Tuesday, February 9, 2010

royal smile cocktail

3/4 oz Apple Brandy (Marquis de Saint-Loup Calvados)
3/4 oz Dry Vermouth (Noilly Prat)
3/4 oz Lime Juice
3/4 oz Grenadine (Homemade)
1 Egg White

Shake once without ice and once with ice. Strain into a claret glass.
On Sunday night, I flipped through Jacques Straub's 1914 Drinks that I purchased from the newly opened Boston Shaker store in Davis Square, Somerville. I was in search of a use for the egg whites left over from the Almond Molasses Flip and I found the Royal Smile Cocktail. The drink could be considered a hybrid of a few Pink Lady recipes; for example, one recipe in Boothby uses dry vermouth instead of gin, and another lime instead of lemon. Moreover, the Royal Smile Cocktail is less booze forward than most Pink Lady recipes; besides the vermouth instead of gin exchange, the Royal Smile's equal parts recipe makes the nonalcoholic ingredients play a greater role in shaping the drink. The Royal Smile Cocktail started with a lime nose and a sweet pomegranate-apple taste. The flavors were modified by the lime's crispness and vermouth's botanicals on the swallow; both of these elements functioned to dry out the drink on the swallow. In addition, the egg white probably played a role in mitigating the grenadine's sweetness.

1 comment:

erik.ellestad said...

I like Straub's Drinks, but a lot of the recipes fall outside of the canon of accepted variations for the name. That is to say, it seems he had an idiosyncratic cocktail recipe book, and his book was not very widely circulated.

Giving its recipes equal weight to more well known and published books is probably not a fantastic idea. To me it's more interesting simply for Archival value. For example, his Pink Lady is really much tastier than those of his contemporaries, but it doesn't have egg white.