Tootling into the new year
There's something about a chill winter evening that makes a cocktail — something with brandy or rum or bourbon, and a bit of citrus or spice — seem perfect. Cold beer and wine spritzers, highballs like gin-and-tonics and cocktails like margaritas and mojitos scream “summer!” Winter is the time for old-fashioned drinks like — old fashioners! Manhattans also come to mind, along with the venerable sidecar. Whether you are cheering on the new year or just relaxing with friends, this is a cocktail that will warm you to your toes.
The name of the American officer in World War I who inspired the sidecar is lost, but my favorite book about booze — “How to Drink” by the British writer Victoria Moore (2009 Andrews McMeel) — says that the officer was “tootled around” Paris in the sidecar of a motorbike. “As fighting in the trenches worsened,” she writes, “he did his bit by making frequent excursions to a certain bistro, where this drink was created and named after his mode of transport.” Moore credits spirits writer David Embury with this bit of history.
Other researchers say the drink was created at the Ritz Hotel or Harry's Bar (both in Paris) or a London bar called the Buck's Club. No matter. Drinking a sidecar from an elegant martini glass makes you think of those PBS movies, set in an English country house in the 1920s, when women in cloche hats and daringly short skirts lounged about with men in flannel trousers saying droll things.
The traditional sidecar, Moore goes on to explain, consists of equal parts cognac, Cointreau and lemon juice, shaken with ice and strained into a martini glass. This, research suggests, is the “French school”; the later “English school” uses two to three parts cognac to one part Cointreau and lemon or lime juice. The recipe for such a sidecar comes from the fabulous and elegant entertaining guide “Recipes for Parties” by Michael Leva and Nancy Parker (2010 Rizzoli). Then there's the Boston sidecar, which adds rum to the mix and which I have dubbed the “Massachusetts school.”
“The presence of brandy makes the sidecar particularly suited to winter, and firesides,” Moore writes.
If you have a fireplace, light it. If you have martini glasses, dust them off and practice being droll.
• Marialisa Calta is the author of “Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the American Family” (Perigee, 2005). More at marialisacalta.com.