Flickr/Espen Klem

cognac

Doesn't this swanky French grape spirit reside in the beverage province of rich, white men in their private, paneled rooms? Isn't cognac what rappers grab at the neck and swig from in their bling-y cribs? Isn't it mostly for postprandial luxuriating or sultry babymaking? What, then, is it doing turning up in cocktails at Mélisse, Black Market, Pour Vous, the Varnish and elsewhere, a gold-standard libation working the trenches and wells of the city's bars?

I was wondering all this on a night out recently where I was handed a Sazerac made with the stuff -- a generous pour of Hennessy Privilege -- and I asked the guy who made it, Jordan Bushell, isn't this a waste of good cognac?

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Flickr/Kenn Wilson

Hot Toddy

There are drinks that, as the saying goes, hit the spot, and then there are those like the toddy, the warm concoction for winter nights with a capacity for comfort-making that seems almost erogenous in its acuity at landing in the spots needed to be hit.

A well-made, well-seasoned, well-heated toddy possesses a kind of prodigious restorative power. The heat of the drink and the heat of the spirit seem to combine in a kind of factorial of warmth, flushing ears and noses and limbs and bellies fully down to the cockles (whatever and wherever those are), inducing a chorus of sighs, rendering the eyelids heavy with contentment.

If that's not enough of a sell, consider that the toddy is basically the only drink on earth for which you have an unlicensed permission to drink when you're sick. Nuff said?

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flickr.com/patruby83

Scofflaw

Prohibition, the law that prohibited the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol in the United States, was ratified as the 18th amendment on Jan. 16, 1919, and went into effect on Jan. 16, 1920. In other words, this day 93 years ago was a very sad day.

And yet, some good things came out of Prohibition -- and one of them is the Scofflaw cocktail. It's a grand irony, the word scofflaw: It came about as the winning entry in a 1923 competition to create a word that would describe an unlawful drinker, as a kind of marketing gimmick that would shame drinkers. Out of more than 25,000 entries, scofflaw was chosen.

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WarmSleepy via flickr

Hot Toddy

There aren't many days in Los Angeles that warrant the drinking of hot booze, but today is one of those days. Which is apropos, because today is National Hot Toddy day, a cocktail that predates the word "cocktail."

No one really knows when and where the hot toddy was invented, although it's known that it's been around for hundreds of years. In 1805, a professor at Yale traveled to the British Isles and reported on the custom of drinking hot toddies. Many people think the word "toddy" comes from the Indian word for fermented palm tree sap.

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Crystal Head Vodka

The Red Head -- equal parts pomegranate liqueur and vodka.

Halloween is the holiday where we can be as creepy, gory and gross as we want -- and that applies to cocktails as well. When else would you even consider drinking a cockail made with Midori AND grenadine AND chocolate syrup (assuming you are no longer a college freshman)? Or infusing perfectly good vodka with candy corn? Or freezing gummy eyeballs in ice cubes and tossing them in an otherwise respectable martini? Or imbibing something called X-Rated Fusion Liqueur (bright red vodka mixed with blood orange, mango and passion fruit -- not sure what's x-rated about that)? To adultify these Halloween cocktails -- recipes provided by the booze-makers -- use some black sugar to rim a glass, or add a rough hunk of pomegranate or some mushed blackberries for a nice gory look.

Have at it. If you look like a zombie the next day and/or are missing part of your brain, don't blame us.

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From Jerry Thomas Bar-Tenders Guide 1887 Reprint; image reproduced with permission from Ross Bolton.

This week's column is devoted to alleviating election stress with a knockout punch, assisted by the great pioneer mixologist Jerry Thomas, circa 1887. Thomas was not only a talented bartender, he was a great aggregator of recipes, collecting hundreds in his Bar-Tender's Guide (reprinted in 2008 by Ross Bolton) for "All Kinds of Sangarees, Mulls, Toddies, Slings, Sours, Juleps, Smashs [sic], Cobblers, Cocktails" -- and Punch, lots and lots of Punch.

For centuries, punch -- booze and flavorings in a bowl, on ice (or warm, occasionally) -- was the nation's preferred mode of imbibing, until roughly the latter half of the nineteenth century, when spirits finally got good enough not to require so much camouflage. Thomas's recipe collection includes the Spread Eagle Punch, the Bimbo Punch, Mississippi, Canadian, and West Indian Punches, Punches named for hotels and cities and saints, Punches named for the 7th Regiment, the 69th Regiment, and the Light Guard, whose fighting strength, after a bowl of Punch, was no doubt considerably reduced.

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Amazon

I was looking for a punch. I'm not sure why. I wasn't planning a party, but having just watched the first debate, keeping a recipe on hand that would obliterate all memory of politics and the election seemed like a very good thing.

A friend suggested that I consult Jerry Thomas' Bar-Tenders Guide. He did not tell me, at least not at first, that Jerry Thomas died in 1885, with a reputation as one of the country's first true mixologists, a bartender so famous he was given an obituary in The New York Times.

How odd it is that a bartender gets remembered at all. Bartenders, after all, make drinks, which are more ephemeral than meals and kisses, and are made and enjoyed mostly to complement more pressing social pursuits. More to the point, a bartender's particular skill set leads directly to inebriation, a state of mind that tends to limit one's memorability.

There is the occasional bartender whose dexterity with a bottle or a shaker can lead to a momentary thrill, like an exotic form of juggling (immortalized by Tom Cruise in Cocktail). This set of skills is known as "bar flair," and is, I've learned, scrutinized by an organization called the FBA (see barflair.org). To each his own.

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B. Rodell

Fitzgerald cocktail

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on Sept. 24, 1896. There are plenty of ways you could celebrate this, like reading, for instance. But we think an appropriate homage could also come in liquid form, preferably gin-flavored liquid.

This drink comes to us from Dale DeGroff, otherwise known as King Cocktail (he was the mixologist at New York's Rainbow Room during the '80s). On his website, he explains the origin of the name:

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jgarbee

High Desert's cherry confiture jam as cocktail inspiration

So many artisan ingredients, so little time. And only so many slices of toast slathered with even the best jam one can eat. But there's always cocktail hour.

Cocktails are also an affordable way to extend the serving life of pricier small-batch ingredients, as you're using only a teaspoon of that fig balsamic vinegar here and there. Better still, these are simple cocktail recipes that require no simple syrup or macerated fruit made in advance -- that's already been kindly taken care of by these Seascape strawberry-obsessed artisans.

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A. Scattergood

Rainier cherries

It's cherry season! But it won't be forever. Here's a way to make it last a little longer: Make cocktail cherries.

Luxardo cocktail cherries are in many ways hard to beat -- they're dense, almost raisinlike and totally delicious. But I also like a juicier, fatter cherry for some drinks. Making cocktail cherries at home is fun, and it ends in a drink, which is always a bonus.

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