What is now in the center was once at the margin. In the history of ideas, the inquiring mind will identify a constant do-si-do between "no way" and "of course;" between stuff that nobody thinks and stuff that everybody thinks. One day the idea of a single god who created everything and sacrificed his own begotten son to rescue humankind from eternal damnation will get you turned into lion chow. Then, bam! Paradigm shift, and you get burned alive if you're not on the monotheism tip. Or take that guy Galileo . . . You get the idea. No matter which field of human knowledge you examine, which art or science, you find the same dynamic. The art of mixing drinks (or is it the science of mixology?) is no different.
David Wondrich is the writer and mixologist behind Alcohol (and how to mix it), our categorized online repository of over 150 carefully-chosen classic cocktails and other alcoholic potions, many — eventually all — with odd little essays locating the drink's position in the cocktail culture. "I love this job," he explains. "It's allowed me to get in touch with my inner bartender. But seriously, my favorite part isn't testing the drinks, it's researching them — digging through old bar books, comparing recipes, that sort of thing. Not that I'm complaining about the testing." His favorite discoveries: the Hearst, the Presidente Vincent, and the Ramos Fizz. There are cocktails, and then there are coctails. Four funky twists on the classics that'll knock you off your barstool.
Bloody Mary
2 ounces vodka
4 ounces tomato juice
1/2 tablespoon lemon juice
1 splash Worcestershire sauce
3 to 4 dashes Tabasco
1 teaspoon horseradish
Instructions
Squeeze the liquid out of the horseradish, then shake ingredients well with cracked ice in a chilled cocktail shaker, then strain into a Collins glass with 2 or 3 ice cubes in it; add a pinch of salt and a grind or two of fresh pepper, to taste. Garnish, if necessary, with a stalk of celery.
Margarita
2 ounces tequila -- silver tequila
1 ounce Cointreau
1 ounce lime juice
Instructions
Shake well with cracked ice, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass that has had its rim rubbed with lime juice and dipped in coarse salt.
A note on the tequila: It should be 100 percent agave, the plant from which the stuff is traditionally made. Save the great golden añejos for sipping.
A note on the Cointreau: It yields results clearly superior to triple sec, most brands of which are marred by an unpleasant chemical aftertaste.
White Russian
1 1/2 ounces vodka
3/4 ounce Kahlua
3/4 ounce heavy cream
Instructions
Shake well with cracked ice, then strain into a chilled Old-Fashioned glass (it'll look less wicked than in a martini glass; that's important). Some folks build this one on the rocks, floating the cream on top. No.
Rye & Ginger Ale
2 ounces whiskey -- rye whisky
4 or 5 ounces ginger ale
Instructions
Pour the whiskey into a Collins glass, add 2 or 3 ice cubes, and top off with ginger ale.
You can also use Canadian whiskey, which has been calling itself "rye" since Prohibition made that profitable. It does have some rye in it, but it's nowhere near as muscular as the real stuff. You're better off with a big, robust bourbon, such as Old Forester, Old Grand Dad, or Wild Turkey.
Classic: Bloody Mary
When you need replenishment--fluids, vitamins, calories--the Bloody Mary is your natural. Tomato juice is a stomach-friendly salad in a glass, and the neutral vodka (from the Russian for "water of life") slips away under the fresh, zippy flavors that are the heart of any well-made Bloody Mary.
And therein lies the key: It's got to be well made. Anyone who's experienced a great Bloody Mary knows that it can save you. And a bad one can sink you. The best place to drink Bloody Marys is a great bar, where the bartenders know what they're doing and make them fresh to order. But these are few and far between, and you're in no shape to leave the house. Self-serve salvation:
No cheap mixes. Fresh lemon juice is what's really important to the taste and wholesomeness of a Bloody Mary. Plus, a squeeze of lemon gives you the vitamins your weary body needs.
You've gotta have Worcestershire sauce--but go easy. A dash too many and the drink looks (and tastes) muddy. The right amount--two dashes--gives your Bloody Mary zing, which won't hurt, given your condition.
To be balanced, the Bloody Mary needs to be "rolled." Pour all the ingredients over ice cubes in your glass. (A highball, tumbler, or beer glass works best.) Then roll the drink by pouring all the ingredients into another glass. Then back into the first glass. Add the celery and another squeeze of lemon and enjoy.
This "savage combination of tomato juice and vodka" -- as master bartender Jack Townsend deemed it half a century ago -- has managed, in the fullness of time, to escape the "Freak Drink" category where he located it. Like the proverbial pushcart-vendor's kid, the Bloody Mary went from the Lower East Side to Scarsdale in one generation, shedding along the way its queer foreign name (according to some, it was originally known as the "Timoshenko") for one of pure Anglo lineage. (Sure, some say it started as the Red Snapper at Harry's Bar in Paris in the '20s, that Hemingway drank it -- what didn't he drink? -- and so forth. But the Red Snapper was made with gin -- gak! -- and what we're talking about here is the other white spirit). In fact, this upstart is now second only to the martini in the world of WASP drinking.
Whatever its current status, a glance at the Bloody Mary's component parts -- neutral spirits, restorative juices, salts, capsaicins, and other volatile oils -- indicates that its origins lie in the shadowy world of the hangover cure, and there, as far as Esquire -- snobbish to the core in these matters -- is concerned, it may remain, a useful citizen of the Republic of Tipple, but never to be listed on the more rarefied roster of nocturnal libations.
Mutant: Heirloom Tomato Bloody Mary
Better than any vodka-spiked V-8 you've ever had, it's made with fresh heirloom tomatoes, Bombay Sapphire gin, triple sec, a whole lemon, and four leaves of basil. The man behind it is bar manager Manny Hinojosa at the Walnut Creek Yacht Club, CA, this year's winner of Shake It Up, the nation's biggest mixolog competition. Kind of beats our T-ball participation ribbon hanging on Mom's fridge.
Classic: Margarita
A relative newcomer to cocktail Olympus, the margarita is the last great cocktail to come into wide use before the vodka revolution sent the finer points of mixology to the guillotine. Although its roots are deep -- world traveler and drink god Charles H. Baker reported a concoction containing tequila, lime, and orange bitters as early as 1939, and the drink itself was around in the '40s -- the margarita is really a child of the '70s. Most bar books before the '60s don't even mention tequila. The Booze Book, a most groovy compendium published in 1967, offers two tequila concoctions, but neither is the margarita. By 1973, however, the margarita had arrived. Esquire's revised Handbook for Hosts lists it among the "twelve most useful of all drinks."
Essentially a variation on the Sidecar -- substituting tequila for brandy, lime juice for lemon, and salt rim for sugar -- the margarita shares its characteristic luminosity and, especially, its sneakiness. Yet it's a completely different drink, less plush than the sidecar but more dignified (when properly made, of course, without strawberries and such gratuitous cargo).
Mutant: The Fresa Brava
The master mixologists at New York's Death & Co. have invented a seriously spicy take on your favorite Mexican cocktail: Muddle a few strawberries in simple syrup, add ice, some yellow Chartreuse, and lemon juice, and spike with two ounces of Herradura Silver tequila infused with jalapeno peppers. It burns going down, and very likely on the way back up.
Classic: White Russian
Roll the clock back to 1930 or so, and, if you look hard enough, you might just turn up a couple of little gloom-lifters based on vodka, then a little-known novelty spirit from the land of Rasputin and tractor-building collectives. There's the Russian, which mixes the stuff in equal proportion with gin and crème de cacao. If you don't like that (and, truth be told, there's not much reason why you should), you can have a Barbara: two parts vodka, one part crème de cacao, one part cream. Of course, that one's even more marginal. Back then, cream was rarely found in drinks outside the uber-girly precincts of the Pousse Café (the multilayered liqueur anthology; it is, alas, still with us).
Over the next 30 years, a lot of things happened that we really don't want to get into, and a few that we do, among them the Russian losing its gin (a lot of that going around) and trading in its dowdy old crème de cacao for the trendy new Kahlúa. And the Barbara getting renamed the Russian Bear (the fact that somebody felt that this deeply frilly drink needed toughening up namewise speaks volumes about the evolution of postwar American drinking), and then losing the "Bear" and doing the Kahlúa shuffle as well. By the end of the '50s, in other words, there are two vodka-Kahlúa Russians out there, with and without cream. This final stage is documented in the 1961 Diners' Club Drink Book, which pins a "Black" on the no-cream one, implying that there's a white one out there from which it must be distinguished.
At any rate, this period of careful evolution was time well spent. By the end of the next decade, the White Russian assumed its present place: straddling the world of mixed drinking like the Colossus of Rhodes, one foot planted firmly among the folks who never drink, the other among those who always do. Lightweights and lushes. Now, this isn't as weird a constituency as it might appear. Like its cousin the Brandy Alexander, the White Russian so effectively lubricates the hefty dose of alcohol it contains that it goes down the hatch with no resistance whatsoever. That's good if you're not used to the stuff -- or too used to it (see The Big Lebowski, in which they provide the bulk of the Dude's daily nutrition). And besides, gargle down a martini every 20 minutes, and you might as well be sporting a scarlet "D" (for "Drunk"). But these sweet, creamy deceivers look so innocuous, it's hard to take them seriously. That's called denial.
Mutant: Milk Punch
Brennan's Restaurant, located in the seedy heart of New Orleans' French Quarter, makes a morning eye-opener that blends a stiff tumbler of bourbon or brandy, ice-cold half-and-half, simple syrup, Mexican vanilla, and a dusting of delicious nutmeg on top. For stealth drunkenness, try pouring it over your cereal. Snap, crackle, drop!
Classic: Bourbon and Ginger
A drink is a world in a glass. Throw your lip over, say, a Fuzzy Navel, and all is Duran Duran and inch-wide black leather ties, Memphis furniture and Martha Quinn, big, kooky earrings and bandanna headbands, heavy mascara and flouncy pink and gray cotton skirts and oh, we're getting a little flustered here. On to the Rye & Ginger Ale.
Fedora hats -- wide ties -- black, rotary-dial telephones -- "What'll it be, mac?" -- Clark Gable -- "I got a fin that says he won't" -- fountain pens -- a hamburger steak with plenty of fried onions -- "If the missus calls I'm at the fights" -- "Summit Ridge Drive" by Artie Shaw and His Gramercy Five -- stocking seams -- Lucky Strikes -- Carole Lombard... definitely Carole Lombard.... If you could ask the guys under the fedoras in all those old black-and-white pictures of New York what they'll have, odds are very high they'd tell you rye. Straight rye whiskey was the whiskey of working America. If you built skyscrapers or puddled steel, walked a beat or booked bets (we're not gonna be the ones to tell you that's not work), you drank rye. Sharp, musky, slightly oily, rye has got to be one of the manliest items humankind has ever created (although plenty of dolls liked it too).* Back before Prohibition, though, no self-respecting saloon habitué would dream of poisoning it with ginger ale. (Brandy, sure; whiskey, no.) Unless he was a man of fancy habits, he'd take his rye straight, or at worst with a splash of soda.
Things change. Hear Joe "the Markee" Madden, an almost impossibly Runyonesque character who owned a speakeasy on Fifty-first Street: "We would take one gallon of pure grain alcohol (very good stuff) and then a gallon of filtered water to which we would add a gallon and a half of very fine straight rye." And his was the good rye. The other stuff, the cheap "rye," was just grain alcohol (not very good stuff) doctored up with various industrial chemicals and colorings. No wonder folks took to adulterating their liquor with soft drinks. It turns out, though, ginger ale works as well with real rye as with fake, and once people acquired the taste they stuck with it, even after Prohibition was repealed. Fact is, it's a damn tasty drink. Babe Ruth used to drink a quart of it with his breakfast (how else to wash down a 16-ounce porterhouse, six fried eggs, and a half-acre of homefries?). Good enough for us.
* Once given up for dead, rye has begun to emit small groans and flutter its eyelids a bit. Wild Turkey, Rittenhouse, Old Overholt, and Jim Beam all make good, cheap ryes that are perfect for mixing with ginger ale (or, for that matter, vermouth and bitters).
Mutant: Bourbon and Maple
We like to imagine that lumberjacks enjoy this beverage after a hard day of work deforesting the great outdoors. The bourbon and maple at Bar Johnny in San Fran is like a blast of bourbon drowning in tasty tree sap. It's got Woodford Reserve, maple syrup, Nocino Della Cristina, and Angostura bitters. No lemon drops here!
