The Spirits #26: The Rhubarb Sour

~ Rhubarb Rhubarb Rhubarb ~ Subscribe to the Spirits! ~ The Jeopardy of Life ~ Easter Everywhere ~ Monty Don's Trousers

~ THE RHUBARB SOUR ~

Fresh rhubarb
50ml (rhubarb-infused) gin
25ml rhubarb syrup (see below)
20ml lime juice
10ml Campari
10ml egg white

Freeze your glassware. Take three or four slices of raw rhubarb and muddle in the bottom of the shaker along with the gin. Add all the other ingredients and lots of ice. Shake extremely enthusiastically for ten seconds. Foxtrot rhythm. Now fine strain (through a tea strainer) into a spare vessel. Allow all the pinkish spume to dribble through… attaboy! Now discard the ice from the shaker and “dry shake” the cocktail again in order really get that egg white ultra-frothy. Mm-hm. Good. Now pour into your frozen cocktail glass. And get creative with some rhubarb for the garnish.

RHUBARB SYRUP

Take one or two sticks of rhubarb, pink as possible and slice up thinly. Place in a saucepan along with 250ml water and 250ml caster sugar (white is best here, colour-wise). Stir as you bring the pan slowly to the boil, then cover and simmer for about ten minutes. Leave to cool and then strain through a sieve. You can use the rhubarb solids as a compote, if you like. The rhubarb syrup will keep for a couple of weeks and makes a versatile cordial: particularly good with a squeeze of lemon and some fizzy water.

Some Rhubarb Sour pointers:

1) This came out quite similar, to Ryan Chetiyawardana’s ‘Rhubarb Leaf’ from his excellent book, Good Things to Drink. However, it has a couple of Godwinian twists (lime for lemon, a dash of Campari, rhubard-infused gin, etc) and thus I felt it branched away sufficiently to merit a new name.

2) Alternative names for this cocktail include: Rhubarbarossa; Rhubarb Rhubarb Rhubarb; Siberian Sour; Rhubarb Club; Rhubarb Gimlet; Rhubarbative; Rhubarbarian; Rabarbaro!; Monty Don’s Trousers.

3) You don’t need to infuse your gin with rhubarb - you don’t need to do any of this! - but it takes the drink to rhubarbarous heights if you do. Simply slice up a stalk (the pinker the better) and leave it to rest in gin for 24 hours before straining. If you just do this, you can make a subtler rhubarb sour with just basic sugar syrup.

4) Both the Campari and the egg white are optional, I suppose, but I would recommend both if at all possible, for colour and texture respectively. And if you’re feeling extra Easter-y why not lob a WHOLE EGG in there? I’m serious. DO IT.

IT’S A BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND! WE CAN SEE OUR LOVED ONES!
Some EASTER MUSIC… and yes, there is room on the picnic blanket for you. As everYou will find instructions for making sugar syrup, grenadine, ice, etc here and my 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS here. I have also assembled some bottle recommendations for a cabinet here - and this here is the full archive of weekly specials. Do please share the Spirits with anyone who might like it - and feel free to tag me with your creations on Instagram ou même Twitter!

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📯 HOUSEKEEPING 📯

I am, as I mentioned last week, adding a paid option to The Spirits. This is partly because lots of people have asked me to do this (honestly!) but also because I would love to devote proper time to this each week, testing recipes, sourcing songs, scouring libraries, etc (and hopefully eliminate those weeks where I notice a typo in the first paragraph as soon as I hit SEND.)

I am elated and touched at HOW MANY PEOPLE signed up last week on the promise of absolutely nothing extra. It reassures me that work and pleasure (and it is a pleasure pulling all this together,) can happily coexist. So here’s what I intend to do. There will remain a weekly recipe, on Friday, for all subscribers, based on the limited cabinet of ingredients we have been using so far. But all the extra musings and tips etc will, after a time, be reserved for subscribers. AND: If I hit a *certain number of subscribers*, I will be in a position to start a new Wednesday mailout soon too, which will be more focused on ingredients and mini-projects for the committed cocktaileur: how to make peanut-butter bourbon, 101 Uses for Green Chartreuse, more in-depth tasting notes, things like that.

As ever I welcome feedback / expertise / acumen. AND there are a few days left to run on the extremely generous introductory offer I have prepared, so do sign up now if you feel that way inclined 👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇

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ON CULINARY COCKTAILS

OCCASIONALLY, in deadline-free moments, when I have succeeded in not looking at social media for a while and my thoughts are my own and not the world’s, I think about new cocktails, cocktails that should exist but don’t, not quite yet, cocktails that I might make up in my kitchen. One of the pleasures of the classic cocktail canon is that it can transport you to times and places far distant from where you are: 1920s Paris, 1940s LA, 1970s Kuala Lumpur, etc. But there’s another approach to cocktails that I find just as compelling, especially as Spring blooms and the fresh, seasonal things start bursting out of the ground and begging to be made into delicious drinks. These past couple of weeks, this is how I’ve been enjoying drinking: fingers muddy from the garden, the scent of blossom in the air, the world opening up. I find that I crave fresh, fruit-forward cocktails that run with the trajectory of the Earth’s orbit, as opposed to trying to crank against it; drinks that take a thing and make it more.

I mentioned in my Banana Rum Old Fashioned dispatch the other day that the word “spirit” refers to the miraculous property that alcohol has of capturing the essence of whatever you leave macerating inside it. But of course, this is not the only way of introducing fruity/herby flavours into cocktails and not all plants benefit equally from this treatment. There are many different ways that you can use plants in cocktails: as juices, as syrups, as liqueurs, as brandies, as bitters, as whole muddled fruits, as tea-like infusions, etc. The “spirit” of each ingredient can usually best be captured in one or perhaps two particular ways; so the art of coming up with interesting seasonal cocktails lies in working out which methods to use for which ingredients. This is the idea behind the cocktail above which I hope serves as a sort of template.

I got to thinking about this recently as someone asked me (and I failed to answer, sorry!) if there were any acceptable cocktails that could be made with limoncello, the Amalfi lemon-peel liqueur. The answer is no. Not really! Nothing against limoncello. Lovely ‘cello. I’m sure you could make some OK cocktails with it. But it seems odd to me to use limoncello in a cocktail when I can use fresh lemon, or, for that matter, fresh lemon peel. Lime likewise. There are lime liqueurs and there’s certainly lime cordial… but even this can feel a bit extraneous, since the essence of lime, lime in its purest form, is its freshness, its unadulterated zing, and there’s nothing better for that than actual lime. I have just tasted lots and lots of fake limey ready-to-drink cocktails for a newspaper feature and never have I craved real lime so much.

However! Soon after this thought, my own dear father WhatsApped me to inform me that a blood orange had made its way into the online shopping order and what was a good cocktail to make with blood orange? Well, hmm. There are plenty of perfectly OK cocktails that contain fresh orange juice but for the most part orange juice comes over a little insipid in cocktails. The benign healthfulness that makes it the undisputed G.O.A.T. of the breakfast juices becomes a weakness when bourbon or gin square up to it. Orange is an essential cocktail flavour, but it tends to do best in liqueur form or else as bitters, which comes from orange peel.

Is it possible then, to come up with a Generalisable Theory of Fruit in Cocktails? I haven’t managed it. Which is probably a good thing. It is a mystery why the most common cocktail syrup (grenadine) should come from the pomegranate, of all fruits. Why raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, etc, tend to work best fresh, shaken up with the cocktail itself, but the blackcurrant of all berries makes the best liqueur. Similarly, the apricot must be turned into jam or better, apricot brandy, to acheive its cocktail potential, while other soft fruits (mangos, kiwis, etc) are best muddled. And then there’s the apple, which at first appear to be a jack of all cocktail trades, master of none - until you realise that apples belong in the same special category as grapes. It is only after fermentation that they acheive their true cocktailing potential, their applotheosis if you will: as cider, cider brandy or cider vinegar. And if you’ve never made a sour with cider vinegar, I recommend that you do.

Rhubarb? Rhubarb, rhubarb? It is (along with its patch-mate, the gooseberry) a fruit I have only come to appreciate in adult years and in fact not a fruit at all but a vegetable, a hardy perennial, native to Siberia. And as soon as I saw those outrageous pink spears in the greengrocers last week, I began to think about rhubarb cocktails. And so I set about making the rhubarbiest cocktail possible, arriving at the above recipe after rigorous (for me) experimentation.

My first thought was to make rhubarb syrup, a fairly intuitive process if you are used to stewing rhubarb for pies and crumbles. However, I found my first batch a little candy-like, not quite rhubarby enough, and so I decided to infuse a stalk in the gin too. Suddenly (well, not quite suddenly: after 24 hours) the cocktail had a much more sophisticated rhubarb note; the syrup and infusion combined made a fairly upmarket tasting rhubarb liqueur. And finally, once I worked out that the sour formula was the way to go, I found that pounding a little fresh rhubarb at the beginning added one more dimension. And so, the rhubarb enters the cocktail three ways. Four actually. The Campari was serendipidous. I found the colour a little lacking when I went to photograph my first attempt, so added a mere dash of the red stuff, and found that this somehow intensified the rhubarb flavour. And as it turns out, rhubarb is one of the main ingredients in Campari.

Overly fiddly? Perhaps. Delicious? Oh yes.

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PLAYLIST

“An Easter playlist? It cannot be done! Who writes songs about Easter?!” Was my first thought. Then I remembered that two of my favourite albums have Easter in the title: Easter by Patti Smith and Easter Everywhere by the 13th Floor Elevators. And on further reflection and with a little creative interpretation - well, there are tons of Easter or Easter-adjacent songs. I enjoyed pulling this one together, hope you like!

CW: The first 49 seconds of the Richard Thompson song = some of the greatest guitar playing ever committed to record

Please note: if you follow this playlist it will automatically refresh each week - so make the most of it while you can! You can find a masterlist of all songs featured so far here.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

The Bristol Cable is an exemplary community news organisation. It has been doing in-depth reporting on all the anti-policing bill protests here - well worth reading ahead of some of the sensationalist national coverage. (The Bristol Cable).

“A callous, cynical move to downplay the problem”: verdicts on the controversial Race and Equalities report (Guardian).

The Peerless Genius Lana Del Rey on her new album (Mojo)

The Psychedelic Footballer - an old piece that only recently came to my attention (Guardian).

Consider the Stork by Katherine Rundell (LRB)

And I’ve been doing lots of painting while listening to David Runciman’s outstanding History of Ideas series - the one on Simone de Beauvoir is particularly excellent (Podcast)

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SHOPPING LIST

Tequila, fresh jalapeño (or green chillies if you can’t find actually jalapeños), agave (or sugar), lime, pomegranate molasses - which you can get in most supermarkets, or in any Turkish/Middle Eastern grocer.

🌵 🍸 🍋 🌶️