Frank Weber
We are starting the new year with the Manhattan, the quintessential American cocktail. For more variations watch the next video. Salut!
Pour ingredients into a shaker glass filled with ice. Stir and pour
into a martini glass. Garnish with a Luxardo maraschino cherry.
Which would you rather have, a glass of wine or a dram of whisky?
What if you didn’t have to choose?
With the rising cost of barrels for making single malts, distillers are turning to cask-finishing for a richer, more complex spirit. Casks that previously held Sherry are the most sought after for finishing scotch, but with a real scarcity of these, distillers are now using casks that previously held a variety of different wines.
Of this usually limited category of single malts, my favorite is Gordon & Macphail’s Private Collection Wood Finish Linkwood Cote Rotie 1998 45%. With a golden amber color, sweet vanilla on the nose, sweet and peppery on the palate, it is truly a perfectly rounded and balanced scotch. My idea of what a Speyside malt should taste like. If you see a bottle don’t hesitate. In fact, the whole Private Collection is worth exploring.
photos left to right: Katelynn Hawes and Bonnie Angulas
The NEA BIG READ kick-off event was a great success. Thank you, Blanche, for a great day! There were Dust Bowl Dancers, young actors reading excerpts from the Grapes of Wrath, marvelous fiddlers and my stories about Prohibition. The signature drink was Bee’s Knees, a classic prohibition cocktail made with gin, honey syrup and fresh lemon. We all know that the “Bee’s Knees” was “flapper chatter” for the best of the best, but did you kno
w that in the Roaring Twenties there was a famous dancer, Bee Jackson, who introduced the Charleston to Broadway. Rumor has it, the expression became popular because of her very active knees—oh those Bee’s Knees!
Another popular cocktail, the Ward Eight, was actually created by the bartender at Lock-Ober’s restaurant on election eve 1898 at the request of Martin Lomasney, the political boss of Ward Eight in the West End of Boston to mark the occasion. Essentially it was a whiskey sour to which orange juice and grenadine were added giving it a rosy glow. Because it was the perfect mask for homemade rye, the cocktail made a great comeback during Prohibition. It was considered the “Cosmo” of it’s day!
