Molecular mixology
Shaken and Stirred – Creating an Irish Whiskey Cocktail, With a Twist – NYTimes.com:
Remind me not to take the Times seriously anymore. After this quite sensible advice:
YOU will be tempted, on Tuesday, to drink something green. Resist it.
I’m not referring, by the way, to the green-dyed light beer that will be flowing on St. Patrick’s Day like water from a broken fire hydrant. If you’re tempted by that, I won’t stop you: Erin go Bro, and godspeed.No, what I’m talking about is the cocktail equivalents of green beer, all the “obligatory Midori and crème de menthe drinks,” as Anthony Malone, the Dublin-born general manager and bartender at Puck Fair, an Irish bar on Lafayette Street near Houston, put it. “All those awful green things,” he said, such as the Everybody’s Irish, a drink that calls for Irish whiskey, crème de menthe, Chartreuse and a green olive. Everybody’s Irish? Everybody’s gagging.
We get this utterly sickening bilge:
Earlier this year, he issued a curious challenge to a select group of bartenders in New York, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco. He asked them to create cocktails based upon the traditional Irish breakfast — eggs, bacon, black and white pudding, and toast. And Bushmills, of course, though Mr. Egan hesitated to cite his product as a breakfast staple. “More like brunch,” he demurred.
Here in New York, Jim Meehan of PDT responded with a drink in which bacon-infused Bushmills is combined with maple syrup, orange and lemon juice and a whole egg.
The entry from Eben Freeman, at Tailor, was more baroque: bacon-infused Bushmills, again, adorned with roasted tomato gelée squares, a slow-poached quail egg yolk, an Irish breakfast-tea foam and crispy black-pudding bits.
Shite and onions, as John Joyce would say. If you’re going to have whiskey for breakfast, leave off the garnishes.