Beyond the gintonic: the madness for cocktails reaches the restaurants

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We were struck, in our recent gastronomic tour of France, that the proposal for a maison cocktail has been generalized there that makes us just sit in a restaurant. Such a cocktail is invariably a version of the classic champagne cocktail , which we veterans always miss the one we lost when closing Embassy. It is often a royal kir , in which some blackcurrant cream, or sometimes raspberry, is simply added to the sparkling wine. A light glass, in any case, that fulfills its appetizer purpose well. Some would even hesitate to describe it as a cocktail .

France has never been a very cocktail country. The Manhattan, the dry martini, the negroni, the margarita (yes, in Mexico it is masculine, as an abbreviation for the margarita cocktail ) come from other places. They are usually more powerful than that glass of champagne, and many think that their place is at the bar of a bar, maybe listening to some jazz, and that they should not mix with the gastronomic experience in a restaurant. Others think so, and History supports us.

A recent key has been the history of gin & tonic . For our generation it was a nice snack before lunch or dinner. But Ferran Adrià arrived and his discovery, the British tonic Fever Tree, and that classic cocktail became a digestive after meals, much celebrated by those who had the privilege of tasting it in the same kitchen of El Bulli with Ferran in long Table tops late in the morning. So it has rather expanded its terrain. The cocktail can enter into the planning of a meal as an opening or as a closing.

This extension of the territory of the cocktail has been accompanied by a burst of modern cocktails, starting with the same gin & tonic , with the introduction of all kinds of additives that, for some critics, end up turning it into a fruit salad with some alcohol : that if some strawberries, that if a tonic flavored with cardamom or orange blossom ...

All of that is fine, but there comes a time when the result of these currencies ceases to resemble the classical formula , and in fact some of those formulas have almost completely fallen into oblivion. Maybe it's time to claim them.

The circumstances of each country have a lot to do with the development of their cocktails. In Spain, for example, we have not known for a long time the tonic water introduced by the British company Schweppes, founded by a German in Geneva and later settled in London, where he began marketing his famous drink -popularized by British troops in India because it made the intake of quinine easier to fight malaria - in 1871. It didn't come here until 1957 ( "Learn to love the tonic" , implored its famous television commercial in the 60s). But not for that reason in the postwar period we renounced a cocktail with gin: it was the gin fizz - an American creation of the 20s - based on gin, lemon, sugar and soda.

It is very possible that the availability or not of an ingredient has influenced the development of certain cocktails in certain places. The most popular in Madrid from the 40s to 70s was called half a sweet combination , and it was made up of two thirds of vermouth and one of gin, with ice and a siphon drip . At that time, in the north of Italy, the negroni was triumphing - currently one of the most popular in the world - with gin, vermouth and Campari in equal parts. But half a century ago it was very difficult to find Campari in Spain, so we can speculate on it ...

Much more recent, and we would say that still incipient, is the popularity of the Moscow mule , excellent appetizer, in our country. It is still difficult to find in Spain its main non-alcoholic ingredient, ginger beer , a soft drink with an intense ginger flavor that should not be confused with ginger ale , softer and sweeter, and already well known here. Interestingly, ginger beer , the product of fermenting ginger with sugar, is much older than ginger ale , and has been known in Britain since the 18th century.

The Moscow mule , according to the most reliable information, was born in a bar in New York in 1941 when the president of Heublein worried that his new product, the Smirnoff vodka, sold badly because the public saw it as a Russian and communist drink . It occurred to the bartender to combine the distillate with ginger beer and green lemon, and the cocktail was soon popularized throughout the country, particularly in California. Interestingly, it took decades to reach Europe.

With the growing success of exotic kitchens, the number of cocktails associated with them has increased, such as pisco sour with Peruvian and margarita - and its many variants - with Mexican. Cuban cuisine has not grown so much, but for a long time one of the cocktails in the Caribbean country, mojito (rum, soda, sugar, peppermint) has become popular in Spain. Quite more, even, than the great Cuban cocktail, the daiquiri , which is a rum and lemon based sour like pisco sour is based on the distillate born in the Spanish colonies of Peru and Chile in the 18th century, or American sour whiskey is made from bourbon or rye .

Everything is a matter of finding a cocktail to our liking, and there will undoubtedly be, and placing it at the beginning or end of the meal, which is something that we should always - like so many other things - to the great Ferran Adrià.

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