Faux flip

Last night in New Orleans the “Tales of the Toddy” was held at the Hotel Monteleone. It’s sort of pre-holiday, one-night riff on winter drinks from the same folks who put on Tales of the Cocktail. A couple dozen bartenders and restaurateurs came up with drinks both hot and cold and served them to a crowd of several hundred.

One writer also served a drink. That would be me.

My aim was to ladle up a colonial drink as a counterpart to more modern offerings, like the Absolut Mandarin orange creamsicle. A colonial flip seemed like a winning idea — fresh and unknown, yet historic — and I’d made it before in front of a fireplace in Maine. Problem is, it requires an open fire and iron poker heated to the color of a cherry, which is then thrust in a tankard. I devote the better part of a chapter in the rum book to flip, which fueled a colonial craze from about 1700 up to the American Revolution.

Sadly, I was laboring under the jackboot of unreasonable restrictions from event organizers: “Please insure that all cooking equipment is powered by sterno, electricity or butane as allowed by the New Orleans Fire Department.” This seemed to rule out building an open fire and brandishing of a glowing piece of iron.

So a few weeks beforehand I started messing around with adaptations of flip, which has as its base ingredients beer, rum and molasses. I monkeyed around with vats of beer syrup made with molasses. The result was more like something one might consume as a science project rather than for enjoyment. (Although beer syrup made with 50/50 sugar and molasses and served 50/50 with vodka makes for a wonderful sort of beery liqueur. There. I’ve said something favorable about vodka. )

I concluded that there’s something that occurs chemically during the scalding by red-hot iron, a process that creates a whole new beverage, something that can’t be replicated with a hot plate or butane stove. (Flip tastes like none of its components, and has a not-unpleasant burned flavor, like Starbucks coffee.)

So I sadly abandoned my dalliance with molasses, and took up with something else that would have been available in colonial times: maple syrup. And I found that mixed with ginger syrup and rum and beer and lemon, the result was a colonial-style drink that was at once tart and complex and tasted not of beer or rum but something else altogether.

Flippin’ Flip

1-1/2 oz Old New Orleans Crystal Rum
2 oz Abita Amber Beer
3/4 oz maple syrup
3/4 oz ginger syrup*
1/2 oz juice of Meyer lemon**
fresh nutmeg

Combine all ingredients except nutmeg in saucepan and heat until steaming but not boiling. Pour in mug and grate fresh nutmeg over surface.

* Ginger syrup: combine one cup sugar with one cup water, bring to boil and take off heat. Add approximately four ounces of chopped fresh ginger (unpeeled is fine), and let sit until cooled. Strain into bottle. (Will keep refrigerated for a couple of weeks.)

**Note on the Meyer lemon. OK, it’s not really colonial. The Meyer lemon is an Asian fruit that was “discovered” and brought to the US around 1908 by a U.S Dept. of Agriculture staffer named Frank Meyer. It looks like an unripe and soft-skinned lemon, and is sour like a lemon, but has a distinct Mandarin orange tang to it. It’s available at the farmers markets in New Orleans and some stores hereabouts; I’m not sure about availability outside the region. I understand Alice Waters is a fan. If you can’t find them, use regular lemon juice, and a dash of orange bitters.

Tales of the Toddy was a terrifically fun event, and my thanks to Chris Hannah of Arnaud's for saving for me one of the 53 Pouuse Cafes he made (with Gran Duque de Alba Brandy, Chartruese, and St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur), and Marvin Allen of the Carousel Bar for sending over a much-needed Mrs. Claus Tea, made with Rhum Clement's Creole Shrub, Earl Grey tea, Fee Bros. spiced cordial and a dab of spiced butter. And, as always, it was great to catch up with the other authors selling books, including Philip Collier (Mixing New Orleans), Ti Martin and Lally Brennan of Commander's Palace (In the Land of Cocktails), and the always inimitable Lorin Gaudin, photo above (86 Recipes: New Orleans).

A Zombie comes back to life

Today’s New York Times has a great article by Steve Kurutz about Jeff “Beachbum” Berry and his tiki-drink related investigative work. The article gives Jeff all the credit he deserves for taking something that’s camp and making it, well, if not classy, at least respected and worthy of discussion.

“Mr. Berry’s single-minded scholarship has gained him respect in the cocktail world.” Kurutz wrote. He noted Jeff’s uncovering of the three supposedly original Zombie recipes, one after another, and the process he used to identify the original original. This involved, in part, a year-long effort to crack the secret code of a recipe he turned up in a 1937 little black book owned by a former Don the Beachcomber bartender. (The recipe is here.)

But he only scratches the surface about what Jeff’s research actually entails. Cocktail history tends to be more participatory than, say, the study of deep-ocean mollusks or ancient Roman architecture. Inquiring minds want to know: what did the original Zombie taste like, using the rums that were available back at the inception?

The Times didn’t tell the story of a tasting this past summer, which I was lucky enough to join in.

One night during Tales of the Cocktail in July, Jeff, Martin Cate (of Forbidden Island in Alameda) and I headed over to Stephen Remsberg’s. Our goal: make the original Zombie. Stephen, as those who’ve read the book might recall, is the rum collector with 700-plus bottles in his stockpiles, many of them vintage, rare and unopened.

We were interested in recreating the proto-Zombie, then called the Zombie Punch, one of the drinks that made Don the Beachcomber famous soon after he opened his bar in Los Angeles in 1934. Stephen had painstaking accumulated the prescribed rums, including a pre-1935 Puerto Rican rum, an equally early Demerara rum, and a no-longer made early Lowndes Jamaican rum. For the latter, Stephen could locate only an unopened mini, which sadly provided just enough rum to make a single original original Zombie. But this is scholarship and sacrifices must be made. We shared one drink.

(In the interest of scholarship, I should also note that we cheated a little: Stephen broke out a bottle of vintage absinthe for the anis flavor — and that would have still been illegal in the United States in 1934. Some other anis substitute would have gone in the original original Zombie.)

I’m happy to report that the Zombie — flash blended with crushed ice, as Don would have prescribed — was a thing of utter and complete beauty. The biggest surprise to me was how woody it was — this wasn’t all about sweet or juices or ooh-la-la, but about complexity. It had touch of natural pucker to it thanks to the wood, which was eased by the anis and falernum. This Zombie came at you from many directions, all at once, all demanding attention. It was all you could do but to sit down and marvel.

You can have King Tut’s tomb. Unearthing the taste of the original Zombie is my kind of archeology. I’m quoted in today’s Times article as calling Jeff the “Indiana Jones of tiki drinks” — and I’m here to tell you I’d follow Jeff into any cave, snake pits be damned.

UPDATE: I missed this on the first go-around: On the Times web site Jeff narrates a slide show featuring up an excellent capsule history of tiki.

(Photos: NYT portrait of Jeff, above. Tasting photos, by Martin Cate: left to right, Stephen, Jeff, Wayne. And, below, the original original ingredients.)

Cocktail ranger: Trader Vic's Scottsdale

The original Trader Vic’s in Scottsdale, Arizona, opened in 1962 on West Fifth Avenue, just six years after the luxe midcentury modern Valley Ho Hotel up the street. It was axis of swank. Then it became the forgotten zone. The Trader Vic's closed. The Valley Ho closed and there was talk of demolition.

Time passed. Now the Valley Ho has been made over top to bottom respecting its midcentury roots, and a new Trader Vic’s opened adjacent to the hotel a year ago. I was in Arizona last week, and made a detour to check it out, spending a night at the hotel and being drawn by a curious gravitational pull to Trader Vic’s.

The redone hotel is impressive — I’ve always thought that to capture the midcentury sensibility you had to not just recreate the past, but to recreate the future, a far trickier proposition. Fifty years ago, stepping into a sharply angled, plate glass building was to glimpse an open, airy, bright sense of tomorrow. Of course to replicate that “wow” factor today, you need more than just plate glass and boomerang fabrics.

And Valley Ho pulls it off with a great melding of past and future. it’s got the FLW-inspired balcony railings, the mod fabrics, the white brick walls, and the almost perfect two-story scale of a “classy motel.” But it’s not slavishly retro — my bathroom was tucked behind Lever-House like slabs of blue translucent glass that glowed beautifully; the carpet was a lovely black and white textured houndstooth, and the stationery (which of course, I swiped), was dotted with faded olive-on-a-toothpick abstractions. It all worked wonderfully.

And the Trader Vic’s? The lounge/restaurant is similarly a mod adaptation of the old Trader Vic’s. It stands across a parking lot, which somehow made it seemed small and removed. Longtime tiki fans will be horrified by the amount of light allowed to enter — it’s got more in common with a Googie coffee shop than a dusky faux-Polynesian haunt of yore. I have to admit, it’s strikingly beautiful. But the more intimate scale, the cars passing by outside, the TV in the bar…. it seems to have more in common with Applebee’s than one of the old Trader Vic’s. The place doesn’t transport you so much as give you a poke in the ribs and a wink.

The drink menu beats that at Applebee’s, of course — you can get a fine Suffering Bastard — but even here I was pained by some missteps. A “rhum cosmo” made with Barbados rum? A “vodka mai tai”? That'll snap you out of a reverie.

Overall, the hotel is well worth a trip — it’s a great adaptation of the sort of place you’d expect to run into Frank Sinatra at the bar. (You might want to pack some hipster repellent, though.) And the Scottsdale Trader Vic’s is worth stopping by if you’re already there. But I wouldn't suggest a lengthy detour to check it out.

Link: Hotel Valley Ho