Aperitif

 

Aperitif

Cocktail Hour the French Way

by Rebekah Peppler
photos by Joann Pai
Clarkson Potter
2018
 

  

Aperitif is an invitation to enjoy a French style happy hour, an apero, with friends. For author Rebekah Peppler, an American who lived in Paris for awhile in her 20s and 30s, this means drinks made with sherry, vermouth, and other fortified wines, and savory snacks to accompany them before dinner. 

 

Peppler starts of with an introduction to vermouth (plus its cousin quinquina), sherry, and a few recommended liqueurs like Suze, St Germain, and creme de cassis. Most of the ingredients she uses are bittersweet, which definitely gives the drinks she builds from them a consistent palate. 

 

Vermouth is made from wine that's fortified with a spirit like brandy, then infused with herbs, including wormwood, from which it draws its name. Quinquina is very similar, except the bittering agent is quinine instead of wormwood. Sherry starts similarly but gets its flavor from aging in oak barrels rather than infusing herbs. Peppler picks a few brands to mention by name - Byrrh, Dubonnet, and Lillet - but largely treats the various vermouths and quinquinas as interchangeable aside from grouping them as rouge, blanc, and rose, which is honestly what I do at home too.

 

Next there are four sections of drink recipes, grouped by the weather at the time you're drinking them - warm, hot, cool, and cold. Peppler says this is partly seasonal, partly based on time of day, and whether it's been rainy or sunny. The drinks are all relatively low alcohol, what Dinah Sanders calls 'shims'. Because of Peppler's limited ingredient list, and because many of her ingredients are categories with several options for how to fill it, a lot of the recipes seem like flexible templates. Others are oddly specific. There's a Kir drink in each season, for example, always with the exact same ratio, just changing the mixer, always blackcurrant liqueur (cassis), just with sparkling wine, lager, cider, or red wine.

 

There's also a section with recipes for snacks, various puff pastries, crackers, and seasoned popcorns you can make yourself, along with spreads to smear on them, tapenades and pates. There's a bit of advice for doctoring olives or preparing cheese to share, but the emphasis is on things you prepare more than things you might purchase directly.

 

I have a suspicion that Peppler's vision of l'apero has as much to do with the nature of her friend group in Paris (and her nostalgia for those friends, after she moved back) as it does with what's customary in France, but I think that's inevitable. Imagine what a French woman who lived in New York as a young adult might write about American happy hour, for example! But I do feel inspired to try out a few more vermouth drinks this year.

The One-Bottle Cocktail

 
 
The One-Bottle Cocktail

More than 80 Recipes with Fresh Ingredients and a Single Spirit

by Maggie Hoffman

photos by Kelly Puleio

Ten Speed Press

2018

 

 

I got a copy of The One-Bottle Cocktail a few years ago when it first came out. It was getting talked up on NPR and maybe some other news services I was following at the time. And a lot of the drinks in it do sound good, but this is not a book for me. The recipes collected here, most of them anyway, are intended for foodies with well-stocked kitchens. For me, the need to pull a second bottle of liqueur or amaro or bitters out of my cabinet is much less of an obstacle than a recipe that calls for me to prepare my own fresh fruit juice or infuse an unusual vegetable syrup.
 
There's an irony here. In her introduction, author Maggie Hoffman mentions the frustration of finding a cocktail recipe that calls for buying a a bottle of some ingredient that won't have any other uses. But almost all the homemade ingredients in the book are used in only a single recipe, possibly something you wouldn't buy to cook with otherwise. The way Hoffman collected her recipes means that across the book, there are two different simple sugar syrups, and three different concentrations of honey mixed with water. Is that better? It might be a little cheaper, and they'll go bad if you don't use them, instead of hanging out in the back of your cabinet, either to haunt you or to be used again later. Maybe it's a matter of preference.
 
Hoffman found recipes from professional bartenders all over the country, and each recipe credits the original creator and their bar, along with Hoffman's own notes and instructions, and sometimes a photo, either of the preparation or the finished drink. The recipes are organized into sections based on the one bottle they use - vodka, gin, tequila, rum, brandy, and whiskey. At the end of each section is a list of cocktails from the other parts of the book that Hoffman thinks would taste good with that spirit.
 
The recipes vary in complexity, but are mostly on the higher end. There are only a few that only need jam or a single homemade syrup, and maybe lemon or lime juice. Hoffman is very big on the idea of making your own fruit juices by chopping something into cubes, dropping them in the food processor, and first pouring, then pressing the juice through a fine mesh strainer. One recipe notably calls for juicing an entire watermelon this way, something I doubt I have either the stamina or patience for. Other times, she suggests just muddling the fruit before dropping it into the cocktail shaker along with the other ingredients, and double straining during the pour.
 
The size of the recipes also varies, with most making single drinks, a handful making pairs, and a sizable minority making batches of 8 or 12. The punches might be where the idea of this book shines best. They're often for a special occasion, where you don't mind doing a bit more work, and where all the prep can be handled well before everything is combined. The lower alcohol of these recipes is probably also good for most kinds of parties, and by making many drinks at once, you'll use up all the juice or syrup you made, with no leftovers.

Black Sea

 

Black Sea

Dispatches and Recipes Through Darkness and Light

by Caroline Eden

photographs by Ola Smit and Theodore Kaye
Quadrille

2018

 

 

Black Sea is a book that seems to deliberately defy classification. First and foremost, it's travel writing, cataloging author Caroline Eden's trip around the Black Sea coast, starting in Odessa, Ukraine, passing through Romania and Bulgaria, then crossing Turkey, from Istanbul in the west to Trabzon in the east.

Admittedly, travel writing is always an eclectic genre, mixing narration of the author's voyage with tidbits of local history and current events, and it's often combined with food writing, as in this case, where Eden seemingly describes every meal as she travels the coast. But Eden's emphasis on food goes beyond a secondary focus - you could also think of this as food writing that happens to describe travel. She even includes recipes between each stop, usually 2-4 from each place she visits, adding up to dozens over the course of the book. So this is also kind of a cook book.

It's also also kind of a photo book. There aren't images on every page, and the book itself is novel-sized, not coffee table, but there are a lot of photos, usually getting a full page or two-page spread each. In a lot of travel books you get none, or else a few pages of color plates in the center. I don't usually talk about the physical qualities of the book I'm reading, but Black Sea is gorgeous. The hardcover has silver foil and an embossed surface making the wave pattern. The pages are edged in ink so that the closed book is a solid block of black. The paper is heavy, and the photography crisp and attractive.

And the thing is, this genre hybrid, this eclectic mix, it works. Eden marches on her stomach, and you follow along, eating your way from Odessa to Trabzon. There are local variations, but the recipes often involve garlic, rice pilaf or bulgar wheat, yogurt or cheese, honey, leafy greens, hazelnuts or chestnuts, and lots of fish, especially sardines and anchovies, which are beloved across the region. She buses between cities and has local guides and drivers in each one, eating at a mix of restaurants and hospitable family homes. Like me, she's curious about the famous 'mad honey' made from rhododendron pollen, said to be intoxicating in small doses, toxic in large, but she doesn't manage to try any.

Besides food, Eden's other big interest is immigrant communities. She writes about the Jewish and Italian communities in Odessa, Swiss farmers in Romania, Russians loyal to the tsar fleeing Lenin in Istanbul, and Turks who came back to Trabzon after generations in Russia. She's arguably more interested in these smaller communities, their culture and food, than she is with the majority population anywhere she goes. Eden gives special attention to writers, mostly but not only Russian authors exiled by the Soviets, so it would be easy to compile a reading list from books she mentions along the way.

Eden is not, for the most part, interested making any overt comments about politics. There's an obvious reason her journey doesn't start in Crimea or make it out of Turkey into Georgia or Russia - but she never mentions it. Ceausescu only comes up to explain why so few Anglophone travel writers have visited Romania. The Russian seizure of Crimea and territories in East Ukraine, the attempted Turkish coup and Erdogan's authoritarian crackdown afterward - Eden mentions them only in passing, and only when absolutely necessary.

I say this not to cast judgment, just as a description of what she wrote. There's a new edition of the book coming out this year with some supplemental writing about Putin's full invasion of Ukraine. It's hard for me to imagine this won't feel tacked on and dissonant with what's already there. Another writer, or perhaps even Eden herself, could write all about the historical and present-day conflicts and injustices in the countries surrounding the Black Sea, but I feel like that would belong to a different book, a different way of experiencing the region than what we get here.

Easy Tiki

 
 

Easy Tiki

A Modern Revival with 60 Recipes

by Chloe Frechette

photographs by Lizzie Munro

Ten Speed Press

2020

 

 

Easy Tiki is a cookbook that does more than it promises, but also maybe doesn't do the thing it promises to do quite as well as I'd like. 

 

Author Chloe Frechette offers a menu of simplified tiki cocktails, each with 6 ingredients or less. But she also introduces them with a succinct history of the original tiki phenomenon and the modern tiki revival, and she suggests other elements of stage-dressing, from glasses and garnishes to music and ambience, to help complete the tiki mood. Each cocktail has the promised short ingredient list ... but collectively there must still be a hundred or more bottles of recommended ingredients.

 

Tiki started in southern California during the 1930s, when Don the Beachcomber opened a bar to celebrate the end of Prohibition with elaborate, complex drinks shrouded in mystique and lots and lots of Caribbean and Polynesian decorations. Don was beloved, but secretive and protective of his recipes. In northern California, Trader Vic imitated Don's style while adding his own twist, and of the two of them, probably did the most to spread, popularize, and commercialize tiki. After WWII, soldiers returning from the Pacific theater brought home a fascination with Asian and Polynesian culture, and tiki benefitted from this broader interest.

 

The original tiki trend mostly died out by 1970. In the early 2000s, revivalists like Beachbum Berry began learning the history of tiki, interviewing the surviving original participants, and reconstructing the original secret recipes. Alongside the general craft cocktail boom, tiki is also experiencing a modern resurgence.

 

Tiki drinks are mostly based on rum and fresh fruit juices. They blend strong, sweet, sour, and spice. Traditionally, they're complex and multilayered - rather than using one rum, one juice, one liqueur, each element of the cocktail will be multiplied, while retaining the original ratios. These combinations make it hard to identify the individual ingredients by taste, and give tiki drinks part of their mystery. This is traditionally heightened and played up with opaque glasses, large garnishes, windowless bars, and an emphasis on exoticism in the decor.

 

I liked Frechette's concise overview of tiki style. She provides enough references to musicians, artists, and books by other tiki historians that it would be easy for an interested newcomer to decide on their next step after reading this.

 

The thing I wish Frechette had done better would have been to organize her recipes a bit more so that the interested home bartender could get just a small core stable of ingredients, with additions that are usable in more than just one drink. Part of what makes tiki 'hard' or intimidating or just expensive isn't only that one drink has 8-12 ingredients, it's that that drink is recommended side-by side with another that needs 6-10 more if you want to make them both. Frechette addresses the first problem, but not the second.

 

I know I'm being a little unfair here. First, Frechette didn't write her own recipes. As an editor of Punch magazine, she sourced them, drawing on advice from bartenders around the country who are recognized by their peers for their excellence. Trusting the experts puts some factors beyond her control. Second, yes, she's right, a 6-ingredient cocktail is easier to make than a 10-bottle drink. And third, it's never really fair to the author to judge them based on the book you wish they'd written instead.

 

But a lot of times the simplification was to reduce from a blend of 3 rums to just 1, or to hold the falernum or orgeat. But those are exactly the sort of common ingredients that would be in every home tiki bar. Leaving one of those out in favor of a homemade syrup that's only used in a single recipe doesn't necessarily make anything easier. Nor does recommending only one rum, when maybe all 60 recipes in the book have a different 'only one' recommendation - whereas I suspect smart blends of a few reusable staples could serve as well. If you the reader select only a few drinks to try though, then you'll be able to get by with just enough bottles to serve your picks.