colleen bawn

1 oz Rittenhouse Rye
1 oz Benedictine
1 oz Yellow Chartreuse
1 Egg

Shake without ice and then with ice. Strain into a cocktail glass and garnish with grated nutmeg and cinnamon.

Flippy goodness.

So, like, I met this guy at the bar Monday night, and he turned out to be a bartender at a restaurant we'd been meaning to check out. So for the second night in a row, I took the train down to Boston, met Husband, and spent my night hanging out at a bar! No 9 Park has a damn tasty menu, I have to say. The bar is sort of small but well-stocked and certainly seems to live up to its hype so far. There was an estimated wait of an hour to be seated at the bar (yes, at the bar), so I decided that something with an egg in it would keep my belly happy enough so I wouldn't have to eat the well-dressed leg next to me out of hunger.

Thanks to Miz Misty for pointing out my typo in the name, and the story behind this drink from The Cocktail Chronicles:

Oh, and the name? I don’t know where Spencer came across the drink, but the name is related to the notorious 1819 murder in County Limerick of a 15-year-old farmer’s daughter named Ellen Hanley — thereafter known, for reasons opaque to me, as “the Colleen Bawn” — by her newlywed husband, a well-to-do man named John Scanlan, and by his servant, Stephan Sullivan, who shot Hanley and dumped her body in the Shannon. The trial and subsequent executions of Scanlan and Sullivan, with their overtones of love, murder and class divisions, was the news item of the day, and spawned the publication of a bestselling novel, The Collegians, in 1829, and the even more popular Broadway and West End drama, The Colleen Bawn, in the 1860s, followed by the opera The Lady of Killarney, in 1862; the silent-film feature, The Colleen Bawn, in 1914; and the 1934 film, Bride of the Lake. (and not a speck of that’s from Wikipedia….) At the time of Spencer’s book, the story was still a hot number in London, so I’d venture to guess he or an acquaintance nabbed the name and stuck it to the drink.