The Spirits #76: The Pistachio Army & Navy

~ Elegant foamy head ~ Eat and Say Thanks ~ Any Nut Orgeat ~ Army Dreamers ~ Medronho ~

~ THE PISTACHIO ARMY & NAVY ~

50ml gin
15ml lemon juice
15ml pistachio orgeat (see below)

Freeze a cocktail coupe. Add the gin, lemon and orgeat to the shaker, fill halfway with ice, and shake really, really hard, until condensation beads the metal. Fine-strain - i.e. through a tea-strainer or sieve - into your frigid glassware. A lemon twist garnish is traditional, but I think a dusting of something green looks fetching.

Some Pistachio Army & Navy Notes:

1) You can add 15ml egg white or aquafaba to this, should you desire (I desired). In which case, perform the double-shake routine outlined in last week’s Clover Club post. This will give you an elegant foamy head like in the picture.

2) The original Army & Navy cocktail calls for regular orgeat (which is made with almonds, not pistachio). You may find this an easier option; then the Army & Navy becomes a sort of old-school Amaretto Sour. There’s a recipe for homemade orgeat in my Mai Tai post and in the preparations section and there are plenty of commercial versions too. (You can also use orgeat in a Trinidad Sour, a Saturn and many more).

3) Green cardamon might be nice, garnish-wise? This echoes the famous Indian cooler, pista doodh. Equally some slivers of green pistachios might just work. I used moringa, made from the pulverised leaves of the moringa tree, which grows in the Himalayan foothills. It tastes a bit like matcha and is a bit gross in large amounts but a dusting here added a certain chlorophyllic healthfulness that I rather enjoyed.

Attention!

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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 pistachio, I’m sure we can agree, is one of our planet’s great nuts. So easy to tease open. And then you have that outré combination of antique purple and vivid green. Wine stains on a temple wall; a forbidden lawn. I mean, who even thought of that?

Once, I visited Pierre Marcolini’s chocolate factory in Brussels, and I remember being stunned by the otherwordly colour of the masses of shelled and skinned Iranian pistachios, not recognising the buttery green emeralds at first as food. They were about to be turned into pistachio marzipan, if I recall, or maybe macarons, or maybe éclairs, or maybe praline.

Generally, you have to go to the places pisatchio trees grow to find the finest examples pistachio art. There are few more elegant curry recipes than Camallia Panjabi’s Pistachio Korma (you can make it with the leftovers from the orgeat by the way). The Ottoman-influenced recipes in Silvena Rowe’s Purple Citrus & Sweet Perfume are little hymns to pistachio too. Lamb-pistachio kebabs with pistachio-tahini sauce? Excuse me while I gather myself. Oh and there’s an Italian foaccaia sandwich described here that involves pistachio three ways: beaded through mortadella; as individual nuts; and as a proprietary cream.

That’s just the mains. Pistache is a Top Three ice-cream, no question, though you have you generally have to go on holiday to find a steady supply (thank goodness for Little Moons). One of the main reasons I miss living on Green Lanes in Harringay is the loss of access to the incredible Turkish pistachio confestionary - such as this God-tier bar from Ülker. I also discovered that there is a sort of pistachio baklava, Kol wa Shkor, from Damascus that translates as: Eat and Say Thanks.

So anyway, I have long wanted to use this thrice-blessed seed in cocktails but wondered how. There is an intriguing-looking pistachio liqueur Serravinci, but otherwise, mysteriously few pistachio liquids on the market. Perhaps it’s because they don’t drink so much alcohol in Iran, Turkey and the Levant, the pistachio heartlands? I thought about making my own liqueur - infusing pistachios in spirit - before hitting on the rather simpler idea of making a pistachio orgeat syrup and using it in the Army & Navy, an elegant orgeat-based cocktail that I make a fair bit anyway.

Orgeat is usually flavoured with almonds, but actually you can make it with any nut you like: hazelnuts, macadamias, pecans, etc. Indeed, orgeat wasn’t originally made with almonds, it was made with barley, hence the name (l’orge = barley in French). Everyone switched to almonds once they realised how much more delicious it was. Perhaps a similar thing will happen once you’ve all tried my pistachio orgeat.

Before we get to the recipe (adapted from Dave Arnold’s Any Nut Orgeat from Liquid Intelligence, but minus the weird chemicals), I’ll just warn you: I haven’t exhaustively tried say, toasted vs untoasted nuts. I suspect this would be better - certainly colour-wise - using slivered pistachios, since I couldn’t quite face the hassle of skinning pistachios. But I did try to extract as much flavour from those nuts as possible. Usually, when I make homemade almond orgeat I’ll cheat a bit and add a few drops of almond extract, maybe a tot of Amaretto. However, I don’t happen to have any pistachio flavinoids lying around, so it was extra important to make those beauties count

PISTACHIO ORGEAT
(Yields c.750ml)

150g shelled pistachios
500ml water, just off the boil
c.500g caster sugar
A liquidiser
A sieve
Muslin

1. Toast half of the pistachios in a dry frying pan. Leave the rest raw. This is to ensure different levels of pistachio flavour.
2. If you want to remove the skins, you’ll need to soak them in water for about 30 minutes, then scrape it all off. (I didn’t bother.)
3. Place the pistachios and the hot water in a liquidiser (a Nutri-Bullet is ideal) and whirr for a minute or so. I’d recommend doing this in 15-20 second bursts, pausing to release steam. You might leave to infuse for a further hour or so.
4. Line a sieve with muslin, place it over a bowl/pan and pour over the pistachio mush. Allow the water to drip through. Go do something else - it will take a while.
5. Towards the end of the drip-drip-drip, you can ball up the muslin and squeeze it - milk it, almost - to extract the liquid. Don’t force it, or the nut-mush will come oozing and you don’t want that. But you do want as much pistachio milk as possible.
6. If you were being really thorough, you’d recombine the liquids and the solids, refrigerate for 24 hours, and then pass through muslin once more. I did not do this.
7. What I did instead was make a 2:1 syrup with the green-ish pistachio milk. Measure two times the volume of sugar (I’d go white caster sugar here) to one part pistachio milk, and stir over a low heat until fully dissolved. You could also do this in the liquidiser.
8. You may add orange flower water or rose water, if you desire, plus a little alcohol to preserve: vodka, grappa or white rum best here, I think. And do you know what I added just to nudge that greenness in a more fetching direction? Do you really want to know? A small soupçon of blue curaçao. Drink and Say Thanks.

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CABINET POSTS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

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

Coming soon: Crème de cassis

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PLAYLIST

A military theme today, I’m afraid. I haven’t found a convincing origin story for the cocktail but I believe it was first recorded by David Embury in 1948, when there would have been hundreds of Army & Navy clubs all over, so perhaps it was the house drink of one or the other. Anyway: enjoy Kate Bush, Arthur Alexander, Marlene Dietrich, The Mekons, PJ Harvey, David Bowie, Jacques Brel, the best version of Shipbuilding imho, Chicago punk legends Naked Raygun, and more.

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

About sherry (The Spirits)

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

Alcohol is bad for you but not you. (Guardian)

I told you this would be a good Substack! Here is Simon Carr on the significance of the Iberian moonshine, madronho/medronho, in Hieronymous Bosch’s vision of hell. (The Garden of Earthly Delights)

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SHOPPING LIST

Canteloupe melon, ideally a bit overripe. In fact, chop one up right now and leave the flesh to infuse in as much white rum (or vodka) as you can spare. Place in a dark cupboard and shake every day until next week.

Also: absinthe, lemon, sugar, further canteloupe and crushed ice.

🍈🧡🍈🧡🍈