Clover Club Cocktail – David Lebovitz

by


I’ll admit to being the kind of guy that likes a pink drink every now and then, but I don’t like to admit that I’m the kind of guy that buys raspberries in the winter. Writing cookbooks with deadlines that don’t always flow with the seasons, if I need a few cherries in the winter to test a recipe or a few cups of blueberries, I’ll resort to frozen or, uh…”fresh” if I really have to get the job done. I used to look down on people that bought out-of-season fruit at the markets or grocery stores, or the ones who inspected every single piece of fruit on offer like it was a rare gem, until I realized they were all recipe developers or food stylists and they were just doing their jobs.

I’ll also admit after making this Clover Club cocktail, which has a dash of raspberry syrup added for color and flavor, perked me up this winter. Although vacation is off the table for a while, I felt like I was taking a little trip to somewhere exotic when I took that first ruby-color, raspberry-flavored sip. To be honest, it felt a bit illicit. And I loved it.

Bushberries have become available all year round in America as well as in France. I find most of them okay, although they’re not as good as just-picked berries off the bush. (Out of season strawberries, however, are universally terrible.) Last year was a loooong year – and it’s only the middle of January for this year – and I needed something to give me a psychological reset, if you will.

The Clover Club cocktail is a pre-prohibition classic cocktail that was named after a club in Philadelphia, named the Clover Club. It’s unclear who first came up with it, but leave it to Julie Reiner, owner of Clover Club, an excellent cocktail bar in Brooklyn to offer up a great version of the drink. Her recipe has appeared in different versions around the web, on Imbibe and Punch, to name a few. And the versions vary a bit in the technique for shaking it up (because food and drink aren’t static). After giving it a few gos, this is the one I settled on which uses a reverse dry shake, where you shake up the ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker, then remove the ice and shake it again to froth up the egg whites even more. It’s a fun drink to make, and even more fun to drink.

Clover Club cocktail

If you’re skittish about using raw egg whites, you can substitute the liquid from chickpea cooking liquid, called aquafaba. In my side-by-side experiments, the foam isn’t quite isn’t as rich and stiff as the egg white, but it works just fine. To measure out the egg white, briskly stir an egg white in a small bowl for a few seconds to break it up, then measure it into the jigger. The technique used for making this cocktail is called a reverse dry shake. With egg white-based cocktails, sometimes you do a dry shake where you shake all the ingredients together without ice to set the foam, then add ice and shake it again before straining the drink into a glass. The reverse dry shake is said to make a better foam and I tried it here and it works well. In place of fresh raspberries, frozen unsweetened raspberries will work just as well and Julie also told me that you can replace the raspberry syrup in the recipe with 1/2 ounce of raspberry jam in a pinch. I’ve also seen recipes that call for grenadine in place of the raspberry syrup, but I’d stick with the raspberries.

Servings 1 cocktail

  • 1 1/2 ounces gin
  • 1/2 ounce dry vermouth
  • 1/2 ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice
  • 1/2 ounce raspberry syrup, see Note below
  • 1/2 ounce egg white

Prevent your screen from going dark

  • Place the gin, vermouth, lemon juice, raspberry syrup and egg whites in a cocktail shaker and fill two-thirds full with ice. Cover and shake vigorously for 25 seconds.

  • Strain the mixture into a glass or small bowl, dump out the ice, and return the mixture to the shaker, cover and shake for 15 to 20 seconds.

  • Pour into a chilled coupe glass. Garnish with a skewered raspberry or two.

Note: To make the raspberry syrup, toss 1/4 cup (40g, 1.5 ounces) of fresh raspberry in a small bowl with 1/2 cup (100g) sugar. Pour 1/4 cup (60ml) of warm (not hot) water over them and let sit for 30 minutes, stirring and mashing them together with a fork or spoon a few times. Press the mixture through a fine strainer and chill until needed. 
The syrup will keep for up to a week in the refrigerator or it can be frozen. 




Source link

Leave a Comment