Rye Whiskey

Shaking the egg white and other drink ingredients without ice—known as a "dry shake"—helps get the whites foamy without diluting the drink.

Mix this New Orleans classic hours ahead of time, and serving it is as simple as pouring a pitcher of lemonade.

A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
By John Kennedy Toole Originally handwritten on piles of paper, A Confederacy of Dunces found life only after its author lost his own; John Kennedy Toole committed suicide, his mother found those secret pages, and she began hawking the thing around their home state of Louisiana, claiming it was the next great American novel. (Sorry, guys: sometimes moms are right.) Now a universally adored Pulitzer-winner starring a brilliant New Orleans nut with a heart of odd, this classic goes best with another: the Big Easy's own Sazerac. Raise a glass to the tragically shortchanged Toole—and everything else he might have written.

A twist on bananas Foster, this parfait is made with rye instead of rum and finished with caramelized-maple pecans. The parfaits can be made ahead and look great layered in freezer-proof rocks glasses or mason jars.

Unlike your traditional holiday ham, fresh ham is uncured and unsmoked. We pack it in an herb cure for several days for incredible flavor and juiciness. When roasted, the skin transforms into addictive, crispy-sweet cracklings that may cause fighting among guests.

We were surprised to discover the Frisco Sour, as it was so close in ingredients to our Ruby Tuesday cocktail. This very tasty cocktail provides a multidimensional gastronomical experience. We serve it mainly to people who are exploring whiskey cocktails other than Manhattans and traditional sours. We have little information about this savory cocktail besides its recipe as it appears in Charles Schumann’s American Bar and later editions of Mr. Boston.

Robert Krueger, our bar manager, discovered the New Yorker in a vintage copy of Booth’s cocktail book from the late 1930s. It is an offshoot of the New York Sour, with the addition of club soda. Think of it as a rye Collins with a float of red wine. The New Yorker is tall and fizzy, great for a hot day, and certainly stunning to look at. This cocktail is also a great culinary example of how substituting or adding one ingredient can drastically change the style and feel of a cocktail. The club soda changes the character from a simple sour into a long drink, which changes the perception of consumption by reducing the acidity and intensity in each sip. Whereas a Whiskey Sour is more a late-evening and cold-weather drink, the New Yorker tends to be more of a lazy-afternoon and summertime treat.

The Whiskey Sour is the pinnacle of the sour cocktail family and unarguably its most famous member. In Harry Johnson’s Bartenders’ Manual, the preferred method is to stir together sugar, water, and lemon juice before shaking with whiskey. During the dark ages of the cocktail in the 1970s and ’80s, it was turned into a two-ingredient drink in which cheap blended whiskey was poured over ice with sweet-and-sour mix from a soda gun. However, the real Whiskey Sour has been resurrected and can be made in its pure form almost anywhere that has a decent cocktail menu, even by aspiring actors working as bartenders. It is a very straightforward cocktail with a strong base of whiskey mixed with simple syrup and sour, freshly squeezed lemon juice. To bring together the body, add a splash of orange juice—just realize that with more than a splash, this drink becomes a Stone Sour. It is a fairly easy drink that can help you master the balance between sweet and sour to spirit. Make sure you shake it enough so that a thin foam rests on the surface—that is the hallmark for Whiskey Sour fans.

We will not simply turn a blind eye to the contemporary version of the Old Fashioned—it was the first cocktail we were taught that used bitters. Somewhere between the 1890s and 1930s, what probably started out as an ornamental garnish of orange and cherry fell into the mixing glass and got muddled with sugar and bitters. We see evidence of this drink in Burke’s Complete Cocktail and Drinking Recipes from 1936, in which the fruit is muddled, whereas during the same period Old Mr. Boston Bartender’s Guide continued to add the fruit after making the drink. More than likely it was a trick used during Prohibition to mask poor-quality booze that stuck with many and was passed down over the generations. Today, many look down on this version of the cocktail, mostly because of the use of commercial, artificial maraschino cherries. Many young cocktail enthusiasts may not have enjoyed this cocktail in its original form, so we offer this restoration for them.

We discovered the New York Sour in the summer of 2003 while we were researching cocktails to put on the opening drink list for Keith McNally’s Schiller’s Liquor Bar on the Lower East Side. Visually inviting, this sour is deep yellow with a crimson band of red wine floating on top. The origin of the cocktail is shrouded in mystery, but it is certain that it was served at several New York City speakeasies in the late 1920s. It was no surprise to discover that this cocktail was New York’s Prohibition-era favorite, probably because the lemon juice, sugar, and wine camouflaged and successfully balanced the bad watered-down whiskey common in those days. It was the cool drink to have, and people who ordered it were “in the know.” Think of it as the Prohibition-era Cosmo—or any other status-symbol cocktail that clearly advertises itself in appearance. Made with better ingredients, the cocktail became a masterpiece of complex flavors and mouthfeel. A chef friend of ours once remarked that this drink is like sangria à la minute—and one of the few cocktails that can be successfully paired with a main course.

Stunning to look at, the Greenwich Sour is rich and frothy, with a band of red wine floating on top. It is a variation of a Prohibition classic, the New York Sour. The key difference between the two is that we have add an egg white in our take, a practice common throughout the history of making sours. Many people today are wary about consuming raw eggs for fear of salmonella. The risk of contamination is actually quite low and ca be reduced even more by using eggs from free-range chickens; add high-proof spirit to that, and the chances of getting sick are reduced to almost nothing. The egg white adds texture to the cocktail by trapping air and requires a very long hard shake to create the necessary consistency. Many bartenders will shake the egg white on its own first to begin this process. To give the Greenwich Sour its necessary backbone, it is important to use high-proof whiskey to cut through the sour body. The wine’s tannins add depth to the cocktail and complete its finish.

According to David Wondrich, the Whiskey Smash comes from the Baroque Age (see opposite page) of the cocktail. Obviously, it served as inspiration for our seasonal Ginger Smash cocktails, but it is in all its features a julep—the only difference being that the Smash has some ornamental fruits for garnish and is always shaken so that the mint is “smashed”—hence the name. From all the smashes in the Baroque Age, it appears that the Brandy Smash was the most popular (same drink, different base spirit—try it out for yourself), but somehow the whiskey version stuck with us. Maybe sampling Dale DeGroff’s rocking peach whiskey smash sealed the deal for us, or maybe it was just that we loved the term “smashed.” In any case, this is a very simple drink to make, and we suggest that you use our homemade Mint Syrup in place of simple syrup for a far more dimensional cocktail experience. This cocktail is one of the very few that contains no juice but nevertheless should be shaken and smashed.

The Sazerac was invented by pharmacist Antoine Amedee Peychaud in New Orleans sometime in the early 1800s. In his French Quarter drugstore, M. Peychaud served his concoction of Sazerac cognac, absinthe, sugar, and his homemade bitters in the large end of an egg cup—what the French call a coquetier. (There had been speculation that the word cocktail comes from the mispronunciation of coquetier, but this myth has been disproven.) Later, rye whiskey replaced Sazerac cognac because it was more readily available, but the name stayed. The traditional making of a Sazerac is a ritual still practiced in New Orleans. It begins with the bartender pouring Herbsaint into a rocks glass, then tossing the glass in the air while yelling “Sazerac!” Coating the inside of a glass with liquor is referred to as “seasoning” the glass. The glass is then chilled as the cocktail is made. At Employees Only, we make Sazeracs by seasoning the glass with our Absinthe Bitters, and we use Angostura bitters in addition to Peychaud’s.

The Manhattan cocktail we serve is not to be confused with the contemporary Manhattan. This recipe first appeared in the latter part of the nineteenth century and is referenced in later editions of How to Mix Drinks or the Bon Vivant’s Companion as well as Harry Johnson’s 1882 Bartenders’ Manual. This forgotten formula has a higher ratio of sweet vermouth to rye whiskey, with an accent of orange Curaçao and Boker’s bitters, served straight up with a lemon twist. Cherries in Manhattans came later as the mixture evolved into a different cocktail. The subtle mingling of flavors in this version illustrates an older style of drink making. Of course, as with any epic cocktail, there are several conflicting stories about its origins. Our favorite version has Winston Churchill’s mother, Jennie, ordering its creation for the celebration of Samuel Tilden’s election as governor of New York at the Manhattan Club. As exciting as this may sound, it seems that little Winston had more to do with disproving the theory. At the time of the election, Lady Churchill was in England giving birth to Winston, and the only noted celebration for Tilden actually coincided with the day of Winston Churchill’s christening.

When we're not drinking Manhattans, we'll take an Old Pal. Usually made with rye, we prefer it with bourbon (the higher the proof, the better).

Now the official cocktail of New Orleans, this spicy, heady concoction was the creation of a Creole apothecary named Peychaud whose medicinal tinctures became after-hours cocktails with the addition of whiskey and sugar.

Two types of bitters give this drink its characteristic flavor.

This is David Alan’s take on an old-fashioned that incorporates a smoky flavor from the home-smoked orange juice used as a base. Although smoked juice adds an extra layer of flavor, the drink also tastes good with plain orange juice.

This variation on a Manhattan was created by longtime Lantern bar goddess Kristen Johnson and christened by Lantern lexicographer Phil Morrison. When naming his first novel, Thomas Wolfe is said to have been inspired by an engraving of a John Milton poem on a stone statue of an angel in a cemetery in Hendersonville, North Carolina, not too far from Levering Orchard: Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth: And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.