The French Jewel

Everybody, meet Tamara.

She's a bartender on the Carnival Liberty, six weeks into a six-month stint onboard (many of the workers do six months on, two months off). This is her first bartending gig for the Carnival line, and she's still learning her way around her job. Her bartending requirements are no different than many others who work the job in a high-traffic situation–she's responsible for much of the bar service during the dinner seating, and interacts with waitstaff who employ a variety of ways to get her to work on their drinks first. Otherwise, she's assigned as needed to bar locations: I got my first drink of the cruise from here in one of the center interior bars (a great place to work: high traffic, people wants their first drink as quickly as possible, and everyone's in a good mood). Later in the week, she worked one of the back bars: busy during the dinner hours, and then very quiet thereafter. As there's a guaranteed tip assigned to each drink served, there is a definite advantage to having people ordering drinks from you.

I was on board for my job, if you can believe that. I was part of a team from our company running a Settlers of Catan tournament on the ship. Every night, we also participated in an open gaming session, where we could play whatever we felt like, and feel better about having a drink during working hours. (Justifying a drink is a very slippery slope on board a cruise vessel.) So, on this particular night, I'm playing a game, drink in hand, when Kim, our travel agent, bursts into the room. She grabs my hand.


"Come. With. Me."

Okay, another brief aside. Think about the limitations of tending bar on board a ship at sea. Space is precious, and the alcohols that you have on board are selected for maximum familiarity, variety of uses and ease of replacement. The craft cocktail craze has largely bypassed Carnival (they had one bar, The Alchemy Bar, that was exploring some less-traveled ingredients), but they sure do know their way around a fruity rum drink. As a vacation thing, it's easy enough to simply rationalize in your head that for the next seven days, your lot in life will be a parade of tropical flavors and a lot of hurricane glasses.

Okay, back to the distraught travel agent. I have no idea what she wants, but I gather there's some expediency in the matter, so I follow her out of the room and down the hallway to the bar. Tamara is behind the counter, and she has seven or eight patrons merrily keeping her company. Kim sits at the bar, and points to a pink drink in a martini glass on the counter. "Drink. That."

I'm beginning to suspect that the issue at hand is not so much a matter of urgency, but more a matter of "I've just had some drinks, and you need to do so as well." Tamara sees me smell the drink first, and smiles. "Are you a bartender?" I laugh a bit. The more I'm around working bartenders, the less I'm willing to claim the title.

The drink is comfortably in the wheelhouse of the tropical drinks on the boat, but not as sweet, and certainly a bit more subtle than most of what I've consumed on the trip so far. Another of the patrons wanders up to me. "I told her to make me a drink, and that's the best drink I've had onboard. I went to the Alchemy Bar, told them to make me a drink, and then I told them that there was a Czech bartender downstairs who was kicking their ass!"

"Would you be willing to tell me what's in the drink?" I ask Tamara.

She smiled. "Last day of the cruise."

For each of the next three nights, I came back to the bar and had a drink. One of the barstaff managers took an interest in her drink. Each night, a group of people joined me in searching her out and getting her to make us her drink. She was clumsily hit on, the target of the occasional sexist comment, constantly having to shift gears between her customers and the demands of the dining room waitstaff. And each night, her group of fans grew. As bartenders go, she did her job, and did it well, and my cruise was better for it.

Courtesy of Tamara, enjoy her drink and know that somewhere out in the Caribbean, there's a Czech bartender, new at her job but getting better at it every day, who has knowledge, a personality, a smile and a drink that's all worth spending some time with.

French Jewel (courtesy of Tamara, Carnival Liberty)

2 oz. vodka (Tamara uses Grey Goose)
1 oz. Malibu rum
.5 oz. pineapple juice
.5 oz. mango puree

Shake together with ice; serve in a martini glass with a sugar rim.

Back in the Day

This drink is pictured in the 13.5 oz
Polka Dot Zombie Glass, available on the
Contemporary Complements website.

So, I'm wandering the streets of Bisbee, Arizona. (Don't worry, I'm home now, you're all safe.) Myself and a few friends duck into an antique shop, and start rummaging around the well-kept piles of aged folderol. I have two targets in the typical antique store: board games and books. (Barware is coming on strong as a third category, but unless I have a good way of getting it home, I mostly just look at it and whimper.)

My find for the evening is a well-kept 1956 copy of the Esquire Drink Book. This is, to my knowledge, not a particularly valuable or important tome, but it does fit nicely into my enjoyment of watching recipes change over time. This applies equally to food and drink - my go-to cookbook is the mid-1960's Culinary Arts Institute cookbook with the orange cover that my parents had, and that I now have a new copy of thanks to my local used bookstore. Sometimes, you do need to know how to use animal fats and cook game in the way that was ubiquitous back in the day, and you fancy-schmancy lowfat modern cookbook is not gonna have a clue.

In reading through my little window on 1957, I'm struck by the things that are to be casual knowledge to reader. There's delightful anecdotes about the various alcohols common to the Mad Men bar era, but you're also expected to be able to casually divide by 17 in your head (the "basic 17" being the number of jiggers - 1.5 ounce pours - in a standard fifth of alcohol). So if you're mixing for 20 people, you're to use 3 drinks a person, for 60 drinks, meaning four bottles of any alcohol being used in your drinks at a 1-part ratio. Fortunately for you, there should be 9 or so drinks left over at the end of it after having done all that math.

There's a much stronger focus on certain alcohols of the time: rye whiskey definitely gets its due, and applejack and gin, though certainly not uncommon today, rate page after page of recipes, with tequila ranking a miserable three recipes total. And, of course, there are several pages of celebrity-endorsed cocktail recipes. Many are notable for their lack of effort (Bob Hope's Rye Lemonade has two ingredients, left as an exercise to the reader), some are more hyperbole than substance (the Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon is absinthe and champagne - replacing the tradition water drop with the bubbly - and the admonition to "drink 3 to 5 of these slowly") and some are, well, impractical (the Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road Cocktail starts with step one: "Select in May six of your finest McIntosh trees and place a hive of bees under each tree in ensure the setting of the blossoms."). However, some recipes were perky enough to take notice of, and so we have arrived at Bing Crosby's Kailua Cocktail.

There's no story or information given as to the endorsement; there's a line in a Bing Crosby song named "You Took Advantage of Me" that goes:

But horses are frequently silly-
Mine ran from the beach of Kailua And left me alone for a filly,So I-a picked you-a.

Hey, they can't all be winners.

The obvious "Blue Hawaii" and "Mele Kalikimaka" aside, this may have simply been Esquire looking around and saying "hey, this Polynesian thing has some legs, let's The Bing in for a spread and ply him with drinks," which, truth be told, would actually be a pretty cool way to get an endorsement of your drink. In any event, his cocktail is a nice little tiki-ish drink that's a bit on the sweet side (thank you pineapple), and if it doesn't in any particularly new directions, it at least gives me an another reason to admire my book purchase. Certainly more than the "365 Excuses for a Party" (November 28: Anniversary of peace between U.S. and Tunis)...

Bing Crosby's Kailua Cocktail (from the Esquire Drink Book, 1957 printing)

2.25 oz. Puerto Rican dark rum (I used Bacardi Gold, spiked with a bit of Myer's*)
.75 oz. pineapple juice
.5 oz fresh lemon juice
.5 oz pomegranate syrup

Add to a shaker with ice; shake to blend. Pour into punch or tall glass with ice.

*Interestingly, when working on this, it appears that the dark rum I drank for years, Bacardi Black, is no longer available in the US (or at least in Michigan). I know that Select is also a 4-year age, the same as Black, but it's definitely not the same visual as the dark rum of my misspent youth. I obviously haven't missed it, what with my Myer's and my Cruzan Blackstrap and my Kraken and so on, but it does give me a bit of pause (and perhaps incentive to pick up a bottle at the Schipol duty-free on my way through Amsterdam next month, for nostalgia's sake...)

Tiki Love

Let us talk of the tiki.

I've already documented my tiki-flavored introduction to my fascination with alcohol in an earlier blog entry, but the fantasy-Polynesian world perpetuated by those who adhere to the theme remains a delight of mine. I will once again push off the story of the Zombie, but I will hint at one theme that story will expound upon: the origin of these drinks, the early 1930's post-Prohibition versions of the classic tiki drinks, were designed to be beverages for adults, not candy liquid.

This drink is pictured in the

Black & Silver Polka Dot 

Cosmo Pilsner (16.5oz), 

available on the 

Contemporary Complements website. 

The black tiki mug is from 

Frankie's Tiki Room 

in Las Vegas.

That said whenever I try a new recipe, I must always bear in mind that my wife likes drinks to be a bit on the sweet side. Where many of the classics of the genre are tart combination of lime or grapefruit juice, I always need to have a bit of pineapple juice handy to bring the sweetness up to my wife's preferences. It's not a big deal to spike her drink after decanting my own, but it does illustrate a guiding principle in my mixology missions: it don't matter what you did to it, if they ain't gonna drink it. If I can bring up the sweetness a bit (using appropriate and moderated means, of course) in order to make my primary audience more enthusiastic about the drink, then bring on the grenadine and pineapple.

Today's drink does not suffer from said lack of sweet. The Blue Hawaii has a creator (Harry K. Yee of the Hawaiian Village Hotel, circa 1957), a mission (help Bols sell blue curacao), and a profile that definitely settles it on the sweet end of the spectrum. It has a seafoam green-blue color that's almost a shame to hide in a tiki glass, but it's very much the kind of drink that won't surprise you coming out of said glass. As always, make your own sour mix (see the Long Island Iced Tea recipe for my sour mix notes) to take out might be a bit too much sweet, but otherwise this is a drink that's very easy, uses basic alcohols, and is as tiki as a Hawaiian lei.

Blue Hawaii

3 oz. fresh pineapple juice
.5 oz. blue curacao (I use Bols)
.75 oz. rum (I use Bacardi white)
.75 oz. vodka (any midrange will do, such as Absolut)
1 oz. sour mix

Shake vigorously with ice, pour into tiki mug or tall glass.

This recipe appears in Beachbum Berry's Sippin' Safari, and is also available on his app, Beachbum Berry's Tiki +, for the iPhone or iPad.