Champagne Cocktail

Saved for last, it’s the Champagne Cocktail:

• 1 sugar cube
• 4 dashes Angostura Bitters
• champagne

In either a tall (pretty) champagne flute or a saucer (traditional) champagne glass, add the sugar and bitters. Fill with champagne. Garnish with a lemon twist.

No, this is not my last cocktail but it is the last of the 110 recipes (including the appendix) in Ted Haigh’s seminal Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails book. It took me a little over two years to make them all, so that averages out to about one a week. I wonder how many other people have managed to “make them all”?

The Amarosa Cocktail

From halfway around the world comes The Amarosa Cocktail:

• 1.0 ounce Amaro Cora
• 1.0 ounce gin
• 1.0 ounce kirschwasser

Stir well and enthusiastically. Strain into a stemmed glass of your choice, but use something pretty, because this cocktail has a very pretty color. Twist a small lemon peel directly over the drink and drop it in.

Okay, I’m not a huge fan of amaro. I just find it to bitter, and while I love what it can do in a cocktail, I was very worried about drinking an amaro-centric libation.

The Jack Rose Cocktail

When you have a bar in your living room, you end up collecting bottles of spirits. Some are gifts, some are random purchases and some end up there when people move and don’t want to ship the bottles, etc.

Thus I have no idea how a bottle of Captain Apple Jack ended up in my collection, but I figured I’d use it in the Jack Rose Cocktail:

• 1.5 ounces applejack
• Juice of 1/2 lime (or lemon – about one ounce)
• 2 or more dashes of real pomegranate grenadine

Shake well in an iced cocktail shaker, strain into a cocktail glass and garnish with a lime or lemon wedge

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