CLASSIC CABINET: Crème de Cacao

From March 11, 2022

FRIENDS - I ran out of time to write a fresh post this week. My apologies. I will certainly get something your way ere Halloween is upon us and I can tell you now to get in bourbon and also cinnamon sticks, allspice, ginger, cardamom and nutmeg (don’t worry about all of them, just as many as you can). In the meantime I didn’t want to leave you thirsty. So here UNLOCKED for one week only is my old post on cacao, i.e. chocolate liqueur. I thought of it as Tim Hayward, one of the great content-producers of our time, has recently been running some Gin Alexander experiments and I’ve been meaning to catch up on them. Anyway. Enjoy and hopefully when we next raise a glass I will be a little less fraught. À tout à l'heure!

Richard

~ CREME DE CACAO ~
Chocolate-flavoured liqueur. 15-30% ABV / c.£12-25 for 700ml
Friends with: vodka, rum (light and dark) and especially rhums agricoles; bourbon, rye, brandy; to a lesser extent gin; orange liqueur; Chartreuse; sweet vermouth, both the red kind and especially the white kind; Campari; Cynar; lime; pinapple; cream.

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Considering how famously delicious chocolate is, and also how famously delicious alcohol is, it’s surprising that crème de cacao - chocolate alcohol! - isn’t more popular. I mean what’s not to like? Drink, dirty little girl, drink! As Pessoa might have written.

Was there ever a Golden Age of Cacao? Because speaking of Pessoa (the Portuguese poet Pessoa… though maybe also the passion fruit liqueur Passoa) one of the low-key highlights of my recent-ish trip to Lisbon was surveying the ancient tropical liqueurs on display in the antiques shops. There were many such shops, dusty and arcane. The thing I liked about Lisbon was the feeling of being right on the edge of the continent, in a civilisation that had its golden age about 500 years ago, in a city that feel like it’s still reaching towards the ocean, away from Europe and into the wider world. I felt sure that if I searched amid the bric-a-brac - the azulejo tiles and incense burners and ancient volumes on the flora of Moçambique - I would eventually find a map of Atlantis sketched by Vasco de Gama himself.

Didn’t have time sadly. But what I did find were some handsome old alcohol labels and defunct elixirs in a shop that my phone remembers as being in “Misericórdia”. (The woman who owned it shouted at me for taking these pictures). Chocolate liqueurs featured prominently - or at least, more prominently than they might have in equivalent English, French, Italian or American fantasias. As did liqueurs of banana, pineapple, cinnamon, vanilla. I pictured elegant 1930s century ladies sipping tropical cocktails on modernist trams in Brazil; expeditions; elephants; parasols; carracks; capuchins; missionaries; churches on the edge of unknowable jungles.

The two kinds of cacao, white and brown

ANYWAY. I suspect the reason that more households do not stock liquid cacao in this woebegone age of ours is that cacao liqueurs come in two main kinds, white (blanc) and brown (brun), and it’s a bit confusing. The brown stuff behaves more or less as you’d expect a chocolate liquer to behave. It’s a rich and puddingy liqueur made by macerating chocolate in neutral alcohol and sweetening it. It usually has vanilla in it and can be bitter as well as sweet. I think of this in the same loose family as Coffee Liqueur and Bénédictine, dark, complex, slightly syrupy liqueurs, good for after-dinner sipping, creamy drinks (like the Brandy Alexander - equal parts brandy, cream and cacao) and simple A+B cocktails where you just add a tot of liqueur to an aged spirit. Tempus Fugit make a really delicious brown cacao. So does the Austrian company Mozart.

All very delicious! And yet the white stuff is a bit more interesting, mixing-wise, and what I’ll be focusing on here. It’s made from chocolate distillate (i.e., cacao is left to infuse in grain alcohol, then it’s redistilled, so it comes out clear, like gin) that’s then sweetened. The result is subtler, drier, perhaps less intensely chocolatey and instead rather buttery and elegant, almost grassy. Hint of kerosene. This stuff goes especially well with light rum or a really good vodka; but also rhum agricole, lime, banana, herbs, vermouth, amari. It makes all manner of surprising drinks, shaken and stirred.

There is also chocolate cream liqueur… Baileys-type stuff for solo sipping. But we needn’t worry too much about that.

Anyway, my point is: it’s asking a bit much of someone to buy not one but two liqueurs. My advice is, if you’re sipping, buy dark, if you’re mixing - which is what this series is about - buy the transparent stuff. It’s not even that expensive. I found the extremely serviceable Gabriel Boudier for about £12 I think.

On a completely unrelated note: cacao, or rather, какао, was for a long time one of only two word that Vladimir Nabokov could read and write in Russian as a boy - the other being мама. Two essentials of life.

THE COCKTAILS

Stirred

A good way to approach cacao (I’m going to call it that as shorthand so I don’t need to keep cut and pasting the accent…) is via a CHOCOLATE MARTINI. No doubt drinks of this name are served in the sort of bars you and I wouldn’t be seen dead at, and no doubt these drinks are sickly sweet confections that you and I wouldn’t dare admit we actually find quite tasty. But what I mean is a simple, chocolate-accented sweetish Martini… let’s say 50ml vodka, 10-20ml sweet white vermouth (Cocchi Americano is especially good here), and a scant 10ml of cacao. Served unbelievably cold and garnished with an orange twist.

When I wrote my book The Spirits, I decided to be fairly restrained in the number of me-invented cocktails I included. But one that I did see fit to share was EDWARD I which I improvised up on the night that I came home from the hospital after my first son was born. At the time, I had a bottle of the delicious Mozart Dry, a bone-dry Austrian chocolate distillate that was essentially unsweetened white creme de caco. I miss it still. But regular cacao does the job. I wrote down: 40ml vodka, 20ml Cynar, 5ml cacao, 5ml orange liqueur. Stirred, orange twist.

Note that both these recipes use vodka, not a spirit I often reach for - but the creamy mouth-feel of a decent grain vodka like Dima’s or Konik’s Tail can work wonders. White rum makes a good substitute in in both of the above. But for a more brooding cocktail, try the ALL IN created by Natasha David at Nitecap in New York… which has sadly fallen prey to coronavirus. Stir: 40ml rye (or bourbon, higher proof best), 20ml Campari, 20ml French vermouth and 5-10ml cacao. Garnish with a lemon twist.

Sours

This is where cacao becomes interesting - and a little bit risky. Chocolate and citrus is a combination that can be poised and sophisticated, or can clash rather unpleasantly. This very much the case with the 20TH CENTURY from the Café Royal Bar Book (1937) which is something of a cocktail pseuds' cocktail. “I believe we now firmly have an idea what Art Deco tastes like”, says Ted Haigh. The original recipe follows the Corpse Reviver “equal parts” formula but Haigh tweaks it to 45ml gin, 20ml Lillet Blanc (or sweet white vermouth), 20ml lemon juice, 15ml creme de cacao (“or a scant splash, to taste…”)

Anyway: I’ve never liked it. Lemon + chocolate + juniper doesn’t work for me. The 19TH CENTURY, however, is a winner. This is: 40ml bourbon, 20ml Lillet ROUGE (or Byrrh/Dubonnet/Italian vermouth), 20ml lemon juice and 20ml cacao.

But to my mind, it is in white rum rocktails that cacao really shines. Here’s a lovely old Cuban mixture created by the great Constantine Rabailagua called the LA FLORIDA: 40ml light rum, 20ml Italian vermouth, 10ml white cacao, 20ml lime juice plus one teaspoon each of orange liqueur and grenadine. So complex! But I like how all of those ingredients make sense of each other.

And here is another of crazy collection of flavours: the PAGO PAGO. Take three squares of fresh pineapple (or ~10ml pineapple juice), 45ml gold rum (a Spanish-style dark rum rather than a supery heavy one), 15 Green Chartreuse, 15ml lime juice and 7.5ml white cacao and SHAKE. And enter an alien civilisation.

Long

Cacao doesn’t really lend itself to long drinks so well - though you could sub the coffee liqueur for dark cacao in a WHITE RUSSIAN, I guess. But there are a few long Tiki drinks that are worth taking your time over. Should you happen to have the ingredients knocking about, may I commend the TORTUGA? It was Trader Vic’s “answer” to Donn Beach’s multi-ingredient Zombie and rests on overproof dark rum. I made it once and it was amazing. OK, I’m going to do this one properly.

~ THE TORTUGA ~

Makes two or even three

60ml overproof dark rum
60ml golden Spanish-style rum
60ml Italian vermouth
30ml Cointreau
30ml crème de cacao
30ml orange juice
30ml lemon juice
30ml lime juice
15ml grenadine

Shake with crushed ice and pour unstrained into tall glasses. I used a mint posy garnish.