The Spirits #9: The Treacle

~ Is This Something I Could Do in Women's Clothing ~ Apples - Sweet Thing ~ Drinking with your EYES ~ Oral History ~

~ THE TREACLE ~

50ml dark rum
10ml golden sugar syrup
Dash Angostura bitters
50-100ml apple juice

Stir the rum, sugar syrup and bitters in an Old Fashioned-type glass with lots of ice (ideally a single large cube). Top it up with apple juice. Garnish with apple (see below for a full garnish guide!) or go for grated nutmeg/cinnamon and maybe a lemon twist.

Some Treacle pointers:

1) Most rums are going to work here. I’ve made ‘practise’ versions with Appleton 8 Year, Flor de Caña 12-year and Chairman’s Reserve Spiced, which is one of the very few decent spiced rums. All slipped down, somehow?

2) I used the demerara sugar syrup I had leftover from last week’s Jungle Bird. If you’re making a fresh batch and you have some cinnamon sticks around (and/or vanilla pods, star anise, you know, apple pie type spices) you might consider infusing the sugar syrup.

3) The Treacle’s creator, the late Dick Bradsell (also see below), specified that this should be made with brown (i.e. rum-coloured) apple juice. But, it’s still going to taste fine with the cloudy kind.

Sweet sweet MUSIC. And welcome!

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IT’S a medium-sized journalistic regret of mine that I never pinned down the legendary Dick Bradsell for an interview while I was still at the Evening Standard and he was still mixing drinks. No bartender had done more for the cause of cocktails in London than Bradsell. He upheld the old traditions during the 1970s dark days; he helped revive the cocktail’s fortunes during the 1980s and 1990s, at venues like the Zanzibar, the Colony Rooms and the Atlantic (crazily, the only non-paying/non-members club you could legally buy a drink in London after 11pm for most of the 1990s). And he set the stage for the 2000s revival. Not that he was too fussed about that. “Your average customer doesn't care who you are, they just want a good drink and quickly", was his general philosophy.

He was working in perfect obscurity at a Mexican bar called the Pink Chihuahua in Soho by the time I caught on. I did swing by a couple of times at the end of evenings - this place? really? - but never caught him on shift. And he died of a brain tumour in 2016 at 56.

In the obituaries, he is fondly remembered as a sort of punk Jeeves, an contradiction in flesh. He was the son of an Isle of Wight radar engineer. He did actually train as a butler, and learned his barcraft under his uncle at the In and Out Naval and Military club in Piccadilly, a bastion of the old ways. His insitence on fresh lemons and limes and frozen glasses was ahead of its time. But Bradsell was also mischievous, arty, irascible, subversive, on the side of the underdog. “For those of us attending St Martin’s School of Art, Dick’s habit of wearing black eyeliner, a turban and a skirt as he sucked caviar out of a styrofoam wig head made perfect sense,” recalled one contemporary. When invited to judge a cocktail competition once, his response was: “Is this something I could do in women’s clothing?” Which is just a great response to pretty much any request.

Bradsell also came up with at least three enduring classics, all of which he invented on the spur of the moment and honed over time. Most famously, there’s the Espresso Martini, originally the Vodka Espresso. According to well-worn legend, Naomi Campbell (or was it Kate Moss?) asked him for something that would “Wake me up and fuck me up.” So he obliged. The Bramble? That’s also his: a modified Gin Sour, served down with a drizzle of blackberry liqueur: “An English drink made with English ingredients,” he called it.

And there’s the one I make all the time and which you are drinking now, the Treacle, a Rum Old Fashioned with an apple juice float.

🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏

So simple! But so… perfect? A good drink needs only three ingredients - four at most, Bradsell insisted. Here’s a good example of that. Dilute it to the strength of wine and you could sip it all evening. It works with bourbon and (Somerset) cider brandy too - but somehow rum is best - just the right side of not-obvious, like all flashes of genius. I particularly like how despite its urban roots, the Treacle is actually kind of a countryish drink; certainly one that slips down well on wet West Country evenings. Since moving to Bristol, I have gained a new appreciation for the English apple. The apples here are amazing. There’s a family friend who makes his own apple juice in a converted washing machine and it’s one of the most delicious liquids I’ve ever tasted. The version above was made with some fancy (but correctly-coloured) Jonagold apple juice from Herefordshire that I picked up in Fed 303 on the Gloucester Road, as delicate as wine. Or just stick to your basic cornershop kind.

Last word to Bradsell’s daughter Bea: “I know Dad is known for the drinks he’s created, but that was such a small part of the job for him. It was always about serving people well, taking the time to care.”

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PLAYLIST

So my first thought was to do apples but when I began to list my favourite apple songs - Red Apples by Smog; the Song of Wandering Aengus by Donovan, etc, - they did not scream: COCKTAIL HOUR! They screamed: REGRETFUL MORNING AFTER! So, I lent into sweetness instead: treacle, honey, molasses, sugar, spice, all things nice. Maybe I’ll do a depressing drinking list another time.

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ASK RICHARD

The renowned science reporter Nick Fleming rapped upon my door to demand:

Can you do something on garnishes…? I generally don’t bother, but I think I should and often don’t understand the relevant instructions. Not really convinced of the merits of the glacé cherry attached to a tooth pick that sank to the bottom of our Aviations last week

Alright then: I will.

We drink cocktails with our eyes first. Not literally. That would be painful. So would a toothpick in the eye for that matter. What I mean the first visual gulp of a cocktail should be as delightful as the first actual gulp. And a worthwhile garnish contributes to the actual gulp too: a nose of nutmeg, a haze of lemon, the salty pfzing of an olive… This doesn’t mean you need to go all out. Some cocktails are best unadorned. And it’s certainly better to have no garnish than a crap garnish. But: it’s worth making some effort, aesthetically speaking, especially if you’re making the cocktail for someone else.

🍋 If in doubt? Go for a lemon twist. That’s a length of zest, removed from a (hopefully unwaxed) fruit with a vegetable peeler. Watch fingers. You can then ‘twist’ it to express the bitter spray of lemon zest juice and maybe rub it round the rim of the glass too if you want extra lemoniness. If you want your twists to look all pro-ey (the technicaly term), tidy the edges up with a knife. Parallelograms look nice. Oranges and grapefruits also make good twists .

🍊 A citrus wedge is a good option, particularly for sours (e.g., Daiquiris). Not rocket science: you want about a sixth to an eight of the fruit; cut into the flesh at an angle and it will slide comfortably on the side of the glass. Limes usually end up in wedges, allowing the drinker to besour the drink to taste. A lot of people, you will notice, squeeze the lime in as soon as you hand them the drink. Philistines. That’s like immediately smothering your food with salt and pepper before you’ve tasted it.

🍒 A cocktail cherry looks dandy. Luxardo and Starlino make the best ones; the syrup they come in usually enhances a cocktail too. Glacé cherries are a different thing and best saved for cakes. No need to spear it on a stick either, just leave at the bottom of the glass. Alice Lascelles wrote an enjoyable dissertation on these kitsch delights in the FT the other day.

🌿 Another reliable stand-by is fresh mint (or basil, tarragon, rosemary, lime leaves, etc, as appropriate). If it’s a short drink, float a single leaf on top. If it’s a long drink, bury a sprig in the glass. If all you have are manky, slug-begotten sprigs, go without.

🌰 Or: spices? A grating of fresh nutmeg is one of my go-to’s on punches and sometimes on Martini-type drinks too. (Be warned: powdered nutmeg isn’t remotely the same.) Cinnamon can be good too.

🌺 Flowers if you really want to make an effort. The classic ‘tiki’ garnish was a gardenia blossom. You can usually buy dried roses in Middle Eastern/Chinese shops; dried hibiscus and chamomile work too. And fresh nasturtiums (petals and leaves) are good in summer. The novelist Oana Aristide recently shared this - which I found bracingly avant-garde.

🍓 Otherwise, whatever fruit you’re using in the drink. A pineapple wedge if it’s a pineapple cocktail (or, perhaps, a pineapple frond?). A few raspberries speared on a cocktail stick for a Clover Club. A strawberry, green bit and all. Etc.

🥒 Cucumber is good for summery long drinks, too: use a vegetable peeler to cut it lengthwise and then stick the ribbons around the inside of the glass.

🍏 That apple fan above? Cut off a hemisphere of apple flesh, chop that into as thin slices as you can manage and wet them with a little lemon juice: this stops them going brown and also helps them adhere to one another. You can then use a cocktail stick to skewer them all at one end and balance on the side of the glass; I had not such spear so simply smoozhed them on.

🏺 Finally, some lazily drizzled bitters can look fabulous on the eggy-foamy top of a sour; Pisco Sours are usually garnished this way. The blood-red Peychaud’s bitters looks particularly ravishing.

🧊 But bear in mind presentation goes beyond garnishes too. Freezing your glassware unfailingly makes people go “Oh my!” So does using ample ice - ideally one large cube. Maybe I’ll do another little guide to glassware some other time.

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LIKE THE INFLUENCE OF DRINK

“Another day is another world. The difference between foreign countries is never so great as the difference between night and day. Not only are the landscape and the light changed, but people are different, relationships which the night before had progressed at a sudden pace, appear to be back where they were. Some hopes are renewed, but others dwindle: the state of the world looks rosier and death further off; but the state of ourselves and our loves and ambitions seems more prosaic. We begin to regret promises, as if the influence of darkness were like the influence of drink. We do not love our friends so warmly: or ourselves. Children feel less need of their parents: writers tear up the masterpiece they wrote the night before.”

From Elizabeth Taylor’s A Game of Hide and Seek (which Johanna has been reading)

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OFFER!

Online alcohol shop The Drop Store is giving readers of the Spirits a discount. Head HERE, have a mooch and if you add thespirits10 (i.e. lowercase!) in the promo code you will get 10% off at checkout.

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WHAT I’M READING

Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy, one of the greatest short stories yet written? And one of the seven Russian classic collected by George Saunders in his forthcoming collection, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. (Project Gutenberg)

An Oral History of the Espresso Martini, Dick Bradsell’s great innovation. (I feel like a 3,000-worder on the undying popularity of Douglas Ankrah’s Porn Star Martini would be a worthy follow-up if any commissioning editors are reading?) (GQ).

How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism (New Yorker).

The latest in Katherine Rundell’s animal series, Consider the Giraffe. Pure pleasure (and a bit sad too). (LRB).

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SHOPPING LIST

OK, let’s mix it up a bit. Gin, orange liqueur, egg white, lemon juice, sugar syrup.

Orange liqueur is a new addition to our cocktail cabinet. “Triple sec” and “curacao” are both types of orange liqueur; either is fine. So is Cointreau, which is very much the dominant force in orange liqueurland. (I’d just buy a half-bottle if I were you, shouldn’t be much more than £15 - and you won’t need very much at a time). Grand Marnier isn’t so good however: an exceedingly delicious liquid it may be, but it’s actually orange liqueur mixed with brandy so it doesn’t have the sweetness required for our purposes. Blue curacao on the other hand is absolutely fine.