This month I have been commissioned by my Curatorial Overlords at the CSOWG to recommend some curl-up-by-the-fire reading. Naturally, we operate under the assumption that this includes a cat (or dog) dozing at your feet, a crocheted afghan on your lap and a piping hot toddy next to your low-burning reading lamp. If not, I hope that you at least get a toddy to keep you warm.

Speaking for myself, generally reading involves a lot of fantasy/sci-fi/horror and non-fiction. Understanding that most people do not share my proclivities, I combed my shelves looking for books I love which are not centered on monsters, time travel, outer space, supernatural deities, ghosts, history, art, architecture or mythology. It left quite a hole in my library, but I was happy to find that two of my favorite novels fit the bill. Both kept me awake nights in my hurry to read them, so I hope you find them as compelling. (Given that everyone I know who’s read them had the same response, the chances are good.)

The Secret History
The first novel by Donna Tartt, friend and contemporary of Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho and Less Than Zero), is the story of Richard Papen, student of ancient Greek at a small college in New England. (It does contain history and mythology, but that is definitely not the focus of the story.) Having abandoned his family in California for a more academic life he is drawn into a circle of friends, also Greek scholars, who are exceptionally bright, wealthy and privileged—and keeping some very terrible secrets. Suspenseful, intelligent and witty, this is the book I recommend to everyone who asks me for a recommendation.

The City & The City
Chine Miéville is my favorite living author. He is most well known for writing fantasy (his first novel of the Bas-Lag series, Perdido Street Station, is the best novel I’ve read in ten years), but his newest book The City & The City is a crime novel, his ode to Raymond Chandler. A murdered woman is found on the outskirts of Beszel, a fictional city that resembles Communist eastern Europe, and veteran Inspector Borlú is sent to investigate. The course of the inquiry takes him through Beszel to the border of its sister city, Ul Qoma, divided arbitrarily and bitterly from each other and policed by an invisible boogeyman known as Breach. That’s about all I can tell you without explaining too much, but if you like whodunits this is an excellent one.

Erik Ellestad is a blogger and bartender at Heaven’s Dog in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also the brain behind the Stompin’ the Savoy project.

One of the most common questions I get when friends and acquaintances find out about the Savoy Cocktail Book Project is, “Why?”

After these few years of making cocktail after cocktail, I have to admit I sometimes wonder the same thing.

To start from the beginning…

While planning a trip to New Orleans, I’d run across Chuck Taggart’s article about the Sazerac on his site Gumbo Pages. The level of detail and elaborate ritual involved for such a seemingly simple cocktail appealed significantly to my obsessive nature.

1. Chill the cocktail glass with ice.
2. Stir the whiskey, bitters, and syrup with ice.
3. Discard the ice from the cocktail glass.
4. Dash absinthe into the glass and swirl to coat.
5. Discard most of the Absinthe.
6. Strain the chilled whiskey into the glass.
7. Squeeze a lemon peel over the glass and serve.

When executed well, it is an amazing drink that completely eclipses every one of its component ingredients.

So when we went to New Orleans, we went on a bit of a Sazerac quest, asking for them at most of the bars we got to. While we got a few really good Sazeracs, most were just not quite as tasty as the ones I had been making at home.

That made me curious. What if the same was true for other cocktails?

What usually happens when I get curious about things is I get a bit obsessed. I read every thing I can find on the subject. I participate actively in online forums on the subject. I post questions to the same forums. In general, I stuff as much of the subject as I can find into my brain until it can hold no more.

As I’ve mentioned before, this has happened many times in the past. With Comic Books, Jazz Music, Computer Games, Computer Hardware, Cooking, Gardening, Botany, and now Cocktails.

But even after all that, I was still really only making the same few cocktails. Old Fashioneds, Manhattans, Sazeracs, and Margaritas. There was a whole world of cocktails out there that I didn’t know and hadn’t tasted. How would I familiarize myself with more of them? Where should I start?

Fortunately, Ted Haigh’s book, “Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails,” was published about this time, pointing a way towards both culinary and historical research into cocktails. Not to mention a gold mine of information regarding the historically appropriate ingredients to make those classic cocktails with.

About this time another participant on the eGullet.org Spirits and Cocktails forums started posting occasionally about obscure recipes he found in an edition of Patrick Gavin Duffy’s “Official Mixer’s Manual”. At the same time, another friend decided to familiarize himself with cooking by attempting to make all the recipes, in order, from a copy of “Joy of Cooking”.

The idea of making cocktails from one or another book, not haphazardly, but systematically and sequentially kind of appealed. It certainly wasn’t as quixotic as attempting to make all the recipes from the “Joy of Cooking”.

I scanned through my bookshelf, looking at the spines. From the start, I knew I wanted to do a vintage book, not a modern edition. I wanted to get back to the origins of modern cocktails. Delightful gentleman, though they are, Wondrich, Haigh, Regan, and DeGroff were thus out of the running.

Looking at what remained, four stood out: Jerry Thomas’ “The Bartender’s Guide”, “The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book”, Charles Baker’s “Gentleman’s Companion”, and “The Savoy Cocktail Book”.

Jerry Thomas, at the time, just seemed too far in the past. Similarly, there seemed to be just too many defunct ingredients in the Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book. Charles Baker was very, very tempting, but his recipes seemed like they would be too much of a pain to transcribe and interpret. Besides, what few cocktails of his I had made, had never turned out all that well, without some serious massaging.

That left “The Savoy Cocktail Book”. In its favor, it didn’t seem to have all that many defunct ingredients, a modest variety of ingredients, most recipes were easy to read, and the cocktails were listed purely alphabetically, rather than by ingredient or some other categorical system.

In the deficit category, according to the back of the book, it contained 750 cocktail recipes. Even making one or two cocktails a day, this was going to take a while.

I mentioned the idea to some of the powers that were at eGullet.org and got a warm reception and some interest.

Well, then…

Not being one to shirk a challenge, on June 8^th, 2006, with a cocktail called “The Abbey,” I took the plunge and posted the first cocktail and picture to a topic I called, “Stomping Through the Savoy: A to Zed.”

The Rules:

• Make the recipes in order.
• Make the recipes as written.
• Try to get as close to the original ingredients as possible.
• Take a picture of every cocktail.
• Do some research into the cocktail’s name, history or ingredients
• Don’t drink yourself to death.

Make the Recipes in Order
Being, by nature, a rather disorganized and undisciplined person, it’s often tough for me to submit to systems. In fact, more often than not, I find myself, even when I think I am behaving, subconsciously subverting rules through selective memory. If I just picked out random recipes and made those, I’d never get done with this book. I’ll plod through, one after another, as best I can. I am hard headed enough to follow through to the bitter end, once I get started.

Make the Recipes as Written

I have a small problem following recipes to the letter. No matter what, I always think there is some small thing that I can tweak to make them “Better”.

Probably this is partly a line cook’s attitude. For a line cook, there usually aren’t recipes. There are ingredients, your execution, and taste. There are no “This pasta has 1 tsp of garlic, ½ tsp of pepper flakes, ½ tsp of salt, and ½ cup tomatoes.” When you’re trained, it’s all visual. “The pasta has this much of this, a pinch of that, a scoop of that. It should taste like this. OK, you make it.”

When I first started making cocktails, I guess I thought there would be some sort of transference of ability. I could just start screwing around with cocktail recipes and be able to tweak them for the better without really knowing what I was making. At about the time I started The Savoy Project, I was beginning to realize how little I knew and how much I needed to learn. My portion sizes were ridiculous, I didn’t understand the qualities different spirits brought to drinks, or even how much difference a simple change of brands of spirits could make in a simple cocktail. I did understand it was important to use fresh juices and quality spirits, but that only gets you so far. What better way to learn than to submit to a higher authority and just make the recipes?

Try to Get As Close to the Original Recipes as Possible

Initially I interpreted recipes pretty literally. Only using traditional spirits, rather than modern styles. Trying to locate Cuban Rum for where Bacardi was called for. Using Canadian Whiskey where Canadian Club was called for. Only using old school gins from England.

But the more you learn, the more that seems to become a waste of time.

For instance, when you start researching recipes, you discover how much substitution was already going on. That almost every Savoy recipe calling for Canadian Club, originally called for Rye or Bourbon. It was only because of Prohibition and the limited availability of American Whiskies, that the Savoy bartenders substituted Canadian Club.

When I talk about “lost” ingredients now, I like to divide them into three categories.

1)Those no longer made, like Crème Yvette, Hercules, Caperitif, and a few others. For some of these we really don’t even have a clue what they might have tasted like.

2)Those which are still made, but are difficult to get. When I started in 2006, this was a much larger category than it is today in 2009. Absinthe, Pimento Dram, Crème de Violette, Swedish Punsch, and Old Tom Gin were all in this category. All could pretty much only be gotten by expensive mail order or by traveling to where they were made. Today, I am told, there are 53 Absinthes alone either on the market or waiting for TTB approval.

3)Those which are still made, but whose current formulation differs so radically from their vintage character that they may no longer be suitable for the recipes or cocktails originally created for them. This is always a grey area, but really the most vexing of the three categories. For example, many cocktail in the Savoy Cocktail Book call for something called, “Kina Lillet”. Is the character of modern Lillet Blanc really even close to Kina Lillet? Signs point to, “no”. The same with many ingredients, even those as simple as French and Italian Vermouths.

Take a Picture of Every Cocktail

I never try to get the most beautiful picture, or even the most beautiful garnish or glassware when taking pictures of my drinks. If I have any goal, it is either to capture some transient quality of a freshly made drink, or just to try to take a picture that presents a drink in a way that I’ve never seen before. Light glinting off the orange oils which I have just sprayed across the surface or the slight foam caused by a vigorous shake. But most of the time it is just to take an unvarnished and real picture. This is what the drink looks like. Not a glossy shot for a magazine.

Do Some Research into the Cocktails, Name, Recipe, or Ingredients

The Savoy Cocktail Book is a terse recipe book. Basically just lists of ingredients and the instructions, “Shake well and strain into cocktail glass.” If this journey is going to be interesting to me or the readers, part of it is going to have to be filling in those blank spaces between the names, ingredients, and recipes.

Researching ingredients has been among the most fun things. Particularly my little obsession with the nature of Hercules, proved to be of some value to the cocktail community. When I started making Savoy recipes, everyone agreed with Stan Jones, that Hercules was an “Absinthe Substitute” of some sort. At my prodding, and stubbornness, we uncovered that the commonly held assumption was completely wrong. We still don’t know exactly what it might have tasted like, but at least we now know it wasn’t an Absinthe Substitute, but an aperitif wine fortified with Yerba Mate.

For me, though, some of the most fun has been researching cocktail names. To find out who a Barney Barnato, Gene Tunney, or Odd McIntyre might have been. To turn up some clue as to why their name might have been honored or ridiculed with a cocktail. To gain some small insight into the culture and time that the book was written. Not to be over dramatic, but sometimes it does feel a bit like time travel, to discover these facts and try to taste the character of the time in the drink.

Don’t Drink Yourself to Death

750, or as it turns out 888, cocktails is a lot of drinking, and I’m far to cheap to throw out just about any crazy mixture I have concocted. As the folks at Burrito Eater say, “The site’s called ‘Burrito Eater’, not ‘Burrito Taster’”.

On the other hand, there are days when I don’t even feel like drinking alcohol, let alone fix up some liqueur laden complex early Twentieth Century cocktail. In addition, my obsession with beverages stretches across just about every species of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverage. From Straight Whiskey to First Flush Darjeeling Tea.

If I want to come out of this enterprise with some small sliver of a liver and a brain, some moderation is necessary.

As the project developed and I did some experiments on my own tolerance and ability to photograph and blog, about 5 Savoy cocktails a week turned out to be a good balance between sanity and the abyss. That compromise has pushed the duration of the project out a bit further temporally than I initially intended. So it goes.

So, really, “Why?”

Initially just curiosity. As the project continued and other’s interest developed, it soon reached a point where there really was no choice not to continue. Even taking a small break, as I have been for the last couple months, has gotten me some quizzical emails. “What is up with the Savoy Stomp?”

To answer their questions in the affirmative, “The Stomp Goes On!”

A FEW HINTS FOR THE YOUNG MIXER

1. Ice is nearly always an absolute essential for any Cocktail.
2. Never use the same ice twice.
3. Remember that the ingredients mix better in a shaker rather larger than is necessary to contain them.
4. Shake the shaker hard as you can : don’t just rock it : you are trying to wake it up, not send it to sleep!
5. If possible, ice your glasses before using them.
6. Drink your Cocktail as soon as possible. Harry Craddock was once asked what was the best way to drink a Cocktail : “Quickly,” replied that great man, “while it is laughing at you!”

Thanks to some of my compatriots in the CSOWG for help on this post. Gabe from cocktainerd for invaluable editorial input and Blair from TraderTiki’s Booze Blog for cleaning up what seemed to me to be a hopeless morass of MS Word HTML.

Cherry Heering has been produced in Denmark since 1818 to an original secret recipe handed down through five generations, and is the original “Cherry Brandy.”

The cherries – a special strain of cherry is used – the small, dark Stevens Cherry which has been evolved from an ancient variety still to be found growing wild in parts of Denmark, are pressed together with stones to create a unique cherry taste, and then placed in wooden casks with more spirit added together with spices. No artificial flavours or colouring is used. In order to ensure that the rich taste of the cherries is maximized, the blend needs to rest and circulate for several months. 3-5 years later the product will be bottled.

As i really love cherries it isn`t hard for me to like this product especially since it really is of a very good quality. I find the taste just sweet enough, its deep,warm and rounded with a very pleasant cherry flavor. It`s an essential ingredient in the Singapore Sling and Blood and Sand cocktails. And Blood and Sand is a cocktail which is a favorite of mine, so here it is :

BLOOD AND SAND

This drink has got its name from the film starring Rudolf Valentino as a bullfighter,in 1922. Its served at Tiki Ti with a top pouring of tequila while the crowd led by one of the Mikes yells toro toro tooooorooo..

I wanted to try that (the tequila part) but if I sit here at home yelling toro, toro, toro while pouring a drink I`m not sure how the people here would react. I could be thrown out head first.

For my Blood and Sand I decided to try my Yamazaki 10, wonderfully inspired by my friend Chris who used Yamazaki 12 in his version of this drink. And blood oranges…I just love them! and of course I want to use them as much as I can while they still are in season.

* 1 ounce Yamazaki 10
* 1 ounce fresh-squeezed blood-orange juice
* ¾ ounce Cherry Heering
* ¾ ounce sweet vermouth
* splash tequila

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Top with a little splash of tequila. Garnish with pineapple and a brandied cherry.

It tasted great with the Yamazaki and the tequila topping, very interesting. I will definetily make more of these. For garnish I used a pineapple/brandied cherry garnish lazily strewn on top of the foam, mmmm…

Inspired by Blood and Sand i made another little cocktail that i call Cherry and Sand which also was a part of the float themed TDN a while ago.

CHERRY AND SAND

1 oz Bourbon
1 oz dark Jamaican rum
¾ oz Cherry Heering
0.5 tsp simple syryp
Top with Lemon Soda
Float Lemon Hart 151

Shake over ice and servi with crushed ice in a highball glass, garnish with fresh mint.

To round it up i made a tiki drink, a version of the Aloha cocktail:

ALOHA COCKTAIL #2

This cocktail is based on the Aloha cocktail page 55 in Sippin Safari.The original recipe uses 151 Bacardi rum and light Puerto Rican rum. I switched the Angostura bitters for their orange bitters, used hibiscus grenadine and upped the orange juice to 1 oz from 0.5. Apart from that its the same recipe as in the book.

0.5 oz white rum
0.5 oz JWray overproof
1.0 oz fresh orange juice
0.5 oz fresh lime juice
1/4 oz Cherry Heering
0.5 oz hibiscus grenadine
2 dashes Angostura orange bitters

Shake and strain into a ice filled glass. Garnish cherry and pineapple leaves or pineapple slice. This cocktail went down way too easily, its really tasty.

The story of Mud Puddle Books is the story of Greg Boehm. Greg was born , a poor black child into a family that published Salvatore Calabrese’s cocktail books under the Sterling Publishing label. “Each year I would go to London a few times and inevitably spend my evening sitting at his bar when he was at the Library Bar at the Lanesborough Hotel,” said Greg. “As my interest in cocktails grew, I started collecting old cocktail books. This was about 10 years ago.” Sitting across Salvatore Calabrese’s bar and learning the art and reward of fine drink would light a passion in the most stolid and steadfast of us, and, in Greg’s case, his passion took the form of locating, and collecting, one-by-one, the lost spirits and recipes for which he’d begun his exploration at the appropriately named Library Bar.

“The internet helped in tracking down these ingredients and recipes could be found for the ingredients that were not commercially available. My book collection grew steadily….When I finally gathered all the books in one place there were close to 2,000 books from 1940 and earlier. Now my collecting madness includes innumerable bottles of long discontinued booze.”

Then, something changed. Suddenly, Creme de Violette, Pimento Dram, and other long-forgotten cocktail ingredients, so many of which are required to faithfully reproduce the recipes in the vintage tomes Greg had assembled, began appearing on the market. And, likewise, a burgeoning community of cocktail enthusiasts were publishing, and promoting, recipes for lost liqueurs and spirits on the Internet and in mainstream magazines such as Imbibe. And Greg was sitting on an accidental Alexandrian Library of the Cocktailian Arts. “In other words, the books were now a living history and part of the cocktail renaissance that was in full force. And, once I decided to republish the books, they had to be as accurate as possible.”

But, how would the purists, the collectors who had been using out-of-print cocktail books as a commodity for trading as collector’s items, and the general reader receive these reprints? Fortunately, because these are not mere “reprints” but faithful reproductions of the original works, down to the paper’s weight, the book’s binding, the typeface, the embossing and imprints, and the dimensions, they have been widely welcomed. “The cocktailian community has been incredibly supportive of Mud Puddle’s cocktail book publishing program,” confides Greg with a mixture of pride and relief. “It has been incredible to see bartenders across the world re-creating old drinks and also creating new ones based on the old recipes form the books [and,] for the most part, cocktail book collectors are happy with the reproductions…luckily for [them], the reproductions seem to actually have increased the value of the originals. Perhaps more people are aware of the old books now.”

And so, from “Barflies and Cocktails,” a book in which Greg had to find, “…a printer that was wiling to go the extra step [of using] 3-piece binding that is never used today,” to “The Modern Bartender’s Guide” which has the original “blind stamping” on the front and back Greg has brought us Mud Puddle Books’ Cocktail Kingdom. The original books to publish were selected through the best possible means imaginable, “Bartender and fellow cocktail book collector from London, Jeff Masson and I sat down with David Wondrich and Ted Haigh at the French 75 bar in New Orleans during Tales of the Cocktail to discuss what books to publish next.” This organic process of selecting and reproducing classic and vintage books has been a boon for cocktail enthusiasts interested in the first recorded recipe for Parfait Amour as well as the casual reader wanting to enter into the world of better drinking with books such as Robert Hess’ “Essential Bartender’s Guide.”

In fact, so flexible and open-ended are Greg’s pursuits for the next cocktail classic reproduction that he relates how his latest project came about in this way:

“Mud Puddle is a small company and we are all very hands-on. It would be difficult to be as flexible as we are if the company was larger. For example, while in the Mixoloseum chat room last week it was suggested that we should republish “The South American Gentleman’s Companion” by Charles Baker. And, we started working on the project the very next day. Sterling Publishing was a much larger company and while we published cocktail books, they were a tiny part of the business. “

Greg freely confesses that it’s “by some miracle” that the Cocktail kingdom endeavor has stayed afloat. I highly recommend any of the beautiful reproductions but especially Embury’s “Fine Art of Mixing Drinks“, Jerry Thomas’ classic “The Bartender’s Guide: How to Mix Drinks: A Bon Vivant’s Companion” and Charlie Paul’s “Recipes of American and Other Iced Drinks“. Between these three vintage books you will find yourself immersed in the language and history of the American Cocktail and can appreciate its history, colorful contribution to culture, and keep yourself mired in long lost flavors for as long as your heart, and your curious mind, desire. Just be sure to keep the miracle alive and start building your collection today. You won’t be sorry.

Some times, I so want a book (or a spirit) to be one thing that I can’t help but feel disappointed when it is something else, no matter how good it is at being what it really is.

Artisanal Cocktails by Scott Beattie

This is how I feel about Scott Beattie’s Artisanal Cocktails: Drinks Inspired by the Seasons from the Bar at Cyrus. I really want this book to be an instruction manual, a guide on how to blend different fresh tastes and local ingredients into a unique cocktail.

That’s not what it is. It’s a beautiful, coffee-table quality cocktail recipe book. It’s a showcase of Beattie’s ability to fashion beautiful and delicious drinks from local ingredients. Unfortunately, it elides the journey he took to get to each drink.

Scott Beattie is bar manager at Cyrus Restaurant. As he states in his introduction, Cyrus is compared with Thomas Keller’s French Laundry. He felt challenged to create a drink menu that rose to that standard. He had the backing of the management to use local, fresh ingredients and high quality spirits, as long as he stayed on budget.

Artisanal Cocktails documents many of the results of that journey. Organized by season, he lists several of his greatest hits on the Cyrus cocktail menu.

Drinks such as the Lotus Potion, which includes Hangar One mandarin orange vodka, freshly squeeze orange juice and Meyer lemon juice, Chinese five-spice syrup, and is then garnished with orange foam, a lotus root chip, and rosemary blossoms. Even if what you are served on site is half as beautiful as the photograph, it will be a feast for the eyes, and the descriptions makes it sound delicious.

And there’s the rub. Beattie’s focus on local, fresh ingredients make me despair that I can ever recreate this cocktail at home. Yes, he includes the recipes for the lotus root chips and orange foam. But they are involved processes, including the suggestion of using a dehydrator for the lotus chips. Each molecular mixology ingredient seems to take hours. The foam recipes to provide enough for 20 or so drinks, but that’s a lot of investment to try out a recipe that I may not like.

And in most cases, I would be having to use replacements and less fresh ingredients. I live in the Pacific Northwest, where citrus doesn’t exactly thrive. Sure, I’ll be using California citrus, but mine will be shipped in on trucks, while Beattie can buy his from the grower or pick from tress near the restaurant.

Most of the recipes call for specific Bay Area liquors that I can’t get through my state’s control board stores without special orders. And it’s hard to ignore the sense that these are highly honed recipes, designed to work with the specific liquors when named, to the determent of any substitution.

There’s a lot to like about this book. In addition to the cocktails, it is full of excellent techniques for making syrups, foams, and even pickling liquid.

Yet I sorely miss the section I wish was there. Beattie refers in his introduction to the amount of time he spent in experimentation, both when he first started trying to create great cocktails in general, and then for Cyrus specifically.

I wish he’d detail that experience, and what he learned. It’s one thing to see the final product. But I’d like to hear what he learned from the failures. I’d like to see his ideas on why the final drinks work, and what didn’t work in experiments to get there. That’s the sort of information I need to take these recipes and modify them to my needs, to use them for inspiration for my own creations.

I feel the absence of this missing information the most when I come across several standard cocktail recipes that were included. Beattie’s take on the Margarita, Cuba Libre, and Gin and Tonic really doesn’t contribute to my understanding of these drinks or his techniques. They seem to be there to pad out the page count to something more convenient for the printing process. So why not, instead, include expository about the drinks he did invent?

I know I will refer to this book, and try several of the techniques. I bet I will learn from this book, and make better drinks as a result. I may even learn a thing or two that will improve my own processes for inventing new drinks and using local ingredients.

And yet I can’t shake the disappointment that I will probably have to learn through making many of the same mistakes Beattie made himself. While there’s a lot to be said for learning from experience, there’s more to be said for a teacher who lets you learn from his.

___________________________________________________

Stevi Deter is a cocktail ingenue who writes at Two at the Most.