Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, The Roffignac!

A forgotten New Orleans classic with tasty non-alcoholic options.

Maybe we can’t let the good times roll, exactly, but we can push them along.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. It’s Mardi Gras week, so I thought I’d take a swing at another New Orleans cocktail. This one’s a deep cut from the New Orleans cocktail bible, but a drink this bright and refreshing deserves a comeback. And it’s easy to make an NA version for those who wish to abstain. Let’s whip up my take on the Roffignac. Here’s the recipe.

Roffignac

1 ½ oz raspberry shrub

1 ½ oz Sho Chuku Bai Nigori Sake

Soda water

Add shrub and sake to an iced highball glass. Top with soda water. Stir gently, raising the bar spoon several times to ensure proper mixing. Serve with 1-2 raspberries as a garnish. For a non-alcoholic option, omit the sake, increase the amount of shrub to 2 oz, and add a twist of lemon.

Raspberry Shrub

6 oz fresh raspberries

¾ cup Alessi Raspberry Blush Vinegar

¾ cup sugar

Add berries, vinegar, and sugar to a small freezer bag. Squeeze as much air out of the bag as possible and seal tightly. Bring a saucepan of water to a boil. Reduce heat to its lowest setting, then submerge the bag in the water. Let sit for 1 hour. Strain the contents of the bag into a small bowl, pressing down on the solids with the back of a spoon. Strain the remaining liquid into a resealable bottle. Will keep refrigerated for months.

Purportedly, the Roffingnac was created by Count Louis Philippe Joseph de Roffignac, mayor of New Orleans from 1820 to 1828. His Excellency brought important things like street lights and cobblestones to the rough port town. I’m a little dubious of the pedigree myself. There’s the Roffignac Cognac brand, after all, and I’ve been in the industry long enough to know that liquor distributors push recipes.

No matter the origin, this cocktail deserves a comeback. It’s not particularly complex, but the introduction of a shrub makes it important to the non-alcoholic cocktail scene. Shrubs are drinking vinegars — fruit and herbs steeped in vinegar and sugar until something delicious results. They’ve been the basis for drinks of all kinds, since the 18th century in this country and even longer in other parts of the world. A few years ago craft bartenders rediscovered them for spring cocktails. A good shrub is sweetness, acid, flavor, and body all in one package, a drink starter all by itself.

Shrubs are great for non-alcoholic cocktails because of their acidity. (I hate the term “mocktail.” A good NA drink doesn’t pretend to be a ‘real’ drink.) Classic NA drinks like the Shirley Temple are sugar bombs. A good drink should be balanced — sweet, tart, and flavorful, with no one element predominating. Shrubs bring intense acidity and flavor to the glass that’s hard to find from other mixers. I’m working on my shrub-making skills, and fully expect to use more of these over the summer.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Ingredient shot. Champagne vinegar would be great here too.

Raspberry shrub: The challenge in making any shrub is extracting flavor from the fruit into the sweetened vinegar. I found several recipes that asked you to let the shrub sit for three or five days to let the flavors meld. I think we can all agree that we need a drink much sooner than that. The quick and dirty sous vide method I found does the trick very nicely. Low, gentle heat extracts the fruit flavor without breaking down the acids in the vinegar. Make sure you strain the shrub thoroughly — no one likes drinking a raspberry seed.

[Rebecca here to add that this local Detroit shrub company deserves your dollars if you don’t want to do it yourself, although Hoop does make it sound easy! Peach ginger honey! Cherry orange vanilla! Strawberry guava! Alllll of the others! This is what I spend (some of) your donations on. This is not an ad, I just love them.]

Sho Chiku Bai Nigori sake: The Roffignac called for cognac in its original incarnation, but recent incarnations have used whiskey or tequila as the base spirit. On a lark, I tried nigori sake as the base (it worked very well for the Tokyo Rose I created earlier). Nigori sake is cloudy, soft, and flavorful, thicker and milder than clear sake. The sake emphasized the fruit in the drink and enhanced the beautiful color of the shrub. If we’re still stumbling toward dystopia by the weekend, consider using vodka or gin to up the proof.

Soda water: I’m fairly indifferent to soda water as a bottled product, but if you want a lot of bubbles use Q Soda Water as your brand. Avoid club soda, which has salt added to it.

In summary and conclusion, drink well, drink often, and tip your bartender — donate to Wonkette at the link below!

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We aren’t linking to Amazon anymore, because fuck Bezos with a rusty bar spoon. Go read Shrubs: An Old Fashioned Drink for Modern Times by Michael Dietsch. You’ll have a whole new take on your soft drinks for the summer.

You can find me on Bluesky at @samuraigrog!

OPEN THREAD! DRINK!