The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks
Page 28
Yuzu is an enchanting addition to flavored sake and shochu-based liqueur. A Korean yuzu syrup called yucheong, available at Asian grocery stores, is mixed with hot water to make tea but also happens to be a fantastic cocktail ingredient.
Because yuzu trees are hardy to 10 degrees Fahrenheit, they survive in mountainous regions where no other citrus can be found. Gardeners in England and colder regions of the United States who are determined to grow citrus outdoors might have luck with yuzu if other citrus have failed to thrive.
RAMOS GIN FIZZ
New Orleans bartender Henry Ramos is credited with inventing this drink around 1888. During the 1915 Mardi Gras Carnival season, he created quite a spectacle by having thirty-five muscular bartenders line up and shake the drinks. Many bars won’t make it, fearing the liability of serving raw eggs, or dreading the effort involved. At Graphic, London’s excellent gin bar, it is not unusual for a Ramos Gin Fizz to be passed around the room and shaken by bartenders, waitresses, and customers until the froth is perfect.
1½ ounces gin (the original recipe called for Old Tom gin)
½ ounce lemon juice
½ ounce lime juice
½ ounce simple syrup
1 ounce cream
1 egg white
2 to 3 drops orange flower water
1 to 2 ounces soda water
Combine all the ingredients except the soda water in a cocktail shaker and shake without ice for at least 30 seconds. Then add ice and continue to shake for at least 2 minutes, passing the shaker around the room as needed to keep it going without incurring frostbite. Pour the soda water into a highball glass and strain the fizz into the glass.
Orgeat (pronounced or-ZHA, although many americans pronounce it or-ZHAT): A sweet, often nonalcoholic syrup made with almonds, sugar, and orange flower water, sometimes in a base of barley water. Orgeat is an essential ingredient in a Mai Tai, although it is left out all too often.
MAI TAI
1½ ounces dark rum (some recipes mix dark and light rum)
½ ounce lime juice
½ ounce curaçao or another orange liqueur
Dash of simple syrup
Dash of orgeat syrup
Maraschino cherry
Wedge of pineapple
Shake all the liquid ingredients and strain. Serve over crushed ice in a goblet or highball glass. Garnish with the cherry and a pineapple wedge. If you have ever been tempted to put a paper umbrella in a glass, this would be the time.
ORANGE LIQUEURS: A PRIMER
-- and wrapping things up with --
nuts & seeds
Nut: a dry fruit that does not open at maturity to release its seed; generally surrounded by a hard woody outer covering and containing only one seed.
Seed: a structure containing an embryo which forms in a plant’s ovary following fertilization.
Almond | Coffee | Hazelnut | Kola Nut | Walnut
ALMOND
Prunus dulcis
rosaceae (rose family)
There is drawne out of sweet Almonds, with liquor added, a white juice like milke.” So said John Gerard, English barber-surgeon and herbalist who in 1597 published The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, a vivid but fanciful compendium of botanical knowledge and half-truths. He claimed that chestnuts could keep horses from coughing and that the juice of basil leaves could treat snakebite—but he did get a few things right. Sweet almonds? Liquor? Gerard was on to something.
Almonds are quite closely related to apricots and peaches and probably share an Asian heritage. The trees were cultivated in China twelve thousand years ago and made their way to Greece by the fifth century BC. They prefer a Mediterranean climate, with mild winters and long, dry summers, which helped them to spread successfully across Asia and into southern Europe, northern Africa, and the west coast of the United States. They are so abundant in California that hives of European honeybees are carried from orchard to orchard to pollinate the crop.
The nuts weren’t always so delightful to eat. Bitter almonds, Prunus dulcis var. amara, contain enough cyanide to be deadly at a dose of fifty to seventy nuts. Fortunately, people are unlikely to eat a bitter almond by mistake; they are not sold in stores and are grown primarily for pressing into almond oil, using a process that removes the poisons.
It is the sweet almond, Prunus dulcis var. dulcis, that lends its unmistakable honeyed nuttiness to liqueurs. The poisons have been bred out of this variety through centuries of selection, with orchardists choosing trees that happened to produce sweeter, less toxic almonds.
Almond liqueurs have been popular since the Renaissance, an era of great discovery that included the realization that any number of wonderful things happen when fruit, spices, and nuts are soaked in brandy. The goal could have been to create a medicine, or simply to soften the edges of a crudely distilled spirit. The Italian amaretto is the best-known example, although the brand most widely sold around the world, Amaretto di Saronno, contains no almonds at all but instead gets its nuttiness from the kernels of a close botanical relative, the apricot. Still, it is fairly easy to find an amaretto made with actual almonds: try Luxardo Amaretto di Saschira Liqueur.
Although the liqueur is perfect on its own, it is also used to flavor biscotti. There are few better ways to end a meal than with amaretto-laced coffee and biscotti.
An almond is not technically a nut. From a botanical perspective, a nut is a fruit with a dry, hard shell. An almond is a drupe, or a stone fruit whose pit surrounds a fleshy seed. Unlike peaches, apricots, and other drupes, however, the almond’s “fruit” is nothing more than an unappetizing leathery outer membrane.
COFFEE
Coffea arabica
rubiaceae (madder family)
What we refer to as a coffee bean is actually a pair of seeds found inside a small, red fruit: the coffee “cherry.” The fruit grows on an Ethiopian shrub that claims both quinine and gentian as relatives. (All are in the taxonomic order Gentianales.) It produces a remarkable poison that will paralyze or kill an insect attempting to feed on it. That poison, caffeine, is exactly what drew us to the plant seven hundred years ago. Humans are not immune to the poison, but it would take over fifty cups of coffee, downed in rapid succession, to deliver a fatal dose.
Arab traders first brought coffee from its native Africa to Europe sometime before 1500. It took over a century for it to catch on, but by the mid-1600s, coffee houses were well established in England and throughout Europe. A charming story circulated about an Ethiopian goatherd whose goats ate the fruit of a coffee shrub and were so energized that they jumped and frolicked for the rest of the day and didn’t sleep that night. Although this was probably nothing but a tall tale recited by merchants, it persisted well into the nineteenth century. The fact that a plant could allow people to go without sleep was considered a major scientific breakthrough.
In the early 1700s, Dutch and French traders took just a few varieties of coffee to plantations in the Americas, inadvertently creating a sort of genetic bottleneck. A surprising lack of diversity among coffee plants continues today. Although there are over a hundred known species, almost all coffee grown around the world comes from clones of Coffea arabica, with C. canephora (sometimes called C. robusta) in second place. Insect and pest problems among this monocrop have sent botanists in search of other species, some of which are near extinction in their native habitat. Plant explorers from Kew Gardens have discovered thirty previously unknown species of coffee in the last decade, each with their own remarkable characteristics: some contain almost no caffeine, others produce seeds twice the size of anything seen before, and some, it is hoped, will be better able to resist pests and disease.
There is no easy way to harvest coffee. It has to be handpicked because the fruit does not all ripen at the same time. The green seeds must be separated from the fruit, which can be accomplished through a “wet” process, in which the seeds are picked out of the fruit and fermented in water to remove pulpy residue, or a “dry” process in whi
ch the fruit is dried so that it can be more easily separated from the seeds. (The wet process is believed to produce a better-tasting bean and commands a higher price.) Once the green seeds are clean, they’re ready to be roasted.
Coffee is now grown in fifty countries and has surpassed tea as the global drink of choice: we produce three times more coffee than we do tea. But learning to grind it and boil it in water was only the first step. By the early 1800s, coffee was being made into liqueur as well. Most early recipes called for nothing more than roasted coffee beans, sugar, and some sort of spirit. Such a product was produced commercially by 1862, when it was shown at the International Exhibition in London. Early twentieth-century recipes added cinnamon, cloves, mace, and vanilla.
By the 1950s, the rum-based Mexican liqueur Kahlúa was gaining popularity. Unlike many liqueur companies, this one does not keep the recipe a secret: the sugarcane spirit is barrel-aged for seven years, then combined with coffee extract, vanilla, and caramel. Dozens of coffee liqueurs are now sold around the world, based on spirits ranging from rum to Cognac to tequila. Craft distillers are partnering with specialty roasters to create high-end coffee spirits. Firefly in Santa Cruz, California, is one such example. They blend wet-processed Costa Rican beans with a brandy made from Syrah and Zinfandel grapes. Bartenders are also doing their own coffee infusions behind the bar, muddling beans into cocktails, and using coffee bitters in spicy drinks.
But perhaps the best-known combination of coffee beans and alcohol is Irish coffee. As with most famous drinks, its history is hotly debated, but one version of the story credits a bartender in Ireland’s Shannon Airport as the inventor. A travel writer returning from Ireland asked a bartender at the Buena Vista restaurant in San Francisco to re-create it, and after much experimenting, the perfect combination of coffee, whiskey, sugar, and cream came together in the glass.
BUENA VISTA’S IRISH COFFEE
Hot coffee
2 sugar cubes
1½ ounces Irish whiskey
2 to 3 ounces whipping cream, lightly whipped with a whisk
Fill a heat-resistant glass or mug with hot water to warm it. Empty it and pour in the coffee until it is two-thirds full. Add the sugar cubes and stir vigorously; then add the whiskey. Carefully top with whipped cream.
HAZELNUT
Corylus avellana
betulaceae (birch family)
The hazel tree traces its origins to Asia and parts of Europe, where it has been actively cultivated for over two thousand years. The French gave the nut the name filbert, presumably after seventh-century abbot St. Philibert, whose feast day is August 20, precisely when the nuts are ripe. But the English called it a hazelnut. Over time, botanists settled the disagreement by assigning the word filbert to one species, Corylus maxima, and hazelnut to another, C. avellana. In the United States, the two words are used interchangeably, much to everyone’s confusion, even though most farmers grow C. avellana. There are native American species, but they’re not as productive as the European trees.
Although hazel trees can reach fifty feet in height, they tend to be short and shrubby, and farmers encourage that behavior. They lend themselves to coppicing, a practice of cutting down the main trunk of a tree to encourage twiggy growth from the roots. This keeps them productive and makes the harvest easier to manage.
Roasted hazelnuts in particular have a sweet, caramelized flavor that comes from at least seventy-nine different flavor compounds. Raw nuts have fewer than half that number, so the roasting process is vital to bringing out their complex taste.
Hazelnut liqueurs like Frangelico and Fratello are sweet blends of hazelnut and other spices like vanilla and chocolate. The Frangelico distillery crushes its toasted hazelnuts and then extracts the flavors in a mixture of water and alcohol. Some of this infusion is distilled, so that the final version contains both the distillate and the infusion. Also added are vanilla, cocoa, and other extracts.
That is the Italian style; the French version would be something more like Edmond Briottet’s Crème de Noisette, a pale amber liqueur with a bright, clear hazelnut flavor. Craft distilleries in the Pacific Northwest have also begun experimenting with hazelnut-infused vodka and hazelnut liqueurs. And behind the bar, hazelnuts are an ingredient in small-batch bitters, and pure hazelnut extract can be used as a cocktail ingredient or whipped into cream for nutty coffee drinks.
KOLA NUT
Cola acuminata
sterculiaceae (cacao family)
This African tree, a relative of the South American chocolate-producing cacao, grows to over sixty feet tall in its natural state and unfurls sprays of exquisite pale yellow flowers streaked in purple. After it blooms, a cluster of leathery, wrinkled fruit emerges, each containing about a dozen seeds. Those seeds are the kola nut, a mildly caffeinated treat enjoyed by West Africans as a stimulant. Once Europeans discovered it, the nut followed a now-predictable journey from eighteenth century medicine to nineteenth century tonic to twentieth-century flavoring extract.
Kola elixirs were prescribed for seasickness and as an appetite stimulant, often in combination with gentian and quinine. Early recipes for kola bitters were straightforward combinations of kola nut, alcohol, sugar, and citrus. By the late 1800s, kola wine and kola bitters were available in markets in London, and French and Italian distillers were releasing aromatized wine and amaros with kola as an ingredient. Toni-Kola, an aperitif wine, is one famous and now defunct brand.
Soda fountains stocked kola syrup to make cocktaillike mixtures of fizzy, nonalcoholic drinks in the early twentieth century; these elaborate drinks were seen as one way to encourage temperance. The Coca-Cola company fought endless trademark battles over its use of the word “cola” to describe its products, but courts remained firm that “cola” was a general term to describe any beverage made with an extract of the kola nut and could not be trademarked. It remains an approved food flavoring today, and many natural soda companies still use the nut to add caffeine and that sweet, round cola flavor.
South Africans can buy a sweet syrup called Rose’s Kola Tonic, and British, Australian, and New Zealand drinkers can look for Claytons Kola Tonic, a mixer that is also marketed as something a nondrinker can order in a bar (much like any other cola). Master of Malt, a UK liquor retailer, sells kola bitters in a dark rum base, which they promise will deliver “depth, tang and astringency” to cocktails. And although Italian amaros, including Averna Amaro and Vecchio Amaro del Capo, are described as having “notes of cola,” the manufacturers offer no clue as to whether the nut is in fact part of their secret formulas.
WALNUT
Juglans regia
juglandaceae (walnut family)
There is nothing as astringent and unpleasant as a green, unripe walnut—until it has been soaked in alcohol and sugar, that is. Nocino, an Italian walnut liqueur, is surely one of the most ingenious uses of surplus produce ever invented.
Walnut trees are native to China and eastern Europe, and still grow wild in Kyrgyzstani forests. They were introduced to the West Coast by Franciscan monks around 1769, and are still seen growing on the grounds of California missions. The black walnut, J. nigra, is native to the eastern United States and is prized as much for its durable, dark wood as its fruit. Because it tolerates cold temperatures so well, European explorers brought the black walnut to Europe in the seventeenth century.
The magnificent trees reach over one hundred feet and cast a wide shadow. Long, ropy clusters of male flowers, called catkins, emerge in spring and release pollen, which is captured by the decidedly unglamorous green female blossoms. A soft green fruit emerges after pollination, and by early summer, the tree is laden with more walnuts than it can possibly support. Many of them drop to the ground before autumn.
This must have frustrated early orchardists, who would have wanted to make use of everything their trees produced. Fortunately, the tannic green walnuts made an excellent black dye, wood stain, and ink—but a liqueur made from the inedible fruit would have been valu
able as well.
The recipe for nocino (called liqueur de noix in France) has changed little over the centuries. It’s nothing more than soft green walnuts, cut into quarters or crushed, and soaked in some kind of spirit along with sugar. Vanilla and spices can be added; some people include lemon or orange zest. It’s ready to drink after it has sat for a month or two and turned a deep, rich brownish black.
Nocino doesn’t have to be made at home. Haus Alpenz imports Nux Alpina Walnut Liqueur from Austria, and California’s Charbay distillery makes a black walnut liqueur with a Pinot Noir brandy base called Nostalgie. Another California brandy-based walnut liqueur, Napa Valley’s Nocino della Cristina, has also won rave reviews. Although nocino is intended to be sipped on its own as an after-dinner drink or poured over ice cream, bartenders also serve it in coffee drinks or in cocktails that call for spicy, nutty liqueurs.
HOMEMADE NOCINO
20 green walnuts, cut into quarters
1 cup sugar
750 ml bottle of vodka or Everclear
Zest of 1 lemon or orange
Optional spices: 1 cinnamon stick, 1 to 2 whole cloves, 1 vanilla bean
Green walnuts can be gathered in summer or purchased at farmers’ markets. Choose whole, unblemished fruit that can easily be pierced with a knife. Wash them thoroughly before cutting. Pour the sugar in a saucepan with just enough water to cover it and boil, stirring well. Once the sugar is dissolved, combine it with the remaining ingredients in a large, sterile jar, and seal. Store it for 45 days in cool, dark place, shaking occasionally. At the end of 45 days, strain out the walnuts and spices and rebottle in a clean jar for another 2 months of aging.