Things We Said That Sounded Good at the Time

I'm working on a year-end retrospective on Charleston food for the City Paper this weekend, and in the process was cruising through some back issues of the paper to refresh my memory.  In the process, I came across this headline: "Salads Can Be Just as Satisfying as a Plate of Pulled Pork."

Wow.  That is so fundamentally just not true.

More Mysteries of the Roffignac Cocktail (Part the Third)

In which depending upon the kind assistance of strangers produces a curious recipe.

[This is part three of a series on the Roffinac.  Start with Part 1 to get the whole saga from the beginning.]

Thanks to a tip from Tom Freeland (a.k.a. NMissCommentor), I reached out to Tom Fitzmorris for more information about the Roffignac cocktail--particularly in its final incarnation as the house cocktail at Maylie's Restaurant.  Fitzmorris--the proprietor of the indispensible New Orleans Menu website, author of Hungry Town and the hot-off-the-presses Lost Restaurants of New Orleans--not only remembered the cocktail from his days as a Maylie's regular back in the 1970s but also conjured up a recipe, taken straight off an old Maylie's menu.

And, without further ado, here is the Roffignac as it was last served in New Orleans:

In a rocks glass filled with ice cubes, add:

1 oz. Cognac
1/2 oz. rye whiskey
Grenadine to taste
Splash of club soda

Add a lemon twist and there you are. 

I wasted no time in stirring one up and, from sip number one, it was quite fine.  In all my permutations before, I never thought to mix Cognac and rye.  I sort of associated Cognac as the original version and rye as the later substitution, so  it's curious to see a recipe with both together.  But I think it really works.

Next steps: try to replicate a Roffignac with himbeer essig syrup in place of the grenadine.  With the "to taste" admonition, I think we can make it work.

Thanks again to Tom Fitzmorris for his generous assistance!

Is Competition Barbecue a Menace?

Wright Thompson has a wonderful piece in the Oct/Nov Garden and Gun on the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest and the efforts of the Fatback Collective, a motley band of award-winning Southern chefs--Donald Link, Sean Brock, John Currence--and veteran barbecue kings--Rodney Scott, Nick Pihakis, Pat Martin, Drew Robinson.  Their mission was not just to win the whole hog category but, in the process, "rescue a barbecue contest, and maybe barbecue itself, from a crushing sameness."

It's a great read and makes you really wish you could have snuck onto the team, but the central premise of the article got me thinking not about the past but about the future of barbecue.

Memphis in May, Wright writes, is "a threat to authentic barbecue", with its judges acculturated to lean pigs shot full of MSG and sugar, the cooking manipulated through their Mr. Wizard tricks like filling cavities with sticks of butter and using ice-filled pillow cases to halt cooking.

Thompson may be right when he says that these high-tech competitive teams are currently "the face of Southern barbecue."  They certainly have about as much exposure as one can imagine through cable television and full-color glossy books.  But, it just doesn't strike me as something to worry about.

The competition barbecue circuit is a closed, almost insular world, one in which teams travel from weekend festival to weekend festival, mingling and bonding and getting to know each others' families along the way.  As Wright points out, the trick to winning a barbecue competition is to understand who won the last few contests and mimic their techniques, a sort of closed-island evolutionary accelerator that has resulted in a barbecue style that can truly be found only on the grounds of a sanctioned barbecue competition.

But is this really a threat to authentic barbecue, the slow-cooked regional variations that barbecue lovers hold so dear?  I don't think so.  Sure, some of the champions publish bestselling recipe books that have certainly shaped what your average backyard barbecuer (that is to say, a backyard griller) is throwing on his gas grills or his shiny new Big Green Egg.  But, how many of those folks were ever going to dig a pit and fill it with hickory coals?

No, the real threat to barbecue is the Southern Pride gas-powered, wood-chip-smoke infusing cooker and others of its ilk for the simple reason that they make it really easy to have barbecue that, while not great, is pretty good.   A barbecue restaurateur can put on the meat, set the thermostat, and go home and sleep in a comfy bed instead of staying up all night.

There are other threats, too.  Like health department regulations that make it a herculean task to get approval to open a real wood-burning pit.  Like a fast-food restaurant industry where the never-ending race to the bottom makes it hard for a slow-cooked product to compete with four dollar combo meals and computer-controlled deep fryers.

Going old school and winning one of the new fangled festivals with some old fashioned pig would be sweet.  But even sweeter would be keeping our rich, ever-evolving barbecue tradition moving forward in the right direction.  For my money, that means getting more good barbecue joints onto more street corners, with a new generation of barbecue kings learning the glories of cooking over wood and letting smoke and time work its magic.

No, I have no idea how that's going to happen. But still I have hope.          

Rum's Inferiority Complex

Check out the fun Flash segment on the home page of Appleton Estates Jamaican Rum.

Here's a synopsis, for those of you on iPads or too busy to fill out the mini-customs form required to access the site (what's with liquor sites making you enter your birthdate--does the law require them to do that, or just their lawyers?): It's a clever little bit showing a glass of dark rum over ice with a paper umbrella in it.  Along comes a stream of red fruity-looking liquid.  The umbrella spins into action, sending the juice flying in all directions and keeping the glass of rum pure and pristine.  "The Rum That Needs Nothing" is the punchline.

It's a clever bit, but it's also a little sad, for it shows how much the recent fetishization of bourbon and Scotch is spilling over into other realms.  You know the drill: the connoisseur who would pay $60 not for a bottle but for a single glass of whiskey with a lone sculpted cube of ice in the middle--unless, of course, they are the purist sort who would threaten to shoot you in the face if you even think about bringing a scoop of ice within ten yards of their drink.

I can hardly blame the rum guys for trying to keep up with the Joneses (and Beams and the Van Winkles).  If I were them I would do whatever I could, too, to be able to slap three digit price tags on bottles of "limited reserve" products.

But, this elevation of rum to a sip-it-slow-on-the-rocks connoisseur drink is a little depressing.  From the very beginning--when it was blended with sugar and citrus into punches--rum has been the consummate joiner, always playing well with others.

Yes, I know its reputation has been tarnished by two generations of frozen banana daiquiris and sugar-soaked pina coladas.  But, from the purity of an original daiquiri to the exquisite muddled mint of the mojito, there are any number of rum concoctions that are subtle mixtures suitable for grown ups. As classic tiki drinks like the Zombie illustrate, rum is alone among the liquors in that it can be mixed with other varieties--letting you blend a light rum and a dark rum and finish the drink off with an overproof rum float.

A while back, I was given a bottle of Ron Zacapa Centenario, a 23-year-old, barrel-aged rum. It's rich, mellow, and warm, absolutely perfect for sipping on the rocks and every bit the peer of a fine bourbon. I quite am sure that, using the proper subtle recipes, it could be incorporated into a splendid cocktail--perhaps something as simple as a little lime and sugar, or perhaps something more complex that builds in a couple of liqueurs and maybe even an overproof-rum kicker.

But, every time I've pulled out that brown, rattan-wrapped bottle with the intention of shaking up a cocktail, I hear the voices of the brown-liquor snobs whispering in my ear, "You can't do that, you philistine!  It would be a sacrilege."  And the 23-year-old rum ends up cold and alone in a rocks glass with just a chunk of ice to keep it company.

But, would it really be a sacrilege to let such a rum mingle with a few close friend? As Jeff "Beachbum" Berry relates, Victor "Trader Vic" Bergeron developed one of the classics of tiki bar culture because he had received a bottle of 17-year old J. Wray and Nephew rum and believed, "the flavor of this great rum wasn’t meant to be overpowered with heavy additions of fruit juices and flavorings."

Did he serve it in a stylish glass with a single orb of handcrafted ice in the middle?

Hardly.  He blended it with orange curacao, rock candy syrup, orgeat syrup, and the juice of one lime.   And thus was born the legendary Mai Tai.

So, my plea to the premium rum distillers is this: don't try to compete head-to-head with bourbon and Scotch as a sipping liquor.  You can't win a me-too game.  (Did pork gain anything over chicken by branding itself "the other white meat?" The answer is an emphatic no!)

Instead, change the playing field and take the game to a place where bourbon and Scotch can't follow.  Don't make rum aficionados feel guilty about mixing in a little lime juice or simple syrup. Encourage them to experiment.  Hell, if you invent some fancy enough formulas with fine cognacs and multiple aged rums, you might be able to come up with single-glass cocktails whose price tags make single-malt Scotches look like house brands.

There's about two ounces of Ron Zacapa Centenario left in that bottle in my liquor cabinet, which I've been saving for a special occasion.  Perhaps tonight I'll use it in a mai tai.

And I won't feel guilty about it at all.

Presidential Barbecue

A team of archaeologists have discovered what appears to be a barbecue pit at Montpelier, the home of President James Madison near Orange, Virginia.  Barbecue has a long, rich history in Virginia, and there are quite a few connections with George Washington, who in his journals recorded attending many barbecues and even hosted a few of his owns.  This establishes a connection with another American president.

Unraveling the Mystery of the Roffignac Cocktail (Part 2)

In which I attempt to contract a febrile affection or two.

(For the story up to now, see Part 1 of Unraveling the Mysteries of the Roffignac Cocktail)

Secrets of Red Hembarig Revealed

I was stuck hard on the identity of the sweetener named Red Hembarig, but I plugged away at it periodically.  A forum thread on eGullet (which included a helpful response from cocktail and punch guru David Wondrich) speculated that "Hembarig" was a corruption of himbeere, the German word for raspberry, and that "red Hembarig" was nothing more than raspberry syrup.

This didn't strike me as fully satisfying--why would Arthur include raspberry syrup as an alternative to raspberry syrup?--but it was just the hint I needed.  Back to the newspaper archives, and with a little trial and error I was able to track down not only "himbeer syrup" in turn of the century New Orleans but something even more interesting: a syrup that pairs himbeer (raspberries) with essig--the German word for vinegar.

And there you have it.  The elusive "Red Hembarig" is, I believe, Arthur's elision of himbeeressig syrup, which means the long-lost ingredient of the great Roffignac cocktail is . . . pause for drama . . . raspberry vinegar syrup!

Now, raspberry vinegar, to modern palates, seems more fit for salad dressings than for cocktails.  But, it  was rather common in drinks a century or more ago.  Like a lot of things in the world of 19th century imbibing, it comes out of the medicinal realm.

You can find raspberry vinegar and raspberry vinegar syrup recipes in any number of 19th century handbooks for pharmacists and chemists.  The formula from the 1884 edition of the National Dispensary is pretty typical: you mix a "convenient quantity" of fresh raspberries with a "sufficient quantity" of sugar (the precision of these pharmaceutical recipes is amazing) and let it rest for 3 days.  Then, you press and strain out the juice and let it sit until it has completely fermented and become clear (which should take a day or less), then filter it.  You mix this liquid with sugar (2 parts of liquid to 3 parts of sugar), heat it to a boil, then strain and bottle.

And what do you do with such a concoction?  The National Dispensary notes that "This syrup has no special medicinal virtues.  It forms an agreeable addition to mixtures, and with water a pleasant drink for febrile affections."  Febrile affections (per Rudy's List of Archaic Medical Terms) means pretty much any medical condition accompanied by a fever, so it might be safe to say that raspberry syrup is good for whatever ails you.  During the Civil War, in fact, a letter writer to the New York Times recommended raspberry vinegar as "a grateful, cooling and wholesome drink for the fevered, sick and wounded."

But why wait until you are sick or wounded?  Pharmacists and bartenders alike (and, in old New Orleans these occupations were often one in the same) discovered somewhere in the mid 19th century that raspberry vinegar syrup made an agreeable addition to cocktails, too.

In How to Mix Drinks (1862), Jerry Thomas includes not one but three recipes for raspberry vinegar syrup.  In one, you first make raspberry vinegar by macerating 30 pounds of raspberries in 7 1/2 gallons of wine or cider vinegar for eight days before pressing and straining it.  Then, you dissolve 80 pounds of sugar in the vinegar, boil it for 2 minutes, then skim and strain.  Another recipe calls for 3 1/2 lbs sugar, 1 pint raspberry juice, and 2 pints of vinegar.

Thomas does not provide, any recipes for drinks using the syrup, but there are plenty out there in other publications, some alcoholic and some not.  Raspberry shrub--a few tablespoons of the vinegar syrup mixed with a glass of water--was a popular summertime beverage, while hot raspberry ade (which added lime juice) was a wintertime refresher.  Amanda Hesser of the New York Times rediscovered raspberry vinegar as a beverage component a few years ago, using it by the spoonful to spruce up a glass of sparkling water or prosecco.  Her recipe, borrowed from a 1900 New York Times article, is for 1-1/2 quarts raspberries macerated for three days in one cup of vinegar, then mashed and strained and made into a syrup by simmering with a half pound of sugar.

Raspberry vinegar syrup was particularly popular in New Orleans, where it was commonly referred to by its German name himbeeressig.  Why the German was used in New Orleans and not elsewhere in the country is uncertain, but New Orleans did have a substantial German-American community, and its members played a prominent role in the city's pharmacy, hotel, and restaurant trade.

Advertisement for Loubat's Syrups for

Soda Fountains

(Times-Picayune, March 5, 1934)

One commercial vendor of himbeeressig syrup in New Orleans was the Loubat Glassware and Cork Company, which dates back to at least the 1870s (and is still in the restaurant supply business today as the Loubat Equipment Company).  In the 1920s, it advertised himbeer essig as one of the 14 flavors of Loubat's Syrups, which it sold to soda fountains in one-gallon jugs for $1.50 a piece.

So, it seems, there was plenty of raspberry vinegar syrup floating around the pharmacies, soda fountains, and bars of New Orleans around the turn of the century.  Little wonder that it made its way into a few liquor drinks.  

The Legacy of the Roffignac Cocktail

And that brings us back to the Roffignac.  Having equipped myself with a bottle of Cognac and dozens of recipes for "Red Hembarig"--that is, himbeer essig--syrup, I was ready to take a crack at constructing perhaps the original Roffignac cocktail

But, first, here's how not to create raspberry vinegar syrup.  Flush with the victory of uncovering himbeer essig, I raced to the Historical Cocktail Testing Facility.   All the recipes I had uncovered called for days and days of steeping, but I was in the heat of the hunt and figured I could cut corners and mix one part of the raspberry syrup made in my previous Roffignac forays with one part cider vinegar.  This, emphatically, does not work, and the pungent vinegar concoction quickly ended up in the Failed Experiment Disposal Unit (a.k.a. kitchen sink drain), wasting an ounce and a half of perfectly good rye whiskey in the process.

I resigned myself to having to wait, using the recipe for raspberry vinegar syrup from Jerry Thomas's How to Mix Drinks and recalculating the proportions to make a more manageable amount.

---

Himbeer Essig, or Raspberry Vinegar Syrup


12 oz. raspberries
24 fl. oz. (3 cups) cider vinegar

32 oz. sugar

Put raspberries and vinegar in a large plastic container and let them soak for 8 days.  Strain through a sieve, mashing and pressing the raspberries to extract all their juice.  Put the liquid in a saucepan along with the sugar, bring to a boil over high heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar.  Let it simmer a minute or two, then cool and bottle.

---

The preparation of the syrup will give your house a good fumigation and send the wife and kids running for the doors.  But, once it cools and the flavors blend in the fridge overnight, it's a truly remarkable substance: sweet and tangy and complex, the bite of the vinegar mellowed and smoothed by the raspberries and sugar.

Now, there's just one confusing thing about Stanley Clisby Arthur's recipe for a Roffignac.   "Sirup" appears twice in the ingredients list:  1 jigger of whiskey, 1 pony of "sirup", seltzer or soda water, and, finally, "raspberry sirup".   In the instructions that follow, he says simply to add the whiskey, then "the sirup, which may be raspberry, grenadine, or red Hembarig."  So, does this mean you use a pony of regular simple syrup and a splash of raspberry, grenadine, or "red Hembarig"?  Or, do you use a full pony of the flavored syrup?

A Roffignac made with a jigger of rye and a pony of regular raspberry syrup is nicely balanced.  The same drink made with a pony of himbeer essig was quite off: way too pungent and strident.  I loved the zing of the raspberry vinegar, but it was much too strong.  So, I tried a few variations where I moderated the himbeer essig, cut it with plain simple syrup, added in a little bitters, swapped Cognac and rye in and out.

A version made with rye whiskey and a blend of simple syrup and himbeer essig was getting close to the mark, but something about that vinegar tang and the sharp edge of the rye just wasn't quite there.

Finally, I mixed up one with Cognac and himbeer essig diluted 2 parts to 1 with a simple syrup made with demerara sugar, which has a nice pale brown color and a little darker, richer flavor than a syrup made from granulated white sugar.  I stirred it up, took a sip, and and thought to myself, Goddamn.  That tastes almost exactly like Coca-Cola.  With, of course, a very pleasing kick.

Could this be the original Roffignac?  A drink as mild as Coca-Cola but as potent as a Sazerac?

Maybe.

---

The Original (Perhaps) Roffignac Cocktail

1.5 oz. Cognac or other good brandy

2/3 oz. simple syrup

1/3 oz. himbeer essig syrup 

soda water

Combine the Cognac and syrups in a rocks glass and stir.  Fill glass with ice, top with club soda, and give one final stir. 

Arthur calls for a highball glass, which would be at least eight ounces, but unless you just drown the thing in soda it leaves it awfully empty.  I generally use a 6-ounce rocks glass, which seems more appropriate

---

The Roffignac Cocktail,
Rye Whiskey Version

A Roffignac Rebirth?

While I like my version of the Roffignac, I am painfully aware that I'm totally shooting in the dark, trying to recreate a cocktail I've never tasted before and with ingredients that are murkily established at best.

It doesn't seem possible to me that a whiskey soda with a splash of raspberry syrup would have been special enough to become a signature New Orleans drink, one that would rival the Sazerac or Ramos gin fizz.  My Coca-Cola-esque version seems more like the kind of thing that would have gotten the attention of locals and tourists alike.  But I'm just guessing.

Errol Laborde over at MyNewOrleans.com recently retold an amusing anecdote about Roffignac cocktails taken from an 1892 edition of the Mascot literary magazine.  I'll let you read the anecdote over there, but the fact that the Roffignac passes itself off as a temperance drink further suggests that it would have been very soft drink like in flavor.

Larborde also notes that the Roffignac, which never came back into fashion after Prohibition, lingered on as the house specialty at Maylie's, which opened in 1876 and lasted 110 years.  When Maylie's closed in 1986, Laborde writes, "so did the public life of the Roffignac."

1986, alas, was just a little before my (legal) drinking time, but perhaps someone who remembers the Roffignac from Maylie's could weigh in on the concoction: was it just a raspberry-flavored whiskey-and-soda, or something more subtle and complex?  Does anyone from New Orleans remember seeing a bottle of himbeer essig syrup at soda fountains or elsewhere?

Maybe, just maybe, the public life of the Roffignac is not at its end just yet. 

Unraveling the Mystery of the Roffignac Cocktail (Part 1)

In which I am stymied by the mysterious Red Hembarig

I am currently neck deep in research on the classic cocktails of New Orleans, and along the way stumbled upon a bit of a mystery.  The Sazerac, the Ramos gin fizz, even the absisnthe frappe: these I was familiar with.  But not too long ago, while working through old newspaper archives from around the turn of the 20th century, I came across a cocktail that I had never heard of before.  It was highlighted as one of the signature drinks of New Orleans, and it had a splendidly rich, dramatic-sounding name: the Roffignac Cocktail.

That name came from a man known in New Orleans as Joseph Roffignac but who bore the even more grandiloquent full name of Count Louis Phillipe Joseph de Roffignac.  Roffignac fled France during the Revolution and established himself as a leading merchant in New Orleans.  He served as mayor of the city from 1820 to 1828, inaugurating under his watch the first paving and lighting of streets, and was by all accounts a bon vivant and all-around great guy.

While it isn't likely that Roffignac himself ever tasted the drink named in his honor (he died in 1846, long before I can find any trace of the cocktail in print), it had become one of the city's signature drinks by the 1890s.  

Maylie's Restaurant, New Orleans
Home of the Roffignac Cocktail for Almost a Century

Mannessier's Confectionary--a Royal Street shop known for its coffee, ice cream, and pastries--was also famous for its Roffignac cocktails. In its 1899 guide for carnival visitors, the New Orleans weekly Harlequin included included Mannessier's along with the Sazerac, the Imperial Cabinet, and the Old Absinthe house as drinking spots not to be missed, noting that "the Mannessier has a great reputation for its roffignacs."

Mannessier's closed in 1914, but the Roffignac lived on at Maylie’s Restaurant on Poydras Street. Originally named Maylie and Esparbe, the restaurant dated back to 1876 and catered initially to the butchers of the Poydras market.  By the turn of the 20th century it was considered second only to Antoine's among the city's restaurants.  Its classic dishes included its soups, eggs Remoulade, panned veal, and pan-fried trout, and the Roffignac was the house cocktail.


So what kind of cocktail was it?

The 1937 Primary Source for
Roffignac Recipes

Googling up some basic information on the Roffignac was easy, since it has appeared on several cocktail enthusiast blogs recently.  All of the recipes seem to trace back to a single source: Stanley Clisby Arthur, whose slim 1937 volume Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix 'Em is an indispensable guide to historic New Orleans libations. Here is Arthur's recipe for the Roffignac, which is essentially a whiskey soda with raspberry syrup:

1 jigger whiskey
1 pony sirup
seltzer or soda water
raspberry sirup

Arthur's instructions have you mix the whiskey, "sirup," and soda water in a highball glass and add ice.  He notes that you could replace the whiskey with cognac, which was used in the original version of the drink, and instead of raspberry syrup use something called "red Hembarig," which he describes as "a popular syrup when old New Orleans was young."

Down in the Historical Cocktail Testing Facility (a.k.a. my kitchen), I easily mixed up a whiskey-and-raspberry syrup version of the Roffignac, since, thanks to a bag of raspberries in my freezer, I had all the necessary ingredients on hand.

---

Quick and Simple Raspberry Syrup
This would be better with fresh raspberries, but if they're out of season or you are in a historically-driven cocktail research rush, you can limp by with frozen.

2 cups raspberries
1-1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water

Combine raspberries, sugar, and water in a small sauce pan and bring to a boil, stirring until the sugar is dissolved.  Reduce heat and simmer five minutes or so, then remove from heat and allow to cool.  Pour through a strainer, squeezing all the juice from the berries, and bottle.  Refrigerate and use as needed.

---

Raspberry syrup and a bottle of Old Overholt rye in hand, I proceeded by Arthur's instructions to construct my first Roffignac.  The resulting cocktail had a brilliant red color and was pretty tasty but, I would have to admit, nothing to make a big fuss about--just a raspberry-tinged whiskey soda.

The next step, of course, was to try to recreate the original version hinted at in Arthur's recipe.  The Cognac made perfect sense: it was the liquor of choice in New Orleans cocktails up until the 1870s, when, in part because of the phylloxera outbreak in France, Cognac and other real French brandies became rare and expensive and the city's bartenders began substituting whiskey.  The original Sazerac, in fact, was made not with rye whiskey but with Cognac, and its name comes from Sazerac de Forge et Fils, a much-esteemed brand of Cognac in the mid-19th century.

But what about that other ingredient, Red Hembarig?  My efforts to track it down hit a brick wall very quickly. The term seems to appear only in the work of Stanley Clisby Arthur, and all the references I could find on the Interwebs (like cocktail blogs) pointed ultimately back to Arthur's book as their source.  Searches through digital book, newspaper, and magazine archives came up dry.  It seems a word invented by Arthur himself.

For a few days I was stuck fast.  What on earth was Red Hembarig?

And then came a lucky break . . . which I'll tell all about in Part 2.

Part 2 now posted here

Classic Cocktail Books

Brandy Sour, Which I Enjoyed While
Composing this Post and May Explain
the More Egregious Typos

So, this came to me via my old buddy Robert Trogdon, who sent in a tweet:

  any rec for good cocktail book? Something old school.

A little too long a topic for 140 characters, so I'm jumping to the blog to record a few recommendations.

If you want to go REALLY old school, you have to go to Jerry Thomas's How to Mix Drinks, or, the Bon-Vivant's Companion (1862) which, most authorities agree, is the first bartender's manual published in the United States.  Fortunately, since it dates back to the Civil War, it is long out of copyright and readily available online at Google Books and many other places.

But, unless you're just a total cheapskate, it's well worth plunking down a few bucks for David Wondrich's Imbibe!: From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar.  Despite its impressively 19th century title, it's a recent work (2007) that draws from the recipes in Thomas's original guide and adds a lot of great historical anecdotes and also solid, helpful advice on translating the old formulae and ingredients to the modern bar.

I recently ordered Stanley Clisby Arthur's Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix 'Em, an essential 1937 work that is a time capsule of classic recipes from American's most important cocktail city.

And, perhaps the book I reach to most when actually mixing a cocktail is Dale DeGroff's The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks, it's got a great selection of both classic and modern cocktails, and DeGroff's deft hand with ingredients results in recipes that are always just a bit tastier and more interesting that other bar guides.

Hope this helps, Troggie, and I hope we can lift a glass together soon!

Now Available Online: Pimento Cheese Please!

Pimento Cheese, Please! from Christophile Konstas on Vimeo.

The waiting is over. Pimento Cheese, Please!, the best sixteen minutes of documentary film ever produced on the subject of classic Southern cheese spreads, is now available online. I pop up every couple of minutes with a few fun facts on the history of pimento cheese, and you gotta watch out for the coolest clip of all--the guy about 3/4s of the way through (okay, at 13:54 to be precise!) carving up watermelons with a handsaw.

Nice job, Nicole and Christophile!

Pimento Cheese Please, a documentary from Nichole Lang and Christophile Konstas, is premiering at the Hippodrome Theatre in Richmond this Wednesday (November 9th). Read all about it in Richmond Magazine.

Lang and Konstas shot much of the documentary here in Charleston, including interviews with Matt and Ted Lee, Robert Stehling of Hominy Grill, and, of all people, me.  I shared with them a great old pimento cheese advertisement from the 1920s that I hope made it into the final cut.

If you're in the Richmond area, check it out!