alcohol
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Dress British Drink Yiddish: Mazel Tov Cocktail


This is not ordinarily a topical blog, but last night Donald Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes claimed that a Jay Z video "starts off with a crowd throwing Mazel Tov cocktails at the police," and this is just too delightful to pass up. This is especially thrilling as a Minnesotan, because we have a member of the North Stars Roller Girls who calls herself Mazel Tov Cocktail, who hails from St. Louis Park, where, as I live and breathe, I am currently sitting and writing this.

 So obviously the time of the Mazel Tov cocktail is upon us, and what would it be? 

Firstly, perhaps it need not be stated, but what Hughes meant to say was Molotov cocktail, the improvised explosive device named after Vyacheslav Molotov. He was, if you don't know, the Russian diplomat behind the behind the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact that guaranteed no Soviet aggression against the Nazis that lasted all of two years, until the Nazis decided to get aggressive against the Soviet Union by attacking Russia.

Molotov started producing propaganda in support of the pact that was widely mocked, especially by Finns, who suffered bombings under the Nazis that Molotov insisted were food runs. So the Finns started calling Nazi bombs "Molotov bread baskets," and when the Finns started throwing bottles filled with petrol at the Nazis, these were, of course, called Molotov cocktails, because why ruin a lovely food metaphor?

There is a bit of Jewish history hidden here, as Molotov replaced Maxim Litvinov as diplomat, and Litvinov was Jewish. Litvinov was replaced, in part, because the Germans refused to have anything to do with him, calling him "Finkelstein-Litvinov." Stalin then ordered Molotov to purge the ministry of Jews. There are longstanding rumors that Litvinov was later murdered by Stalin in a faked auto accident, although Litvinov's widow denied this; nonetheless, his dismissal marked the start of a growing official antisemitism under Stalin.

Even putting that aside, Molotov's pact with the Nazis kept Russia out of the war for two years, until 1941. So, for many reasons, Jews have plenty of cause for mocking Molotov.

But what should the cocktail be? There already is an actual cocktail called the Molotov, but there is nothing to it: It is vodka with high-proof rum floated on top, and the rum is then set on fire. I think we can do better. For one thing, I think the drink must be served in a bottle to preserve the iconic look of the improvised bomb. I would suggest a Mexican Coke bottle or the like, as wine or whiskey bottles will simply be too large for a single cocktail.

I don't mind the suggestion of starting with vodka, and, as this is a Jewish drink, I would suggest starting with rye vodka, which was the sort Jews were associated with manufacturing in Eastern Europe. I strongly think the drink should preserve some of the flavors of Finland, since they named the thing, and the Finns have something called Lonkero, made by mixing gin with grapefruit soda, so we're going to add in some Fresca.

Of course, all we have now is soda and vodka, and a proper cocktail must have three ingredients or it is, as Peggy Olson says, an emergency and not a drink. This would be the moment when we can really make the drink Jewish, as we should. As it turns out, there is a bit of a hidden tradition in grapefruit cocktails of using cherry as a flavoring -- the sweetheart martini, as an example, combines both. So we're going to put some Cherry Heering in, which will make it a drink your bubbe might have loved, assuming she also loved setting fire to things. I suggest not blending the drink, because then we have the thrill of watching the Heering spread through the vodka like blood through water.

Finally, the drink needs a wick, and, believe it or not, people make wicks to put into bottles (here's an example).  I haven't tested this, but the alcohol in the cocktail should be a high enough proof to feed the wick's flame. It is low enough, however, not to be incendiary should the flame touch the drink itself. So just stuff some of these wicks into your bottle and pass them around, still burning. When people are ready to drink, they need merely snuff the wick and down the drink with a hearty "Mazel Tov!"

It's everything I like in a cocktail. It's a novelty, a history lesson, a floor show, and a bottle of booze all in one.

Dress British Drink Yiddish: The SeaPea Fizz Cocktail


Another cocktail created by Jewish mixological giant Frank Meier, the head bartender at the Paris Ritz in the mid-20th century. This is both a tremendously simply drink, and, for some drinkers, utterly terrifying. Two of the ingredients, after all, are absinthe and egg white, and these are the sorts of ingredients that make the timid imbiber swallow hard once and think twice. Let's tackle them one at a time.

People make such a fuss about absinthe, and I can't peer down my nose at them, as much as I would like too, because I once did too. It's a drink that was outlawed in the United States in 1912 and only became legal again in 2007, and absence, in this case, makes the heart grow stranger. All sorts of folktales sprang up about the drink: It was toxic, it was hallucinogenic, it was a drink that produced muse-like visions for the waiting artist.

Never mind that there were already anise liqueurs that were pretty much exactly like absinthe, such as Pernod, which was produced by a former absinthe manufacturer, and Herbsaint, which was used as an absinthe substitute in many classic cocktails that called for absinthe. Both lacked an ingredient -- namely, the bitter wormwood that made absinthe so legendary -- but worked in a pinch, and still work. Quite a few modern absinthes are meant to be drunk straight or with water, and so have an especially potent flavor that risks overpowering a cocktail. I still make my sazaracs with Herbsaint, and prefer them that way. I find it useful to forget all the fairy stories about absinthe and just treat it as another cocktail ingredient, and, sometimes, it's not the best option.

I think it is for this drink, however, because the cocktail is meant to highlight the absinthe flavor. Like a lot of Meier's cocktails, it favors the flavor of lemon, and lemon goes really well with asbinthe, both mellowing the drinks bitterness and making the anise flavor pop. I don't know that it is the best absinthe cocktail I have ever had, but this is the one that best showcases the flavor of the absinthe.

So what about the egg white? Well, the drink is a fizz, which indicates citrus and seltzer, but recalls one specific drink: The Ramos Gin Fizz, where sugar and extreme shaking emulsify the egg white, creating a light, frothy drink with a marvelous head, like an alcoholic cloud. This is that, but with absinthe rather than gin, and is marvelous in the way -- absinthe is the sort of drink that seems like it should be dense, as it is the sort of thing poets contemplating suicide would drink. But this makes the drink light and buoyant, an absinthe for the rest of us who prefer our drinking with a little less brooding.

And that is as it should be, as the drink was named after one of the lightest and most buoyant men of Meier's era: The songwriter Cole Porter, whose initials give the drink its name. Cole Porter, who was not Jewish, but who once explained his approach to songwriting to Richard Rodgers, saying "I’ll write Jewish tunes."

Here is how to make the SeaPea:
  • 3/4 ounce absinthe
  • 3/4 ounce simple syrup (1:1, sugar:water)
  • 3/4 ounce lemon juice
  • 1 egg white
  • soda water
Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker; Shake without ice. Add ice and shake until well-chilled. Strain into a glass. Top with soda water.


Dress British Drink Yiddish: HE'BREW Beer


I have been focused on liquors, but some of you are beer drinkers, so let's talk about beer. After all, when you go into an Irish pub, you could buy whiskey, if you like, but there is also a selection of Irish beers to choose from, and even a specifically Irish mix of beers, generally Guinness and Harp, where the beers are layered one atop the other. (If I can put on my Irish-American cap for a moment, don't call this a black and tan in an Irish bar, as the Black and Tans were a violent temporary police force established to suppress the Irish War of Independence; call the drink a half and half instead.)

So if we are to have a Jewish bar, even in our own imaginations, we must have beer. Fortunately, not only is there a Jewish beer, but it is a very good one: HE'BREW Beer from the Shmaltz Brewing Company of Clifton Park, New York. The drink originated in 1996, when a group of homebrewers in San Francisco made a pomegranite ale, and, for many years, the beer was contract-brewed at established breweries and hand delivered in the Bay Area. Three years ago the company opened its own brewery, and has expanding its distribution considerably. I don't know if I could get it here in Omaha, but it was easy to locate bottles of their Hop Manna IPA last time I was in Minneapolis.

There are a lot of beer lines out out by HE'BREW, including their original pomegranate ale, and they are generally well-reviewed. Additionally, their names typically reference something explicitly Jewish, such as a double rye IPA called Bittersweet Lenny’s R.I.P.A, named after comedian Lenny Bruce, and a sour brown ale called Funky Jewbelation; some of these are released in limited series, so if you see a HE'BREW beer you haven't seen before, grab it; it may not be around long.

The IPA I bought had a very thick head, the sort of thing where you pour just a little beer and it starts to foam over so you leave it alone for a little while and then come back and pour just a bit more and then the foam rises and threatens to spill and so you go away again for a while. The beer was bitter, as an IPA should be, and citrusy, with a strong malt flavor, and if I try to describe it further I'll just start babbling nonsense: It's musty with an apple finish and the insouciance of an electric candle.

I tossed a shot glass of bourbon into a glass of the IPA to try the stuff as a boilermaker, which is always a bit risky, as whiskey and beers don't always go well together, but this was perfectly pleasant. I suspect the IPA would make an enjoyable shandy mixed with lemonade, but I drink so much lemonade so quickly that's it's never around when I have beer.

Perhaps a better beer cocktail to make with HE'BREW would be something called a Czech Sour, whose roots, like HE'BREWS are both San Francisco and Eastern Europe. The cocktail comes from the Bay Area's Burritt Room and is inspired by Czechoslovakian drinks, and combines Becherovka herbal liqueur with grapefruit bitters, gum arabic, lime, and a pale ale (HE'BREW had a limited pale, but you might have to sub in one of their IPAs), and then topped with cinnamon.

You could probably also layer their nut brown ale with an IPA for a half and half, but I feel like the resulting drink deserves a Jewish name. Um, let's call it the Samuel Goodman, after the Jewish rugby coach who led the American team to gold medals at the 1920 and 1924 Olympics.

Why? Because a traditional rugby ball is black and tan.

Dress British Drink Yiddish: Cel-Ray Soda


I have started to get the feeling most of the world has not heard of Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, as it wasn't for sale anywhere in Minneapolis when I was a child, and I would only see it in delicatessens in New York when visiting family there. In fact, it was only available in these delicatessens, for reasons I will detail in a moment. But that still doesn't excuse the general cultural ignorance of the rest of America, as Cel-Ray, often simply called Celery Tonic, has made appearances as a heroic prop in films such as "Serpico," "Funny Lady" (it's all James Caan drinks in the film), "Tootsie," and "A Chorus Line." It's even mentioned in a Seinfeld episode, and if people could learn and remember babka from Sienfeld, they can learn and remember Cel-Ray.

I recently watched "Isn't She Great," the somewhat frantic biopic of "Valley of the Dolls" author Jacqueline Susann. Screenwriter Paul Rudnick includes a scene in which he sends a WASPy editor, played, appropriately, by David Hyde Pierce, to edit Susann's manuscript, but is constantly interrupted by deli-based irritations. These are usually generated by Nathan Lane as Susann's husband Irving Mansfield, and in one scene he walks around bellowing for celery tonic.

So Cel-Ray isn't just a weird soda -- if you haven't had it, it literally tastes exactly like celery. It's a deli soda, and, more than that, it's a Jewish soda; the New York Times wrote about it in 2011, saying that it has been called the "Jewish champagne" since at least the 1930s. There is a long and detailed history of the soda on Serious Eats, but here are the highlights:

It's an old drink, dating back to 1868, and was informed by Eastern European savory and lightly fermented drinks like kvass. Cel-Ray was long marketed as a health drink, thus the reason why it is often called a "tonic" long after the FDA decreed it shoudn't be, which happened a shockingly long time ago: 1900. Even as American tastes started moving toward sweeter sodas, Cel-Ray retained its popularity with Jewish diners, who felt it paired especially well with salty, meaty dishes, and so Dr. Brown's continued producing the stuff and selling it in New York delis, and did not offer it elsewhere.

But the deli has declined and Cel-Ray's customer base has expanded, to the point where it is relatively easy to buy it in New York, and is drunk by a wide variety of New Yorkers who apparently have no idea that the rest of the world doesn't know that this is a thing that is done, and would find anyone who did this to be mad. It has also become almost inconsequentially easy to order the stuff via the Internet, and so, while the traditional deli may be in decline, we are at a strange moment when just about anybody can enjoy something that was once unique to the deli.

And thank goodness, because even if you are unsure about just drinking a celery flavored soda, I can tell you unambiguously that Cel-Ray is a dynamite cocktail ingredient. It can easily be subbed in for any drink that requires seltzer, and generally imparts a slight umami quality without tasting specifically like celery -- especially in drinks that use lemon or lime, Cel-Ray creates a subtly deeper flavor, and a welcome one.

But there is one drink in particular that I have found especially benefits from Cel-Ray: The Bloody Mary. Don't be shy with the stuff either -- add in at least two shots of Cel-Ray per drink, just enough to give the cocktail a light effervescence. As deli patrons long ago discovered, Cel-Ray pairs perfectly with thick, savory flavors, and the Bloody Mary is the thickest, most savory cocktail I know. It's so thick that the celery soda doesn't even thin out the drink appreciably, but instead imparts that recognizable peppery/radishy celery flavor, which many people already associate with the Bloody Mary thanks to the use of celery salt on the glass rim.

In fact, using Cel-Ray in the cocktail frees you up to explore different sorts of salts on the rim. We have used creole seasoning with great success, but that's not an especially Jewish choice. Here's an opportunity for a little mixological innovation. I suspect just about any deli spice would go along with this drink, especially the sort of spice rub that delis use to flavor their meat, which typically includes onion, garlic, pepper, and coriander. Or one might attempt a return to the sorts of Eastern European flavors that originally produced Cel-Ray, including dill, paprika, horseradish (already popular in Bloody Marys), and mustard.

Anyway, obviously this version needs a Jewish name, and I have a suggestion: While there are multiple origin stories for the Bloody Mary, one of them credits the drink to a Harlem-born Jewish New York entertainer who frequented the 21 Club, a claim that is supported by a 1939 article by gourmand and columnist Lucius Beebe. Whether the Bloody Mary was actually invented by this entertainer will forever be in dispute, but let's at least name this version, made with the Jewish champagne, after the man.

Let's call it the Georgie Jessel.

Dress British Drink Yiddish: The Automobile Cocktail


Here we have another cocktail creation by Paris Ritz bartender Frank Meier, this one titled The Automobile. There is something charmingly 1936 about the name -- 1936 was the year Meier published the recipe in his book "The Artistry of Mixing Drinks," and it was a year in which automobiles were still so exciting that their name alone could inspire a drink. It's hard to think of contemporary advances in transportation that might do the same. The Segway Cocktail? The Hoverboard?

Meier's drink is essentially a martini, except made with sweet vermouth and with a large helping of scotch added in. Here is the recipe:

1 oz Scotch Whisky
1 oz Dry Gin
1 oz Sweet Vermouth
1 dash Orange Bitters

Stir well with ice and strain into cocktail stem or rocks glass.

I'll note that there is a school of thought, argued by David Emory in his 1948 book "The Fine Art of Mixing Drink," that believes a well-made cocktail highlights a specific liquor, with additional elements added in in smaller quantities to act as modifying, coloring, and flavoring agents. The Martini is perhaps the purest example of this, consisting almost entirely of gin, with a small amount of vermouth as flavoring agent, and then, classically, with orange bitter and a garnish to top it off.

Just dumping in equal measures of scotch and vermouth is pretty openly defiant of that formula. Perhaps this is why the Martini is still widely served while the Automobile has lapsed into obscurity.

That being said, Meier knew his business. The Automobile is a fine drink -- really fine, dominated by the flavor of the scotch, but smooth and comfortable, like something that should be drunk by a fireplace in an overstuffed leather chair while a dog sleeps at your feet. I always bring my dog along with me when I go drinking, but he's a comically tiny, one-eyed little beast who tends to approach the world with a wild smile and a tongue dangling to one side, looking absolutely mad, so I'll never be able to pass myself off as classy.

No matter. Drinks are often aspirational, rather than reflective: We drink to represent the life we wish we lived, rather than the ones we are living. And there are times I wish I was the sort of guy who could have made it in Paris before World War II, a frequent visitor to one of the finest hotels in the world, sharing drinks and stories in the Cafe Parisian, made by Frank Meier and drunk by Hemingway, who both would have looked at my dog and laughed.

Dress British Drink Yiddish: A Shot Called Rosh Hashanah


This blog focuses on the Yiddish-speaking parts of Europe, which were mostly East, and its influence. I tend not to look overmuch at the parts of Europe that had little to do with Yiddish, which were a lot of Western and Middle Europe. But I am also the creator of the most Jewish alcohol shot in history, and it is thoroughly German in its constituent ingredients.

But then, I suppose Yiddish originated in this part of the world and then moved east, or so most historians of the language believe. (There is a minority opinion that Yiddish is a Slavic language that somehow adopted a massive amount of  Middle High German words; as far as I can tell, that theory is considered fringe by most scholars.) So let's consider this the Yiddish of shots -- it started in the Rhineland, but has been absorbed, modified, and Judaized by an Eastern European Jew, namely me.

There are two constituent liqueurs in this cocktail. The first is one with a delightfully terrifying name: Bärenjäger, which means "bear hunter." It's apparently generally called Bärenfang in Germany, which translates into the slightly less terrifying "bear trap." And what traps bears? Honey, of course.

So this is a vodka-based liqueur flavored with honey, and it's an old drink, dating back to the 15th century, and is often illustrated with a woodcut of a bear trapper.

Our second ingredient is a newer German liqueur called Apfelkorn, which debuted in the 1970s and is an apple flavored liqueur. I mix the two liqueurs in approximately equal measures and call the drink the Rosh Hashanah.

This came about because I am a Minneapolitan, and Minneapolis is a city with a very large German population, so I frequented, and still frequent, German restaurants and bars, which always had these two liqueurs on hand, and I thought I was being funny by combining the two and giving it a Jewish name. That being said, it is an awfully tasty shot -- the mix of apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah has always been my favorite thing about the holiday, and these flavors combine quite well into a shot as well.

It is possible to make an Eastern European variation of this, but it's a little more work. There is a honey liqueur popular in many of the countries in the former Pale of Settlement called, alternately, Krupnik and Krupnikas, which is strongly alcoholic and also strongly herbal, and there is a Russian fermented honey called Medovukha that bears some similarities to mead, and I regret typing "bears." Add to this a fruit brandy from the Carpathian basin called Pálinka (apple Pálinka exists) and you have a variation that seems right for this blog, although I want to know who your liquor dealer is.

This variation deserves its own name. Let's call it epl un honik.

Dress British Drink Yiddish: The Bee's Knees Cocktail


I don't know that there is anything obviously Jewish about the Bee's Knees cocktail. Its ingredients are gin, lemon, and honey, and I suppose if you made it with citron instead of lemon it might feel a little Hebraic, but, as is, no. Its name comes from Flapper slang, which I find delightful, and there certainly were Jewish flappers, but there is no reason to assume they invented this particular phrase, and the phrase may have been created in honor of Charleston queen Bee Jackson, who was not Jewish. The cocktail's place of origin isn't notably Jewish, either: The upscale Hotel Ritz Paris, founded by Swiss hotelier César Ritz and famous for its chef, Auguste Escoffier, neither of whom were Jewish.

But the Ritz also has a famous bar, and a famous bartender, and here's where things get Jewish. His name was Frank Meier, and he ran the Ritz Bar from 1921 to 1947. Meier invented several cocktails, including the Bee's Knees, and I am going to cover them all. I will note that the origin of this cocktail is disputed, but, then, the origins of all cocktails are disputed, and so we need merely note the dispute and move on.

Moving on: Meier's own biography is a little vague. He was likely Austrian, and he was either wholly or part Jewish, depending on the source. Tilar J. Mazzeo's book about the Ritz during the Second World War, "The Hotel on Place Vendome," has Meier as both Jewish and passing secret messages onto resistance soldiers, and I always find it weird to discuss Judaism in percentage, like it were a national heritage rather than a cultural one. Whatever percent Jewish his ancestry was, he was Jewish enough for our sake.

Meier wrote a classic book on the cocktail called "The Artistry of Mixing Drinks," where the Bee's Knees appears. The recipe is a classic example of traditional mixology, depending on a few ingredients that highlight the taste of the base liquor. It is as follows:

Bees’ Knees
In shaker: the juice of one-quarter Lemon, a teaspoon of Honey, one-half glass [one-ounce] of Gin; shake well and serve.

Honey can be a bit hard to mix, so modern bartenders typically make it with honey syrup, which is just honey dissolved in boiling water, and the completed cocktail is often offered with a lemon twist to garnish.

How is it? I suppose it depends on how you like lemon, as that is the dominant flavor, sweetened slightly by the honey. I happen to like lemon, and it blends well with gin; depending on the gin you use, the liquor's flavor will be more or less prominent. One supposed if you are not a fan of gin, vodka can be substituted, as with vodka gimlets and vodka martinis, but I will be perfectly honest here: People who do that are monsters, absolute monsters.

Finally, if you really want to Judaize the drink, you might consider giving it a Yiddish name. Bee's Knees in Yiddish is Bee's Kneer.

Come to think of it, that's not really that different.

Dress British Drink Yiddish: Manischewitz

A wine spritzer made with Manischewitz kosher wine

It is time for us to tackle the complicated legacy that is Manischewitz brand kosher wine, because, honestly, I don't think it is possible to stock a Jewish bar without having the stuff on hand. For many American Jews, who drank the inexpensive, Concord grape-based drink furtively at bar and bat mitzvah, this is a drink we associate with synagogues, thrift, and wine headaches. Me recommending it for Jewish bars is not that far removed from the fact that hipster bars made a point to carry Pabst Blue Ribbon, and it has the same appeal of being déclassé, kitchy, and cheap.

But I'm not here to suggest Manischewitz as the wine-of-choice for the ironic Jew. I have another suggestion for that, which I shall write about later, and that's Mogen David and its even-less-reputable relative Mad Dog 20/20.

No, I am not here to suggest Manischewitz as an ironic Jewish wine, but an iconic one. It's got a few things going for it. Firstly, it's old, coming from a company that started in 1888 producing matzo. Secondly, it's about as authentically Jewish as anything produced in America, having been started by a rabbi named Dov Behr Manischewitz , whose name actually was Abrahamson until he escaped Russia using a dead man's passport. Thirdly, the wine's roots are in Brooklyn, as it was originally produced by the Industry City-based Monarch Wine Company. Finally, while its sweetness may put of many wine connoisseurs, it's the result of an approach to wine-making that we now consider an asset: using local sourced grapes. The grape used for Concord wines, in this case Vitis labrusca, is native to North America and grows in upstate New York. The grape is sour and musty, and so sweeteners are added -- typically corn syrup, but the company makes a Passover version that uses the now-trendy cane sugar.

It should be noted that sweet wines are frowned on specifically because they are associated with the drinking habits of the urban poor, which is, to put it mildly, problematic. Sweet wines, for example, are popular among many African Americans -- as an example there is Moscato, a sweet white that has enough of a cache to be the subject of NPR's Code Switching podcast. And, not incidentally, one of the first Moscatos to find an audience in black communities was Bartenura, a kosher wine, which I will likely also write about. There are theories floating around that the flavor of Concord wine may already have been familiar to blacks with southern roots, as Baptist churches may have used kosher wine as sacramental wine during the 30s, but wherever the reason, sweet wines have long had a place in the black community.

Bartenura was just following a path already trod by Manischewitz, which started pitching itself to the black community all the way back in the 1950s, and was popular enough that a Doo Wop group, The Crows, released a song celebrating the drink called "Mambo Shevitz." Manischewitz used black artists like the Ink Spots and later Sammy Davis Junior to promote their wine, and all the way up to the 1980s, according to Forbes, the average Manischewitz drinker was urban, working class, and black.

So this is a wine enjoyed by both the Jewish community and the black community, and, with Sammy Davis Jr., both simultaneously, and if such a wine doesn't have a place in a Jewish bar, no drink does.

For those that find the drink's sweetness to be cloying, I have some suggestions. I have used Manischewitz as an ingredient in coolers and spritzers, and it works marvelously in both -- the other ingredients mediate the sweetness without losing the wine's distinctive Concord flavor. I have also mixed Manischewitz with Coca Cola, a combination imported from Spain and called Kalimotxo, and that works nicely as well. Coke's signature flavor comes, in part, from orthophosphoric acid, which goes a long way toward adding tartness to anything sweet. Kalimotxo is sometimes made with additional ingredients, such as anise liqueur or a lime twist, and those are worth experimenting with.

I suspect there are a lot more ways to make use of Manischewitz, and so I'd entourage drinkers to be unafraid in exploring the wine. Think of yourself as a modern Sammy Davis Jr, and, like him, look at the little bottle of sweet wine and say "Yes I can."

Dress British Drink Yiddish: I. W. Harper Bourbon


There is a part of me that veers toward a sort of absurd conceptual purism. I managed the box office for a bar/nightclub in New Orleans for a while, and the conceit of the place was that it was a speakeasy. I was of the opinion that we should have private memberships and people should drink their liquor from teacups and that we should occasionally be raided by the police, and we did none of that, and went home every night disappointed.

In the same way, I sort of want this little project to be nothing but a succession of increasingly rare and increasingly terrible East European liqueurs, until I am finally huddled over from an ulcer caused by drinking illegal fermented mare's milk. "Now this," I would say through gritted teeth, "this, at last, is a Jewish bar!"

And so my impulse is to say that bourbon doesn't belong in a Jewish bar. It's a goyishe drink, so goyishe that you sort of think it must be made in crude stills fashioned from radiators by men in straw hats and tattered overalls smoking a corn cob pipe. It's associated with Kentucky and was supposedly invented by Elijah Craig, a Baptist minister, and all of this sounds like the setup to an Appalachian folk song and not anything Jewish.

But I am here to tell you, the Jews had a hand in the making of bourbon. Some of it was through work as liquor wholesalers, which has a long and mostly undocumented Jewish history in the United States. There was, for example, Loeb, Bloom, & Co. in Paducah, Kentucky, who were active in the region in the 1870s and helped open the market for bourbon distillers. But Jews weren't simply in the bourbon trade as merchants. A German Jew named Isaac Bernheim graduated from working as a bookkeeper at  Loeb, Bloom, & Co to owning his own distillery. Now, Bernheim is not the sort of name you associate with Kentucky bourbon, even in the 1870s, so Isaac was savvy enough to brand his product with a name that could belong to a mountain roughneck: I.W. Harper.

The bourbon is still around, or, rather, it is back, having been discontinued in the 1990s, which was a bad time for whiskeys. There are a couple of Harper-inspired brands out there, including one called Bernheim Original Kentucky Straight Wheat Whiskey, and I reckon a Jewish bar should have the complete selection. Here in Omaha, I had some trouble tracking down anything but the I.W. Harper Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey (there is also a 15-year-old version), but that was enough for my purposes.

I had two drinks with the stuff. I started with a bourbon and coke, which is always the drink I use to try a new bourbon, because the Coke is always going to taste the same and so differences in whiskeys really become highlighted. I suppose I could just drink the stuff straight, but what am I, a 1920s bootlegger? Anyway, I.W. Harper is unmistakably bourbon, with a very strong flavor of the charred oak barrels it is aged in. In fact, it's a pungent enough bourbon that it overpowered the Coke flavor a bit, and I started feeling guilty about making such a declasse drink with such a bold liquor.

So I also got a Manhattan, which is a decidedly upscale drink, supposedly having been invented for Jennie Jerome, the mother of Winston Churchill. And I.W. Harper makes an excellent Manhattan, blending well with the drink's other ingredients, sweet vermouth and bitters. I usually have my Manhattans with rye whiskey, I suppose because everything in the whole god damn world has to taste like a deli sandwich to me, but I.W. Harper makes a really enjoyable Manhattan, with a strong but enormously palatable flavor.

I wanted to make a cocktail designed by a Jewish bartender, but so far my research hasn't been all that forthcoming, and it doesn't help that the origins of most classic cocktails are often shrouded in myth. There is one fellow, Frank Meier, who I will write about in a future entry, who was the bartender at the Paris Ritz, invented a drink called the Bee's Knees, and was apparently a spy, but he doesn't seem to have made any bourbon cocktails. I found a site that suggests infusing bourbon with apricot and then rimming the glass with poppy seeds to make an alcoholic hamantaschen, which seems ingenious to me, but I have not tried it and it might be terrible.

There's also a drink called the Jewish Bulldozer, which is a mix of bourbon, club soda, and cream of coconut, and I don't know what to say about this drink. It doesn't seem to actually be Jewish in any way and I can't find any provenance for the drink, and I am afraid, like the Irish Car Bomb, that it may be a drink of extreme poor taste, as, deliberately or not, it seems to reference the death of Rachel Corrie, and I am not of the opinion that that complicated and tragic international politics makes for a very good cocktail name.

I am instead of the opinion that, if a Jewish bar is to stock a Jewish bourbon, its cocktails should reflect on the distinct Jewish experience in the American south. A classic bourbon cocktail is the mint julep, which combines bourbon, powdered sugar, water and mint, and is the official drink of the Kentucky Derby. I think it would be very easy to create a Jewish bar version of this with I.W. Harper. Offhand, I would switch out the water for seltzer, and I might consider using both sugar and cinnamon in the drink to give it a hint of kugel.

I would call it the Art Sherman Julep, after the Jewish horse trainer who won the Kentucky Derby in 2014. That's how you name a cocktail.

Dress British Drink Yiddish: The Pink Elephant Room at Grossinger's


When I was a boy, for a few years, I spent summers in the Catskills with my grandfather Jack, who had a little cabin up there. It wasn't much, but at least I got a glimpse of the world of the Borscht Belt, even if it was a the tail end of the institution. I remember it mostly as old Jewish men playing pinochle and second-tier comics doing very shticky routines. These were guys I saw on Carson, and I was amazed to see them doing completely different material, sometimes ending jokes with incomprehensible Yiddish idioms that had the old Jewish men in stitches. "What did that mean?" I asked my grandfather, who literally wept with laughter at the joke. "On a friend's beard it is good to learn how to shave," he'd gasp back.

If I am going to look at Jewish bars of the past, I might as well start at places like this. Catskill's resorts weren't exclusively Jewish, but they might as well have been. If you ever wanted to experience an alternative America, where the dominant majority is Jewish, where Yiddish was widely understood and spoken, and where the American diet consisted of kosher deli food, it was in the Borscht Belt hotels.

It was also the greatest expression of Jewish kitsch and specifically Jewish bad taste in history, and so, of course, if you're curious about what it might look like if Jews built bars for other Jews, here is where you start.

I'm starting with Grossinger's, mostly because I find the name of their main saloon delightful. It was the Pink elephant Room, and before that it was the Bamboo Room, and both are exactly the sorts of names I want bars to have.

First, a thumbnail history of both the Borscht Belt and Grossinger's. The Catskills developed as a Jewish getaway in the 1920s, mostly out of necessity -- Jews were routinely access to gentile-owned hotels and vacation resorts. By the 1940s and 50s, the area had exploded, offering perhaps 500 resorts. It was, in its time, one of the great incubators of American entertainment, providing opportunities for budding comedians and musical acts.

The Borscht Belt began its long decline in the 1960s, partially because Jews had accessed to a lot of the mainstream vacation opportunities that had previously been denied to them. The resorts struggled on for several more decades, but by the 1980s most of them had closed and the era of the Borscht Belt had reached its end.

Grossinger's was one of the Borscht Belt's largest resorts, having grown from a small kosher hotel in the early part of the 20th century to a 1,200 acre, 35-building resort community by 1972 -- it was big enough to have its own post office. In its heyday in the 50s and 60s, Grossinger's drew some huge acts, including Mambo King Tito Puento, who recorded an entire album there in 1960 called "Live at Grossinger's" that included a song called "Grossinger's Cha Cha Cha." Eddie Fisher met Debbie Reynolds at Grossinger's and married her there.

So let's talk about the bar. I haven't been able to locate anything about the Bamboo Room -- I presume it was tropically themed -- but the Pink Elephant Lounge is well documented. Firstly, it was pink. Pink carpet. Pink wallpaper. Pink cushions on the chairs. It even had a stuffed pink elephant hanging at the bar.

It was something of a hot spot for aspiring Lotharios: According to "Growing Up at Grossinger's" by Tania Grossinger, in its Bamboo Lounge days it had been called the Meat Market and Pig's Alley, and I found an online group consisting of only three people and "Dedicated to preserving the memory of sneaking into Grossinger's on Saturday night and meeting chicks at the Pink elephant lounge."

What was it like? Well, a former cocktail waitress from Grossinger's named Mindy Littman Holland offered a vivid description on her website, and I will quote a few passages:

"By the time we were two weeks into the summer, all of the virgins had been deflowered by golf pros and pool boys. I wasn’t a virgin going in – lucky me – but I was far more knowledgeable going out than coming in. 

I ended up dating a guy from Canarsie whose face should have been posted at every planned parenthood clinic in the country – wanted, dead or alive. The man was the knock-up king of the Borscht Belt. There was one woman he impregnated four times – and they still couldn’t figure out how to prevent it. He eventually stopped having sex with her in order to have sex with me. He was a real stand-up guy that way – and in every way, apparently. In fact, he was so fertile, I got a false positive pregnancy test from just kissing him!  No, I’m not kidding."

The bar was also used for entertainment. Ken Dornstein's book "The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky," the Pink Elephant Room was the location of morning samba lessons. According to the website The Schmooze, Grossinger's had cocktail parties on Friday and Saturday nights. According to "Growing Up at Grossinger's," the bar had an "entertainment area for musical groups and dancing." I'd love to track down more information about the sort of entertainment offered -- when I do, I'll append it to this article.

It's still possible to see the Pink Elephant Room. While the resort closed in 1986, the building still stands in a dangerous state of disrepair, and urban explorers occasionally peek in to take photos. The roof has started to sag inward, but the bar stools still stand, albeit stripped of their pink cushions -- from the photos I have seen, none of the bar's signature color remains. Neither does the elephant.

All that remains are memories, I suppose, of cha cha dancers and late-night hookups.

Dress British Drink Yiddish: Heering Cherry Liqueur


When you start researching Jews and alcohol, you run across one name again and again: Heering Cherry Liqueur. "'A little schnapps' to my grandmother and greataunt Mary meant a tiny crystal cordial glass filled with Cherry Heering," wrote Jayne Cohen in "Cooking for Jewish New Year." "A well-stocked bar must include soda, caffeine-free soda, diet soda, club soda, Creme de Cacao, Cherry Heering and Harvey's Bristol Cream," wrote Molly Katz in "Jewish as a Second Language." Jewish authors talk about growing up with it, and loving it, including Isaac Asimov, Elizabeth Ehrlich, and Sonia Pilcer. It seems like there was a time when no American Jewish liquor cabinet was complete without the Danish liqueur.

It helped that Heering has long been Kosher, and smartly marketed itself directly at Jews. And although the drink is sweet, it isn't cloying, and comes by its thick cherry flavor naturally, making it a terrific dessert drink. Better still, unlike the notoriously hard-to-mix Slivovitz, Cherry Heering is a tried-and-true cocktail ingredient, with two classic cocktails that feature the liqueur: the tropical Singapore Sling and the and the Scotch-based Blood and Sand.

So this was a liqueur that could be drunk as an after-dinner shot in the kitchen by your grandparents and mixed into cocktails in the basement rumpus room by your groovy parents.

This makes it a must-have for the Jewish bar, especially as their are a wealth of Heering cocktails with names that seem appropriate: There is, as an example, the Red Russian, which is just vodka and Heering, or the Heering White Russian, which is the same drink with cream or milk added.

Cherry Heering also mixes well with Coca Cola, creating an alcoholic cherry Coke. This may not seem like an especially Jewish drink, unless you've been to a delicatessen and seen how many Jews drink cherry Coke with their meat dishes. In fact, I feel this mixture needs a name, and "Heering cherry Coke" doesn't do it for me, so I'm going to call it the Wilensky, after the Canadian lunch counter featured in " The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz." The place is apparently somewhat famous for their fountain-made cherry Cokes.

One last thing: I should share the Yiddish word for "cherry," in case an inspired bartender concocts an especially Jewish Heering cocktail. It's "karsh," and I have a cocktail name to recommend, but no cocktail to affix it to: Karsh my Mellow.

Have at it.

Dress British Drink Yiddish: Slivovitz


I spent several years of my life writing and editing an online magazine about cocktails (two, actually: Daily Lush and The Bottle Gang.) The one thing I really took away from the experience was a sense that the American drinking palate was absolutely ruined by Prohibition. American's nascent wine industry was decimated, legal imports of European liquors halted, and the quality of locally produced alcohol plummeted. Savory cocktails that highlighted the flavor of good liquor were replaced with sweet cocktails that masked the flavor of bad liquor, and Americans acclimated to this and eventually preferred it.

We're only now crawling out of this catastrophic failure of good taste, even though it is almost a century since the Volstead Act. Americans who previously insisted on drinking sugary vodka concoctions are exploring the world of pre-Prohibition drinking, and, as a result, it's finally possible to get a decent Sazarac pretty much anywhere.

So this might be the ideal time to consider the liquor menu of our imaginary Jewish bar. Ethnic bars always have signature liquors that represent their homelands: tequila in Mexican cantinas, Irish whisky in Irish pubs, Pimms in the better British watering holes, etc.

Jews had their own liquors too, which are suddenly more available than they had previously been. Some of them were manufactured by Jewish distillers, such as Slivovitz, which we will discuss here. Some Jews merely colonized, like Heering cherry brandy, which we will detail later. Some were universally popular in Eastern Europe, but just would feel overlooked if left out of the liquor selection, such as vodka, which author Paul Kriwaczek argues Jews had a large hand in introducing to mainstream Europe.

But it's Slivovitz that I first associated with Jews. There is a throwaway scene in the 1990 Barry Levinson film "Avalon" that stayed with me, in which the movie's first-generation Jewish immigrants discuss their father's eccentricities, such as his refusal to drink tap water. What did he drink, they ask each other, trying to remember. "Slivovitz!" one declares, and they all shake their heads with disgust.

Slivovitz is a plum brandy, and it would be years before I first tried it, at a wedding of a Ukrainian friend in a Serbian Orthodox church. I did not taste the plum in the drink, and, in fact, tasted little other than the burn of high-proof alcohol. But there is a very good liquor store in Minneapolis called Surdyk's, and they had Slivovitz, and so I started to buy it regularly. After a while, I got acclimated to the flavor, and it became a point of pride to me that I could drink it at all. "It puts hair on your chest," I liked to tell people. "Then it sets fire to those hairs."

Over time, better brands of Slivovitz started to make their way to the United States, including some that had been aged 10 years or more. As with most liquors, aging Slivovitz mellows it. What had essentially been a plum moonshine was now quite drinkable, and the plum flavor came out.

So what does this have to do with the Jews? Firstly, because Slivovitz is made from plums rather than grains, it has long been a popular Passover drink. But Jews were also manufacturers of Slivovitz, especially in Poland, where they essentially had a monopoly according to Glenn Dynner's "Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland." Finally, Slivovitz has recently come back into the limelight as a Jewish drink thanks to being the drink of choice for Meyer Landsman, the hard-drinking homicide detective protagonist of Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policeman's Union."

How do you drink Slivovitz? Traditionally, it was treated as being a sort of schnapps, which in Yiddish identifies any strong alcoholic drink, and not the cloyingly flavored neutral spirits we drink in America. These would be offered any time a toast was called for -- which was apparently quite often, according to author Michael Wex. Slivovitz could also be enjoyed as an after-meal aperitif, and the tradition was to serve it in little stemmed glasses that used to be common and were called pony glasses, but seem to have been abandoned in favor of the shot glass.

Slivovitz is notoriously hard to mix into a cocktail, and it is a new enough ingredient that I wasn't able to find many examples of Slivovitz mixed drinks online, although I had one that added in lemon juice, simple syrup, and seltzer to make a sort of plum collins, which was perfectly drinkable. Most cocktail recipes I found online seemed like existing recipes with one ingredient swapped out for Slivovitz, and I tend to be suspicious of this approach.

My own tastes tend toward those espoused by David Embury in his classic book "The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks," who preferred a cocktail that consisted of a base liquor, a modifying liquor, and a special flavoring or coloring agent. This describes such classic mixed drinks as the martini (gin, dry vermouth, orange bitters) and the Manhattan (whiskey, sweet vermouth, bitters), and while I am not an utter purist on the subject, I do find this a good starting point, as it tends to produce a drink that highlights the flavor of the base liquor instead of hiding it.

I haven't found a recipe that does that yet with Slivovitz, so there is room for mixological inventiveness. I do have a shot to offer, however, and it is my own invention. Just combine Slivovitz with Heering cherry liqueur, although the Slivovitz tends to overwhelm the drink, so I'd mix it with one part Slivovitz to two parts Heering. I call it the Tkemali, after the Georgian sour plum sauce made with cherry plums.

Serve it in a pony glass if you can.
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