The Spirits #110: The Cotonian

~ Scotch Passion ~ The Pioneers ~ Dress Sexy At My Funeral ~ Number Nine ~

Sep 22, 2023

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~ THE COTONIAN ~

40ml Scotch
20ml French vermouth
20ml passion fruit pulp
10ml honey syrup
5ml lemon juice (optional)
Drop of Islay single malt (optional)

Freeze a cocktail glass. Now, scrape out the goop from a passion fruit and combine in a shaker with the other ingredients. Add plenty ice and shake very hard. Fine-strain the resultant mixture into the chilly, chilly cocktail glass. by fine-strain, I mean don’t just rely on the shaker itself - use a fine-mesh sieve to eliminate all shards of ice and decimated passion fruit seeds. And there we have it. Garnish with citrus twist, I think.

Some Cotonian notes:

1. The above is a simplified version of an almost wholly forgotten drink from the 1937 Café Royal Cocktail Book. The original specs are as follows: 20ml ‘Pash’, 20ml Vat 69 Whisky, 20ml Drambuie, 20ml Fontorice French Vermouth.

2. Pash? Commonly supposed to be some defunct 1930s passion fruit liqueur, it is in fact “a registered name for passion fruit juice”, according to the peerless Café Royal glossary. Fresh passion fruit seems to me the best subsitute. The dark fruits you find in England yield about 20-25ml of pulp (you must wrap them in clingfilm and keep them in the fridge if you want them to last). However, you may live in a more clement zone and have access to more luscious fruits.

3. Vat 69? Blended Scotch. Any will do. I used Famous Grouse.

4. Drambuie? By all means use Drambuie if you have some (“A Scotch liqueur, golden in colour, with the flavour of whisky and honey” - Café Royal). Bénédictine isn’t a bad sub either. But in the interests of keeping things accessible, I simply made a syrup with some English blossom honey - and added the merest drop of Aerolite Lindsay 10-year-old Islay single malt for that squally complexity.

5. Lemon? Yes, note that I added a small drop of citrus to my version. Not enough to turn this into a true sour but just enough to make the passion fruit sing a little brighter.

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THERE are, among our cocktailing fraternity, a small set of pioneers who set out and discover a brand new classic. I mean the creators of such delights as the French Pearl, the Paper Plane, the Mexican Jumping Bean, and so on - the liquid equivalents of a new opening in chess, a fresh way of making blue, a mindbending conceptualisation of the subatomic realm. These individuals are rightly celebrated with statuary and garlands, Légions d’Honneur and Orders of Lenin, feasts, banquets, national holidays and the like.

But there is another, quieter breed whose diligent work, while less heralded, is just as valuable to our collective endeavour. I refer of course to the cocktail scholars. These are the ones who seek to unearth from the vaults some lost masterpiece: a Last Word; an Aviation; a Jungle Bird; a Cotonian.

On the face of it, this second calling doesn’t seem so hard. There are, after all, tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of drinks listed in the vintage books (and can I recommend this astonishing resource?) Each one of these drinks was deemed worthy of writing down by someone at some point. Moreover, just about anyone can set up a newsletter these days and pronounce to their readers that, by gum, the Schlummer served by the great Victor Hugo Himmelreich at the Blaue Maus in Prague is an unjustly overlooked classic. And the Japanese variant of the Xanthia? Why this is the cocktail equivalent of Mozart’s lost Trumpet Concerto!

On closer inspection, however, most forgotten drinks are forgotten for a reason. They’re either minor variants on established classics; or they don’t sound terribly nice; or they’re just a bit so what. However, of all the dusty old volumes, W. J. Tarling’s Café Royal Book contains the number greatest volume of intriguing possibilities. It was the first book to introduce tequila and vodka to English readers; it makes liberal use of ingredients like blue curacao and passion fruit juice; and it contains many recipes that place these things in unexpected combinations. Alongside his Café Royal day job, Tarling was the head of the UK Bartenders’ Guild and combed through some 4,000 drinks from around the country before choosing the ones he found most “interesting” to place alongside his own recipes in the book. I wrote about the book at more length a in my AVENUE post - which also includes a little history of the famous “Set” who haunted the Café Royal in the 1930s:

“…One of its members was the Anglo-Irish prankster Horace de Vere Cole. He once hosted a party where it only dawned on the guests halfway through the evening that the sole reason they had been invited was because their names contained the word ‘bottom’.”

Anyway. The Cotonian sounds like it shouldn’t work. Scotch. And passion fruit? With Drambuie!? In fact, it is heavenly. I have made it numerous times to quadruple and quintuple-check this fact. And I note it isn’t the only drink to combine Scotch and passion fruit in the CRCB so clearly the creator of the Cotonian(one Leslie Miller) wasn’t entirely out on a limb.

Passion fruit is one of my favourite fruits to use in drinks - tart, lush, fragrant, decadent, silly - and, indeed, the passion fruit seems almost to have been designed for use in cocktails. “The potency of passionfruit makes it a kind of ready-to-use extract, scooped directly from the shell,” as Niki Segnit writes in the passion fruit chapter of her all-new Flavour Thesaurus. “It also has a powerful acidity. It’s perfect for icing, filling, or flavouring sweet coconut biscuits.” Or shaking up with whisky, she might have added, since she notes elsewhere that it shares flavour molecules with “fine Cognacs and whiskies” and “Virginian tobacco”. I suppose that explains why that little wisp of peated smoke from the Islay works so delectably in this cocktail.

For all that, I have never seen The Cotonian on a bar menu; in no modern book besides my own; and it is nowhere to be seen, either, in the otherwise compendious app, Martin’s Index of COCKTAILS & Mixed Drinks. Researching this little post, however, I did find two references to it from Brazilian sources, which my lusophone readers might enjoy. There is this charming article by the bartender Thiago Cecotti who notes the popularity of whisky-passionfruit combination in Brazil and compares the Cotonian to the Blood & Sand - another Scotch/vermouth/liqueur/juice combination. I also found this more recent barroom TikTok with a quarter of a million(!) likes. So who knows? Perhaps it is in the early stages of a comeback. Perhaps at last I will receive my medal.

The Spirits

The Spirits #110: The Cotonian

~ Scotch Passion ~ The Pioneers ~ Dress Sexy At My Funeral ~ Number Nine ~

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