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After-Dinner Cordials
Place in pony glass half pony each creme yvette and apricot brandy. Care should be taken to have each separated and not running together. Crack a fresh egg in a large glass tumbler, add a half teaspoon powdered sugar and thoroughly beat egg and sugar with a spoon. Pour in a teaspoon each red curacao and green chartreuse, a pony glass good whiskey, fill glass with finely cracked ice, strain into a small flat glass and serve. Place in a cordial glass half a teaspoon raspberry syrup, carefully pour one over the other, a half teaspoon each maraschino, creme de menthe, green chartreuse and brandy; serve very carefully without mixing different colours. Place in small wineglass a teaspoon red curacao and yolk of a very fresh egg, taking special care that the egg yolk remain whole, then carefully pour in a teaspoon each maraschino, yellow chartreuse, green chartreuse and very good brandy. Light a match, set fire to brandy and let burn one and a half minutes, which should be done in presence of the guest.
Place in bottom of a cordial glass a teaspoon red curacao and fill a teaspoon with yellow chartreuse. Gently and carefully put spoon into glass far enough down to allow point of spoon to just touch surface of curacao, slowly withdrawing spoon until empty, then fill spoon with brandy, gradually pour over the yellow chartreuse and serve without shaking.
Five separate drinks run together in one unbroken paragraph here: two layered pousse-cafés, a whiskey flip, a flaming prairie-oyster variant and a final three-layer cordial. Two of them are built on raw egg that is never heated, which is why the caution above stands.
- The raw egg is the problemThe whiskey flip beats a whole raw egg with sugar and then combines it with cracked ice before straining; the flaming cordial floats a whole raw yolk in curaçao. Neither is ever brought near a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the shell-egg supply of the period was not graded, refrigerated or washed as it is now. Alcohol at cocktail strength does not pasteurise an egg, and the minute and a half of burning brandy sitting on top heats only the surface.
- The flaming stepSetting fire to brandy in a small wineglass and letting it burn for ninety seconds in front of a seated guest can heat the glass enough to crack it, and leaves a lit pool of spirit at table height. It reads as bar showmanship rather than a domestic trick.
- A pony glassOne fluid ounce, roughly 30 ml — the standard small bar measure of the period, distinct from the jigger at an ounce and a half. "Half a pony" is therefore about a tablespoon.
- Crème YvetteA violet-flavoured American liqueur, deep purple and heavy with sugar. It disappeared from production for decades in the twentieth century before being revived, so most older bar books calling for it were written for a product no longer on the shelf.
- Red curaçao and the chartreusesCuraçao was routinely dyed red, green, blue or orange in this era; the colour, not the flavour, is what the recipe is choosing. Yellow Chartreuse is sweeter, lower in proof and denser than green, which is why the two are never interchangeable in a layered drink.
- Why the spoon touches the surfaceThe layering depends on density — sugar content chiefly, but alcohol content too, with the heaviest syrups at the bottom and the spirits at the top. Lowering the spoon until its tip just meets the liquid already in the glass, then withdrawing it as it drains, is the technique that keeps the layers from cutting into each other. It is sound method, and the reason these drinks were a test of a bartender's hand.
- If you want to make something like thisWork from a current cocktail book. Any modern version of an egg drink will specify a pasteurised egg or an equivalent, and will say so explicitly.
Layered cordials of this kind were the pousse-café, a bar specialty in print from the 1860s whose whole point was visual: bands of coloured liqueur held apart by differences in sugar density, poured over the back of a spoon and set down without a tremor. They belonged to the hotel and restaurant bar rather than the home. The ingredients tell you where the fashion came from — Chartreuse from the French Carthusians, maraschino from the Adriatic, curaçao from the Dutch Caribbean trade in bitter orange peel — all of them imported, expensive and unmistakably coloured, which was rather the idea. The flip, older by a century or more, began as a heated ale-and-spirit drink stirred with a red-hot iron; by the time it reaches this page it has become a cold shaken egg drink.