I made a Jack Rose for the first time

Posted on December 10, 2012

So I’ve been trying out pre-depression era cocktails because they seem to gibe with my interest in from scratch cooking. Also the drinks are all about tasting the spirits, the liqueurs and vermouths with the notes of bitters. It’s not about making drinks into kool-aid so you can scarf down gallons of booze. I had recently read this recipe on how to make your own grenadine and made the grenadine and it was so delicious I immediately made a bunch of eggless, creamless pink ladies and pomegranate gin rickeys. And really it is delicious to the point where you do almost find it to be as drinkable as Hi-C. But then I wanted to do something more traditional with it, pre-depression drinks are not as dry as many modern ‘traditional’ cocktails anyway, which I still like. Anyway I decided to get some applejack and try a Jack Rose, and the proportions I used are a bit more modern because the older proportions are either much more sweet or much more sweet and sour. Also there’s a debate whether to use lemon or lime. Since I did a lot of lime drinks lately and I had to open a lemon for something I was cooking, I went with lemon. So I went with:
2 oz. Laird’s Applejack
1/2 oz lemon juice
1/2 oz grenadine that I had made as per the Jeffrey Morgenthaler recipe above.

Shaken over ice and served in a small stemmed cocktail glass that I just got for $3.