Welcome to Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, The Wandering Rambler!
AKA What I Did On Christmas Vacation.
Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. How was your Christmas? Let me tell you about the treats my brother Joe left under the tree. In the process, we’ll talk about how to adapt a recipe off the internet (like this one!) when you don’t have all the tools or ingredients you need. If you know the hows and whys of mixology, you can get great results for nearly any drink. Time to make a Wandering Rambler. Here’s the recipe.
Wandering Rambler
2 oz El Dorado 8 Year Rum
1 oz orgeat
.75 oz lemon juice
4-6 oz fresh apple cider
2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
Shake all ingredients and pour into an old fashioned glass over ice. Garnish with an orange twist.
This Christmas, I traveled to New York City to visit family. The city isn’t my favorite place in the world, but I did have the pleasure of visiting Astor Wines, one of the best stocked liquor stores I’ve ever seen. Upscale NYC liquor stores tend to be a bit “curated” — they stock the stuff that the owner likes and skip the fundamentals. Astor Wines doesn’t have a single bottle of Bacardi, but they have several rare bottles of rum that I’ve lusted after all year. I purchased my big prize (Planteray Mr. Fogg, and my birthday is right around Memorial Day for future reference), and a bottle of 8 Year El Dorado as a backup. El Dorado's a favorite for fancy recipes in books like Death & Co, and I thought it would be fun to give it a try.
The next day, I visited my brother Joe and his family in New Jersey. Joe provided me with a heavy gift bag and an innocent smile. In the bag was a bottle of orgeat and … another bottle of El Dorado 8 Year. Joe pulled up a recipe from the Internet and showed it to me. “I thought you could make this for everyone!”
Now, I love my brother dearly, but he’s not a cocktail guy. That meant that he didn’t have the basic tools I keep at home for cocktail making, like a shaker or a jigger. The recipe he provided was in metric, which I don’t speak, at least when it comes to cocktails. And with six adults in the house, I needed to multiply his recipe several times over. However, I’ve seen enough cocktail recipes to understand why an ingredient is in a glass. With that information in mind, I knew how to take what my brother offered and turn it into a party offering on the fly.
Let’s break down the ingredients in this one and talk about some choices I made to get this to the table. There’s some interesting options to explore here worth discussing, and I want to give you the tools that I used to dissect this recipe:
El Dorado 8 Year Rum: This bottle proved to be everything I could hope for — a dark rum from Guyana with caramel notes and enough astringency to cut through the natural sweetness of the spirit. But if you don’t have it, nearly any rum would do. Mount Gay rum would be pretty close to perfect here. So would Hamilton 86. If none of that is on the shelf at the liquor store, good old Bacardi Gold will serve. Bourbon would do as well. So would reposado tequila. The flavors surrounding the spirit — spice, apple, almond — matter more than the spirit itself.
Figuring out how much rum to use was a bit trickier. Joe didn’t have a jigger or other measuring device. I’ve been behind the stick long enough to free pour successfully, and it’s a nice skill to have. But in a pinch, whip out the kitchen measures — two tablespoons will garner one ounce of fluid.
Orgeat: For the record, this is pronounced “or-zho,” sort of like Zsa Zsa Gabour. This sweet almond syrup gets paired up with rum all the time in tiki drinks, but this drink isn’t tiki in any meaningful way. Orgeat is thick, and adds body to a drink. The nutty flavor is useful as a stable base. No orgeat? Simple syrup is fine. Splash in a few drops of amaretto and you’ll be good.
Lemon juice: Acid to balance out the orgeat. We’ve talked about how acid and sugar balance in the daiquiri, and that knowledge is key here. Use enough juice to keep the drink from being sugary or sweet, but not enough to make it tart. Fresh is always best, but if you’re stuck with bottled so be it.
Peychaud’s bitters: Here’s the curve ball that let me know where this drink was headed. Peychaud’s is an offbeat ingredient in rum drinks. This anise-flavored bitter is common in New Orleans cocktails like the Sazerac, but doesn’t show up often at the tiki bar. To make things even stranger, my brother’s Internet recipe called this a “five spice rambler” ... with no spices in evidence. What gives?
It turns out that Chinese five spice powder features star anise as a primary ingredient, similar to the anise in Peychaud’s bitters. Roughly five years ago, five spice powder was a sexy cocktail ingredient paired with rum. Jeffrey Morgenthaler wrote a recipe for a Dark and Stormy using five-spice infused rum. Five spice syrup made its way behind several bars in its time. It looks like this cocktail author decided to use Peychaud’s instead of a specialty ingredient for the drink. But if you don’t have Peychaud’s, making a syrup with five spice powder would be fine, and not too hard to find at the supermarket.
Apple cider: How much to use? Enough. Specifically, enough to make the drink as strong as your audience. My parents, Joe, and his wife aren’t big drinkers, so the ratio of liquor to juice was pretty low. Use the juice to keep the drink tasty. That’s what matters.
Prep and garnish: No cocktail shaker? A big water bottle with a screw top lid will do. Strain out the ice as you pour. No orange peel? Do without and don’t fret. Sometimes sacrifices must be made in the field. In the end, the only thing that matters is good rum, good cheer, and good company. The rest is just details.
In summary and conclusion, drink well, drink often, and tip your bartender — donate to Wonkette at the link below!
We aren’t linking to Amazon anymore, because fuck Bezos. Go read The Bar Book, by Jeffrey Morgenthaler. I’ve stolen a few of Jeffrey’s techniques behind the bar, and every single hack he comes up with is genius.
You can find me on Bluesky at @samuraigrog!
OPEN THREAD! DRINK!
So romans trying to get drunk quickly apparently put strong wine up their butts so that it would get into their systems faster than if they had to drink it. Now, I'm sure this wasn't a common thing, but it happened famously enough to be remembered in writing that lives to this day.
So I thought about what it would be like if fantasy/scifi worlds were as crazy as this one, and I decided to put a joke in a bard's song about some the rich people two city-states over about not knowing which end to use to drink the wine. The joke isn't explained anywhere, but there's a bit of attention paid in the text to a couple of audience members sudden discomfort with the kids present until they see that the kids are laughing innocently, presumably at the idea of trying to drink from the bottom of the wine bottle.
The bard having successfully pulled off the child-safe double-entendre continues as if nothing had happened and there isn't anything in this story that tells the reader that this was an alcoholic enema joke, but I feel like that's how it would have happened in the real world. People familiar with the rumours coming out of the rich estates of that far-off city get the hidden joke, the rest of the people just laugh at calling rich people stupid and everything is fine.
This, to me, is world building. I have no need to decide whether the rumour is true, or maliciously spread, or was true about some particular rich person and his friends 150 years ago but it was never widespread and everyone who did it is dead now, so it's unfair to the living, etc. etc. etc.
If they actually travel to that city they're more likely to deal with working folks who hate the rumour for maligning their home town than they are to meet anyone who has done the thing or even seen the thing done, so I may never have to decide whether the rumour is true no matter how many stories I set in this universe.
The important part isn't that every story told in the universe is true. The important part is that the characters in the universe react to the stories told appropriately. That's what adds richness: innocent kids laughing, nervous adults panicking, dirty-minded adults guffawing -- they're all aware a joke was made, but you don't have everyone reacting the same to the same joke, and you don't bother spelling out to the reader b/c why would the narrator stop the narration to say, "Oh, by the way, the joke was multi-layered and based on rumours out of Enema City..."
I don't do this enough, but more to the point, I don't think most authors do this enough. If they're clever enough to put in such a multi-layered joke, they just feel COMPELLED to have someone explain to the reader how clever the joke is.
Fuck that. Your world isn't real unless there are too many stories in it to ever tell them all.
Happy last Friday of the year! I raise a mug of beer to my fellow Wonkers.