welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to cocktails after
dark today we're going to do
a cocktail out of this 1930 cocktail
book
published here in toronto called
cocktails by jimmy
late of ceros in london i never know how
to take that
all of these cocktail guys are late of
somewhere did they get fired were they
not good enough did they go into
publishing because they
couldn't really be bartenders who knows
today we're going to do a recipe called
the bijou
and the bijou is a tale of two
intertwined cocktails down through
history
the one we're going to do today um from
this 1930 cocktail book
you see over and over through the 1930s
and the 1950s
and the first mention of this recipe
goes back to 1900
in a harry johnson cocktail book and
it's essentially this recipe
exactly except it has orange bitters and
this one does not
so this recipe calls for old tom gin
and as you look through the bijou
recipes that follow this line
their old tom jin their plymouth gin
their london dry
gin none of them are jennifer
but it's a mix of gin it doesn't really
matter which one you use i don't
think so i'm going to use two different
types of old tom gin today this one is a
local
gin made about 100 kilometers from us
and it's got this red
tint from the sumac that they put in it
and sumac grows wild all over the place
here so i'm expecting kind of a little
bit of a lemon flavor
and next is chartreuse and it's equal
amounts of
gin and chartreuse and also
italian vermouth now variations on this
recipe
also have dry vermouth instead of the
sweet italian vermouth
so we'll get that in there
now the other competing bijou recipe
dates from 1895 and a cocktail book
written by lawler and the recipe there
is almost completely different
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and so this competing bijou recipe
is gin italian vermouth and grand
marnier
and it shows up time and time again and
it's in this uh 1931
waldorf bar days book that i have in
front of me
it shows up in multiple places there's
also another
recipe and so this third recipe is
called the yellow diamond it
shows up in this art of drinking book
that i have here from 1931
and that is gin yellow chartreuse
and italian vermouth so similar
uh just a slightly different take
on the flavor and so you can see there's
quite a few
variations on how this might be made and
you can choose any one of them
to suit your own palate so i guess what
i'm saying
is there really is no wrong way to make
this cocktail
choose one of the versions of the bijou
that you want to make
and then choose any gin that you want to
use it with
choose any italian vermouth that you
want to put in it
really doesn't matter all that much
choose what works for your
palette that's probably what's the most
important instead of some guy faffing
around on the internet telling you
the way it's supposed to be made so a
little piece of
lemon peel and this one gets a cherry
so put a cherry in each one
so the 1931 or a
version of the 1931 bijou cocktail
i see two glasses so two different two
different types of gin
okay same type of gin two different
versions of the same type of gin
uh oh yeah kinzip yeah
so that's that one okay
uh this one is the other old tom from
from england
all right
that's a nice drink i do like that
that's a nice drink so here we go try
the try the different gin
i think if you stirred a little bit of
that maraschino around it would even
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wow
there's a slightly different flavor
they're both lovely this one has um
so there's a little more punch to it
yeah this one's definitely sweet a
little sweeter
soft and the gin flavor is softer like
it's
like this one punches you with that with
the with i'm gin
and this one says i'm gin okay
it's kind of nice and so this is one of
those cocktails that you could spend a
lifetime
just never making it the same way twice
just by changing the brand of gin
yes do you want to try some orange
bitters because some of the recipes have
orange bitters
i'm not sure sure let's say yes okay so
let's try and one first
one dash a bitter let's do two dashes a
bit okay
stir that in now we'll get that cherry
that little maraschino flavor out a
little bit more too oh i love those
those are just
okay here we go
that changed it it's still lovely but
now it's got that
little bit of that like that citrusy
yeah kind of flavor to it yeah
it's added another twist another man
it's a very calm
it's not very complicated it is very
flavorful yes and so
the other cocktail called the bijou i
hate this
cocktail book i hate this cocktail book
i love this cocktail the old waldorf bar
days cocktail book
has incredible stories in it about the
cocktails and the characters that hung
out in the bar
the recipes themselves are horrible um
they're written horrible they're
inconsistent in their instructions and
their methodologies and
completely inconsistent but the story it
tells about the bijou
is that it's named for the theater on
broadway
um they and
the bijou is also that it's the bijou is
a french word for
jewel which ties it back to this other
cocktail called the yellow diamond
in that it looks like a jewel and using
a different color of chartreuse
brings a different flavor brings a
different alcohol content but also would
change the color somewhat
gentle why not try the other one
and so all of these cocktails i think
are tied together in some way
but you know they're different i don't
know that that one benefited
in any way from uh the bidders
it did not benefit from the business
it's still not bad but i think it was
better it was better without the bidders
okay so do you like a bijou cocktail
what gin do you use do you use a london
dry gin do you use an old time gin to
use a plymouth gin do you use a jennifer
and then which brand of those gins
do you use to make your bijou so many
choices every one of them would be
different
i think you've only got two choices for
chartreuse both made by the same monks
complicated one thanks for stopping by
see you again soon
you