welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to cocktails after
dark today we're going to do
another cocktail out of this book the
old waldorf
bar days published in 1931 at the height
of prohibition
published in new york um it represents
recipes
that pre-prohibition had been served at
the old waldorf bar
in new york city a cocktail book that i
love to hate
because the it's it's compiled from a
bunch of different recipes
written by different bartenders and so
that's
it's very inconsistent in its language
it's very inconsistent in its use of
measurements it's very inconsistent in
its
in the way that it tells you to build
the cocktails so you have to sort of
really pick
through the information and try to
figure out what they were getting at
which can be a little bit difficult
today we're going to do a cocktail
called the brut
or boo or brute straight up brute if you
read the little story that goes with the
cocktail and i've chosen this cocktail
because it uses
this calisa
and calisa is essentially
a dead cocktail ingredient this is the
only company that i s
that i can find that still makes it very
low production um
it is it is a bitter liqueur whose main
component is chinchona bark
or quinine and bitter orange peels so
very bitter next ingredient it asks for
french vermouth i'm going to use this
bianco
even though it is a little bit sweeter
than french vermouth because i
like it it's the right vermouth for me
next in a couple of dashes of orange
bitters i'm making two cocktails so four
dashes
and then a dash of absinthe
so again i'm doing two cocktails two
dashes
next we're going to ice the
tin the only thing that this recipe says
about building this recipe
is frappe now
i've done cocktails out of this book in
the past
and where people have seen frappe they
have left comments saying i did it wrong
you're supposed to serve it over crushed
ice
which in the context of 2020 you would
be correct
this is 1930 and some of these recipes
go back to the 1800s
in the context of this book frappe
simply means to shake with ice there are
a couple of recipes in here that's
that give you an indication of how
that's correct
they say frappe and then strain
and serve and other ones say serve
frappe so i'm assuming that where it
says frappe it just means to shake and
shake hard and that's
kind of what it says in the back here in
some of the instructions
frappe just means to shake
if it meant to be served frappe it would
say serve frappe
so let's give this a shake
okay i've got two nick and norris
chilled down and ready to go
and we will double strain
so this is the brew a cocktail the brew
cocktail brew hi friends hi glenn hey so
um let's give it a taste see what
happens let's try it first and then
we'll talk about it
that was no good let's try that again
oh
apparently it's very dense because you
don't get a ting sound when you use it
it is very dense yeah
wow it smells like it has a really sweet
smell to it
it does but it's not sweet no well i
mean
brew means it's a dry cocktail or raw if
you want to go for the actual
now i used bianca bianco
a semi-sweet white vermouth instead of a
dry french vermouth because i really
like that one
the licoricey well
yes there is a touch in there okay so
that would explain that i'm like
i'm drinking it going why is it what is
this flavor i'm thinking really hard did
you see that thinking really hard part
there is some absinthe in it oh okay
yeah so this is calcium um again another
dead ingredient this was really hard to
get my hands on
um there is only one manufacturer that i
know i've left and that's this one
and they don't make it in really large
quantities this is march 2021 when we're
filming this
this has been sitting on a warehouse
since 2015 since 2015.
so very low volume very low demand for
that particular ingredient
although maybe this will change maybe no
particular scent to it
so as soon as it goes in your mouth you
get that whoosh of that alcohol
yeah like that not the harsh but just
the
that that way it evaporates in your
mouth
it sticks around it's kind of sweet that
would help explain that would also
explain that denseness of the denseness
so um cinchono bark and bitter orange
peel
and it's a later so it's heavy on the
sugar and it's made in a
it's made with other botanicals in a um
neutral grain spirit i think over maybe
over a piece of ice
to just give it a little chill would be
on its own it would be great
in this in this it's it's i really like
this now i've also noticed that calista
shows up
in places um like this
1892 cocktail book where it's only used
as a dash and it's used in the place of
orange bitters
okay which i think is interesting that
there's orange bitters in this cocktail
they're going all out mm-hmm i like this
i think this is good i
i like the calisa so we're going to do a
bunch of calisa
videos since i've got that bottle now
and it's one of these things that shows
up over and over and over in these old
cocktail books
that's really quite lovely it is nice it
is very nice thanks for stopping by see
you again soon
you