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Drink Thu Dec 04 2008
Dale Degroff: The Essential Cocktail
Dale Degroff is often credited with bringing fresh ingredients back to the art of cocktails. While bartending at Manhattan's Rainbow Room, Degroff stripped their drinks of mixes and artificial ingredients and brought back honest cocktails long forgotten in the states.
Degroff recently visited Chicago to promote his new book, The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks. The local launch party was held at the highly appropriate Violet Hour and served five of Degroff's drinks: the East India, the Manhattan East, the Original Manhattan, the Monkey Gland, and the Cosmopolitan.
The Essential Cocktail is a definitive book with hundreds of recipes, variations, and drink histories. Best of all, the book boasts 150 full-color photographs -- a detail that is often missing from other cocktail books.
Degroff was recently a guest on the Rachel Maddow Show, where she admitted to being an "amateur, low-level, hobbyist bartender" (swoon). Degroff shared a brief history of the American cocktail and the recipe for his version of the East India. See the recipe after the jump.
East India Cocktail
1 1/2 ounces Martell VSOP cognac
1 ounce orange curaçao
1 1/2 ounces pineapple juice
1 dash Angostura bitters
Flamed orange peel, for garnish
Nutmeg, for grating
Combine the first four ingredients with ice, and shake. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass, dust with freshly grated nutmeg, and garnish by flaming the orange peel over the top of the drink.
