Mary Lee And The Nancy Drew

STARS AND SPIRITS

Cocktail: The Nancy Drew
Inspiration: Actress Mary Lee Wooters
Base Ingredients: Rum
Why today? Mary Lee was born Oct. 24, 1924.
Origin: Did this drink exist before the 30 Rock episode?
Cocktail Groupings: Old Hollywood, Actresses & Stars And Spirits

Actress Mary Lee Wooters was born Oct. 24, 1924.

She was a big band singer and B movie actress from the late 1930s into the 1940s, starring mostly in Westerns.

I usually know something about the actresses I post about here, but I had to do a little reading about Mary Lee — and also about the Nancy Drew cocktail.

Mary Lee’s first screen appearance was in the Warner Brothers Nancy Drew… Reporter (released Feb. 18, 1939). In the film she played the character Mary Nickerson, the younger sister of Nancy Drew’s boyfriend, Ted Nickerson.

About This Drink:

The Nancy Drew is a simple drink, just rum and ginger ale with lime juice — which makes it a sort of buck/mule.

Ingredients:

• 1 part white rum
• 2 parts ginger ale
• Splash lime juice

Preparation:

Build in a rocks glass filled with ice, and garnish with a lime wedge.

A VARIATION:

The blog A Crimson Kiss gives a recipe for a slightly more “craft” version of this drink:

• 2 oz aged rum
• 1 oz ginger syrup
• 3/4 oz freshly squeezed lime juice
• 1/2 oz coconut cream
• Angostura bitters

Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice; shake vigorously for 10-15 seconds, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Top with a few dashes of Angostura bitters.

Thirsty For More!? Click These Links:
—Nancy Drew and “The Hardy Boy”
—Another post about 30 Rock

All The Stars & Spirits:
There are dozens of cocktails named after actors and actresses, and I’ve written about a few of them here:
•Charlie Chaplain — (Link)
•Clara Bow — Link)
•Fay Wray — (Link)
•Ginger Rogers — (Link)
•Lauren Bacall — (Link)
•Lillian Gish — (Link)
•Mary Astor — (Link)
•Mary Pickford — (Link)

Amos Mosquito’s

Destination Cocktail:
Amos Mosquito’s Beach Drinks

On Tuesday night I got the chance to eat and drink at Amos Mosquito’s in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina.

It’s after Labor Day, but the parking lot of the place was still starting to fill up at 4:45 p.m. — which is when we happened to be driving past.

I didn’t get a picture of the exterior of the place, but I did take this photo of my souvenir coozie after dinner when I was back in my hotel pool:

  

My only regret from dinner was not being hungry enough to order more. My wife and I split a seafood plate and I had two house cocktails plus a Pilsner that was on tap (I think maybe it was Scrimshaw).

We didn’t get a chance to eat or drink at the restaurant last July when we were first here, but made up for that fact last night. It was definitely a high-priority for us this trip — and proved to be well worth the effort. The restaurant has a reputation for filling up fast and staying busy throughout service each night, which is a testament to both the quality of their food and the unique “rustic” atmosphere.
The mosquito theme of the place is pretty intense — with all sorts of mosquito-related posters and wall-hangings decorating all corners of the place. And their attention to detail extends to the bathrooms where there are framed photos of outhouses above the urinals and a soundtrack of swamp noises plays on a loop.
I felt bad for our waitress, a really nice woman named Junior who had to deal with us and our million questions right at 5 o’clock. She was friendly, funny and professional as we grilled her about everything from the ingredients in their different housemate breads to the coconut flavoring in their tiki drinks.
As I mentioned already, I had two of their house cocktails and a pilsner.

I started with their Painkiller:

 

I also had their Bourbon Beach Cooler, which I didn’t enjoy as much as my first drink but was still alright overall. I’d ordered it because I saw the Wild Turkey listed, and I think that that’s all I’d really wanted — not the grapefruit or agave. Looking back I should’ve just asked to have had the bourbon with ginger beer, but that’s on me.

The list below is a small selection of some of the  drinks listed on their cocktail menu:

Malibu Pina Colada
Malibu coconut rum blended with coconut and pineapple.

Amos Mojito
Bacardi rum muddled with fresh mint, sugar and lime juice, served over ice—light and refreshing.

Bourbon Beach Cooler
A refreshing bourbon cocktail with a pronounced citrus presence. Wild Turkey 81 bourbon, fresh grapefruit juice, St. Germain elderflower liquor, fresh lime juice, organic agave nectar and a splash of soda on the rocks.

Painkiller
Gosling’s Black Seal rum, creme of coconut & pineapple and orange juices shaken with ice and garnished with nutmeg.

Mai Tai
Bacardi Silver rum, Malibu coconut rum, apricot brandy, banana liqueur, orange & pineapple juices and grenadine shaken with ice and served in a tall glass.

Dark & Stormy
Gosling’s Black Seal rum mixed with Barritt’s ginger beer over ice.

And here’s another shot of the coozie I got:
  

Hold Fast The Summer

August is cooling down here in Western New York and although it’s not quite autumn yet, the fall flavors are already in full effect.

I love fall. It’s my favorite season. I love the cool temperatures and long sleeves, the pumpkin flavor and falling leaves — all of it! And I didn’t even mean to make a rhyme there!

Still, despite the fact that I love the fall, it’s hard to let the summer slip away so easily — especially when we’re still in the month of August.

And for that reason there’s this “Hold Fast The Summer.”

  
Hold Fast The Summer is a transitional drink, one part warm-weather nostalgia and one part acceptance of the changing seasons.

The recipe is easy — just Plantation’s pineapple rum, DeGroff’s pimento bitters and apple cider:

Ingredients
1 oz Plantation Pineapple Rum
1 oz apple cider
1 dash DeGroff’s Pimento Bitters

Preparation
Stir equal parts Stiggins’ Fancy and apple cider over ice with DeGroff’s pimento bitters then strain and shoot — or double the recipe and enjoy over ice. Adjust the cider accordingly to suit your tastes and prepare mentally for the colder weather coming in the months ahead.

  

You’ve Got Airmail

Here’s some history: The song “Please Mr. Postman” was released on August 21 in 1961.

The song was released by The Marvelettes and it was the first Motown song to reach the number-one position on the Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart.

  
Rather than search the Internet for a “Postman” cocktail, I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to celebrate the classic “Airmail” drink!

About This Drink:

The Airmail is a rum and champagne drink made with honey — or made with a honey syrup.

The recipe below is David Wondrich’s recommendation, which can be found online at Esquire.com:

Ingredients:
•2 ounces rum (golden or aged)
•1/2 ounce lime juice
•1 teaspoon honey
•5 ounces Brut champagne

Preparation:

Shake all ingredients (except the champagne) over ice and strain into a chilled champagne flut. Finish by topping the drink with champagne.

In his Esquire article, Wondrich points out that the drink is sort of like “a cross between the French 75 and the Honey Bee.” And additionally, he can’t explain its origin, but it does appear for the first time in Esquire’s 1949 Handbook for Hosts.

Further Reading:

—Check Imbibe Magazine here.
—This recipe includes Angostura Bitters.
—And the Cold-Glass blog has a really lengthy article worth reading.

Coconut Drinks From Friday Night

By Friday afternoon I had finally finished experimenting with a homemade coconut mixer for cocktails — and these are a few of the drinks I made with it:

Blue Hawaiian:

This Blue Hawaiian came out a little more sea foam green than I hoped it would, but maybe that was because of the milky-white color of the coconut mixer.
••••• ••••• •••••

White Hawaiian:  This White Hawaiian was a mix of Myers Dark Rum, Kahlua, Stoli Choklat Kokonut, a little heavy cream and my homemade coconut mixer.
••••• ••••• •••••

Kraken Painkiller:  
I didn’t have the right rum for an appropriate Painkiller cocktail, so I substituted in Kraken.
••••• ••••• •••••

MAKING COCONUT MIXER
The mix I settled on was a simple syrup of sorts, but less than the usual 1:1 recipe. I made the syrup with four parts coconut water and one part coconut milk — and half the amount of sugar it usually takes to make a simple syrup. 

Then, once the syrup had cooled, I blended it with shredded coconut flakes and strained out the solids.

I did use sweetened coconut flakes, though I’m sure that using non-sweetened flakes would make a perfectly fine mixer too. I don’t have any set ratios as to what made the perfect final product. It was just more of a guessing game as I alternately sweetened and diluted the mix.

Tiki Photos From Friday Night

Last night I was serving drinks with a homemade coconut mixer that I’d been working on throughout the week.

Now, I don’t usually close on Friday nights, but I picked up the shift (which was also our second week of Late Night Food that we’ve started doing on Friday nights).

One of the dishes our chef was serving was a surfer dog, which I knew about ahead of time and is partially the reason I started working on coconut cocktails this week.

With the Surfer Dog and coconut cocktails a part of Friday night, our owner picked up these tiki glasses and Hawaiian leis:

 

  

Experimenting With Coconut

Summer is starting to feel like it’s here and now that Negroni Week is over, my mind has started to wander toward tropical rum drinks.

At the bar where I work, we do a big trade in Mojitos every summer. We have a dozen different flavored rums… And we bring in watermelon every summer to muddle with the mint and lime. That’s easily one of our most popular drinks this time of year:

  
One thing which we don’t have at the bar where I work is a blender. Thats’s never really been a problem though. We are not a beach bar. We’re located in the city of Jamestown. And moreover, all those typical neon-colored cocktails served at beach bars are always so sugary and sticky sweet — which I’m guessing comes from all sorts packaged syrups and canned juices.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think there is a proper place and time for all that. One of the best drinks which my wife and I enjoyed on our honeymoon in the Dominican Republic was something called a Miami Vice — which was equal parts piña colada and strawberry daiquiri. It was exactly the sort of thing we wanted at the time, while sitting by the resort pool looking at the ocean.

Aside from that there was a lot of straight rum and a local liquor called Mamajuana.

In the city though, those sorts of beach drinks aren’t an immediate “go-to” for us or any of our customers. We do serve plenty of rum drinks — like daiquiris, Hurricanes, fake Caipirinhas and Dark and Stormy by the ton. But without a blender, we’ve never seen need to bring in any cream of coconut — which is probably why anytime anyone wants anything with coconut flavor, that flavor always ends up coming from Parrot Bay.

So, yeah, that’s where I found myself this past week — with an interest in making tropical drinks that no. 1, aren’t blended and no. 2, don’t use Coco Lopez or any other store-bought syrup or mixer.

Add to all this the fact that a recent episode of Best Bars In America showed a bar which used its own house coconut mix — comprised of equal parts coconut milk and coconut water. 

Seeing that half-and-half blend behind a high-end cocktail bar got me thinking about what I could do to incorporate coconut into our drinks (while still only shaking them and not incorporating a blender).

Another Watermelon Mojito Photo

Yesterday I posted a picture of the first Watermelon Mojito of the season made at my bar.

Today’s post is just another brief “Photo Post” because I got so many useable shots of the drink:

  

On The Bar — Dark ‘n’ Stormy

Using the “On The Bar” app.

I downloaded it a long time ago, when it was mostly all just Boston-area bartenders who were using it. But it looks like it’s spread far and wide, so hopefully we can get a bunch of people using it in Jamestown!

  

Further Reading:
— Recipes for a Dark ‘n’ Stormy

— A link to something similar, but different.

— And I know, I know… It’s gotta be Gosling’s.

Happy Birthday, Mary Pickford!

Today is film actress Mary Pickford’s birthday!

And, as so many of the stars from her era did, she has a cocktail named after her!

The Mary Pickford cocktail is made with rum, pineapple juice, cherry liqueur and grenadine. It was created by a bartender named Eddie Woelke, who fled to Cuba during Prohibition — like so many others in the profession who scattered to countries all around the world.

About Mary Pickford:

Mary Pickford was born April 8, 1892 and died May 29, 1979. She was a Canadian-American actress and a co-founder of the film studio United Artists. She was also one of the original 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. You know, thee Academy!

She won two Academy Awards in her lifetime. The first was in 1929 when she won the award for Best Actress for her performance in Coquette. The second was in 1975 when she was presented with an honorary Oscar “in recognition of her unique contributions to the film industry and the development of film as an artistic medium.”

You can find her full filmography online here.

The Mary Pickford Cocktail:

Recipe from Imbibe Magazine:

• 2 oz. white rum
• 1 oz. pineapple juice
• 1 barspoon grenadine
• 1 barspoon maraschino liqueur

Combine all ingredients and shake with ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a brandied cherry.

The PDT Cocktail Book:

In The PDT Cocktail book, author Jim Meehan gets a little more specific about brands. He cites the book Cocktails by Pedro Chicote, published in 1928:

• 2 oz. Banks 5 Island Rum
• .75 oz. pineapple juice
• .5 oz. Luxardo maraschino liqueur
• .25 oz. house grenadine

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled coupe. No garnish.

Alternate History:

The Mary Pickford cocktail was created by either Eddie Woelke, as mentioned above, or another bartender of the era. As with so with so many classic cocktails, there are multiple sources cited in the history of the Mary Pickford.

In his book Cocktails, Cocktails, and More Cocktails, author Kester Thompson writes that the drink was created specifically for Pickford during a trip which she took to Cuba in the 1920s with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. The bartender he names as having created the drink is Fred Kaufmann.

Imbibe Magazine cites Woelke while Difford’s Guide names Kaufman (only one “N” though for some reason). Additionally, the Difford’s Guide article I linked doesn’t even mention Woelke, even though the piece does mention the El Presidente cocktail — which is the drink he’s best known for having created.

The blog Cold Glass has a nice write-up about the drink here.

Thirsty For More?

•Serious Eats — Link

•Mix That Drink — Link

•History Of Drinking — Link