You can taste great food in your head long after you first experience it. That’s the case for me and the rhubarb cocktail I drank at Franny’s in 2009. Most rhubarb drinks have a cooked quality to them; the rhubarb is generally poached in a sugar syrup. The Franny’s rhubarb drink (which, apparently, is made with Aperol) is nothing like that. The rhubarb flavor (which comes from juicing rhubarb raw) is intense and sharp and the cocktail, as a whole, is incredibly bracing. It’s the kind of drink that makes you sit up in your seat, alert and ready for dinner.
When my friends Patty and Lauren came over for dinner last week, they brought the ingredients to make a cocktail. One of those ingredients–a simple syrup–spilled all over Patty’s bag in transit, but let’s not focus on that. Instead, let’s focus on the e-mail exchange that I had with Patty yesterday about the drink that she made.
Downstairs from our apartment, we have two friends who have their own apartments. These friends are Rob (who you’ve met before) and Ameer (who you’ve also met). Rob is a cardiologist, Ameer works in advertising. The two of them recently invited Craig and I and several other people to a Scotch tasting at Rob’s apartment because, well, they love Scotch.
Tonight I’m hosting a bachelorette party for my dear friend Diana and we’re about to go shopping for alcohol. What kind of drink should we serve? I just polled Twitter and here’s what the Twitterverse had to say:
College is for experimenting, right? We know all about your gay make-out session and that time you tried to smoke catnip. When I was in college, I’d experiment with smoothies. I’d go to Smoothie King, right there in Emory Village (because I went to Emory, see) and order a Caribbean Way which was 5 squirts of this and 4 squirts of that and, if I wanted, a shot of protein powder. Then came Jamba Juice with a few more squirts of this and that and some other strange powders and I was hooked. Only, I always thought two things while consuming these smoothies: (1) what kind of junk is in this drink I’m drinking? and (2) Why is it so expensive?
On a Sunday afternoon, lounging around my apartment watching “Terms of Endearment” on HBO, inspiration suddenly strikes and I am compelled to make ginger ale from scratch.
It would take a team of behavior specialists and Debra Winger fans to analyze this phenomenon, but suffice it to say: I was hot and I had ginger. I recalled a recipe for homemade Ginger Ale in Jean-George’s book “Cooking At Home with a Four-Star Chef”, so I tore myself away from Aurora Greenway and studied the recipe.
So I was watching “Groundhog Day” for a bit on TV last night and there’s that scene where Bill Murray is trying to seduce Andie MacDowell in a bar. He memorizes facts about her so that when the day happens again, he can win her heart. One of these facts happens to be what drink she likes: sweet vermouth on the rocks. When he orders that for himself the second time around, she says, “That’s my favorite drink.”
My regular drink isn’t so singular: it’s a Tanqueray and Tonic. I stole the drink from my dad and now it’s what I order when I go out. Would I be seduced if Bill Murray crept up next to me and ordered a Tanqueray and Tonic? Probably not. I’d be more impressed if he sang a song from Pippin.
This begs the question, though, reader: what’s YOUR drink? How did it become your drink? How important is your drink to you? The Bill Murrays of the world want to know.
