The Spirits #62: The Brandy Daisy

~ The Daisy Age ~ David Wondrich's Wonderful Book ~ A Ukrainian Playlist ~ Танцi ~ Threads ~

~ THE BRANDY DAISY ~

50ml brandy
15ml lemon juice
15ml grenadine
~15ml fizzy water

Shove it all in the shaker. Not the fizzy water though! Add ice. Shake. Strain into a cocktail glass. Top with fizzy water and stir. Garnish with lemon/mint/cherry.

Some Brandy Daisy Notes:

1) All I’d say is, this isn’t necessarily one for your very best XO cognac - your basic bitch pantry stuff is going to be fine here. I used the extremely serviceable Greek spiced brandy, Metaxa 12-year.

2) If you have no grenadine and can’t be arsed making any, feel free to use any syrup, cordial or sweet liqueur you have handy. Anything goes in a Daisy. (See below).

Is that… no… is it… Spring in the air?

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🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine etc are here.
🧑‍🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full A-Z recipe archive is here. 
➡️ Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.

And you like The Spirits, do please forward this to all of your friends.

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IF YOU are partial to riffling through old-time bar manuals - no doubt you have better things to do? - you will have noticed that Cocktails were by no means the only alcoholic mixtures in town back in the day. There are Punches too, of course, but numerous further categories of drink whose finer differences might elude the 21st century reader. Fixes. Fizzes. Smashes. Crustas. Collins. Sours. Juleps. Moustache-Twisters. Fandangos. Smack-in-the-Mouths. Call-Me-Daddies. Milk Flaps. And Daisies. Lots of daisies.

At first glance, these drinks all seem much of a muchness. OK, so a Julep contains mint… but a Smash also contains mint? What gives? And hang on: how exactly is a Gin Fizz (gin, lemon, sugar, soda water) different from a Tom Collins (gin, lemon, sugar, soda water)? What makes a Fix a Fix and a Sour a Sour? And what even is a Daisy?

Once this was a matter of idle speculation. Now I know precisely where to turn: David Wondrich’s compendious Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails. I received a copy for Christmas (thanks mum!). It’s a proper doorstopper and one of those books you open to look something up - and then spend an hour reading. I like books like that. Perfumes by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez is one. The Spirits by Richard Godwin is another. Niki Segnit’s Flavour Thesaurus too. And now this beast.

So! The Daisy, per the nigh-on omniscient Wondrich, is a “sour sweetened with a liqueur or flavoured syrup, lightened with a splash of sparkling water, and served in a cocktail glass”. The Daisy first gained fame in America in the 1870s - but Wondrich identifies two specific waves of Daisy popularity.

In the first 1870s wave, the Whiskey Daisy was king: 60ml rye / 15ml lime juice / 10ml orange curaçao / 10ml raspberry syrup. Shaken with ice, strained into a cocktail glass and topped with sparkling water. In the second wave of the early 1900s, the Gin Daisy gained precedence. This one’s served in a tall glass filled with ice: 45ml gin, 15ml lime, 15ml grenadine, topped with fizzy water and garnished “elaborately”.

Hmm. These are quite different! But Wondrich reassures us that it is the syrup and/or liqueur that makes a Daisy a Daisy; orgeat, raspberry syrup, curaçao and maraschino were all common, as was yellow Chartreuse. This, plus the mere spritz of fizzy water, are the distinguishing features. Wondrichs meanwhile laments the fact that modern bartenders have neglected the Daisy while reviving numerous other types of defunct drink. Or perhaps not. You know what Daisy is in Spanish? It is just possible that the Margarita is an evolved Daisy.

Anyway, the Daisy above is actually the Daisy recipe from Harry MacElhone’s ABC of Mixing Cocktails from the 1920s. Note that it’s closer to the first Daisy in structure (spirit, syrup, citrus, plus a splash of fizz, served up). I found it a very pleasant drink! I happened to make a very good batch of grenadine the other week, which helped: freshly squeezed crimson pomegranate and golden caster sugar, plus pomegranate molasses, orange zest, orange flower water and a tear of vanilla. This combined happily with the faintly medicinal Metaxa - and the dash of fizzy water gave it a Spritzy feel. A pleasant way of welcoming Spring. And a formula I can imagine fooling around with a while longer.

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THE CABINET!

The Spirits is dependent on readerly goodwill to keep it going. (Seriously, it does take me quite a while, doing this every week)!. Please consider subscribing and you will have access to the full Cabinet, with its dedicated posts on: GREEN CHARTREUSE, MARASCHINO, APRICOT BRANDY and CREME DE CACAO…with more coming soon!

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PLAYLIST

I thought a Ukrainian playlist might be in order? I make no claim to expertise here. The songs here are (mostly) new to me; I’ve been compiling them these past few weeks, whether by word of mouth, creative Googling or algorithmic spooling. But since Vladimir Putin begin his war, I have been through cycles of sadness, horror and admiration for Ukraine - and then felt the need to deepen my knowledge of the country - and then felt doubly sad, doubly horrified, doubly admiring, to better understand what is being destroyed.

Still, I’ll be honest, as I started this list I thought: hmm, are there going to be enough decent songs? (My attempts in the past to enjoy Russian/Soviet pop/rock has enjoyed a certain amount of goodwill). But I needn’t have worried! Ukraine has many rich and varied music scenes and enough wonderful bands to make me wonder why I haven’t spent the last few years going back and forth to Dnipro psych-folk clubs and Kyiv hardcore happenings.

Anyway: I really enjoyed putting this one together. Most of the songs are contemporary; perhaps DakhaBrakha (above) will be familiar to some? The opening track, Танцi by Vopli Vidopliassova, is an authentic piece of Ukraine punk from 1986. Sort of a Soviet Song 2? Perhaps I will do a playlist of dissident Russians next week, too.

THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. The idea is, you download it and return to it each week in your Spotify. If there was an old song you’d like to hear again, you’ll find it RIGHT HERE in the ongoing archive of 2021 playlists.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING

Oh a bunch of important stuff that hasn’t been published yet!

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

Kamil Galeev. (Twitter).

How Putin’s oligarch’s bought London (New Yorker)

Who are the siloviki? (FT)

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SHOPPING LIST

Gin, sugar, lemon, raspberries, orange flower water, egg, fizzy water.

🦚