What next, for pity’s sake? Is it going to be zombies or locusts?
Why not both?
Now is the perfect time to make an apocalypse of zombies or a cloud of grasshoppers — and not just because of their names. These drinks are at the extreme ends on the scale of cocktail complexity. The grasshopper is about as simple as a drink gets, just two ingredients, making it perfect for those of us for whom working at home has consumed most of what used to be downtime. The zombie is notoriously complicated, a kitchen sink of a drink, and thus perfect to keep those of us who are furloughed occupied.
Let’s start with the grasshopper. Quite fashionable in the ’50s, if by fashionable we mean popular with Vegas showgirls trying to look chic, this green concoction hasn’t caught the retro wave of the last decade. A mixture of two sweet liqueurs, it’s candy-sweet, lacking the balance that has been such a salient principle in the cocktail renaissance. I’ll admit it’s too sweet for me, but it is cheerful in its faux sophistication. It remains a semiclassic in need of reviving, even if with tongue in cheek.
The recipe writes itself: Combine equal parts green crème de menthe and clear crème de cacao, shake with ice, and strain into a small liqueur glass. Pandemics are as good a time as any for a little minty, chocolaty cheer.
And now, the zombie, one of the two greatest tiki drinks of the Polynesian Pop era. The zombie was Don the Beachcomber’s signature drink just as the mai tai was Trader Vic’s. They represent a duality typical of American culture. There are Count Basie and Duke Ellington; Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly; Ginger and Mary-Ann: the zombie and the mai tai.
Don and Vic went to great lengths to keep their original recipes secret. The Beachcomber himself would personally mix certain components so that not even his own bartenders knew every ingredient. That meant during the original zombie craze of the ’30s, bars across the country were mixing blind, tossing together whatever tropical juices they had with a mess of rums. Cocktail books just winged it too. Trader Vic’s Bartender’s Guide (1947) offered a recipe, not quite correct, that called for rums with lemon juice, orange juice, orange curacao, grenadine, and Pernod. Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts (1949) fessed up that “there’s no knowing what some zealous mixers may load into multi-rummed specimens” and then printed a recipe that included such nonstarters as papaya nectar and apricot brandy. Charles Baker’s eclectic The Gentleman’s Companion: Being an Exotic Drinking Book (1939) suggested coconut milk, cognac, and maraschino liqueur.
There may be a horde of wrongheaded zombies, but there is also no one correct zombie recipe. Tiki drink historian Jeff Berry has shown that the Beachcomber’s zombies changed over time. The key secret ingredient turned out to be grapefruit juice.
In the spirit of zombie improvisation that gripped the nation some 70-80 years ago, I have come up with my own variation, one that is close to the original as the Beachcomber was said to make them in 1950. Fill a shaker with finely crushed ice. Pour into it 1 ounce of each: fresh lime juice, fresh lemon juice, unsweetened pineapple juice, grapefruit liqueur, white rum, gold rum, 151-proof demerara rum. Add a dash or two of Angostura bitters, shake, and pour, without straining, into a tall narrow glass.
Take a little time to decorate your zombie. Dress the top of the glass with some pineapple and mint, and put in a straw or two. (Biodegradable straws of course — don’t forget the environment, which will surely return as a crisis once the pandemic crisis has passed.)
The hallowed hype of the zombie was that no customer be served more than two in a sitting, and that is probably not such a bad idea. The last thing we need in these perilous times is more zombies than we can handle.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
