As many readers of GOURMET know, the debonair young sportsman Paul Dubonnet has been wise enough to test California wine of the southern French type, and having found a fine base for his apéritif, is in production bottling Dubonnet veritable at his Philadelphia plant. Experts affirm its excellence, and we cannot tell it from the French bottling. Its price, furthermore, being relieved of ruinous import duties, is kinder to the purse. Dubonnet, like Angostura, Chartreuse, Bénédictine, Drambuie, and other potables, is one of those jealously guarded family secrets, so all we can know is that it is a blend of Bourdeaux type wines and bergs and bitters of varying sorts, to agitate the gastric juices. But secret or no, it’s sound liquor.
Oddly enough we did not meet our first Dubonnet mix in the Café de la Paix, but in a tiny bistro in Villefranche, where we disembarked along with other companions for a visit to Monte Carlo. This Dubonnet Méditerrané Special was brewed this way …. 2 parts dry gin, 1 part Dubonnet, ½ teaspoon lemon juice, 3 dashes Orange bitters; shake and serve. We found a twist of orange peel used after pouring vastly superior to the Orange bitters—more aromatic. Incidentally, we serve Dubonnet as an apéritif by pouring it over a wine glass filled with fine ice and pointing it up with a bit of lime juice, with the peel twisted on top at the last. A trifle of Grenadine is often admired by the ladies.
Coming home from Yoko, also in pleasanter days, we met up with a young American who started out on the schooner Chance with a batch of other Yale gentlemen headed around the world. But this chap, Clymer Brooke by name, dropped off at Tahiti, for reasons not relevant to this thesis, and migrated to Moorea, the lovely smaller island lying across from Papeete with its tumbled peaks against the horizon. Here Clymer hobnobbed with native royalty, got interested in a vanilla plantation, and generally enjoyed life. This drink is an addition from his bar log. Take a small thin goblet or wine glass, and chill. Into a bar glass or a Martini mixer put 2 jiggers brandy, 2 teaspoons strained lime juice, ditto yellow Curaçao and Grenadine, and either donate 2 teaspoons vanilla extract or 1 full pony Nos. 1 and 2. Créme de Vanille. Stir in with a cup of fine ice, and permit some of the latter to go into tumbler or goblet. Garnish with a stick of rice pineapple—a lot of this month’s drinks seem to take it!—and consume. The ladies like this one, for it is fairly sweet.
Now for three specials involving Kirschwasser, usually known as Kirsch. Like Hollands, Kirsch is an acquired taste; and I have wondered for years why so many Americans ignore it completely. It is a unique, potent spirit, made from certain wild black European cherries in Alsace and Switzerland. The ripe cherries are put into wood vats and mashed and mixed with wooden paddles, stones and all. It is the flavor of these stones that make Kirsch so distinctive, that give it the taste of bitter almonds. Like Absinthe and Jamaica rum, only a little is needed in most cocktails, since its potent taste cuts through other ingredients.
The Green Star I met in Gibraltar one cold January day after hours of climbing through the permitted parts of the Rock. This drink was the gift of a British army officer returned from a ski-leave in the Bavarian Alps. To 2 ounces Kirsch add 2 teaspoons Curaçao, and flavor with green Créme de Menthe to suit your taste—about ½ pony being right. Shake with big ice; and serve in a large Manhattan glass, with a twist of orange peel on top. Like a Stinger, the Green Star must be cold.
One miserable slushy day in early February we came down to Athens lower town after skidding, in the name of art, about the whole Acropolis—from Parthenon to Erectheum, to the peerless little temple of Athena Nike above the Western wall—undoubtedly to the improvement of the mind, but definitely to the detriment both of the seat of this historian’s trousers, and of the structure beneath that insubstantial covering. At the Grande Bretagne Hotel, however, I found sympathy and succor. The Greek equivalent of a femme de chambre did a passable cross-stitch job on the trousers; and with other fabric the little aged Greek bar master attended to the inner man.
He had, he advised me, been active in liquors for forty-odd years. During much of the time he had amused himself by casting up strange and weird mixes. Those impossible to absorb he promptly cast into limbo—and he pointed to a fancy blue-glazed gaboon of the right classic design. Those worth remembering he drank and noted down. The pick of the lot were what he entitled his Grande Bretagne Specials, Nos. 1 and 2.
Your traveling warden tested both, and both were equally good; both deserve permanent niches in the bibulous hall of fame. No. 2 requires 1 jigger dry gin, ½ pony Kirsch, 3 teaspoons or less (to taste) of strained lemon juice, 1 teaspoon or slightly more of egg white. Shake hard, and pour into a chilled Manhattan glass; float ½ teaspoon dry Cherry brandy or Cordial Médoc on top. Juggle the amount of Kirsch to suit personal taste; a little sugar is optional—very little.
During a honeymoon spent in rural England, in Boxmoor, and still within lucid memory of this desiccated and doubtless failing brain, we always headed into London town every week or so for a bit of city life—in a raffish Morris car constantly ailing with mysterious female complaints, yet somehow managing to get us and a dickey—rumble to us—full of our fanciest clothes into town. Here we put up at the Savoy—nowhere else on the glove is there a spot quite like this hostelry!—and here one afternoon we met a cocktail known as Hands Across the Sea, which I was informed had won a blue ribbon or something at the recent International Bartenders’ Competition. It merited registration, and here is the platoon of the strange bottle-fellows that go to make it. Take ¼ jigger each of Bourbon, Créme de Menthe, strained grapefruit juice, and dry white wine; sweeten with 2 teaspoons or less of maple syrup; shake hard and serve in a Manhattan glass. We were informed, with importance, that this work represented, in order of ingredients used, the United States, France, South Africa, Alsace or the Champagne country, and Canada.
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