Welcome to Cocktail Friday! Today’s cocktail is a relic called The Chauncey.
First, a note: how do I pick the cocktails to feature on Cocktail Friday? Sometimes it’s a cocktail I’ve known for a while and just haven’t got round to featuring. Sometimes it’s something I’ve tried in my travels.
And sometimes I’ve added something to my bar and I’ve gone looking for a cocktail to feature it. That’s this week’s cocktail, The Chauncey. It’s a great example (if not a classic per se) of pre-Prohibition cocktails’ tendency to break the rules and combine liquors that we would never dream of combining today, like rye and gin. For good measure, it adds red vermouth, brandy, and orange bitters, which round out the flavor profile and add up to something unusually complex and good.
Aside: Bernard DeVoto, author of the cocktail classic The Hour, would have hated The Chauncey. In addition to adding something to gin besides dry vermouth, he hated mixed drinks made with rye or bourbon (“the Manhattan is an offence against piety”), non-Angostura bitters (“all others are condiments for a tea-shoppe cookbook”) and—even worse—orange bitters (“Orange bitters make a good astringent for the face. Never put them into anything that is to be drunk”). Very odd for a man who fondly remembered drinking at the Knickerbocker, no bastion of drink purity, in its heyday! So drink this with pride, and a certain defiance.
As always, if you want to try the recipe, here’s the Highball recipe card. Enjoy!
