3/4 oz Sweet Vermouth (Dolin)
1/2 oz Yellow Chartreuse
Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
woxum
3/4 oz Apple Brandy (Laird's Bonded)
3/4 oz Sweet Vermouth (Dolin)
1/2 oz Yellow Chartreuse
Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
Sunday night I was flipping through the Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book and found the curious recipe for the Woxum. Besides serving to finish off our old bottle of yellow Chartreuse so we could replace the spot with the new one, the recipe entry had the following intriguing description, "Some think it is aboriginally American, and ascribe it to a 'bunch of Indians,' so called, who occasionally made whoopee--or, as it was said at that time, 'raised hell'--in the Old Waldorf Bar when they could get away with it." A quick web search for Woxum pulled up no references to Indians of any sort, save for the description in the book transcribed online elsewhere. In the cocktail itself, the richness of the apple brandy meets the sweet spiciness and complexity of the vermouth and Chartreuse. To add to the drink, I rimmed the glass and garnished with a small sage leaf from our garden. The sage odor brought out some more vegetal notes in the Chartreuse and worked rather well with the apple brandy. CocktailDB has an entry for the Woxum Cocktail which is similar in ingredients but different in proportions (1 1/2 oz apple brandy, 1/2 oz each of sweet vermouth and yellow Chartreuse) which might serve to be a drier variant to this one.
3/4 oz Sweet Vermouth (Dolin)
1/2 oz Yellow Chartreuse
Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
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3 comments:
There's also the similar Full House #2: equal parts applejack, Benedictine, and yellow Chartreuse. It's on cocktaildb but I don't know if I noticed it somewhere else first.
I love the name of this drink. Thanks for the reminder--I remember coming across this cocktail in the Waldorf book, too, and marveling at its odd-ness. Now I will remember to actually sample one!
This appears to be related a variant (or the original) of the Waxen in Straub 1913/1914, which adds Old Tom, everything a half jigger but the chartreuse a half pony. Jack Grohusko copies this from Straub in 1916/1933, but apparently misses the distinction, since he has all equal parts. These guys borrowed from the Waldorf bar and/or the Hoffman House bar books before they were published.
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