Santa's Favorite Drink

This festive cocktail is a riff on the pre-prohibition cocktail Stinger and it’s a perfect yuletide drink to enjoy in front of the fireplace when the gifts are wrapped and the Holiday calm sets in. Or by all means while sitting in the shade of a palm tree watching the ocean in the tropics.

The original first appeared in print in the 1914 book ”Drinks” by Jacques Straub. According to David Wondrich’s cocktail book ”Imbibe” an Ohio newspaper credited Reginald Vanderbilt with the cocktail in 1923 writing that he had served his guests Stingers since the beginning of the 1900s. It is said that Vanderbilt spent three hours a day mixing them for his guests during cocktail hour at his Fifth Avenue mansion. The cocktail has since the days of the Vanderbilts been associated with the upper class and was featured in many movies like ”High Society” from 1956 with Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. Cary Grant orders one in the 1957 ”Kiss Them for Me” and James Bond drinks a Stinger in the 1956 ”Diamonds Are Forever”.

The glass called “Sukat Makkaralla”, Finnish for “Socks rolled down” was designed in 2010 for Marimekko by the Finnish designer Anu Penttinen.

Taking a Voo Car-Ray For a Spin

Just like the Hurricane, the Sazerac and the Grasshopper, the Vieux Carré was created in the Big Easy, New Orleans. The name is French for “old square” or “old quarter” being the original name of the New Orleans’s French Quarter but when ordering one in the city of its creation the pronunciation isn’t remotely French. The Creole way of pronouncing it is “Voo car-ray”.

The cocktail was invented in the mid to late 1930s by Walter Bergeron, head bartender at the Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone. (Mr Bergeron is not related to his namesake Victor Bergeron aka Trader Vic). The Hotel Monteleone opened in 1886 when a Sicilian nobleman, Antonio Monteleone, bought the hotel after having settled down in New Orleans in the early 1880s. After five generations the hotel still remains in the family.

The Carousel Bar as you find it today was installed in 1949 and is decorated with paintings of circus animals and is lit up just like a real carousel. But it wouldn’t be a carousel bar if it didn’t twirl so it is rotating but at the smooth pace of 15 minutes per revolution.

The glass called Ovio was designed by Achille Castiglioni in 1983.

Vieux Carré

1 part Rye Whiskey
1 part Red Vermouth
1 part Cognac
1/2 part Bénédictine
2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
2 dashes Angustura bitters
1 Maraschino cherry or 1 lemon twist

Stir ingredients with ice. Strain into chilled glass. Garnish with a Maraschino cherry of a lemon twist.

Enjoy the ride!

What Is A Sidecar?

As often with old classic cocktails there are many different stories about the origin. The Sidecar, possibly the most famous of the cognac cocktails, is no different. The two most common stories both involve an army captain arriving to a bar in the sidecar of a motorcycle sometime during World War I. The bartender mixing the first Sidecar was either Harry MacElhone at the famous Harry’s New York Bar in Paris or Pat MacGarry, bartender at the Buck’s Club in London and inventor of the Buck’s Fizz. However Harry MacElhone himself gave MacGarry credit for the cocktail in his book ”Barflies and Cocktails” from 1927.

Another explanation for the name is that it rather derives from a bartending term for the leftovers in the shaker after pouring the drink. This is poured into a shot glass and served alongside the cocktail and is called the ”sidecar”.

The cocktail was first published in two books in 1922, “Harry’s ABC of Mixing Cocktails” by Harry MacElhone and “Cocktails and How to Mix Them” by Robert Vermeire. Both original recipes calls for equal parts Cognac, Cointreau and lemon juice but as time passed the ratios have been altered to two parts Cognac, one part Cointreau and one part lemon juice.

The silver cocktail glass is called Millennium and was designed in 2000 by Lella & Massimo Vignelli.

Sidecar

2 parts Cognac

1 part Cointreau

1 part Lemon juice

Shake ingredients with ice. Strain into chilled glass. Garnish with an orange twist.