Green Swizzle

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A Green Swizzle is an alcoholic Sour cocktail . It was popular in Trinidad at the beginning of the 20th century and was forgotten with World War II. Today's recipes mostly represent significant modifications of the original.

history

The earliest written evidence for the Green Swizzle comes from the Handbook of Trinidad Cookery by EM Lickfold from 1907. There a "Green Cocktail" is listed, which consisted of Falernum and Wormwood Bitters , whisked (English to swizzle ) and rounded off with Angostura bitters has been. For Falernum, on the other hand, the same cookbook names rum, lime juice and sugar as ingredients. In 1912, travel writer (and later entrepreneur and politician) Lindon Bates described a completely different drink than Green Swizzle and named gin , lime juice and soda water as the ingredients of the drink. Through the short story The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy by the British comedian PG Wodehouse , first published in 1924 and republished many times in anthologies , the Green Swizzle gained popularity in the Anglo-American region. However, the short story does not name any ingredients.

A travel guide published by the Trinidad Information Bureau in 1924 equates the Green Swizzle with Carypton . Carypton was an alcoholic mixed drink produced by the Angostura company (then Dr. Siegert & Sons). The Carypton already contained several ingredients of the Green Swizzle: rum, lime juice, sugar and unspecified, regional herbs and spices. As early as 1912 Angostura presented the Green Swizzle in a publication with cocktail recipes as Carypton on shaved ice ( ice scraped off a block) with a few splashes of Angostura bitter . According to the online cocktail database Mixology , the production of Carypton was stopped before 1920. After the Second World War, the Carypton production was resumed, but at this point in time, apart from a few mentions in travel reports, the traces of the original Green Swizzle are lost.

The travel writer Owen Rutter provided a detailed recipe in 1933 that he learned about while touring the West Indies :

"Fill the shaker half full of crushed ice and add 1 teaspoonful of falernum, half a wine-glass of carypton, 4 dashes of wormwood bitters. Shake well, strain, and serve with 4 dashes of Angostura bitters on top. "

- Owen Rutter : If Crab No Walk: A Traveler in the West Indies

In 1958, the journalism professor and Chicago Times editor Lawrence Martin, who had previously traveled through South America and the Caribbean for three years, described the Green Swizzle as a Carypton-based cocktail.

Later recipes often name crème de menthe as an ingredient, but this has no relation to the original cocktail. The reason for adding Crème de Menthe was the assumption that a Green Swizzle must have a distinctive green color, a fallacy that Victor Bergeron in his Trader Vic's Bartenders Guide , published in 1972, and the cocktail historian David Wondrich in 2007:

"(...) crème de menthe, since in those balmy days (...) that was the only green stuff around"

- David Wondrich : Green Swizzle

The cocktail encyclopedia Difford's Guide describes the variants with crème de menthe as “modern interpretations”. Wondrich corrected his mistake in 2015 and presented a recipe from the New York Herald from 1908 that confirmed Falernum and Wormwood Bitters as ingredients.

In 2011, the Canadian spirits blogger Darcy O'Neil reconstructed a Green Swizzle recipe based on literature from the years 1890 to 1962 and the ingredients he had access to, which essentially follows Rutter's description and whose origin he mistakenly saw in Barbados . At the beginning of the 20th century, the Green Swizzle was available in hotel bars in Barbados, neighboring Trinidad, as well as in Grenada . Almond extract O'Neil used instead of Falernum and exhibited wormwood ( wormwood ) and white rum cocktails Bitter ago, who had a deep green color.

preparation

As with a typical swizzle , the ingredients are combined in a tall, narrow, chilled glass, which is then filled with crushed ice . A swizzle stick is inserted into the glass and rotated with the palms of the hands while the stick is slowly moved up and down at the same time. This mixes ingredients and ice, while at the same time the glass is quickly cooled down further and frost forms on the outside . The process is the same for “counterfeit” Green Swizzles with Crème de Menthe.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Danielle Delon (Ed.): A Handbook of Trinidad Cookery 1907 . Cassique Publications, Port of Spain 2016, ISBN 978-976-95415-5-9 , pp. 154 .
  2. ↑ Lindon Bates: Path of the Conquistadores . Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1912, p. 72 .
  3. ↑ a b c ArtOfDrink.com: Green Swizzle. Retrieved March 15, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Trinidad Information Bureau: Trinidad: The Riviera of the Caribbean . Trinidad Publishing Company, Port of Spain 1924, p. 44 .
  5. ^ AngosturaBitters.com: History of Angostura Bitters. Retrieved March 15, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Mixology.recipes: Carypton. Retrieved March 15, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Angostura Bitters: Complete Mixing Guide . JW Wuppermann, New York 1912, p. 27 ( scan ).
  8. ^ Owen Rutter: If Crab No Walk: A Traveler in the West Indies . Hutchinson & Co., London 1933, pp. 48 .
  9. ↑ Lawrence Martin: The Standard Guide to Mexico and the Caribbean . 1958-1959 ed. Funk & Wagnalls, New York 1958, p. 650 .
  10. ↑ Sean Muldoon, Jack McGarry, Ben Schaffer: The Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual: Secret Recipes and Barroom Tales from Two Belfast Boys Who Conquered the Cocktail World . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston 2015, ISBN 978-0-544-37339-6 , pp. 91 .
  11. ↑ Esquire.com: Green Swizzle. Retrieved March 15, 2020 .
  12. ↑ DiffordsGuide.com: Green Swizzle. Retrieved March 15, 2020 .
  13. ↑ David Wondrich: Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar . Updated and Revised ed. Penguin, London 2015, ISBN 978-0-698-18185-4 , p. 157 .
  14. ↑ Jeffrey Morgenthaler: The Bar Book: Elements of Cocktail Technique . Chronicle Books, San Francisco 2014, ISBN 978-1-4521-1384-5 , pp. 226 .