This year’s Negroni Week recipe comes from Charlie Schott at Parson’s Chicken and Fish in Chicago. Why would anyone not want a boozy slushy with a hit of bitter fruit juice?
Serves two:
Blend 60ml gin, 60ml sweet vermouth, 60ml Campari, 75ml fresh orange juice and 75ml fresh grapefruit juice with ice.
Blend, stir and add more ice until you reach the desired slushiness.
Serve in a chilled highball and garnish with a frozen half orange wheel.
Next up, World Gin Day. Doesn’t it seem unfair that gin just gets a day while negronis get a whole week?
Photo courtesy of quinn.anya, some rights reserved.
The Cosmopolitan was introduced to a generation of young women as Carrie Bradshaw’s drink of choice, but before it found fame on the Upper East Side, it had its beginnings in the mid-1980s as a pretty pink (and easy-drinking) alternative to the Martini for those who wanted the glamour of drinking from a martini glass, but weren’t fans of the eponymous drink itself. As a result, the “Cosmo” gets a lot of bad press among ‘serious’ cocktail writers who dismiss it as a cocktail for people who don’t like cocktails.
The Cosmopolitan is now usually listed as one of the ‘sours’ family of cocktails, alongside the Margarita (which replaces vodka with tequila), and the Kamikaze (which excludes the cranberry juice). In many ways therefore, it is a useful gateway drink to a world of cocktail discovery, and it is certainly more popular in my house than a large number of ‘more serious’ drinks.
The other side to that coin is that the drink has started to become a victim of its own success. In its celebrity champion’s own words:
Miranda: “Why did we ever stop drinking these?”
Carrie: “’Cos everyone else started.”
By the time Sex and the City had reached its peak, the Cosmopolitan was found on every basic cocktail menu around the world. This spawned a world of below par Cosmos that suffered from the use of cheap ingredients, sour mix and an over-reliance on too much cranberry juice.
For a better Cosmopolitan, focus on the vodka, and use considerably less triple sec and cranberry juice; follow a 2:1:1 ratio. If you’re looking for something a little easier on the palate, don’t move further than a 1:1:1.5 ratio:
Shake 40ml citrus vodka, 20ml Cointreau (triple sec), 15ml fresh lime juice and 15ml cranberry juice with cubed ice for twenty seconds.
Citrus vodka works best if you have it, and a wedge of lime perched on the edge of the glass is also acceptable in place of the twist of orange but not nearly as much fun.
If you’re looking for a more grown up version of the Cosmpolitan, you could do worse than mix yourself a Xanadu Fancy – a drink that I discovered on the menu of the much lamented Raconteur Bar in Edinburgh’s Stockbridge neighbourhood:
Add 40ml vodka, 20ml aperol, 20ml orgeat, 20ml fresh lime juice and 20ml cranberry juice to a shaker.
Fill the shaker 2/3 full of ice and shake hard for twenty seconds.
Fox & Beagle 