Forgotten drinks

Kim has a new hobby: inspired by a book found on an occasional prowl through the delightfully vast cooking section of the Bibiliothèque Nationale du Québec, she came across an interesting little book. Elixir et boissons retrouvés is a charming tome that has a wonderful combination of old-fashioned aperitifs, liqueurs, infusions and syrups, interspersed with charming old labels. If, like us, you have ever wanted to make your own Absinthe, Pastis or Crème de Cassis (and you can read French), this is the book for you. Our house has turned into a depository/laboratory/herbarium, with strange ingredients such as Artemisia, Winter Savoury, Gentian root, Angelica and dried artichoke leaves turning up in surprising corners of the house, or hanging on rustic-looking ropes, drying above the heater. You could easily mistake this for a witch’s lair...

Yes, we have always liked drinking strange things, as long as they are tasty. Cynar, the Italian artichoke aperitif, is one of our favourite drinks, so it was only natural for us to develop and invest in this new hobby. Making drinks at home is an unfortunately forgotten art, although it was once common in many places. We have friends in France who said that in their village people used to bring their surplus fruit to be distilled by the local distiller. We tasted some of their plum eau-de-vie and it certainly was good! Now, even France has been known to put a stop to this age-old tradition by requiring people to have licences for distilling. It is really too bad that such a beautiful centuries-old tradition can be so easily lost. Most of the drinks in this book, however, do not require anything as exciting, dangerous, blindness-inducing or - at least in Canada, blatantly illegal. All it requires are some simple ingredients found in most homes (or gardens/specialty shops), like red or white wines, eau de vie (or vodka if you don't have it), and whatever flavours with which you wish to infuse them.

The aperitif that we would like to share with you was inspired by (but doesn't actually come from) this book. It is for a rosemary red-wine based aperitif and it is, in our humble opinion, rather delicious. Actually we have a new blog policy that if we get more than two requests for a recipe we will blog about it, and we received several requests for this one. At the beginning, we were rather skeptical, and worried about wasting a perfectly good bottle of wine. But this concoction, when served to family and friends is sure to bring much praise and admiration. So, without any further ado- the recipe!


Rosemary Aperitif

75 grams rosemary
750 ml (1 bottle) of red wine
75 grams of sugar
one small glass of rum (approximately 1/3-1/2 cup)

1. Macerate (soak) the rosemary in the red wine for four days.
2. Strain, mix in the sugar and rum.
3. Put in a bottle.



Obviously, the recipe is simplicity itself. A few tips:
-It is best to get wine with a screw top, then you can use the bottle to store the aperitif.
-Do not macerate the rosemary in the wine bottle, otherwise it will be hard to get all the bits out. The best is to put it in a glass pitcher with a cover, as it may be hard to get the taste out of plastic.
-While putting it back in the bottle (using a funnel or something with a spout for pouring) don't forget that because you added the rum you now have more liquid than will fit in the bottle!
-The drink mellows out as it matures, the first few days it is quite strong, and after a week it has toned down a bit.


And if you were wondering who helped with the styling of "randomly scattered" rosemary in the  the photo above, here is a hint: