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 The bite in the air and the crunch of the
fallen leaves indicate that this is the season for applejack,
the cider brandy traditionally described as "kinda like an apple
whiskey." Not remotely as sweet as a biddy's schnapps, not quite
so refined as a Frenchman's Calvados, applejack boasts a
forthright character and an identity as American as apple pie.
Our forefathers drank cider like it was water, literally, their
water being undrinkable, but some they set aside to make the
hard stuff, as if concentrating the gaiety of the harvest
festival to last through the hard months ahead.
The liquor derives its name from an ancient method of its
distillation—fractional freezing, or jacking, which involved
leaving a barrel of hard cider out in the cold and periodically
skimming off the ice. You could do this yourself on your fire
escape. Please don't. It may be as illegal as any other type of
unlicensed distilling. More importantly, it can be as immoral as
any other form of self-harm. An ambitious youth, I once made the
worst bad decision in the history of Myrtle Beach, a South
Carolina resort town that's kind of like Atlantic City without
the gambling, or the class. Just after graduating high school,
during that ritual known as Beach Week, I found it appropriate
to ingest some applejack whipped up by a friend who had done a
bit of home-brewing under his father's guidance and then gone
rogue.
It is not often enough appreciated that the real problem with
underage drinking isn't that the kids don't know when to stop
drinking but that they can't understand when not to start. I
should have taken the cloudiness of the potion as a bad sign and
regarded the particles of pulp suspended as ominous. I might
have considered that I was helping myself to a libation that
perhaps shared certain chemical properties with butane fuel and
primitive antifreeze. But no. For the length of the following
day, at dreadfully regular quarter-hour intervals, my soul rose
up to punish my digestive tract. A quest for sustenance went no
farther than a bedside cylinder of Pringles. Licking the salt
and onion powder first from the convex side of each, then the
concave, I very carefully restacked the saddle-shaped chips in a
tower on the bedside table, constructing a moist monument to
idiocy.
There can be no doubt that others have fared worse and that
their shuddering accounts of shattering experiences have
contributed to the decline of applejack's popularity over the
centuries. There must be a good reason that New Englanders once
referred to this stuff as "essence of lockjaw" and that it was
once amusing to note that "the victim of applejack is capable of
blowing up a whole town with dynamite and of reciting original
poetry to every surviving inhabitant." But let's all agree to
put those traumas behind us. Unless your applejack mishap
inspired you to get on the wagon, it is time to get back on the
horse.
Placing your trust in professionals, you will likely turn to
Laird & Company, of Scobeyville, N.J. America's first commercial
distillery and the producer of as much as 95 percent of its
applejack, the firm is perennially proud to say that it once
lent its recipe to George Washington. It is easiest to come by a
bottle of Regular Laird's, which is 35 percent apple brandy, 65
percent neutral spirits, 80 proof, and best fit for making a
reduction sauce for your pork chops. You'd be better off with
Laird's Straight Bonded, which is 100 percent brandy and 100
proof. Its advantage isn't its strength, though there is that,
but rather its depth. There is a mouthful of golden flavor in
each jigger. Pouring this jigger into your shaker, you are
preparing to invent a liquid fruit undreamed by the Creator. Our
test kitchen has determined that the apple cart, a variant on
the sidecar, is a succulent marvel of tartness; that the
applejack rabbit hops to the tongue with great tang; and that
the crisp Harvard cooler is one of the few Ivy League cocktails
that does not suck worse than Columbia football.
Tread gently into this particular corner of the cocktailian
past. The antiquity of applejack ensures that some drinks mixed
with it are perfectly antiquated. Take scotchem, which, as
described in an old tavern tale, is made with applejack, hot
water, and "a good dash of ground mustard." I endeavored to try
one of these in sympathetic circumstances, on the evening of an
unseasonably early snowfall. There was meanness in the wind and
moisture in my socks as I bolted home from the store with a box
of Colman's. Drinking my scotchem, I felt as if I'd curried my
own thorax. There is little need of it in a century blessed by
central heating, polar fleece, and microwave soup bowls.
Tread gently. Stay flexible. The origins of very many classic
cocktails are matters of frantic dispute. There are perhaps a
dozen stories about the invention of the margarita, most having
to do with the barkeep's attempts to honor and/or hump a woman
named Margarita or Margaret or Marjorie. But applejack cocktails
tend to have especially murky histories.
For instance, opinions are divided on whether the stone fence—a
spiked cider currently popular in the White House—earned its
name because it will inspire you to try vaulting one or to
believe that you have barreled downhill into the same. An old
issue of the trade magazine American Bottler confuses the issue
further by suggesting (in antique orthography) that "once
properly prepared, [the drink's] hardness is only paralleled by
a pile of granite bowlders."
For instance, the conjunction of applejack and sweet vermouth is
sometimes known as an Applejack Manhattan and sometimes as an
applejack cocktail and sometimes as a Jersey lightning or a
Marconi wireless or a star cocktail, depending on who's doing
the knowing and his sense of proportion. (This is one of those
occasions where pretending to know will likely suffice. As long
as the drink is cold, it should earn the appreciation of a
neophyte and the cautious approval from all but the most
curmudgeonly experts.)
For instance, there are those who would have you believe that
the most famous applejack cocktail, the Jack Rose, owes its name
to a gangster or to a Jersey City bartender or to a flower. It
would be wise, perhaps, to suppose that the jack is for
applejack and the rose is for its color when made with
mass-produced grenadine. It would be wiser yet not to care and
instead to devote your energies to discovering which of the
innumerable recipes for the drink best suits your sweet tooth or
your taste for piquancy.
The trick is in figuring out the most agreeable ratio of
applejack to lemon (or lime) juice to homemade grenadine. Don't
be daunted by this third ingredient, which is easily concocted
by picking up superfine sugar from the grocery store, swiping
your wife's pomegranate juice from the fridge, and mixing them
in equal parts. If your wife gets on your case about the
pomegranate, it might or might not be productive to observe that
her juice is pricier than your booze, ounce for ounce. If your
wife has used all of your lemons to bleach her sneakers or to
discipline the dog, then bear in mind that you can old-fashionedize
your Jack Rose—outmode it, you might say—by using a dollop of
grenadine, a few dashes of bitters, and a slug of applejack to
create a firm and plummy number.
That covers the Jack Rose. Or it would if I weren't obliged,
according to tacit rules of pseudo-literary drinks scholarship,
to mention that Jake Barnes drinks these in The Sun Also Rises.
I will add that the greater challenge in this field of endeavor
is to discover a major cocktail that does not appear in the
oeuvre of this most ecumenical of literary alcoholics. If Papa
were still around, his matadors would be drinking vodka and Red
Bull. |
