The Spirits #75: The Clover Club

~ Raspberries ~ Manly Drinks ~ Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so ~ Liar Liar ~ The Garden of Earthly Delights ~

~ THE CLOVER CLUB ~

40ml gin
20ml French vermouth
15ml lemon (or lime) juice
15ml golden sugar syrup
15ml egg white
Three or four raspberries

Place a cocktail glass in the freezer. Separate the egg. Now, add all of the ingredients to the shaker and perform the eponymous action with your usual vigour. Add copious ice and shake again. Fine strain - i.e. through a tea-strainer or sieve - into your frozen cocktail glass. Garnish with raspberries and/or mint.

Some Clover Club Notes:

1) Cocktails involving egg-white require a “double-shake” as outlined above: once to froth up the egg; and again to cool and dilute the drink. You can do a “reverse double-shake”, too, which is where you shake with ice first, strain into a spare vessel, and then re-shake with no ice to acheive frothiness. Your call.

2) There are squillions of Clover Club recipes floating around the ether and no two are precisely the same. So, should you omit the egg, or the vermouth, or make this with lime / raspberry syrup / grenadine - you won’t be wrong. But my recipe, the product of years of fine-tuning, is objectively the best.

3) The mint garnish technically makes this a ‘Clover Leaf’.

I can’t believe he’s actually gone.

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🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, 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 your friends.

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THE Clover Club was the drink of choice of a Philadelphia men’s group who met at the Bellevue-Stratford hotel from the late 1880s onwards. It went on to become the manly thing to order in the US, pre-Prohibition apparently - a period in which the American male had no qualms about frilly, pinkish cocktails. These would come later. As I noted in my book, a bartender at Hawksmoor once told me that the Clover Club was what he suggested whenever a female customer ordered a Cosmopolitan - the quintessential “girly drink” of the 90s-00s. The Clover Club is rather similar to the Prohibition-era Pink Lady, too, once derided as an effeminate abomination (it was included in a list of America’s Ten Worst Cocktails, published by Esquire in 1934 for this reason).

The moral? Gendered drinking is a social construct. And hopefully we have reached a period where no one gives a damn about any of that stuff anyway. The fact is the Clover Club is a delight. If you don’t like it, you don’t like cocktails. Or quite possibly, pleasure itself.

There are, as I mentioned above, lots of recipes, all subtly different. The first one ever published (in 1909, I believe) involved cream, interestingly. There’s also a Royal Clover Club, which demands egg yolk in place of egg white. (Must suck to be royal, right? Always obliged to drink flips instead of sours). And there’s a future-pushing recipe from the Hotel Belvedere in Baltimore, c.1914, which calls for red and white vermouth and says that raspberries are to be used in place of the grenadine “when in season”. Bingo!

This fresh raspberry approach is, to my mind, the thing that really makes the thing sing. Not only is it much easier to lob three raspberries in the shaker than messing around making syrups. It also gives it an extra layer of acidity that feels wonderfully summery and fresh. The addition of French vermouth, too, is an option worth taking, lending a sophisticated herby je ne sais quoi that lingers. Probably worth trying with strawberries, too, come to think of it.

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CABINET POSTS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

🌿Green Chartreuse
🍒 Maraschino
🍑 Apricot Brandy
🍫 Crème de Cacao
🌷Cynar
🏝️ Falernum
🌵 Mezcal

Coming soon: Sherry

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PLAYLIST

In honour of this week’s events. Man, that felt good.

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 past playlists.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING

I interviewed FKA Twigs, a great heroine of mine, and found her in forthcoming mood. Tip for aspiring celebrity profile writers: a little astrological knowledge goes a long way. (ES Magazine)

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

About the collapse of Tory Britain. But enough of those clowns! Here’s Johanna Thomas-Corr on threesomes: (New Statesman)

My erstwhile breakfasting colleague Henry Jeffreys on Felicity Cloake’s Red Sauce Brown Sauce: (Spectator)

…and the source of that outstanding baked bean analogy: (London Review of Breakfast)

Amelia Tait with one of her killer ledes: (Wired)

Whither the messed up artists of yesteryear? (New York Times)

Oh, and I highly recommend this new Substack by Simon Carr, former Independent sketch writer who once described George Osborne as having a “mouth like a duelling wound”. It’s entirely about Hieronymous Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights - and the hitherto unnoticed details revealed by ultra-high-resolution photography and digital archiving. Such as this pig dressed as a nun forcing this poor gentleman to sign a legal document. (The Garden of Earthly Delights)

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SHOPPING LIST

Pistachio nuts (the unsalted kind, about 100g), sugar, orange flower water; gin, lemon (or lime).