Little Italy

Manhattan

The IBA specifies 50ml of rye whiskey, 20ml of sweet vermouth and a dash of Angostura bitters, strained into a chilled glass with a cocktail cherry; we stir it over ice for 20 to 30 seconds and serve it in a coupe. That is five parts whiskey to two of vermouth. About 2.3 UK units. The Oxford Companion says the most commonly told story puts it at New York’s Manhattan Club on 29 December 1874, at a testimonial dinner for Samuel J. Tilden, later retold with Jennie Jerome, Lady Randolph Churchill, as host or inspiration, and calls that story simply not true: she had given birth to Winston Churchill in Oxfordshire less than a month earlier. The Companion names O. H. Byron’s Modern Bartenders’ Guide among the bar books that printed the drink in 1884, and we read Byron’s and Charlie Paul’s books of that year in the Internet Archive scans. With so little in the glass, the vermouth decides it. Twenty millilitres is over a quarter of the drink, and a bottle opened months ago tastes flat and sour against the rye. We keep it in the fridge and replace it within about four weeks.

Black Manhattan

A Black Manhattan is 50ml of rye whiskey, 20ml of Averna and a dash each of Angostura and orange bitters, stirred over ice for 20 to 30 seconds and strained into a chilled coupe, with a cocktail cherry. About 2.6 UK units. It keeps the Manhattan’s five parts whiskey to two of the sweet partner and replaces all of the vermouth with amaro. Drinks and Drinking, a drinks newsletter, credits Todd Smith with it in 2005, when he was working at Cortez, a San Francisco restaurant; it gives his first version as bourbon, a smaller measure of Averna and coffee-cherry bitters he made himself. Kindred Cocktails, a cocktail database, says a 2008 Washington Post recipe already had rye, Averna, Angostura and orange bitters. Averna is a Sicilian amaro at 29% ABV on Difford’s Guide’s listing, and in our view sweet first and bitter after, with orange peel and a note close to cola. In the vermouth’s place it makes a darker, denser drink with a longer bitter finish.

Red Hook

A Red Hook is 60ml of rye whiskey, 22.5ml of Punt e Mes and 15ml of maraschino liqueur, stirred over ice for 20 to 30 seconds and strained into a chilled Nick and Nora glass with a cocktail cherry. About 3.2 UK units. Imbibe credits Vincenzo Errico with it, at Milk & Honey in New York in 2003, and says it takes its name from Red Hook, the south Brooklyn neighbourhood that was a 19th-century industrial shipping port. It sits between the Manhattan and the Brooklyn: rye from both, maraschino from the Brooklyn, and Punt e Mes, a bitter-edged Italian vermouth, doing the work of sweet vermouth and the bitter Amer Picon at once. Imbibe’s published recipe takes half an ounce, 15ml, of Punt e Mes. We pour 22.5ml, which keeps the bitterness in step with a maraschino measure twice the size of the Brooklyn’s.

Brooklyn

A Brooklyn is 60ml of rye whiskey and 22.5ml of dry vermouth, with 7.5ml each of maraschino liqueur and Averna and two dashes of orange bitters, stirred over ice for 20 to 30 seconds and strained into a chilled Nick and Nora glass with a cherry. About 3.3 UK units. The Averna and orange bitters stand in for Amer Picon, the French bitter orange aperitif the old recipes call for. The Oxford Companion says Picon’s strength fell from about 40% ABV to 38% in the 1920s, 27% in the 1970s and 18% in 1989, and Punch says it is still largely unavailable in the United States; in our view any Brooklyn poured now is a reconstruction. Difford’s Guide says the Brooklyn as we know it first appears in print in Jacob Grohusko’s Jack’s Manual, 1908, as equal parts rye and Italian vermouth with a dash each of Picon and maraschino. In 1913 Jacques Straub’s manual, as Difford’s Guide reproduces it, made it with French, or dry, vermouth.