All Hail the Macabre Cocktail

• PIN

One of the consumerist traditions that you see a lot of in America, England and the other cultures that really embrace the modern take on Halloween, is the seasonal drink or dish. The internet is full of wholesome looking people giving earnest instructions on how to decorate your cake so it looks like a screaming skull, how to make a lasagna that looks like intestines or how to arrange your crudites so they resemble a terrifying clown. A certain type of bar will make something sweet with a lot of food dye in it and maybe an eyeball ice cube if they are really committed which will invariably taste like off cough syrup and give you a headache way before one is due. Thankfully the annals of cocktail making are both more inventive and more seriously fun than this with many classic cocktails already alluding to the biggest questions in life, death and everything in between. Here are some classically macabre cocktails.

Corpse Reviver No.2

Cocktails have been described, or perhaps excused, as restoratives as long as they have been around. One of the obvious problems with this magical quality is that the thing that they were most often restoring you from was the previous night’s cocktails, the notorious hair of the dog that bit you. Regardless of the circular nature of this argument, the family of cocktails called Corpses Revivers became very popular and were refined and elaborated on by renowned liver-botherer Harry Craddock who reigned over the American Bar at The Savoy in London. The Savoy cocktail book dryly notes that “Four of these taken in swift succession will unrevive the corpse again”.

Recipe

• 30 ml gin
• 30 ml lemon juice
• 30 ml Cointreau
• 30 ml Lillet Blanc or Cochi Americano (the original cocktail was made with Kina Blanc which was rereleased with a different recipe as Lillet Blanc. Many bartenders consider Cochi Americano a better substitute.)
• 1 dash absinthe

Shake ingredients over ice and strain into glass. The absinthe can be added to the drink or used as a garnish. Add orange peel.

Zombie

A Zombie is a Tiki style cocktail invented by Donn Beach in Hollywood in the early 30s but its fame quickly spread as the craze for Tiki bars and restaurants took off. It’s one of those fearsome concoctions that hides its strength under a selection of deceptive juices and syrups. It was apparently named after a hungover customer asked for something to get him through a meeting. He returned to the bar and told Beach that the drink had turned him into a Zombie. Served in a tall, thin Zombie glass, some bars get creative with their serving and it can occasionally be found in a Tiki head or even skull. Given the number of ingredients this is a trickier cocktail to make at home but would make a great punch for a larger gathering.

Recipe

45 ml Jamaican dark rum
45 ml Puerto Rican gold rum
30 ml Demerara rum
20 ml fresh lime juice
15 ml falernum
15 ml Donn’s Mix (2 parts fresh yellow grapefruit juice and 1 part cinnamon syrup)
1 tsp Grenadine syrup
1 dash Angostura bitters
6 drops Pernod

Mix all the ingredients over ice and serve in a tall glass, ceramic Tiki head or crystal skull. Garnish with mint.

Bloody Mary

Perhaps the most ubiquitous of the macabre sounding cocktails is the Bloody Mary about which there are as many original stories as there are increasingly outré variations. With an early history as transparent the liquid itself, it is generally agreed that the first drink that would be recognisable to the modern Mary aficionado was created by Fernand Petiot at Harry’s Bar in Paris in the 20s. There had been a fifty, fifty blend of tomato juice and vodka knocking about but he added the spices and sauces that we know and love today. The origins of the name are equally opaque but one convincing story claims that a regular of Petiot’s who ordered the drink said it reminded him of a girlfriend who was in a cabaret called Bucket of Blood. The girlfriend was called Mary. There are many other versions available. To my mind the modern life of the Bloody Mary is a rather damning parable for the contemporary love of meaningless and detrimental complexity. A well made Bloody Mary should have seven ingredients and be garnished with a lemon slice or a celery stick if you are really in need of nutrients. It doesn’t need unnerving globules of horseradish floating around in reluctant suspension and it definitely doesn’t need a whole roast chicken on the top as is apparently possible at a number of American locations. I understand that I am aesthetic, bordering on curmudgeonly on this subject so will allow other people their wrong opinions. 

Recipe

• 45 ml vodka
• 90 ml tomato juice
• 15 ml fresh lemon juice
• 2 dashes of Worcestershire sauce
• Tabasco sauce
• Celery salt
• Black pepper

There is also an ongoing debate about whether the drink should be shaken, stirred, thrown or rolled so we would recommend simply stirring over ice and straining into a highball glass.