THE COCKTAIL EDIT

BY ALICE LASCELLES

Cocktails should be simple. Acclaimed drinks writer Alice Lascelles knows everything there is to know about making delicious drinks at home with minimal equipment and fuss. The Cocktail Edit is built around a ‘capsule collection’ of 12 classic cocktails – each of these is followed by six twists, plus tips and inspiration for creating many more. The book also offers essential advice on getting your home bar set up – and shows how easy it is to make amazing cocktails with just a few basic tools, ingredients and techniques.

THE GIN SOUR

If you only commit one recipe to memory, make it the 4:2:1 sour – because four parts strong, two parts sour, one part sweet recurs time and again in the cocktail canon. It’s the formula for the Daiquiri, the Whiskey Sour, the Bramble and the Basil Smash, and the backbone of the Mojito, Collins and French 75. With a bit of a tweak to allow for less sweet liqueurs, it also informs the Aviation and the Margarita. Pick apart many punches, and you’ll find a 4:2:1 sour at their core. Once you know it, you’ll spot it everywhere in a multitude of forms.

Ingredients • 50ml gin • 25ml lemon juice • 12.5ml sugar syrup • GLASS: cocktail glass • GARNISH: lemon or orange twist

Method

You can make a 4:2:1 sour out of any white spirit. But it’s the Gin Sour that I find the most useful; it’s key to so many classics and can be adapted in many ways.

You can lengthen it with sparkling wine or soda or jasmine tea to make a refreshing punch. Or sweeten it with a homemade flavoured syrup, instead of plain syrup, or maraschino or triple sec (if you’re using liqueurs instead of 2:1 sugar syrup, just add an extra teaspoon or two). You can shake it with cucumber, or basil, or lavender or mint. Or serve it over ice and drizzle it with blackberry liqueur or Campari. You can spike it with orange bitters or scent it with a spritz of absinthe. It’s happy on the rocks, in a coupe, or blitzed with ice in a blender. It can be shaken or mixed in a jug. If you take away the alcohol and add water – hey presto, you’ve got lemonade. And if you don’t have lemons, no matter – it works equally well with lime.

Once you know the 4:2:1 formula, you can busk a drink out of just about anything: the dregs of a party, corner-shop booze or the finest gin and lemons from Amalfi. Consider it your cocktail survival kit.

Ingredients 50ml bourbon/rye whiskey 5ml sugar syrup 1 dash bitters

GLASS: rocks GARNISH: lemon or orange twist METHOD: stir with ice

The Cocktail Edit by Alice Lascelles (Quadrille, £16.99). Photography: Laura Edwards.

Ingredients

For the Nectarine syrup: • 50ml vodka or gin • 150ml tomato juice • 15ml dry sherry • 2 dashes Worcestershire sauce • 3 dashes Tabasco • 1 grind pepper • 2 pinches celery salt • 10ml lemon juice

GLASS: rocks/small juice glass GARNISH: any combination of celery stick, lemon slice and spicy salt and pepper rim

Method

The perfect Bloody Mary recipe is highly subjective. But I think it’s much improved by the addition of sherry and celery salt – two ingredients that really amplify the umami. I’m also not averse to using a good-quality spiced tomato juice if one is available. Shaking a Bloody Mary, or serving it over ice, can turn it thin and watery – it’s better to stir with ice and strain, or serve chilled, straight from the fridge. You could also rim the glass with a mix of salt, pepper and spicy shichimi for extra firepower.

THE OLD FASHIONED

Despite what the name might suggest, the Old Fashioned was not the world’s first cocktail – drinks like the Sazerac got there several decades before. But of all the bittered whiskey cocktails to emerge from America in the 1800s, it remains the best known and the most widely adored.

Part of its charm is its lack of pretentiousness – it can be made any time, any place, anywhere. It doesn’t require fancy tools or, save the twist, fresh ingredients. It’s an end-of-days kind of a drink.

The earliest Old Fashioneds were almost certainly made with rye whiskey. Sweet, nutty and spicy, rye gives the drink an almost tactile quality. I love Sazerac Rye and Rittenhouse with its notes of leather and cherrywood smoke. Bourbon gives you a drink that’s a bit more mellow and rounded – Buffalo Trace, Woodford Reserve or the smooth-sipping wheated bourbon Maker’s Mark would all be good.

A good selection of cocktail bitters will increase the mileage you can get out of this drink. Anything spicy, citrusy, nutty or chocolatey is almost certain to work.

At the height of its popularity, in the 1880s, the Old Fashioned wasn’t just one drink, it was a whole genre: Americans drank

Old Fashioneds made with rye, sweet gin, genever and imported

French brandy. And that spirit-sugar-bitters formula can be adapted to suit all kinds of hard liquor. Over the page, you’ll find a delicious Old Fashioned made with rum.

The Old Fashioned has a reputation for taking ages to make – a hangover, perhaps, from the days when it was sweetened with loaf sugar and required masses of stirring. If you use sugar syrup, however, it’s the work of a moment. Either way, its enjoyment should not be rushed. 31