A carnival of technology

I’ve been continuing my examination of the ways of cocktails, though I’ve been doing it out of order after that experience with the Campari. Besides, I don’t have most of the assorted perishable garnishes, and I don’t even have the right knives for making a lemon twist, and for some of these drinks the garnish is the most exciting part. I’ve decided that I’m ok with vermouth in martinis, and I don’t see the point of making them with vodka. I still haven’t tried any of the “After-dinner” class of drinks, mostly because those seem to require a whole new class of ingredients, and I’m running out of counter space.

One recurring ingredient that has given me some amount of confusion is “gomme syrup.” This has been the first difficulty I’ve found in trying to follow the stumbling, crooked path of my forefathers. The idea of mixing a drink with both sweeteners and bitters has been around for a couple hundred years, and most of the recipes on the IBA page are probably at least a hundred years old. Fashion has changed, and though most of the older drinks are familiar to bartenders—you don’t see many people ordering a Manhattan anymore, but you could probably get one if you asked nicely and not even have to explain what goes into it—some alterations have been made even to these old recipes to bring them more in line with what people actually drink these days. The Manhattan you may order, for instance, probably wouldn’t be made with rye, because who drinks rye anymore? Bars might not have that stuff just lying around.

As for gomme syrup, it’s a sugar syrup containing gum arabic as an emulsifier to keep the sugar from recrystallizing. Anything that may have once contained gomme syrup is probably going to use simple syrup, instead. I found some guy’s blag that explained gomme syrup as well as his attempt to make some. While simple syrup, being a super-saturated solution, tends to get some solid bits in it, gomme syrup is supposed to be smooth as candy, as well as a little thicker, giving drinks a silky texture and helping them go down that much easier. The problem is that no one makes it anymore as far as I can tell, so the only option is to get your hands on some gum arabic and make your own. Food-grade gum arabic isn’t particularly easy to find, either, but the aforementioned article suggests health food stores, and if I fail at that there’s some on the Internet. I think I have a new quest.

I’m not sure how well things will go at health food stores. I don’t like those places to begin with (they smell like hippie), and I guess the US has implemented some new trade sanctions against Sudan, the world’s largest gum arabic supplier, on account of that Darfur thing, and that might be the sort of cause that hippie shops rally behind. Maybe I’ll just go ahead and order some online.