Bittersweet Dry Manhattan.
2 parts good bourbon (or bad, it’s all bourbon)
1 part dry vermouth
3 or four dashes of bitters, I can never tell the difference
Splash of local-grown honey.
Several years before you intend to make this drink, you need to go to a farmer’s market with the girl or boy you are desperately in love with.
It needs to be spring; you need to be holding their hand a little too tightly, and they should be glancing down at their phone a little too often.
Stumble onto a kind man, who although he can’t be much younger than you seems much older, and who has a rusted out Ford 150 with faded Grateful Dead dancing bears across the back window (yellow and pink will be preferable to green and red). He will have Mason jars of varying sizes filled with local wildflower honey for sale; go ahead and splurge and buy the big one (it won’t be more than ten dollars).
Over the next few months, be plunged into a living hell, as your loved one informs you that s/he is leaving because you are too self involved / callous / poor artist / poor lover / just poor / nowhere musician / parents were emotionally abusive / parents were physically abusive / screenprinting business has failed/ bad with money / snobby about money/ drink too much / don’t drink enough / do too much coke / heroin / hashish (circle all that apply). Lose ten pounds; make terrible decisions regarding your personal health and hygiene.
Allow the honey to crystallize over the following particularly desperate winter; have heat cut off at least once that season, due to general alcoholic self-destruction, and silently shiver in the fetal position under all the blankets in the house, as the molecules in the honey shift into a solid state.
At a minimum of one year later, find the now-crystallized honey behind a rather wretched and half-empty bottle of E.V.O.O. Try to remember the trick to getting it back to liquid state; accidentally boil the honey in this attempt, and while attempting to stir it fling molten honey across your left arm, scalding yourself, and leaving the faint odor of Thanksgiving dinner and burned hair. Cuss the honey; yourself; yr Deity, &tc.
Add honey to drink via a stirrer from defunct or archaic social spot or hotel, i.e. Fernwood, Miss. Country Club; Pascal’s Manale Restaurant; The Monteleone Carousel Lounge, New Orleans, &tc. Stir. Honey will not dissolve in the v. cold drink; rather, contrary to your intention, it will stick to your stirrer. Cuss it; throw the stirrer, complete with gluey honey, into the garbage can. Miss; it will stick like cement to the side of your stove.
Stalk out of the kitchen, grabbing the drink with a shaky hand; dig out a mix CD with a Hank Williams song (preferably “Cold Cold Heart,” but “Still In Love With You” will work in a pinch), and stand on your porch and drink your damned drink already.
Realize it tastes just like a dry Manhattan, even after all the work you put into it, and after the bright idea you thought would be a new twist on an old favorite. Realize there is nothing new in this scratched-chrome new century.
Put your hand to your face and begin to sob, gently, as the neon yellow pollen drifts down from the oak across the street, as the afternoon sun splashes across the concrete sidewalk, as the American flags twitch and bob in the spring breeze.
I would read a whole book of these recipes.
As would I. That last sentence is about as perfect as they come.
Yay! More please.
Ah, THANK YOU! This is one of the wonders—bringing winter back (all kinds of winter) just when we need it. Speaking of which…does everyone know that the Bonnie Prince plays the Spanish Moon on June 3? Am I the only one saying Woot
Most of the recipe is damn accurate, but I like mine drier, like 4 to 1, with a maraschino cherry. Sort of a bourbon martini.
This is nowhere near as haunting and deep as your lovely evocation, but as a lover of the cocktail, I thought you might enjoy the following little prose-poem, written back when I could drink a little:
DRY, OF COURSE
He thought a manhattan was the perfect party.
Walk into a manhattan, and what hit you first was the conversation: The brash, loud, confident voices of the bourbon—but a brashness that was not without its polish, a confidence that included you warmly, gave your own opinions a certain authority, a certain ring and boldness.
Then the dry suavity of the vermouth—smoothing things over, easing the path for wit or merriment, never itself assertive. A suavity one might tire of very quickly if the evening offered no other entertainment.
And floating above it all, just the right touch of acrimony: a dash of bitters, that slight aromatic of human envy and disappointment.
Finally, curled in the neck of the stem, a twist of lemon, a long clean apparition in the depths of the misted and beaded glass like a seven-foot woman with bare shoulders walking toward you through the smoky host.
This is a wonderful piece of pie, right here, Jack! I think I love the last part best—that seven-foot tall woman . . .
Lula had a sweet Manhattan this weekend, with a cherry—”bluh!” she cried. “It just tastes like booze all mixed together!”
Au contraire!