Tag Archives: Cocktails

Cocktails

Updated on September 27, 2011 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

Happy Tuesday, everyone! I was out last night, hanging out in the bar of my favorite local restaurant (Ludivine, if you happen to be in the Oklahoma City area! Go there–it is fantastic…), and we started speculating on what the first cocktail might have been. So we had to get someone’s phone out and Google it. Here is what we found:

There were things like punches and syllabubs that had recipes from the Renaissance era, but the earliest known printed use of the word “cocktail” was on April 28, 1803 in The Farmer’s Cabinet: “Drank a glass of cocktail—excellent for the head…Call’d at the Doct’s. found Burnham—he looked very wise—drank another glass of cocktail.”

The earliest definition of a cocktail can be found in The Balance and Columbian Repository out of Hudson, NY: “Cocktail is a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters—it is vulgarly called a bittered sling and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said, also to be of great use to a candidate: because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow any thing else.”

The first bartender’s guide could be 1862’s How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon Vivant’s Companion by “Professor” Jerry Thomas.

One of my favorite drinks, especially now that the weather is turning cooler, is a chocolatini–this looks like a good recipe here…

What are your favorite cocktails???

Posted in Jane Austen | Tagged Cocktails, Jane Austen | 5 Replies

Alternate Career Plans

Updated on March 1, 2011 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

How is everyone this Tuesday? I am still laughing over the train wreck that was the Oscars program Sunday (I wonder if Anne Hathaway had to wander the after-parties with everyone asking her “So, Franco, WTH?”; also, it’s hilarious how everyone in Hollywood is acting like they never heard the f-word before) and plowing ahead with my WIP, which is due at the end of the month (gulp). I am currently at the point I reach in every story where I am tired of my stubborn characters who don’t want to do as I tell them and am therefore considering alternate career choices. I think I may have found a good one.

I have a writing friend, Alicia Dean, who I try to get together with on Thursdays to hit the happy hour at the Martini Lounge and then watch Vampire Diaries, it’s always good to have someone to yell things with so I’m not just a crazy woman shouting at the TV screen all by myself. And we have decided if the writing gig quits working out we’re going to open a vampire bar where, instead of sports on the TVs, there is Vampire Diaries, True Blood, Moonlight, and whatever else we can think of. We may need to move to New York to do this.

There will be great cocktails. Bloodtinis and something called a Bite Me, I think, as well as a “make your own Bloody Mary” bar…

There will be a dress code, of course, because it’s my bar and I need a place to wear my approximately 50 black cocktail dresses and these great new tall black boots I just bought….

I haven’t quite decided on decor yet. We could go old skool vamp, lots of red and black…

Or sort of Sherlock Holmes Victorian pub…

Or over-the-top Versailles baroque (I really like this one! There could be Marie Antoinette theme nights)

I turned to Megan for help with planning the music (since she knows more about music than anyone else I know!) and these were her (tongue in cheek) suggestions:

Bela Lugosi’s Dead–Bauhaus
Surf Bat–45 Grave
Release The Bats–Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Cemetery Without Crosses–Flesh Eaters (from Sex Diary of Mr. Vampire)
Sunglasses After Dark–Cramps
Dracula’s Wedding–Andre 3000
Dragula–Rob Zombie

I seem to have vampires on the brain these days, since I am planning to go to the Vampire Diaries convention at the end of the month! So excited–and watch for an article to appear soon after on the Heroes & Heartbreakers blog. (Admittedly, I will probably faint in the Ian Somerhalder Q&A session and will thus remember nothing afterward)

Now I need your help! This bar needs a good name–anyone have any suggestions? And if you could have any fantasy job you wanted what would it be?

(I also just got this review of The Shy Duchess, which should be on shelves–now…)