Cocktail of the Week: The Toronto

Pure happenstance. I swear to you. These things aren’t planned in advance. It’s a complete coincidence that I’m highlighting a cocktail called the Toronto right as the mayor of that metropolis apparently turns up in a video speaking way, way, WAY off the record while smoking crack cocaine. We all of us have our vices.

The Toronto is another drink exploiting the peculiar charms of Fernet Branca. For more on Fernet’s history and its idiosyncratic scent and taste, please to consult last week’s post on the Hanky Panky. Further Fernet factoids:

I was desperately hoping there would be a spike in sales of this abrasive amaro following its cameo appearance in The Dark Knight Rises as Alfred’s aperitif of choice. Presumably Bruce Wayne also drinks it; that would account for the Batman voice.

Costume designer Edith Head, of whom Rosemarie and I are inordinately fond, was introduced to Fernet by the English actress Madeleine Carroll. Edith’s take on the Italian liqueur? It’s “guaranteed to save you on the day you want to kill yourself.”

My favorite, oft-repeated Fernet story took place in 1960. Betsy von Furstenberg, the actress born a baroness, was suspended from Actors’ Equity because of a prank she played on her co-star Tony Randall. She playfully poured Fernet into the glass Randall had to drink from onstage. Randall took one sip – and immediately assumed he had been poisoned.

Knowing that, you’re even more keen to use some in a cocktail, right?

The Toronto was originally created to showcase Canadian whiskey. (Irony #1: It’s never made with Canadian whiskey anymore, thanks to the boom in quality American ryes.) The drink was created in the early 1900s, and survived because its recipe was enshrined in David Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. (Irony #2: In Embury’s opinion, “a brief word about Canadian whiskey” was “all it deserves.” His brief word(s) on the subject: “I don’t like it.”) The drink is a variation on the Manhattan – although the presence of simple syrup means it also owes a debt to the Old Fashioned – so naturally it was named after Canada’s first city. (Irony #3: Early in the classic cocktail revival the Toronto was hard to come by in much of Canada because of a scarcity of Fernet Branca there.)

There’s no mistaking Fernet’s presence in a glass, but for all its assertive flavor it complements the base spirit it’s paired with. While it adds a playful edge to gin in the Hanky Panky, in the Toronto – or the T’ronta, as I’ve heard locals pronounce it – it lights a fire under the rye. Strange how a taste so distinctive can be so versatile.

The Toronto

2 oz. rye
¼ oz. Fernet Branca
¼ oz. simple syrup
2 dashes of Angostura bitters

Stir. Strain. Garnish with an orange twist.

Cocktail of the Week: The Hanky Panky

I have reached another milestone on this path I tread. I have at long last purchased my own bottle of Fernet (pronounce the T) Branca. I have joined the ranks of the hardcore cocktail fanatics.

Fernet Branca is the most bitter member of the amaro family. I’ve heard it called Jägermeister for grown-ups but that’s not at all fair – not to Fernet, or Jägermeister, or grown-ups. Fernet’s taste is so, ahem, bracing that most people first drink it as a dare. Before that distinctive taste you’ll notice its aroma, which contains notes of eucalyptus, menthol, roofing tar and regret. (I kid. It’s only two of the four. And maybe not the two you think.) Like many liqueurs it consists of a hodgepodge of ingredients, the exact formula held in secret. Known elements include myrrh, assorted fungi and gargantuan amounts of saffron, with some speculating that production of Fernet Branca consumes the bulk of the world’s supply of the spice. Almost since its genesis in 1845 it’s been bruited as a potent digestif, capable of preventing hangovers and the pains of gustatory excess before they start.

Despite being the working definition of an acquired taste, Fernet has found devotees beyond its birthplace in Italy. How it’s consumed will tell you something about the person who ordered it. Odds are anyone asking for Fernet and Coke is from Argentina. Fernet and ginger ale = San Francisco. And if someone seated next to you orders it straight, turn to them and ask is-THIS-your-card? style, “What bar do you work at?” It never fails. Love of Fernet is a badge of honor in the service industry.

A small amount of this pungent potable makes a noteworthy addition to a handful of cocktails. One of the best known is the Hanky Panky, a variation on the sweet Martini with a history that sets a world record for sheer bloody Englishness. It was created by Ada Coleman, the former bar mistress at Claridge’s who was installed at the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel by her benefactor Rupert d’Oyly Carte, scion of the family famed for producing the work of Gilbert and Sullivan. (See what I mean? And I’m not done yet.) Coley, as she was known, devised the drink at the behest of Sir Charles Hawtrey, the lion of the British stage who appeared in several silent films. More importantly, he taught a young Noël Coward everything he knew about the theater. When Sir Charles sipped Coley’s creation he is said to have thundered in true Wodehousian fashion, “By Jove! That is the real hanky-panky!,” the term then meaning witchcraft as opposed to serving as a Match Game euphemism for, you know, whoopee.

Hawtrey’s remark was an apt one. Some sort of trickery is involved for the miniscule amount of Fernet to become a dominant but never overwhelming taste amidst the gin and sweet vermouth. There are worse ways to be introduced to this most intriguing of flavors.

The Hanky Panky

2 oz. gin
1 ½ oz. sweet vermouth
¼ oz. Fernet Branca

Stir. Strain. Garnish with an orange twist.

Me Elsewhere: Memories of Malice

First, an apology: there will be no photographs. I didn’t take many. I was too busy being flabbergasted. Also, eating.

Rosemarie and I are back from our first-ever Malice Domestic conference. It won’t be our last. We’ll enjoy them all, but I daresay that future installments of this convention devoted to the traditional mystery novel won’t quite match this one, and not only because it was Malice’s silver anniversary edition.

As explained earlier, we ventured to deepest Bethesda, Maryland in order to receive this year’s William F. Deeck-Malice Domestic Grant for Unpublished Writers. We’d won the honor for our novel Design For Dying: An Edith Head Mystery. We were eager to meet our fellow recipient Ellen Byron, whose book Reality Checked is set in that most murderous of environments, the private school world of L.A.

The grants committee members gathered us up early and took fantastic care of us. Among the first things that we learned was the incredible number of previous winners who had returned to Malice as published novelists and nominees for the Agatha Awards. More impressive was the willingness of these writers to share their wisdom with us.

This year’s convention featured quite the array of special guests, with Laurie R. King, Aaron Elkins, Carolyn Hart and Peter Robinson receiving honors. There was also a stellar array of panels covering a host of crime fiction topics.

Saturday night was the Agatha Awards banquet, where the missus and I got our moment in the sun. It’s not a moment either of us is likely to forget. When grants committee chair and unofficial guardian angel Harriette Sackler announced the premise of our book – that Hollywood’s most famous costume designer must turn detective to solve a young actress’s murder – an encouraging buzz rolled through the ballroom. In the bar after dinner, newly-minted Mary Higgins Clark Award winner Hank Phillippi Ryan told us, “That was the sound of a roomful of writers saying, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’” We received congratulations and advice from plenty of attendees including Agatha winners Louise Penny and Catriona McPherson and toastmaster Laura Lippman, who closed the event on Sunday with an inspirational Q&A. (The full round-up of Agatha nominees and winners is here.) And we had several conversations with agents and editors that were, in a word, extremely promising. (OK, that’s two words. Clearly, I need an editor.) I cannot stress this enough: if you have ever harbored any interest in writing a mystery novel, you owe it to yourself to look into this grants program. It is a transformative experience.

But what had the greatest impact was easily the sheer number of mystery readers – Rosemarie and I lost count at two dozen – who walked up to one or both of us to say how much Edith Head meant to them. Not only as a style icon, but as a professional woman who blazed a trail that is still being followed. Writer Carole Nelson Douglas told us about reading an interview in Parade magazine in which Edith described essentially conning her way into a job at Paramount Pictures despite having no training as a sketch artist. “Edith taught me to say yes to things,” Carole said. It’s an invaluable life lesson, and one our Malice whirlwind has made us take to heart anew. We are saying yes to all of this.

Random notes: if you want cocktails in the District of Columbia, I heartily second all the recommendations I heard for The Passenger. The bartender there made me a whiskey smash with pear liqueur that I can taste even now. And I have to commend the staff at the Hyatt Regency in Bethesda, who truly got into the spirit of the occasion including a doorman dressed as Sherlock Holmes and nightly themed drinks at the hotel bar. One was called the Who Done It?, which meant I had Tavares in my head all weekend. Here’s the song. Maybe it will make up for the lack of photographs.

Book: The Disaster Diaries, by Sam Sheridan (2013)

Sam Sheridan is an MMA veteran as well as a former EMT and wilderness firefighter – and he feels unprepared for catastrophe. If he’s not ready for The End of the World as We Know It (or TEOTWAWKI, as he helpfully abbreviates it), then yours truly is even worse off. No cocktail ice or Major League Baseball? I might as well lie down and wait for the rampaging hordes to come to me.

In his book subtitled How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse, Sheridan asks what you can actually do to prime yourself for The End. He visits with experts and undergoes training on a host of skills that will come in handy in the wake of society’s downfall. Battlefield medicine, hunting, rudimentary auto theft, knife fighting 101 – everything you’ve seen in the movies. His focus always returns to what individuals can do to brace themselves physically and especially psychologically for high-pressure situations. The best material surveys the existing science, much of it conducted by the U.S. military, on how the brain responds to stress.

In addition to the scrupulous research and a surprisingly clear-eyed and optimistic closing chapter, Sheridan frames all of this information in terms of an epic and ongoing calamity. It starts with The Big One striking the West Coast, followed by a mysterious viral outbreak, zombies, an alien invasion, bad weather and cannibalism. Any two of these things in combination would break lesser men yet Sheridan is resolute, curing his own clothes and wood-smoking gunshot wounds. Seriously, I will be of no use to you when shit goes bughouse.

Actually, scratch that. There is one thing I can do. I can lead a ragtag band of survivors to the ruins of a library and point them toward this entertaining, useful book. With any luck, they’ll eat me last.

Cocktail of the Week: The Corpse Reviver #2

In which a fire that had not lost its spark is nonetheless rekindled.

Tackling the obvious question first: what happened to the Corpse Reviver #1? It was hushed up by a covert government agency in the wake of an unpleasant incident at a suburban Pittsburgh shopping mall in 1978. Obviously.

In truth there’s an entire brood of Corpse Revivers, all part of an unruly genus of cocktails. Call them what you like: the bracer, the eye-opener, the hair of the dog. Drinks meant to get you up and out following a night of being down and dirty. Corpse Reviver #1 (now declassified thanks to my Freedom of Information Act request) calls for Cognac, apple brandy and sweet vermouth, and there are a host of other formulae. But #2 has become the standard, to the extent that the number is often omitted. In the Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), Harry Craddock famously warned that “four of them taken in swift succession will unrevive the corpse again.”

It’s a simple recipe, originally consisting of equal parts gin, Cointreau, lemon juice, and Lillet. Which brings us to our problem.

In 1986, Kina Lillet became Lillet Blanc. The new formulation of this French aperitif wine resulted in a product that was both less alcoholic and less bitter, the latter due in large part to the reduction of cinchona bark, a source of quinine. (This recalibration also necessitated a name change, Kina being a diminutive of quinquina.) It’s an all too common story in the cocktail kingdom, one I encountered firsthand while searching every arrondisement in Paris for a bottle of Amer Picon. When I finally scared up a bottle, I was told it was nothing compared to the old version; deep down, hardcore cocktail fanatics are like the eternally wistful Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City, saying the ocean was better in his day. Lillet Blanc was regularly used in place of its progenitor even though it tasted different, meaning that if you’ve been knocking back Vespers since Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale you have not experienced the cocktail Ian Fleming described.

Deliverance came from Italy in the form of Cocchi (pronounced co-key) Americano. This aperitivo, from the same people responsible for the Vermouth di Torino that has of late been elevating my Manhattans, reasonably approximates Kina Lillet. It’s as close as we’re going to get to recapturing lightning in a bottle. I’d always enjoyed a Corpse Reviver #2 made with Lillet Blanc. But substituting Cocchi Americano gives it a structure I’d never noticed it was lacking, the additional bitterness only augmenting the drink’s ebullience. It’s like meeting the cocktail again for the first time, and falling even harder for it.

This discovery will pay immediate dividends. The Corpse Reviver #2 is my go-to selection whenever I’m asked to play bartender at a summer party, to the extent that I even bought a mister. The strong citrus presence means it’s refreshing. Because it’s an equal parts drink you can prepare them by the pitcher, with one in the refrigerator in advance of your guests. When you have to make refills – and you will – everybody gets into the act, one partygoer juicing lemons while another prepares the glasses with absinthe (or Pernod). Try it yourself and tell me I’m wrong. The name may say Walking Dead, but for Mad Men season there’s nothing better.

The Corpse Reviver #2

¾ oz. gin
¾ oz. Cointreau
¾ oz. Cocchi Americano
¾ oz. lemon juice
dash of absinthe (or Pernod)

Shake. Strain into a glass rinsed or misted with absinthe (or Pernod). Garnish with a cherry.

Books: Double Down

Quick takes on new titles from veteran hands.

Thomas Perry’s The Boyfriend (2013) kicks off with a strong chapter depicting an awkward lunch between a trio of former sorority sisters, the most content of whom is lying about her livelihood as a high-priced call girl. When she’s brutally killed, the woman’s heartbroken parents hire private eye Jack Till. Till expects to come up as empty as the LAPD did, but instead stumbles onto several other murders of similar looking escorts across the United States. Till’s attempt to outthink the killer sets up a twist that startles even as it anchors the book firmly in Perry’s wheelhouse. The pattern Till unearths stretches credulity considerably, but Perry commands attention with his otherwise compact plotting, the all-too-plausible history of his villain, and a thorough exploration of how technology has altered the business of prostitution.

The great joy of Loren D. Estleman’s mysteries featuring “film detective” Valentino is learning which piece of obscure cinema history sets the story in motion. In Alive! (2013) it’s a screen test for the role of the monster in Frankenstein. Not Boris Karloff’s, but Bela Lugosi’s disastrous, long-thought-destroyed one. The resurrection of the recovered reels has already claimed the life of Valentino’s fading B-list actor buddy, and puts the archivist on a collision course with a Hollywood heavy who’s not playing a role. The set-up is primarily an excuse to spend time with Valentino and his academic colleague Kyle Broadhead as they revel in the pleasures of yesteryear while navigating the world of today, including an excursion into steampunk subculture. Breezy, inconsequential fun.

Cocktail of the Week: The Manhattan

In a serendipitous convergence, the ninth anniversary of this blog coincides with the fiftieth – the fiftieth! – Cocktail of the Week installment. I’m going to celebrate the occasion by paying tribute to the mixed drink you are most likely to find in my glass. And why are you nosing around my glass, anyway? Get yer own. Bar’s over there.

Along with the Martini, the Manhattan is one of the twin titans of the cocktail kingdom. It is enshrined as one of David Embury’s six basic cocktails in his The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. Kingsley Amis declared it “an excellent drink,” even though it “is in practice the not very energetic man’s Old-Fashioned.” Greater scholars than I have plumbed its history, with many debunking the print-the-legend tale that it was born in New York’s Manhattan Club at an 1874 party thrown by Winston Churchill’s mother in honor of newly-elected governor Samuel Tilden. There is a good chance, though, that the Manhattan Club is indeed where it was first poured.

Quoting the estimable bartender/historian Gary Regan: “(T)he Manhattan is the best cocktail on earth. It’s so simple, but so darn complicated.” Of course, in Chinese the word for complication is also the word for opportunity. (OK, I know it’s actually “crisis” and “opportunity,” and I’m also aware that that saying isn’t technically true. But work with me here. I’ve cranked out fifty of these things.) The Manhattan consists of three ingredients – whiskey, vermouth and bitters – and altering any one of those elements transforms the entire drink. My golden ratio is below, but you owe it to yourself to find the balance of ingredients that works best for you. All cocktails are matters of personal preference, none more than the oh-so-malleable Manhattan.

Whiskey. The Manhattan began as a rye cocktail. For decades, though, it was made with bourbon. It’s only with the recent rye revival that the pendulum has swung back. I still enjoy bourbon Manhattans, but the original will always be my first choice.

Vermouth. “Perfect” Manhattans, featuring equal amounts of rosso and dry vermouth, are now popular, but I have to confess I’m not a fan. Dry vermouth tends to flatten the whiskey’s taste. Plus sweet vermouths offer a great avenue for experimentation. Lately I’ve been making Manhattans with Cocchi Vermouth di Torino, based on a recipe from 1891 and boasting strong notes of cocoa that you won’t find in any other members of its family.

Bitters. I ordered a Manhattan at a bar in Los Angeles once and the chagrinned bartender told me he didn’t have bitters. Any bitters. At all. I did not immediately cancel the order and walk out, mainly because a) I was young and didn’t know any better; b) there were no other bars close by; and c) the place had been a regular haunt of the Rat Pack and I couldn’t bring myself to take my foot off the same rail where Dean Martin had once rested a loafer. (Later, I stood up to use the restroom and literally walked into William L. Petersen, who could not have been nicer. Here ends my best Hollywood story.)

Learn from my rookie mistake, people: it ain’t a Manhattan if it ain’t got bitters. Angostura is the standard in this drink with orange running second, although nowadays you’re spoiled for choice. I often reach for Berg & Hauck’s Jerry Thomas Bitters, a modified version of the formula created by the dean of American bartending. I’ve paired the Cocchi Vermouth di Torino with Fee Brothers Old Fashion Aromatic Bitters. Their savory blend of flavors runs the aforementioned hints of chocolate up the flagpole so high you can’t help but salute. The resulting Manhattan has an extraordinarily dense taste unlike any I’ve encountered, so rich I’d never make it for a neophyte – and yet it’s simply another combination of whiskey, vermouth, and bitters.

Oh, and a cherry. I should probably say a word about the garnish. Man up and get the cherry, just make sure it’s the right cherry. Not one of those sickly sweet maraschino jobs out of a bottle; veteran bartenders have told me that in the bad old days of the 1970s, Manhattans were not only served with these gaudy neon ringers but with some of the juice from the jar slopped in for good measure. You can make your own by steeping sour cherries in maraschino liqueur or you can go to the source – Luxardo, primary producers of the liqueur – and buy a jar. One you sample the genuine article, you won’t be satisfied with anything else. Cheers.

The Manhattan

2 oz. rye (or bourbon) (but ideally rye)
¾ oz. sweet vermouth
2 – 3 dashes of bitters

Stir. Strain. Garnish with an authentic maraschino cherry.