cocktail review no. 46 - Sazerac

Now here's an interesting one.

Miss H and I were wandering around Victoria Gardens the other day. (It's this marvelous outdoor shopping mall down in Rancho Cucamonga.) Over on the southwest side we noticed a shop we hadn't seen before, called Anthropologie. We wandered in. Lots of scuffed wood, dry grass, pottery, and other nature-inspired décor; we assumed it was one of those places whose clothing line was designed to make everyone believe the wearer to be a famous explorer on safari in East Africa or Australia, but instead reveal on closer inspection that he or she is in fact dressed in designer labels for an afternoon out.

Nonetheless we felt the place worth checking out. Full-length linen dresses in blue or beige, trimmed in beads...straw sun hats, pre-weathered...a wicker deck chair, couch-size, with silhouetted antelopes growing out the back...blue china plates with a stylized octopus...

Ah. Here we go. This is more like it.

I found a book propped on a nicked coffee table called Vintage Cocktails.

I opened it up and found the table of contents. There were a few dozen familiar names, listed side-by-side with libations I'd never heard of in any bar, club or mixology handbook: things like "Pimm's Cup," "French 75," "Mary Pickford," and "Agave Gingerita."

Author Brian Van Flandern and photographer Laziz Hamani have, apparently, created a rough-and-ready go-to guide for all the classic highballs and mixers that ever got wildly popular or well-known at some point in American history. There was a picture in the front of the book depicting Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart and some other heavy hitters standing at the bar, knocking back a few examples. Some concoction among these might have been the preferred tipple of Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra.

I was intrigued, let me tell you.
So I started leafing through it. Laziz Hamani should be put up in bronze, along with whoever mixed the drinks he shot (so to speak). Each full-page photo was jaw-dropping and mouth-watering; each cocktail looked good enough to dive into. The recipe (on the opposite page from the accompanying photo) was uniquely laid out too. Rather than a dull typeset font or a trite quotation or a humdrum backstory, the ingredient list and step-by-step preparation were laid out with a minimum of fuss, in giant letters, apparently written with the nearest box of crayons.

Many of them I was familiar with, due to prior interest in the pantheon of time-honored cocktails: the Bloody Mary, Cape Codder, Brandy Crusta, Between the Sheets, Moscow Mule...

And then I saw it.

Sazerac.

Now, I'd seen that name many a time in The Bartender's Bible. It was hidden up near the front of the book, at the tail end of the chapter on bourbon. Odd name. As you may have guessed, it's French. The Sazerac was first mixed around 1850 at the Merchant's Exchange bar in New Orleans, mostly likely by owner Aaron Bird, using a brand of cognac (also called Sazerac) imported by the Exchange's previous owner, Sewell T. Taylor. The original recipe called for one and a half ounces of Sazerac cognac, a quarter-ounce of Herbsaint, one cube of sugar, three dashes of bitters and a lemon peel. (Legend has it that a local druggist down the block, Antoine Amedie Peychaud, mixed up the bitters; on occasion Peychaud himself is credited with the invention of the Sazerac.) Later, due to an epidemic that devastated France's grapes, rye whiskey was substituted for cognac. In one old-fashioned glass, ice was packed; in a second glass the sugar and bitters were muddled, and the whiskey was added. The ice was then discarded from the first glass and the Herbsaint was poured in and swirled to coat the interior; then the excess was discarded. The rye/sugar/bitters mixture was then added to the coated glass (along with ice, if desired) and garnished with the lemon peel.

It's a tricky drink to compile, as you can tell. (Herbsaint?) In The Bartender's Bible,  orange peel, Ricard (anise-flavored liqueur) and Peychaud's bitters are listed among the ingredients. Vintage Cocktails, however, had it differently. Peychaud's bitters was still a factor, but absinthe could be used rather than Picard or Herbsaint. In fact, certain research suggests that the Sazerac was originally made with absinthe; Herbsaint was substituted when absinthe was outlawed in the United States some years ago.

Absinthe, eh?

I just happened to have a bottle of Czech-made absinthe sitting in my liquor cabinet at home.

This was getting more and more interesting all the time. A whiskey cocktail with absinthe, bitters, sugar, and an orange-peel garnish! I could only imagine what it tasted like. I had to admit to myself that I'd begun the long slide into jaded indifference in the realm of cocktail-drinking. I've mixed so many and sampled so much that many libations are beginning to taste the same to me. There's a great deal of variation on a select theme in the world of hooch. These days it's hard to come by a drink that tastes nothing like anything you've ever had before.

Well, this was it. Here, then, culled from the best bits of The Bartender's Bible and Vintage Cocktails, is the Sazerac I've thrown together.

• 1 teaspoon absinthe
• ½ teaspoon superfine sugar
• 1 teaspoon water
• 2 dashes Peychaud's bitters
• 2 ounces bourbon
• 1 orange peel

Pour the absinthe into an old-fashioned glass and swirl to coat the insides of the glass. Discard any excess. Add the sugar, water, and bitters, and muddle with the back of a teaspoon. Fill the glass halfway with ice and add the whiskey. Garnish with the orange peel.

That there may be no speculation, I used regular ol' Angostura bitters; Mata Hari Bohemian Absinthe; Old Crow bourbon (my favorite); and some simple syrup I'd prepared beforehand. It made the muddling rather pointless but I did it anyway. I'd still recommend Peychaud's bitters above all else; it has a lighter, fruitier element to it, more suitable for our purposes.

Oh, and one other thing: I didn't discard the "excess."

Heh heh. Life's too short to skimp on stuff like that. I figured since there'd be a whopping four ounces of bourbon in, I'd better keep what absinthe I had and liven things up a little, right?

I knew I was going to wind up with something different, but the reality of it took me by surprise. Having nearly despaired of the cough-syrup redolence of the bourbon/bitters combo, I was pleasantly surprised at the way it meshed with the rest of the conspiring flavors in this beverage. While the sugar keeps the mixture from being too bitter (for after all, Old Crow and Angostura form a powerful team), the bourbon still has its full sway, providing the nose and the bouquet and (partially) the finishing sting.

The aftertaste is what this drink's all about. I'm glad I left the absinthe in. The anise flavor comes on strong just after the bourbon passes over the taste buds, allying itself with the sugar to lend a sweet licorice undertone to the Sazerac. You mightn't think licorice would mix well with bourbon, but it does. To whatever extent the absinthe is not disguised by the bourbon overture, it melds seamlessly with the whiskey and then adds its own kick at the end. The sugar and bitters create a delicate balance and the orange peel rounds the experience off with a citrus interlude that complements the anise rather well. All in all, it's a smooth and flavorful cocktail with a sumptuous bouquet and a sweet-spicy kick at the end. 

Try it, and raise a glass to Jimmy Stewart or Dino. And buy Vintage Cocktails. Right now. Go do it. You won't regret it. It's as much art as a recipe book.

singing in a house with plaster walls

When I was a kid I had a big book full of Aesop's immortal fables. Forget everything you know about sour grapes and golden eggs. This book had every fable the man ever wrote in it. Fables that never would've made it into a fifth-grade classroom or a kid's television program: fables which dealt with nasty things like grave robbery, diarrhea, big scary lions, crucifixion, shipwrecks, exploding frogs, and the like.

I loved that book. I sure wish I knew where it was. I'd probably get an even bigger kick out of it now than I did back then. It was unabridged, you see. It wasn't really a kid's book. Some dry wit had translated it right out of Greek in a clipped, academic fashion. Many's the time I had to stop and look up a word, or puzzle my way through a rather sinuous turn of phrase. But I understood most of it. Each page had the full text of a fable printed on it, and, italicized underneath, the moral. There were some fables which didn't pass muster, of course. Aesop believed that people's personalities could be judged from their physical appearance, and as we all know, that just ain't true (except in Disney movies). But most of them taught good common sense, and demonstrated it in a rather captivating way, which is why I was so hooked.

The very first fable in that little book was one I didn't heed at the time, because I hadn't yet realized its relevance. Later on, though, it came back to me, and it's recurred to me again and again over the years. Particularly now, as I shall tell you. But first, the fable. I'm afraid I don't remember what it was called. But it went something like this:

There was once a talentless singer who used to practice in a house with heavily plastered walls, which amplified the sound so much that the fellow imagined that he had a first-rate voice. But when he went up on stage to perform, he sang so badly that the audience chased him off the stage with catcalls and vegetables.

And so we see that the disparity between how good we think we are and how good we actually are is often greater than we care to admit.

That wasn't the moral. The moral in the book was shorter and more profound. But you get the gist, right? Seems like every time I read something new, my eyes get opened to a new aspect of writing—and invariably, I hope to incorporate it into my own scribbles. William Faulkner has drawn my attention to the most debilitating defect of my current novel (and my new WIP, second in the series): Voice. The voice in my writing bothers me. It's so...remote. Third-person omniscient the P.O.V. may be, but as everyone from Jules Verne to J.K. Rowling to Douglas Adams to Mark Twain has proven, you can write in third person and still have a personal, lively, engaging voice. My novel manuscripts are anything but. The writing is sterile. Formal. Distant. Puerile, too. It's as intimate as a chastity belt, as approachable as a porcupine.

I suspect this is the chief reason why I'm having such difficulty writing this second book, and why I had such tremendous difficulty with the first, which, as I've mentioned, went through something like 27 versions and took four years to complete. I'm not having fun when I'm writing this crap.

Say, this reminds me of a song. Namely, Frank Sinatra on "I Get a Kick Out of You":

My story is much too sad to be told,
But practically everything leaves me totally cold.
The only exception I know is the case,
When I'm out on a quiet spree,
Fighting vainly the old ennui...

The story is good; the premise is there; heck, the dialogue could be worse. Even the tone is starting to shape up. But the voice is awful. There's nothing there, no spark, no flash, no touch, no soul-to-soul resuscitation. Everything's leaving me totally cold, and I find myself, once again, "fighting vainly the old ennui."

I've got to fix this. I'm not getting a kick out of my writing. I need to relax and write the way I feel like, and worry about how it sounds later. I've got to settle back, get down to basics again, just have fun with the process of creating. Faulkner reminded me of that. Granted, The Reivers is told in first person, but still—the way it's written literally sucks me into the story. It gets me engaged, makes me a part of the world I'm reading about.

A little while ago, I read a quote on The Sharp Angle from an author who figures his (or her) writing is good because he (or she) becomes immersed in the tale he's (or she's) telling. It feels like the characters are real, and that sincerity comes across to the audience. Maybe that was that ancient Greek singer's problem. He wasn't sincere enough. He thought he sounded good bouncing off the plaster walls, but up on stage, it was a whole different ballgame.

I need to muster up some sincerity. You should, too, if you're writing. If you like what you're doing and (even more importantly) know what you're talking about, it'll come through in the writing, and you'll have a decent work on your hands. That's my other problem: ignorance. I've got some research I really have to do, quite a bit for both novels—historical research. I need to know a little bit more about what Wild Bill Hickok did with himself before he became a sheriff in Abilene—namely, his days of scouting and trailblazing. I need to know a little bit more about Nitenryu, the two-blade style of swordsmanship which the great Japanese duelist Miyamoto Musashi practiced. I've got a lot I need to find out about the ancient Akkadians. What they wore, the weapons they used in battle, just exactly how their subjugation of Sumer went, that kind of thing. The Epic of Gilgamesh was good, but it wasn't much on historical detail. Once I get some hard facts (and some other, more nebulous ones) confirmed, I'll feel a lot more confident about the quality of the work. Thus it'll be much easier to get personally invested and calm again.

And somewhere in between, I've got to remember to go outside and play fetch with my dog Harriet every now and then. A doughty challenge, but as I'm starting to learn, challenges look a lot smaller after you've passed 'em. I chronicle these thoughts not to complain, or hedge, or equivocate. I'm not fishing for compliments, or hoping to garner the sympathy of an electronic support group. You can take away whatever you want from it. This is for me, you might say. Years from now, when I'm an accomplished novelist, I want to remember these years of youthful insecurity, those long hours I devoted to a labor of the heart whose success was anything but certain. I suspect I'll laugh. Hard.

Now, if you want a real piece of poetic justice, the word "music" (which is central to the fable I related earlier) is a derivative of the word "muse," originating with the Nine Muses, the daughters of Zeus and the patronesses of intellectual and artistic pursuits. ...like writing, for example.

So tell me, why should it be true that I get a kick out of you.