honeymoon cocktail

2 oz Calvados
1/2 oz Benedictine
1/2 oz Orange Curaçao
1/2 oz Lemon Juice

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

On Friday night a week and a half ago, Andrea and I went down to Coolidge Corner to get dinner at Lineage. At the bar, Ryan Lotz described the two cocktails he had chosen for that weekend's selections from Ted Haigh's Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails. The one that called out to me was the Honeymoon Cocktail which was "a signature cocktail of L.A.'s Bob Cobb's Brown Derby." The Brown Derby was a small chain of Hollywood restaurants that opened in the 1920s, and while they did have a Brown Derby Cocktail, it was not one of the more famous ones made with Bourbon or dark rum.
The Honeymoon Cocktail possessed an apple and Benedictine-laced aroma. I was surprised that the drink was not overly sweet as I first suspected from hearing the proportions; indeed, the lemon juice provided a decent amount of crispness, plus Benedictine while sugarful is not incredibly sweet due to its bitter complexity. Moreover, the Benedictine's spice did a good job complementing the fruit notes in the drink. Ryan was correct in declaring that this recipe was one of the winners of Haigh's book.