COCKTAILS ARE THE FIRST AMERICAN CULINARY ART
That is a big statement. Those words were first spoken by my business partner (author and drinks editor for Esquire Magazine) David Wondrich while laying the historical foundation for today’s explosion of interest in the culinary style cocktails. But then David spends lots of time pouring over recipe books, manufacturing guides and newspaper articles from the 19th century that describe in great detail the culinary roots of this cultural phenomenon—the cocktail.
What was lost during Prohibition was the culinary side of the business of the cocktail. The fresh culinary ingredients of the cocktail were replaced with premixed commercial products invented to guard against a lack of skilled labor.
The public responded, as one would expect; as the cocktails were diminished by artificial ingredients, they became less interesting; people simply poured their spirits over ice and drank them straight or with a mixer in the highball.
Ironically, with the waning interest in the cocktail that peaked in the 1970’s and 1980’s there was a revolution taking place on the culinary side of the hospitality business. Schools like The Culinary Institute of America, Cornell Hotel and Restaurant School, Peter Kump, Johnson and Wales and many many more were growing with fresh infusions of cash from the commercial food producers and began churning out talented young culinary professionals. Soon the monopoly on fine dining in the United States enjoyed by the French and Italian chefs classically trained in Europe began to give way to a brash bunch of young upstarts who flew in the face of tradition and experimented with techniques and styles borrowed from cuisines around the world. They blurred the lines mixing and matching ingredients and techniques from many ethnic and classic cuisines and came up with hybrid cuisines later referred to as fusion cuisine… it was all very exciting.
BUT these young chefs were grounded in the basic sauces during their schooling, and once the basics are mastered, then substituting ingredients and flavors one for the other like a culinary Mr. Potato Head offers tremendous creative freedom. And so it is now just beginning on the drinks side of the business. Finally, serious instruction on the drinks side is becoming a reality and of course the result is the same as on the food side; armed with instruction in the basic “sauces,” young bartenders can take those templates and begin to switch in different ingredients to exploit different flavor combinations.
For example, begin with a basic whiskey sour: whiskey, lemon juice and sugar syrup, in the right proportion, is a very pleasing drink. So what happens if we begin by tossing a small piece of fresh ginger into the lemon juice and extract a bit of flavor, then add our syrup and a small portion of pineapple juice and then the whiskey? Now our simple sour has a completely different profile of Pacific Rim flavors and may have entirely different possibilities when matched with a small dish from one of the many Pacific Rim cuisines. You can imagine the possibilities are limited only by a lack of imagination. But it would not be possible unless the basic sauces and classic recipes are mastered first.
HAWAIIAN STONE SOUR
Ingredients
1 1/2 ounces American straight whiskey
3/4 ounces fresh lemon juice
1 ounce simple syrup
3/4 ounces pineapple juice
1 small piece of fresh ginger root
Preperation
Muddle the ginger root in the bottom of a cocktail shaker glass to extract the flavor and then pour in the whiskey, syrup and the pineapple juice and fill with ice. Shake well to chill and strain into a rocks or old fashioned glass. Garnish with an orange slice and a cherry.
Cheers!
See you next week …enjoy your drinks responsibly and don’t forget to turn the lights out when you leave.
Dale aka kingcocktail
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