Have you ever been at the end of a long meal and wanted a little something with alcohol, sugar or both, but yet you’re about to fall into a food coma? Or you just want a little extra something in your Saturday morning coffee? The French Nudge is a perfect marriage of all these desires. While I never got the exact recipe from the restaurant where I first had it years ago, the Brasserie Montmartre, this is what I re-created at home from memory after a few reconnaissance missions. One of the ingredients was creme de cacao, which I had none of. So I started playing around with ingredients and this is what I came up with. It was the first drink I ever named; I renamed it the Sylvan Nudge. You can guess why.

Sylvan Nudge

• 6-8 oz hot coffee
• 3/4 oz Grand Marnier
• 3/4 oz cognac
• 1/2 oz Kahlua

Top with fresh whipped cream or foamed milk.  Grate a little fresh nutmeg on top.

MMM, warm deliciousness. Warms you up, gives you a pleasant  feeling and a little jolt of caffeine. Whipped cream will float nicelty above the coffee (until it melts) making a crisp line between the light and the dark. The photo is of milk foamed with a Aerolatte-style milk frother.

Heck, it turns out that a lot of things are good in coffee (assuming you like coffee). I came across a recipe for Monk’s Coffee with a shot of green chartreuse in there and thought “No way.” But I tried it anyway and was amazed at how exotic and grown-up tasting it was.  Frangelico, creme de cacao, Kahlua Coffee Cream liqueur, whiskey, and brandy all have their place in hot coffee drinks. And though Kahlua may seem redundant to use in a coffee drink, it really pairs well with it and adds a certain sweetness and depth that I find welcome.

Around my house, the Knickerbocker is a regular summer favorite.  A very old drink, it was published in 1862 by Jerry Thomas and reappeared in books of the time until Harry Johnson’s 1888 manual. I have adapted the recipe here from Wondrich’s Imbibe! (Thomas) and Haigh’s Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails (Johnson). Quoting Wondrich, “With it’s rum and its lime juice, its syrups and liqueurs, the Knickerbocker is the spiritual progenitor of the Tiki drink. Think of it as an 1850′s Mai Tai–similar drink, different island.”

Knickerbocker

• 2 oz Santa Cruz rum (Virgin Islands rum, ie Cruzan)
• 3/4 oz  lime juice
• 1/2 oz raspberry syrup
• 1/2 oz Curaçoa (orange curaçao)

Build over crushed ice and stir or shake to cool thoroughly.

The combination of raspberry, curacao, lime and dark rum is a real winner. I really like the woody edge of a nice, dark Jamaica rum in this one, so I’ve been known to replace 1/2 oz of the rum with Coruba. Or float it on top of the drink for an old-fashioned touch. A recent variation with blackberry syrup also turned out well.

If you go with the recipe listed in Imbibe!, I would disregard Wondrich’s adapted amount of curaçoa in brackets. Neither the 1/2 tsp in the recipe nor the 2 tsp in the notes equal the 1 oz in brackets. However, some drinkers may prefer it with the full 1 oz, especially if the lime is extra tart.

A note on the raspberry syrup – I’ve been working my way through a commercial bottle of the stuff for quite some time, but if the berries happen to be in season, they quite readily yield their flavor to a syrup. For those of us that like recipes: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/dining/192wrex.html

This last Sunday (2/22) was National Margarita Day. It may seem like a strange time of year to schedule this, but my hunch is that it is because limes are in season right now, and the best margaritas use fresh squeezed lime juice. Whatever you may say about commercial margaritas, we can thank this drink for bringing tequila to America. As recently as the 1950′s, tequila was seen as a tough man’s drink and wasn’t very popular at all. Let’s shake one up.

Margarita (7-4-3)

• 1 3/4 oz Tequila
• 1 oz orange liqueur (Cointreau/Citronge)
• 3/4 oz fresh squeezed lime juice

Shake with cracked ice until frosty and strain into a chilled, salt rimmed (optional) glass.

No, I didn't drink that monster all in one sitting.

A margarita is really a simple drink, basically a New Orleans
Tequila Sour and a predecessor to the Cosmo, with its roots traced back to the Daisy. In fact, ‘margarita’ means ‘daisy’ in Spanish.

With so few ingredients, you really need to pay attention to each one. Make sure to get a ‘puro‘ (100% agave) tequila and look for ‘Hecho en Mexico‘ on the label. Otherwise it is likely to be low quality stuff shipped over the border in a tanker and USA bottled. Some prefer a blanco here, claiming the oaky notes of a reposado or añejo are unwelcome, but I disagree. Obviously the base tequila makes a huge difference, but my experience had been that this is a classic example of the kind of mixology that gives you a way to use more inexpensive bottlings. My house mixing tequila was the Margaritaville blanco (a cheap mixto), but I recently picked up some Lunazul reposado. It’s 100% agave and available at a very reasonable price point. Next, do yourself a favor and trade up that old Triple Sec for something better. Jay over at Oh Gosh! has a great write-up of bottlings. Continuing on with the ingredients, you absolutely must use fresh limes, and if necessary adjust sweetness with the liqueur to balance out any extra tart limes.

Variations

How much variation before it is no longer a margarita? Margaritas are quite bastardized these days, but the recipe is surprisingly flexible. I currently favor the 3-2-1 recipe I first tried after reading Regan’s Joy of Mixology, mostly because it is easy to remember. Before that I used a recipe of approximately 4-3-2. There are schools of thought that use some lemon, maybe some simple syrup and a fair number of the current crop of gourmet recipes includes some zest from the citrus. Gran Marnier is a common component of a ‘Cadillac Margarita’, but this is starting to stray a little far for my taste. Blood orange juice, pomegranate, mango and even passion fruit (lillikoi) have made their way into ‘margaritas’ I’ve seen in restaurants.

Going simpler, there are those that substitute agave nectar for the orange liqueur, to better taste the tequila, but I have trouble calling that a margarita.

Anyway, don’t forget about the venerable margarita when you are looking for a drink to make. I don’t make a heck of a lot of margaritas around the house (at least not in the winter) but it is a classic for a reason. And next time you find yourself sipping on a top-shelf tequila or mezcal, think about the humble margarita and its role in bringing that spirit to the American market.