At this stage I have absolutely no idea how we get the list to a manageable size. I’m just going to have to hope that my cute little form and a mid-winter tasting party will magically produce results. I’ve given up on the drink so fine that everyone will chase the bartender until they obtain it, by the way. Unless someone pulls a rabbit out of a hat, it might not exist. Or if it does exist, it might have raw egg again, and I’ve been advised against using the recipes with raw egg in.