A truly good whiskey sour is one of my favorite things in the whole world, and probably my favorite drink overall. Unfortunately, most bars make it with that awful sour mix that ends up in everything from margaritas to long island iced teas, so I hardly ever order it out. One of the few places that does it well beyond properly is Cleveland's renowned Velvet Tango Room, one of the top ten modern speakeasies in the country. They do it the old fashioned way, with egg white to make it silky, but at the rate my household goes through eggs I usually don't think it wise to waste them on drinks. To be perfectly honest, the drink goes down a lot easier without the egg, though I still order one every other time I'm at the VTR because they're just so damn perfect.
Like most of my other staples (Highball, Gin and Tonic, Tom Collins), the Whiskey Sour is something I probably found in a Fitzgerald novel well before I ever had access to liquor. It's an old drink, often confused with an old man drink. While I'm sure there are many delightful old men who love this drink, I must point out that besides myself I know three girls who call it a favorite, including my little sister. Paul Clarke has an excellent history/meditation on it on his blog, The Cocktail Chronicles in which he calls it "the libation that could be described as Stanley Kowalski in a glass." I look forward to the day I get tipsy enough that my drink starts looking like Brando.
Whiskey Sour
I've been making this version for a while, varying the recipe on the pretty bottle of simple syrup I bought just to have something to store my home-made version in that my roommates wouldn't mistake for a bottle of water. This is a double recipe, halve it if you want a normal bar-sized drink.
* 4 oz. whiskey (bourbon is best, but anything works if it's what you have on hand... I try never to be without a bottle of Maker's Mark in the house)
* 3 oz. lemon juice (I use a juicer that strains out the seeds and pulp)
* 2 oz. simple syrup (just two parts sugar dissolved in one part boiling water and cooled)
* 1/2 oz. blood orange bitters (completely optional, but I have a bottle and am addicted)
- Measure the ingredients into a cocktail shaker and shake with four or five ice cubes.
- Pour into an appropriately-sized glass (as Clarke points out, this drink is at home in any sort of cup) and fill with ice cubes.
- Garnish with a slice of lemon and anything else that looks pretty. I've been using frozen raspberries, because there's no better way to end a drink than with a liquor-soaked berry, but maraschino cherries are a more traditional red decoration.
Look how happy I am drinking it!
My excuse for this entry is that cooking leads to drinking and that my computer was being so cranky while I wrote the last post that I had to walk away from it for a while to calm down. This also leads to drinking.
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