The Fine Art Of Screwing With Recipes

So clearly this Bénédictine we got is burning a hole in my pocket — or whatever; it sounds scary and dangerous to think about alcohol burning parts of one’s clothing — because I went to that well again. When I was flipping through The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks I noticed a lot of recipes that used it. Tonight I found one called a Monte Carlo (page 260).

The thing people seem to talk about with Embury’s book is the “opinionated” nature of his writing. You see that in this recipe. It calls for one part Bénédictine, two parts rye and one or two dashes of Angostura bitters. And immediately he’s like, “This drink is a bit on the sweet side. It can be improved by adding 2 parts lemon juice and increasing the rye from 2 parts to about 4 or 5.” I don’t know what his deal is with refusing to write out numbers under 11, but whatever. In essence, it’s a much different drink. I like the freedom of being able to not give a fuck about recipes.

So to that end, I ran out of rye so I used bourbon instead. I followed his advice, however, and upped the whiskey-everything else proportion and added the lemon juice. I think there’s a lot of lemon — maybe half that much lemon would work. Also, I get the concept of rye — that particular rye flavor would probably stand out better. But it was still OK — I’d try it again, with some tweaks.