I hosted Thanksgiving last year: my parents and sister found space to sleep in my one-bedroom apartment, and I spent most of the long weekend completely stressing myself out for no good reason. For the meal, one change I introduced was that very little of the meal was store-bought. I was buying food from a farm co-op at the time, and, when Thanksgiving rolled around, I jumped at the opportunity to get a pastured turkey and all the trimmings. I don’t think the source of the food caused any problems, but what I did with it might have. On the advice of the farmers, I decided to brine the turkey before roasting it, while the family tradition has been to simply roast an unadulterated bird using one of those oven bags to keep it from drying out without basting. I liked the brined bird; there are some things I would change with the brine itself, but overall the turkey was more moist and had some different flavors to it that I thought were interesting. The joints were a bit tougher, which made carving more of a challenge, and the skin didn’t brown and crisp like a dry turkey would have. It probably would have worked a better on a different day.

The parents are staying at Kat’s place this year, a sensible choice since she has the bigger apartment for now, but I’m still responsible for procuring the food, in part because I’m the one who eats meat. I haven’t paid much attention to the farmers’ newsletter since my job change and their closing of a north-metro dropoff point made getting the food inconvenient, so I missed the chance to get a turkey from them this year. But still, my opinion of animals is essentially: a) they’re delicious, and; b) maybe we ought to treat them kind of ok before slaughtering them and feasting upon their flesh, so in the interest of avoiding Farmer Bastard’s corn-fed curiosities, and out of my laziness with regard to driving to more than one grocery store for one list of stuff, this Thanksgiving is brought to us by Whole Foods. The turkey actually came out a couple bucks cheaper, but ay Dios they charge a lot for vegetables there. My family’s Thanksgiving meal consists of a stuffed turkey, some sweet potatoes, “green fluff” which is basically (deliciously) flavored cool whip, pumpkin and pecan pies, canned cranberry sauce and an assortment of raw vegetables like celery and carrots and such. This year I plan to make the experiments that worked last year: a pecan pie (only experimental because I was the one making it), a sweet potato casserole topped with pecans and some other stuff (veganized for Kat this time by using margarine instead of butter), and this year I’m going to add some acorn squash baked and stuffed with rice and pecans and cranberries and whatever else seems like a good idea come tomorrow morning.

I like pecans. They’re tasty and it’s about the only nut native to North America, one of the fruits of the Columbian explosion. I wish I were able to say the word without thinking about how to pronounce it every single time. My geography and ever-growing drawl suggests [?pikæn], but my family and really not-at-all Southern heritage uses [pI?k?n], PEE-can vs. pi-KAHN to put it another way. Usually I end up using the awkward compromise offered in the middle of Meriam Webster’s choices, the vowels of the first with the stresses of the second. What a weird word. Anyhow, I use lot of pecans for Thanksgiving, and last year buying a big bunch of unshelled nuts meant a lot of nut-cracking, most of which was handled by my dad, who had more of the patience and dexterity needed to extract the intact halves needed for the aesthetics of the pie. I bought unshelled pecans again this time around, mostly because those bags were from fancifully-named south Georgia farms and the shelled ones and the shelled ones from California looked like they’d been sitting on the store shelf for a good while, but I also stumbled across some fresh, shelled Georgia pecans at the last minute, so maybe that’ll make the pie a little easier.

My parents are asleep at Kat’s, and tomorrow I’m going to try to make a few dishes that combine tradition with new ideas for taste, some dishes without animal products to accompany the centerpiece of meat. Shelling pecans sure is a whole lot easier using channel lock pliers instead of a nutcraker.

High fructose corn syrup is a solution of usually 55% fructose and 45% glucose produced from corn starch and frequently used as a sweetener in the United States and Canada. It’s difficult to substantiate some of the claims made against HFCS, but it’s hard not to at least feel a little uneasy about the stuff. Well, this America, so vote with your dollars; if you don’t care for HFCS, look for alternatives. You might need to learn a little Spanish before you buy your next Coke, but for the most part there are readily available alternatives. Tonight, let’s take a look at one of the areas oft neglected: things to mix with booze.

While worries about antioxidants and the marketing of companies like POM have created some abominably named cocktails like the pomtini or the pomarita, using pomegranate in drinks is not a new idea. The tequila sunrise, the Roy Rogers (and its sister drink, the Shirley Temple), some variations of the Bacardi cocktail are just a few drinks made with grenadine syrup, named from grenade, the French word for pomegranate. Grenadine today, however, is usually thought of as being cherry flavored, though a cherry in the same sense as cherry Kool-Aid, which is to say that it’s red and doesn’t taste much like any fruit at all. Let’s take a look at the label for Rose’s, the most popular brand of grenadine syrup:

INGREDIENTS: HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, WATER, CITRIC ACID, NATURAL AND
ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS, SODIUM CITRATE, SODIUM BENZOATE (PRESERVATIVE), RED 40,
BLUE 1

Wow, gross. So how hard is it to make your own? Of course, you’ll first need some pomegranate juice. According to legend that I just made up, the pomegranate was given by Ahura Mazda to the Persians as a test. Those who bit in faced a mouthful of bitter pulp. Those who began to pick apart the seeds but grew weary and abandoned the fruit were struck down in a shower of free radicals. Only the patient man, he who carefully picked each seed away from the labyrinthine fruit, could understand the secrets of the universe. Well, you don’t have to worry about that anymore. There are machines that can do that for you, just go to the store and buy a bottle of juice. Pomegranate faces a problem similar to cranberry in that it’s not really drinkable on its own, so most of the juices you’ll encounter have been flavored with other fruits. Pure pomegranate is out there for the persistent, and that might not even actually matter; depending on how you want the syrup to taste, POM or something similar might work just fine.

I found one website that happens to advocate POM and has a summary of a couple basic processes. You can either just mix some cold juice with some sugar and shake it like a Polaroid picture, or you can reduce the juice and mix that with the sugar. The problem I had making the reduction was that scalded pomegranate really doesn’t taste very good. Maybe I got it too hot, but it was very sour and a little bitter by the time I was done. I might take another shot at it, maybe with POM. As for the cold process, the problem I found there was that it doesn’t get very syrupy. I know that I won’t get anything near the molasses thick Rose’s, but I’d like something with a bit of body. One of the comments to that article suggests using simple syrup instead of sugar, and while that seems a good path to take, I found that adding more and more syrup to try to make a thicker grenadine made something that tasted less like pomegranate and more like just sugar syrup.

The method I settled on was to use the cold process in the article—equal parts pomegranate juice and sugar—with the addition of a dash of simple syrup. I think I’ll try experimenting a little more with this; maybe I’ll get out the rest of the acacia powder and see what happens. In the meantime the slightly syrupy pomegranate juice serves its purpose: it’s red, it’s sweet, and it has more flavor than colored corn syrup.

Next up: tonic water! All I need to do is find some quinine and figure out the right blend of the eleven herbs and spices. Sounds easy enough.

So my parents are coming to visit tomorrow. I don’t know, maybe it’s a holiday or something. I figure what better way to prepare than to make sure I wake up hungover? (just kidding, mom (I hope)). I suppose I could try to tidy the place up or something, but that sounds boring, and I hope my apartment isn’t the highlight of their trip. Mostly I wanted to break out The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book again and take another shot at figuring out how people drank back in the days when even the hoboes wore suits. The “Cuban Concoctions” section particularly intrigues me; I imagine a Manhattan bar dropped into the tropics, posh sensibility creating new wonders with rum and exotic fruits. So with that in mind, I thought I’d begin at the beginning. The chapter starts with what was once the signature drink of Havana’s Hotel National:

Equal parts of Bacardi and Pineapple Juice
Squeeze of Lemon
Dash of Apricot Brandy
Ice; shake; strain

So right away I’m faced with a problem. I thought I remembered seeing apricot brandy before, but I was apparently mistaken. I guess I’ll have to visit one of those places with “warehouse” in the name sometime. The closest I could find was De Kuyper’s “Apricot flavored brandy,” which I suspect isn’t quite what they had in mind at the turn of the century. The De Kuyper’s, rather than being a distillation of fermented apricots, is an apricot infusion mixed with actual brandy and some other things, creating something that tastes almost like a very sweet, apricotty vermouth. The brand is also a bit low-rent as far as liqueurs go, but it’s probably close enough for the purposes of this experiment. I don’t know how they rolled in 1908, whether the apricot brandies available back then included the bitter pits, but as far as I can tell from the Internet the brandies sold today don’t, so I’ll assume that the only goal in this recipe is a little hint of sweet apricot flavor. The stuff with the picture of apricots on the bottle will do.

I mixed this drink with two jiggers each of rum and pineapple, a quarter lemon’s worth of juice and a little of the apricot brandy. And it tasted like pineapple. It was like a really boring tiki drink; I used light rum, so I don’t expect much flavor from that front, but the lemon and apricot were completely overwhelmed by that prickly fruit, making little more than a hard glass of juice. The original recipe calls for the cocktail to be strained into a tall glass, but without ice in this glass I noticed a second problem: I don’t really like warm pineapple juice. But I still have faith in this idea. The basic concept of the cocktail is to find the balance between three of the world’s essential flavors—sweet, bitter and boozy—and with some slight modifications I think I found something that better walks this line. A little less pineapple, a little more lemon and a dash of bitters made for something much more interesting. It perhaps wanders closer to a daiquiri as the pineapple gives way to the sour of the lemon, but the pineapple lends a new flavor not imagined in the syruped original, and the bitters offer a new thought entirely, creating something that feels like a martini for the beach. I retained the shaking, since I like how the shaken pineapple juice creates a creamy froth, but I poured the final result over more ice rather than into an empty glass. So with all of that in mind, I present to you the Embargo:

2 jiggers Bacardi
1 jigger pineapple juice
juice of half a lemon
dash Angostura
dash apricot brandy
ice, shake, strain into glass of ice

This drink is considerably less sweet than the National above, but I like to think that addition of the famed Trinidadian tincture is still in keeping with the tropical traditions. It’s something that stimulates the mind and soothes the soul. The pink bitters also create a drink that looks more like grapefruit juice than the simple yellow of the original, but I don’t think that’s such a bad change.

Skimming through some of the other recipes in the Waldorf-Astoria book, there seems to be no definite theme for Cuba. The drinks seem to follow the forms of the most basic of the early cocktails: mostly mixtures of varying amounts of vermouth, but with Bacardi instead of gin or bourbon. An orange or a lime appear here and there, but overall it feels like these are northern cocktails given a hasty island panache. I don’t know when exactly the Hotel National opened, but I suspect it was sometime after Cuba’s independence from Spain, so perhaps there wasn’t enough time in Cuba Libre before these recipes were collected to create new drinks appropriate to the local culture and ingredients. Or maybe the Mafia is to blame; I can’t recall that part of The Godfather Part II.

One of the few cocktails in this collection that survives today, the mojito, receives barely a mention, despite being one of the tastier libations passed down from that time. Perhaps I’ll start with mint next time.

After my Braun drip machine, a trusty friend that I appropriated from my parents, a solid machine that helped me through many long nights in college and even followed me into the desert on the In-n-Out trip, finally gave out after probably close to two decades of service, I used a Bodum cafetière, a simple device originally made in a clarinet factory in Normandy, as my coffee machine. The idea is basically to steep the coffee grounds in hot water much like tea and then push all of the grounds out of the way through a metal filter, creating a strong and mostly filtered brew, capturing that power and charm of the coffees of the Old West without having to watch quite so carefully not to drink to the bottom of the cup. I like the way coffee tastes from a French press, and it and my gas range have worked quite well during a couple of recent power outages. But stupid me, I went and broke it. I had the glass beaker in the dishwasher, and for some reason I decided to rummage around in the cabinets before starting the dishes. A jar fell out, hit the coffee press right on the corner and put a neat little hole in my morning routine. I’ve since ordered a new beaker from my favorite coffee merchant (I have no idea how much they charged me, but they sell the whole deal for $10 under the MSRP, so I figure it can’t be too bad), but in the meantime I’ve had to find some other ways to make my coffee.

I haven’t gone all out yet and made the coffee of the old West and, according to Internet, parts of Scandinavia. Though similar in theory to making coffee in a French press, boiling it in a pot usually takes a fine grind, like Turkish coffee, so that the grounds do their thing and settle into a mud in the bottom of the pot, while the French press uses a more coarse grind, mostly to ensure the grounds are caught by the filter when the plunger is pressed. I haven’t yet felt adventurous enough to deviate from my usual coffee, so I’ve just been doing about the same thing I did with the press: I mix the grounds and water in a mug instead of a big glass thing, and after a few minutes I pour that mixture through a sieve into another mug. It works pretty ok, but it’s a little more chunky than I’m used to, and, since I don’t care to go through all of that more than once in a given morning, I’m now only drinking one mug of coffee a day. I hope my new glass thing shows up soon.

I’d never decorated a cake before. I did find the cake was still a little fragile despite my attempts to fix this with gum, so I decided that it was just going to stay in the pan I used as a decorating surface. I probably also should have bought a spatula for the flat parts instead of using that plastic scraper that came with my food processor. I miscalculated the amounts of icing needed for the various colors and didn’t leave myself enough plain white, so most of those white stars were made with the white icing thinned with corn syrup used on the flat parts, making them a little grayer and a little shinier than they should have been. In general the icing had a bit of a shiny, oily sheen to it, since the vegetable shortening didn’t whip into crisp, stiff peaks like butter would have, but it was the right consistency and didn’t look too awful. I also found that most people aren’t too keen on the idea of vegan cake, and it’s hard to hide that feature when trying to give someone a piece of birthday cake that I apparently baked for no particular reason. I ended up eating a few pieces myself (like the missing tail in the picture) and throwing the rest out after it became stale. Oh well.

As for the real cake, something went horribly wrong with the icing. I’m not sure exactly what—maybe I messed up and used too much shortening, maybe the phase of the moon was wrong—but it came out far too thick. I couldn’t get it to squeeze out of the decorating bags, and if I squeezed too hard a big solid wad of frosting would force the tip out the bag and force a big pink wad of sweetened oil onto whatever I was trying to deliciately outline. Eventually I gave up, frosted the head flat with the green icing, made an eye with the pink, cut all of that off and gave that to Kat instead of the whole dinosaur. Oh well.

Kat doesn’t eat anything that comes out of an animal, and this diet makes certain items, like birthday cakes, a little bit difficult. I figure that I have a cake pan shaped like a dinosaur and a little patience, so I thought I’d give it a shot. So, what ingredients can I not use?

Non-vegan sugar. This one doesn’t take any work to replace; it’s just kind of an oddball surprise. If you took cane syrup and just let it set out to dry, you’d end up with a funky mess, so it takes a bit of processing to make sugar. Some sugar refiners will filter cane sugar through a charcoal made from cattle bones because it turns out that it works really well. Not all cane sugar refiners do this, and beet sugar isn’t filtered in this way at all, but trying to figure out what brand of sugar comes from where takes a bit of research. Both Dixie Crystals and Domino, the brands most prevalent around here, use bone char, so I settled on the Whole Foods brand because it was labeled as “vegan” and I didn’t have to look things up or write any letters.

Milk. This one’s pretty easy. Milk doesn’t do anything special to the cake, just adds a little bit of flavor and some more liquid, so soy milk will work fine as a substitute. All of the sugar will cover up the funky taste.

Butter. This one’s a little harder, but still not a huge deal. There are plenty of non-dairy margarine’s out there. The only trouble is making sure to use one that doesn’t have too much water in it. Vegetable shortenings are another substitute, but this runs into a dietary idiosyncrasy I have: I think that hydrogenated oils like Crisco (“It’s digestible!”) are kind of gross. I settled on Earth Balance shortening, a blend of palm, soy, canola and olive oils that somehow comes in solid sticks without being hydrogenated. I guess I have all the saturated fat in the palm oil to thank.

Eggs. This is where things get difficult. Eggs do a lot of things for a cake: at their most basic they add some liquid and fat to the batter, but they’re also an emulsifier and a leavener. I found several ways that people get around the leavening aspect, but very little about emulsification. A lot of vegan recipes will use a little more baking powder or soda and add in some vinegar to get the cake to rise, but I found that this made the cake rise too quickly and give up, creating cakes that came out more or less the right height but were too dense. There are also some egg substitutes available, usually blends of gluten and vegetable gelatin, but according to Internet these still work better as leaveners than emulsifiers, producing fragile, crumbly cakes. I decided to go with the egg substitute, a bag of Uncle Bob’s Weird Yellow Powder or something like that from Whole Foods. It’s a mixture of soy flour, wheat gluten, corn syrup solids and algin, and it has a bit of an…odor to it. It smells like tree bark and protein from the sea. I hope sugar can cover this up, too. To make up for the weakness of the fake eggs, I decided to toss in some gum arabic as well.

I was a bit nervous about meddling with cake recipes trying to find the right one. Common wisdom seems to state that while savory dishes are a fast and loose art, something well suited to people like that cajun guy on PBS who just make things up as they go and only use measurements as a starting point, pastry is exact, a careful chemistry that demands patience and perfect ratios. I don’t guess things like eggs are very exact, so hopefully it won’t hurt too much if I screw around trying to figure out how to avoid them. Here goes.

Before settling on the recipe I’d eventually use, I solicited some aid from a hippie friend and got some recipes for cakes and frosting from a vegan cookbook. Both the cookbook cake I tried and another cake recipe from the Internet used the vinegar method. The cookbook came out very dense. I think that with some nuts or some other texture it could have made a very nice coffee cake or something similar, but it was no birthday cake. The Internet cake had a lot of trouble cooking through. I’m not sure exactly why, but it formed a crust well before the center of the cake cooked, and by the time it was done it was too crumbly to even make it out of the pan. The cookbook frosting was another disaster, some kind of weird combination of non-frosting things that turned into an unappetizing gray sludge, and it was at this point that I had an epiphany. I made another batch of frosting using a normal buttercream recipe, replacing the butter and milk as appropriate, and it came out great. It was white, fluffy, and it tasted good. For the cake I ended up doing the same thing: take a normal recipe and just replace all the things you can’t use.

So here’s what I did. For the cake:

• 2C flour
• 2t baking powder
• ½t salt
• ½c shortening
• 1c sugar
• 3T egg replacer + 9T (½c+1T) water
• 2t vanilla extract
• ¾c soy milk
• 2T gum arabic dissolved in 2T water and left to sit overnight (probably
  optional)

Mix all that stuff. Bake at 350° for 20-25 minutes. One thing I noticed about the vegetable shortening is that takes a lot to soften it. It’ll melt if you heat it, but for some reason it wouldn’t become soft and pliable like butter does if left at room temperature, making it difficult to cream with the sugar. Adding some liquid (like the milk) makes it mix, though. Also, adding the egg replacer really brought out that nasty smell. It doesn’t show up in the final cake that I could notice, though, so just hold your nose and keep going.

For the frosting:

• ¼c vegetable shortening
• 2¼c powdered sugar
• 2T vanilla rice milk
• 1t vanilla extract

Blend all that stuff. I used rice milk here instead of soy milk because the fake milk isn’t going to bake away into the æther in the frosting: you’re pretty much going to eat it straight. Whatever they do to soy milk to make it look and taste sort of like milk makes it incredibly gross on its own: it has an almost orange tint to it, like it’s visually trying to be soy buttermilk instead, and it tastes so bad, like wheat germ and plaster. Rice milk, on the other hand, though its pale gray pallor is disturbing, doesn’t look too much different from skim cow milk, and it doesn’t taste like much of anything. The vanilla variety gives a little more flavor to the frosting, and, as noted above, the vegetable shortening is going to need a little bit of some sort of liquid in order to do anything.

And that’s it. Use some eggs next time.

Rum has come a long way over the years. Its precursor of sugar wine was probably invented through that alcoholic ingenuity that infects so many of the cultures of the world.

WORKER: Hey boss, what are we going to do with all this extra sugar?
BOSS: Make some booze, you big dummy!

Old world settlers brought the magic of distillation to the new world, and eventually the Caribbean, those fertile tropical islands planted with sugar cane from across the sea, started to make rum. At first it kind of sucked. One traveler to Barbados in the 17th century described the island’s drink as “a hot hellish and terrible liquor.” From these humble beginnings as a cheap staple for islanders and seafaring vessels the hellish sugarcane spirit cleaned itself up to become the base of the finest Cuban, and later Polynesian, cocktails. Today rum can basically be divided into three categories by their colors: white rum, filtered and briefly aged; gold rum, aged in charred oak barrels much like bourbon (often using discarded bourbon barrels), and dark rum, aged in more heavily charred barrels to create a deep, strongly flavored, opaque libation. White rum, first made by Bacardi, is the one most often used in cocktails as it has little flavor. It’s basically a sweet vodka, adding alcohol to drinks without any heavy flavors to complement or disguise, but at the same time not quite as bland as a flavorless grain spirit.

The daiquiri is one of those rum cocktails. I’m not going to try to research an accurate history since cocktail drinkers aren’t known for taking good notes. It’s a Cuban cocktail, and in the interest of starting at least closer to the beginning, here’s the recipe as transcribed in The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book in the “Cuban Concoctions” section, contributed by Will P. Taylor of the Hotel National in Havana:

One part Bacardi
Juice of half a Lime
One barspoon powdered sugar

Note: The order of adding ingredients is important. Personal preference
dictates serving the cocktail with finely shaved iced in the glass.

It’s a straightforward drink and was a favorite of Hemingway, though I think every drink was a favorite of Hemingway. Daiquiris have gotten an unfortunate reputation in more recent years as girly drinks, and the original form is rarely seen; fruity slushies are more often seen bearing the daiquiri name, and the original form of sweetened citrus and rum is all but forgotten. That’s really unfortunate, because it’s not a bad drink, and no man should feel his masculinity challenged by drinking one. Traveling back into modern times, here’s the International Bartenders Association recipe for a daiquiri:

4.5 cl White Rum
2.0 cl Fresh lemon or lime juice
0.5 cl Gomme syrup
Pour all ingredients into shaker with ice cubes. Shake well. Strain in chilled
cocktail glass

Translated to American, that’s a shot of rum, about half a lime’s worth of juice and a dash of gomme syrup. Gomme syrup? Also known as gum syrup or sirop de gomme for those who don’t like franglais, this is what this post is really all about.

The most basic and best remembered cocktail syrup is simple syrup, a mixture of sugar and water, and gomme syrup is a variation of this using sugar, water and gum arabic. Gum arabic is produced from the sap of the acacia tree found mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. It acts as an edible adhesive and emulsifier and is found in a wide range of products, things as diverse as Coca-Cola and ink and postage stamps. I finally got around to getting some. I bought it from some herb-selling hippies in Oregon at $16 for a pound, a much better deal than other sites selling an ounce or two for about $8. It’s certified organic, which I found funny. I don’t doubt that the average acacia tree farm has no need for pesticides or artificial fertilizers, but it’s amusing that someone had to visit Sudan for a week or so to confirm that. I hope I didn’t inadvertently fund a genocide.

I found a couple of gomme syrup recipes, and the basic method was to dissolve some powdered gum in water, let it maintain for a while to soak up the water and form a paste, and then dump that into some simple syrup. I ran into a snag with these in that the all of the ratios were expressed in weights, a simple thing to calculate for people that bought the eight dollar ounce, and I had no way to figure out weights from my pound of syrup. Time for some creative guessing.

The paste steps in both of the recipes involved boiling two ounces of water: one mixed it with an ounce of gum arabic, one with two ounces. How do you boil two ounces of water? There’s no way I could stir that. The answer is to use a double boiler, which I don’t have, and I didn’t realize this until about halfway through. I decided instead to try boiling some water in a kettle, something I conveniently do every morning already for my coffee, and dump that into a jar with some powdered gum. Not knowing the weight of the gum, I tried starting with a 1:2 ratio by volume: I filled a small jar with a tablespoon of gum and added an ounce of boiling water. That seemed to dissolve pretty well, so I added another tablespoon of gum. That didn’t dissolve so well. I ended up with a sticky white blob sitting in the hot water that refused any attempt to stir it or break it up. I tried just letting it sit in the water in the hopes that it would eventually dissolve, but it didn’t. Maybe the second tablespoon was a bit much.

One other thing I noticed at this step was that the hot gum, flavorless as a powder, had started to smell a little bit woodsy, kind of like pine or tea tree oil. I wonder if that little bit of taste will make it into the drink or even be strong enough to be noticed over the alcohol.

After the big white blob of gum made it clear that it wasn’t going anywhere, I decided to reheat the solution by dropping the jar into a pot of boiling water. That actually worked pretty well. The extra heat and stirring dissolved the gum good enough; I let that sit for a while and then started boiling a simple syrup. I usually make simple syrup at a 2:1 sugar to water ratio, and since the gum acts as an emulsifier I thought I’d make this syrup 3:1. I boiled half a cup of water with a cup and a half sugar, dumped in the gum paste, skimmed the foamy scum off the top and let it all cool. After filtering the syrup through some cheese cloth to get rid of whatever scummy bits I missed the first time, I was ready for a daiquiri.

A daiquiri made with simple syrup comes out kind of like a limeade with a kick, and I was expecting much the same here but with a silkier texture. I took a sip and…it wasn’t sweet at all. The syrup was too thick and didn’t dissolve, instead forming a gooey layer on the bottom of the shaker.. Maybe I shouldn’t have used so much sugar, and maybe I should have stopped at one tablespoon of gum. Oh well; maybe I’ll take another shot later.

Perhaps there’s been a shift in our collective taste away from the bitter. I admit that I might share in this. One of the first cocktails I tried with an appreciable amount of vermouth was the first alphabetically on the IBA website, the Americano. Formerly the Milano-Torino, named for the origins of its sweet vermouth (Cinzano in the case of the original) and Campari bitters, Gaspare Campari renamed the drink to “Americano” because apparently early 20th century Americans dug it. I found the Americano to be a bit of a challenge. I used Martini & Rossi rather Cinzano, but I don’t think that would have made a difference. Campari is intensely, unabashedly bitter. It was interesting, and I can see how such a drink would serve well as a slow, careful apéritif, but I have a hard time believing that my brothers and sisters in corn whiskey and apple pie would have ordered more than one. Early 20th century tourists in Milan were probably crazy rich, though, so maybe it’s just that rich people like things that taste bad. I eventually came to terms with Campari and found that a splash of it in a glass of orange juice wasn’t so bad, but what really surprised me about this experience was that I was ok with the vermouth on its own. I view it kind of like gin with a base of wine instead of grain alcohol. It’s not something that I’d drink on its own, but it adds an interesting, and sometimes even sweet, flavor to cocktails.

Vermouth was used in a lot of pre-prohibition cocktails, most notably the Martini—gin and vermouth—and the Manhattan—rye, vermouth and bitters. Vermouth has been demonized in more recent years, with Churchill perhaps being the most famous opponent. Apocryphal quotes tell of him creating martinis consisting of a glass of gin and a wave of the glass over a bottle of vermouth, or even just a nod to a bottle of vermouth across the room or a wave in the general direction of France. That’s not a martini; it’s a glass of cold gin, and it didn’t make Churchill a cocktail hero; it just made him a drunk. Whether Churchill’s alleged martini recipes were true or not is unimportant; the modern martini mistakes “dry” to mean an absence of vermouth rather than the presence of dry vermouth, with perhaps the worst manifestation being just a cold glass of vodka, tasting like nothing in particular. The martini has become more of a glass used to serve fruity concoctions than a drink, and I think we need a return to vermouth. A dry martini used to be something full of flavors, a menagerie of herbs and botanicals in both the gin and the vermouth, a classy sipping drink rather than just a delivery system for tasteless alcohol.

With the manhattan vermouth is at least remembered, but there have been a couple of interesting changes over the course of history. The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book describes a manhattan as follows:

• Dash of Orange Bitters
• One-half Italian Vermouth
• One-half Rye Whiskey (Stir)
• Serve with Maraschino Cherry

“Italian Vermouth” is sweet, red vermouth, which is still available today, and the current idea of the Maraschino cherries might not be the same as it was in 1900, but it’s just a garnish and doesn’t add much flavor, so that doesn’t matter. As for the other two ingredients, rye whiskey was badly hurt by Prohibition, almost disappearing in favor of bourbon. Bourbon or Canadian whiskey usually serves as the base of the drink nowadays. The orange bitters are also hard to find, and Angostura bitters are usually used instead.

According to Bob Skilink’s Beer & Food: An American History, American beer has had a history of sucking really bad. The colonists didn’t have access to good malts, and once the engines of agriculture and production advanced to the point that the drinks became palatable, the Volstead act shut everything down. The rise of microbrews, both by making their own beers and shaming larger breweries into creating better products, have since put us at the point where it’s easy to find an American beer able to stand up next to its German, English or Belgian cousins, but I don’t believe time has been as kind to the cocktail. America has always been pretty good at making a good distilled libation. While England was trying to figure out how to turn unaged spirits into cheap gin, America was perfecting ways to age liquor made from that ubiquitous New World grain, maize, and drinking the finest rum of the Caribbean. Pre-prohibition cocktails, an American invention, sought to create drinks that complemented rather than covered the tastes of their base liquors. Sure, the goal of some of the forgotten recipes was to disguise the taste of bathtub gin, but pre-prohibition American inventions like the old fashioned, the manhattan and the martini attempted to use the tastes of their spirits as an ingredient rather than an alcohol delivery system to be hidden. Basically what I’m saying is that the drunks at the turn of the 20th century had some class, and we’d do well to relearn their lessons.

Rye is easy enough to obtain for a manhattan. There are several companies that still produce rye whiskey. My favorite among the ones that I’ve tried is Old Overholt, now a subsidiary of Jim Beam but otherwise a company that claims a (non-contiguous, at least officially) history of over 150 years beginning in 1810. Michael Jackson (the drinker, not the singer) gave it a good score though wished it was brave enough to be more of a rye. Weighing in at a respectable 23 Bodines it makes an appropriate mixer. Orange bitters, on the other hand, have joined my list of things I’d like to obtain to make old-timey cocktails.

Said list is more or less now the following:

Orange bitters. This is basically a blend of orange peel and herbs, and there are still some made though I’ve never seen it in stores. Drinkboy has a recipe along with some links to manufacturers, though the one he recommends has prices in Euros which, thank to bad home loans or some crap like that, means expensive for me. Maybe I’ll buy some with that $25 Mastercard owes me for scamming me on currency conversion if I ever see it.

Peychaud bitters. This one shows up a lot in New Orleans cocktails. It’s still made, but I’ve never seen them, so it’s probably going to have to be another Internet order.

Gomme syrup. I’ve written about this before, and my conclusion was basically that I just need to buy some gum arabic and make my own, which doesn’t seem terribly difficult. I’ve not yet done this. I haven’t seen gomme syrup appear as much in the Waldorf-Astoria manual as the supposedly modern IBA recipes, but I would like to try it in a daiquiri, perhaps once the weather warms up again.

Old Tom gin. This is sort of a weird one. Supposedly in 16th century England there were some bars ahead of their time that had an early idea of a vending machine. On their outside walls they would install a pipe marked by a black cat, “Old Tom,” and thirsty travelers could drop a penny into a slot, hold their mouth under a pipe and, once the bartender noticed the rattling coin, receive a mouthful of a sweetened gin. Some theories hold that the sugar was there to cover up a really bad taste in the gin, but it still shows up in some recipes, most notably the Tom Collins, even though good gin should have been readily available by then. Internet says that there are a few Old Tom makers remaining, though how close their products are to what people drank on London street corners is unclear, and I’ve never seen any in Georgia. I’m not sure what to do here or if I should even care.

Sloe gin. This isn’t really a gin, but more of a brandy made from sloe plums. I haven’t really looked very hard for it, so it might be available in the store down the road for all I know.

Absinthe. This I have mixed feelings about. It’s unavailable because it’s illegal, and, as the favorite of several famous artists and writers, it has a lot of legend attached to it. I’m skeptical of the claims that the wormwood produces hallucinations; the descriptions of the experiences tend to land somewhere between those found with regular alcohol consumption or delirium tremens, and supposedly there wasn’t that much wormwood in the old stuff to begin with. There are a few ways to get around the laws, either by buying from shady European producers willing to ignore US postal regulations or from a few American distillers that have found ways to supposedly make authentic product while following the very edge of the law, but absinthe seems to appeal and be marketed more to people looking to recreate the depression of Poe than people looking for old-timey booze. I have had absinthe once that was imported, probably legally, by someone who had visited Hungary. I wasn’t impressed. I suspect that anisette would serve as a perfect equivalent in recipes, and, to be honest, I don’t like the taste of aniseed.

So that’s about where I stand with my booze experiments. The Christmas season suggests that I should try egg nog, but, though I don’t share the fear of raw eggs that seemed to come out of nowhere in the ’90s, I’m uneasy about mixing milk and liquor. I think I’ll stick with manhattans made with Angostura for now.

The old folk’s restaurant is a little place off of Holcomb Bridge run by a lady from Dutchland (it took me a while to figure out why everything is served with carrot slices as a garnish) that serves soups and sandwiches and stuff like that. They have a menu, but I honestly don’t know what’s on it. They always have a lunch special of a cup of some kind of soup, a choice of some sort of entree, and a dessert. It’s a neat little place. For whatever reason, the usual crowd it attracts are old enough to be my grandparents, but no one’s ever complained about the young punk coming in and eating their quiche, and there a lot of interesting people there. The restaurant also has cooking classes about once a month or so, and I signed up for one of those.

I’ve since found out that the soup class is famous, but the one I joined was a new idea and a lot less specific; it was about cooking with herbs. The class crowd was about the same as the lunch crowd as far as age, but I did end up sitting at a table with someone who graduated from Tech the same year I did that I sort of knew through Strick. Apparently his wife works at the restaurant. Crazy, man. Anyway, it was an educational experience. The class was basically a series of lectures followed by eating the item discussed, and most of the dishes were just regular things jazzed up with some extra plants. There were a couple kinds of pesto, an herb butter, a vinaigrette and some lemon sherbet with rosemary and lime peel and juice for dessert. I could have done without the chewy rosemary bits, but it tasted mighty nice. I learned a lot, and I got to thinking that maybe I should use that balcony space to try to grow some things. I guess I probably shouldn’t put that off until my foot heals like everything else that I’m procrastinating.

At one point, while making one of the pestoes, Ms. Annelies asked whether everyone had a food processor. I was the only one who didn’t, which I guess isn’t a horrible shortcoming, but can make things difficult. The guy from Tech confessed that he only had one because he took the soup class a few months before. I don’t really know what to think about it. Electricity is great and all, but I usually like the visceral experience of doing everything by hand, kind of like that crazy carpenter on PBS. I guess convenience is nice too, though. I have been known to use a microwave on occasion.

So, for anyone reading this looking for Christmas present ideas (I’m looking at you, mom), I could probably use a Cuisinart.

Really, the only difference between the stuff I’m trying to make and the baklava you can buy at your favorite local Greek restaurant is the addition of some goofy spices. A couple of them were a little daunting, like rose water. I don’t think that’s something I can find at Publix. I asked the Internet, and it offered me some tiny little bottles of the stuff for like ten bucks plus shipping. Then I got the bright idea to try that Middle Eastern grocery store on Mansell next to the pizza place I like and the National Guard recruiting center I don’t like. They sell coke bottle sized containers of rose water for two bucks along with all kinds of other spices I’ve never heard of. The Internet’s a scam. And some jerk in a uniform tried to get me to enlist while I was locking my bike. I would stay away from that strip altogether if the pizza weren’t so good.