The Spirit World

You don’t think I gave you last week’s closing assignment for nothing do you?

Yes, this week we’re going to tackle the Sidecar, which is a fairly old cocktail, but not as old as, say, the Martini. It first made its appearance in Paris around 1920, which as coincidence has it, is exactly the same time that Prohibition was to take its hold on America, and from which we are still feeling the ramifications.

The Sidecar is a brandy based cocktail, to which is added a balanced amount of lemon juice and Cointreau in order to create a delectable aperitif that can be a wonderful way to start off the evening.

The original recipe for the sidecar, first appeared in “Cocktails: How To Mix Them” by Robert Vermeire, printed in 1922. There, the recipe was listed as “1/6 gill of fresh Lemon Juice, 1/6 gill of Cointreau, 1/6 gill of Cognac Brandy.” The use of “gill” here might be confusing (1 gill is approximately 5 ounces, depending on how you do the conversion), but all you really need to notice is that all three ingredients are using the same amount.

This however is not what I would consider a well-balanced drink. The recipe that I recommend that you use is as follows:

Sidecar

• 2 ounces brandy (cognac)
• 1 ounce Cointreau
• 1/2 ounce lemon juice

Shake with ice. Strain into cocktail glass.

Where the original recipe used a “1-1-1″ ratio, the above recipe uses a “4-2-1″ ratio (4 parts brandy, 2 parts Cointreau, 1 part lemon juice). It is the careful balancing of these ratios that can make the difference between a mediocre cocktail, and a great one.

Balance, is one of the key things that all cocktails depend on. In the Sidecar the goal is to carefully balance the sweetness of the Cointreau, with the sourness of lemon juice, and for this all to be held within the embrace of enough brandy for all flavors to be properly accentuated.

For this week you should pick up the following ingredients:

Brandy

Cognac, brandy, both are essentially the same thing. Cognac is just brandy that has been made in the Cognac region of France. The Cognac region takes enough pride in their region, and their product, to pay a little more attention to keeping true to the expectations of the name “Cognac”, but it is still easy to find some brandies that are better than some cognacs. I don’t recommend spending a lot of money on fancy cognac’s (or brandies) for cocktails, but you do need to spend “enough” to get a good brand. You should be able to find something for around $20.

Cointreau

Essentially, Cointreau is just a fancy shmancy “Triple Sec”, in fact Cointreau is the original Triple Sec, but once all of the copy-cats came onto the market they dropped it from their label, and have distanced themselves as much as they can from this category. While with the brandy I didn’t recommend spending a lot of money, here I have to recommend that you pick up Cointreau instead of Triple Sec. It really makes a difference. If you want to see for yourself, you can also pick up a bottle of Triple Sec and compare the difference between the two.

Lemon Juice

Fresh Squeezed. Need I say more? Probably not, but I will anyway. Far too many bars these days are relying on commercially bottled lemon juice, or even worse, sour mix, to make various drinks. This is just wrong. If you want to experiment with this as well, then you can pick up a bottle of lemon juice at the supermarket when you buy your fresh lemons, and pick up a bottle of sour mix (sometimes also labeled “Sweet & Sour Mix”).

Now that you have the ingredients, spend the week experimenting with this drink. Try different ratios (4-2-1, 1-1-1, 3-2-1, 2-1-1, 8-2-1�) to determine which one you think has the best balance of sweet and sour. Then try it with triple sec to see how that makes a difference, and finally by using the different variations of lemon juice.

In the end, you should find yourself the master of this drink, and be able to make one that can rival, if not surpass, that which you will find at any bar.

Oh, and the sugared rim that you’ll often see on this drink? Not only was this not part of the original drink, but I find that it ends up just making my hands sticky, so I always leave it off.