Acknowledgments
Index of searchable terms
About the Publisher
Have you ever had the pleasure of picking a ripe new strawberry directly from the patch, ruby red and so perfumed that your brain goes into overdrive with giddy anticipation before you even put it in your mouth? That sense of freshness once bitten, as juice dribbles down my chin, is one of the purest joys I can imagine!
Over the last 40 years, the gastronomic arc in America has evolved from a keen and then purposeful awareness of sustainably grown food to an equally passionate interest in wine, craft beer, and finally, and more recently, cocktails.
In many ways, the cocktail hobbyist has taken full hold of the zealous American history of cocktails, which has been researched and celebrated widely over the last decade, and applied the parameters of fresh and sustainable food to mixing delicious drinks. If chefs can have rooftop gardens from which to select the most pristine vegetables and herbs, why can’t we treat our home-grown and locally sourced ingredients in much the same way as we fashion a refreshing libation?
My support of the Slow Food Movement in the United States coincided, in the early years of this young century, with the rise of the rejuvenated cocktail culture that has now stretched to communities and countries far and wide. In those days, not so long ago, even the concept of fresh juice behind the bar was not nearly as prevalent as it is today. The championing of quality ingredients—distilled spirits and modifiers, tinctures from herbs and teas, varieties of antique and contemporary bitters, and, yes, near ubiquity of fresh juice—mixed with the emergence of the professional bartender has created the perfect environment for cocktail enthusiasts to take advantage of the best of all aspects of our now-celebrated gastronomic interests.
This pleasure of creativity—whether at home or in our favorite cocktail bar—is not necessarily about convenience, but about discovery. The desire to create “wild cocktails” is a move away from industrial ingredients and a unique and, frankly, privileged pleasure to connect with the very components that comprise our daily food and drink.
There is a uniquely human connection to our sense of reason and desire. Whether you fancy home-grown or foraged herbs, or fruits and herbs from your local farmers’ market, the opportunity to create the exciting, delicious, and unique cocktails crafted in these pages is sure to offer delight, occasional surprise, and, most of all, refreshment.
Cheers!
Allen Katz
Founder of the New York Distilling Company
INTO THE WILD
Living in any urban area, you wouldn’t think you have a lot of opportunity for foraging—and, well, sometimes foraging in a large metropolis simply means finding the one open grocery that has milk for your coffee in the morning.
But as long as there’s sun and rain, dirt and seed, and root, it really is hard to keep a good plant down. I’ve lived in New York City since 1986, when I moved here to go to college, having sprung from a small island town where my mom sometimes sent me to the farm stand around the corner for supper’s side dish. To say I had culture shock when I moved to New York City is an understatement. Here, it wasn’t the woods that were the wilds but the Lower East Side and, at that point in history, unexplored areas of the outer boroughs—where foraging had more to do with cheap drinks, cute boys, and good bands.
About 12 years ago, I bit the bullet and bought a home with my husband in a hilly little neighborhood of Staten Island near that borough’s public ferry. It is an area that’s at once urban but also offers some more space for those of us tired of being stacked up in apartment-building boxes. For the first time in twenty-five years, I had a backyard—and a very overgrown one at that, since my home had been abandoned for many years before we decided to root in and give it some spit and polish. Back then, everything looked like a weed to me. And, to be fair, a lot of it probably technically was. The first wild plant that stood out among the rest, as much for its stubborn, rooted countenance as its incredible smell when I finally wrenched it loose from the earth, was sassafras saplings. It smelled like … bubble gum! And Fruit Loops cereal. And a little like root beer soda. This dirty, gnarled, funny-looking root of this irksome, incredibly prolific weed turned out to be pretty awesome for cocktails. (You can use the leaves for the secret ingredient in gumbo, too—but that’s a recipe for another time.)
I looked at the world a little differently after that. Spiky leaves springing off dandelions, that suburban arch-nemesis, looked like salad or perhaps something to pop off and pickle. When I went out to eastern Long Island in the summer months, where I grew up, I searched the sandy brush for beach plums, which I knew would make a beautiful garnish, liqueur, or syrup. Wild onions springing from the ground? Martini accompaniments, of course.
Putting fresh ingredients in your cocktails isn’t just a fun weekend experiment; it also makes your drinks better. From the days of the Carthusian monks, reaping a multitude of herbs from their monastic grounds and putting them into tinctures and liqueurs (the original wild cocktail concocteurs!) for countenance-curing endeavors, the idea of preserving harvestables with spirits is an old trick that has become new again. It’s thanks to both the thirty-year-old Slow Food Movement and the economic downturns of the early twenty-first century for sprouting the now-avid DIY movement of entrepreneurial tinkerers. But regardless of how we’ve started to re-adapt a thriftier, let’s-get-real point of view, it’s pretty exciting to see so many of us kicking pre-fab, mystery-made, store-bought products to the curb in favor of honest-to-goodness identifiable ingredients. No one’s going to proclaim cocktails a health drink any time soon, but using real, fresh, good ingredients in them is a whole lot better (and more delicious) than high-fructose whatever. Good riddance to that.
I am not a professional forager. There are people who do really great work in that realm—many right here in my own city. “Wildman” Steve Brill, Marie Viljeon, Ava Chin are among my favorites (each of whom has a terrific book or two, and I highly recommend you pick them up). I am, if anything, a cocktail tinkerer and abundantly enthusiastic home cook—and this is how I implore you to approach this topic, too. Use this book for inspiration. Be curious. There is nothing more rewarding than using your imagination and integrating a forlorn piece of flora into a glorious gastronomic bit of sipping pleasure. Be careful, too: the plants I list here are all pretty safe bets; turn to the pros like those listed above or other foraging tomes for your area before ingesting something with which you are unfamiliar. Plants, berries, and mushrooms can be a boon to your cocktail shaker, but they can also be poisonous if you mistakenly opt for an unfriendly look-alike to the thing you really wanted. Curiosity and caution are your two best friends.
Don’t ignore the more domesticated side of fresh ingredients, either: your pots of herbs, your prized summer tomato garden, a funny tuft of leafy greens at your local farmers’ market that you have never seen or used before. Challenge yourself. What’s the worst thing that can happen—you make a bad drink? You’ll make a better one next time. The great thing about booze? Unlike the fresh ingredients I encourage you to incorporate here, its shelf life is fairly indefinite.
Be brave, be curious, get your hands dirty, and by all means do me the honor of having fun with this book. May you never look at weeds the same way again!