The Spirits #79: The Gilda

~ Cinnamon-Lime-Pineapple ~ Cold Tea Secrets ~ It Must Have Been Good But I Lost It Somehow ~

~ THE GILDA COCKTAIL ~

60ml tequila
15ml pineapple juice
15ml lime juice
15ml cinnamon syrup

Hurry, now we don’t have long. Everything in the shaker, hop to it. Half a tray of ice in there too. Lid on. And: shake! Shake! Shake, goddamit, shake! Now, stop, for heaven’s sake! That’s quite enough. Take a moment. Fine strain into a pre-chilled cocktail glass. What? Lime wheel garnish. Drink immediately. Lie low for a while.

Some Gilda Cocktail notes:

1. This is a Death & Co. recipe by Brian Miller from 2009. Attentive readers will note that this isn’t the first drink I have purloined from this institution; nor will it be the last (see shopping list, below).

2. The pineapple-lime-cinnamon combination proved a popular trio at D&C, also appearing in a handful of other drinks. So, if you’ve no tequila, it’s worth trying with just about any other spirit you fancy - gin, bourbon, rum, pisco, etc.

3. Can I let you in on a small secret? I am on a minor health kick at the moment and was, for once, reluctant to muddy my head with alcohol for the sake of a picture. So the above is actually a non-alcoholic cocktail made not with tequila at all but with iced tea as the base. I know! But tea is an excellent substitute for spirits and much cheaper than Seedlip and its spawn; and cocktails like this one - I mean cocktails where fruits and syrups provide the main flavour - lend themselves to the temperance treatment. Also, tea offers plenty of scope for variation. I actually made this twice, once with a green tea and fennel tisane blend; and once with lapsang souchong. All I did was make half a cup of each with 2x tea bags apiece for a concentrate blend, rapidly cooling it with ice when brewed.

4. I preferred the lapsang souchong version, with its undertones of your clothes after a night around a bonfire. But that was also because I took a bit more care with the measurements that second time.

THE SPIRITS is on SEMI-VACATION. You can still expect a recipe each Friday at 4pm BST as usual - but the full service (playlist, musings, links, etc) will resume when the schools go back in September.

In the meantime, I have been getting a lot of pleasure out of this old but recently updated playlist that I made to evoke hazy childhood holidays in Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s: your parents’ tapes, your sisters’s tapes, a bit of Now 12, some snatches of Belgian radio, the song they were playing on the hovercraft, the song they were playing in that place you stopped for a flying saucer ice-cream - plus a few backseat daydreams beamed in from the future:

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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.

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And if you REALLY like it, please consider subscribing to the CABINET, in which I go deep on exciting ingredients like Chartreuse, Falernum, Mezcal and (coming soon) Cassis. It’s the subscriptions that allow me to continue to do all of this, so: huge gratitude to all those who make that possible.

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SHOPPING LIST:

Strawberries, balsamic vinegar, sugar, dark and/or light rum (but, as above, don’t worry about the base alcohol too much, the formula will work just fine with tequila, gin, maybe brandy too).

🍓